The Program Read online

“Look, work with me here a little. I don’t have enough for a warrant—”

  “Not enough evidence for a warrant, yet you want me to root through privileged billing and registration information?”

  Rutherford’s prissy tone was surprising, but his vehemence was not— postal inspectors were 1811s, investigators who toted guns and tracked leads hard. They had a near-fanatical regard for the mails, which Tim respected though found difficult when it inconvenienced him. Realizing he lacked good reason for his frustration, he held his tongue.

  “The mails are sacrosanct, Deputy. I’d like you to consider something for a minute....” Rutherford’s voice, high and thin, took on the tone of a rant. “People only complain about the mail. When it’s late, when it arrives damaged, when some unwashed misanthrope uses it to deliver anthrax. Think about the fact that for thirty-seven cents—thirty-seven cents—less than the price of a pack of gum, you can send a letter from Miami to Anchorage. Thirty-seven cents can buy one ounce a four-thousand-mile trip. This country has the finest mail system in history,” Owen B. Rutherford continued, seeming pleased to have secured a scapegoat for what Tim could only imagine was an elephantine bad day. “We move forty percent of the world’s mail, seven hundred million pieces a day, and—unlike you big-budget DOJ agencies—we’re entirely self-supporting. This country runs on its postal service. Taxes are paid, votes are tallied, medicines delivered in our mail system. And that system has got to be an asymptote approaching the line of perfection. Imagine if your paycheck arrived only two times out of three. Imagine spending your last minutes on your deathbed hand-penning a draft of your will that had only a fifty-percent chance of making it to your attorney. Imagine, for that matter, a confidential P.O. box that you establish for the receipt of documents or personal items, only to find that some knuckle-scraping federal employee with an inadequate grasp of civil liberties called in favors from a corrupt postal inspector so that your political petitions, or inflatable sheep, or letter from your dying ¡Kung aunt”—this complete with tongue click—”in the Kalahari is suddenly a matter of illegal government inquiry!”

  “I, uh...”

  “Good day, Deputy Rackley.”

  Tim sat for a minute, a dazed grin touching his face. He couldn’t recall being so effectively and summarily told off since Ms. Alessandri benched him in fifth grade for supergluing the donkey tail to Tina Min-dachi during end-of-year festivities. He tossed the phone in the passenger seat, deciding to enjoy the rest of the ride.

  The Pacific Coast Highway hugged the coast to Malibu, affording a continuous panoramic view of the gray-blue ocean. The best lawn in Los Angeles stretched back from the intersection of PCH and Malibu Canyon, steeply inclined acres of grass above which the campus rose like a fortified city. After contending with a militant parking attendant, Tim wound his inferior Integra through the main drag lined with Beemers and Saabs. He asked a gardener—the sole person of color he’d glimpsed on campus—for the Sigma dorm.

  A remarkably attractive blonde answered the door. Her face was structured like a model’s—high cheekbones, generous jaw, abbreviated ski jump of a nose. The orange-and-blue scrunchie holding her hair back in a ponytail matched her Pepperdine sweatshirt; the pullover itself featured King Neptune looming with trident and flowing beard, the school’s umpteenth stab at personifying its banal mascot—waves. She tilted her head slightly so she could look up at him through her lashes, a well-practiced move. “Who are you?”

  “I’d like to speak with Katie Kelner.”

  The girl rolled her eyes and leaned back, letting the door swing open. Inside, three surfers were sprawled shirtless on a futon with another girl, an equally attractive redhead. Tim felt as if he’d stepped into a Gap ad. One of the guys tossed a beach towel over a bong smoldering on the coffee table. “That’s me,” the blonde said. “What do you want?”

  “I need to ask you some questions about Leah Henning.”

  “Again? It’s been, like, three months. Aren’t you people over it?”

  “Your concern is touching. Weren’t you friends?”

  Two of the surfer boys snickered, and the redhead cracked up, a lungful of held smoke bursting out of her.

  “Yeah,” Katie said. “We were real close.”

  More laughter from the stoned peanut gallery. “Man,” the most tousled surfer said, tugging at the protruding band of his boxers, “that chick was a serious buzzkill.”

  “Hey, Gidget.” Tim flashed his badge at the kid, and the smile dropped from his face as if someone had pissed on his wetsuit. “Your towel’s burning. Why don’t you take it and your controlled substance and go hang ten.”

  The three surfers hurriedly cleared out. The redhead leaned back on the futon and indulged a long, sleepy blink.

  “I’m sorry, Officer,” Katie said with a pert smile. “I didn’t realize you were here, you know, officially.” She raised her foot, bare to the toes, and swung her knee out, slowly, then back. She wore an anklet with tiny letters on cubes: WWJD.

  “Can I speak with you in private, please?”

  “Absolutely.” A game smile.

  They went to her bedroom, and she closed the door behind them and sat on her bed, legs pulled up to her chest. Her shorts were riding up, giving Tim a pretty good eyeful of inner thigh. He rose and opened the door. The redhead had passed out on the couch, potato chips across her chest. From the TV an inane cartoon discharged piano-tinkling and boinging sounds. Thirty-five thousand dollars’ tuition put to good use.

  “I thought you wanted to speak in private.”

  “This will be fine.” Tim sat on the bed opposite her, a sheetless mattress. “Was this Leah’s bed?”

  Katie nodded. “When you get dropouts or suicides, they let you have your own room for the whole year. It kind of rules.”

  Makeup bottles blanketed one bureau; the other was blank. Katie’s bed was covered with flowery pillows and teddy bears. A single window overlooked the well-kept track with its rubber runway and lush grass oval. Beyond it the hill dropped away steeply. A line of palm trees reared up in the distance, the bursts of fronds silhouetted against the backdrop of the Pacific like fireworks.

  “Tell me about Leah.”

  “We sort of got stuck with Leah. Assigned roommate. She was pretty sweet when we first got here, but she wouldn’t rush the sororities, and we sort of left her behind, you know? Socially.” She cupped a hand by her mouth and stage-whispered, “She was, like, the big V.”

  “The big V?”

  “A virgin. Which is cool, but we tried to bring her around guys, and she was just so... I don’t know, geeky. Playing on her computer all day and stuff—total code monkey. And her clothes—her clothes were bad. And then she started acting weird.”

  “Weird how?”

  “She sort of turned her back on her friends—what friends she had. These dorky kids from her classes, they stopped calling. And she got really anal. Like, on time to the minute. And really neat—lining up the edges of her notepaper and stuff. When we first started as roommates, she was way more casual. I never would have lived with her if she was like how she ended up.”

  “When did you notice this change?”

  “Like, maybe a month to six weeks before she split.”

  “How did you know she got in with a cult?”

  “She kept asking us to come to meetings with her. Stuff like that.”

  “Where were the meetings?”

  “I don’t know. Off campus, I’m pretty sure. We didn’t listen, really.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Laughed at her mostly.” A flicker of remorse in Katie’s sea-green eyes. “Hey, I’m being honest.”

  “Did you meet anyone in the cult?”

  “No.”

  “Notice her with anyone new?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know the names of her friends? Here on campus?”

  “Like I said: What friends?”

  “Did she mention the names of anyone in the cult with her?
Or refer to someone as the Teacher?”

  “No.”

  “Have you heard from her? Or has anyone seen her?”

  “No.” Katie smiled. “No. No, no, no. I don’t know anything about where she is. I just know she’s gone.” She checked the tag on her inner wrist with a shrug of her hand.

  Tim jotted down his cell-phone number on the back of a generic Marshals Service card with the Spring Street address and main phone line. “If you think of anything else, give me a call.”

  Katie relinquished her hug hold on a big white bear and took the card. Tim stood, giving a last glance at Leah’s half of the room. Bare mattress, empty shelves, empty nightstand.

  The thought of growing up in the house of Will and Emma Henning left Tim cold. So did the thought of living here with these veiled bullies, painting their lashes and nails and talking in code like cackling hens. Girls too pretty and rich and white to require empathy. Girls hell-bent on maintaining a status that required riding the top of a social hierarchy. His first case since Ginny—he wasn’t exactly keeping the misplaced protectiveness in check. He decided, staring at the left-behind Scotch tape on the blank wall, that if the empty rooms of girls hastily departed now struck a nerve, he would allow himself that.

  He flipped his notepad closed. “Thanks for your help.”

  Katie scurried after him to the door. “What? I called. Her parents wouldn’t even know she was missing if it wasn’t for me. I did my part.” The hard, pretty shell of her face shifted for a moment, and he saw the softer features of a girl who hadn’t yet been trained in cruelty. “It’s not my fault she went off and joined some cult.” She reached down and scratched the skin beneath her anklet, the letter cubes bouncing on the leather cord.

  “What does WWJD stand for?” Tim asked.

  She lowered her eyes uncomfortably. “What Would Jesus Do.”

  Bear was correct in his assessment—the landlady was a cranky old broad. Tim might even have proposed a more canine term. Her apartment, from what he could see through the barely open door, housed a virtual conservatory of hanging plants. It smelled of stale coffee and cat piss, as did Ms. Adair Peters, sovereign of the Fleur-de-Lis of Van Nuys, a cracked stucco rise with smoked mirrors in the entry and ornate crown molding in the halls.

  She emerged from her apartment, nightshirt trailing from the hem of a corduroy blazer she’d thrown on, breathing hard and clasping the lapels in a fist as if she’d been evicted in a blizzard. She ushered Tim into the elevator and slid the collapsible gate closed. The smell, in close quarters, was nearly blinding.

  An interminable ride to the second floor.

  At Leah’s former door, Adair fussed in her pockets, withdrawing a ring of keys. She tried them each, muttering and overcome with the exertion. One finally turned, and she threw the door open, trudging inside. Tim followed.

  A single room with a sidebar kitchen and a bathroom so small the open door rested against the toilet. The rusting coils of the radiator lurked under a sole window facing a Ravi Shankar billboard on which some mental giant had spray-painted OSSAMMA BEN LADEN IS A DUM SAND NIGGER.

  Clearly, once Leah had moved from Pepperdine, she’d turned over the rest of her money to the cult.

  “I was hoping you were a prospective tenant,” Adair repeated for the fourth and, Tim hoped, final time. “I have to show the unit enough as is.” She finger-teased her pink-tinted bouffant, glancing around. “Can’t say I notice much of a difference with her being gone.”

  “The neighbors mentioned she wasn’t around often.”

  “Barely ever. I only even saw her a few times. Sneaking out in the early morning, tiptoeing in at all hours. She had a full dance card, that’s for sure.”

  “Ms. Henning advertised a moving sale at this address. Does that ring a bell?”

  “She didn’t have the common decency to inform me she was moving out, but I knew she was selling a few things. I remember telling the big fella to stop propping open the front door for anyone to walk in.”

  “The big fellow?”

  “The lug who helped her with her little sale. No, more like he oversaw her. A weird name. Skip. Skeet.” Her knobby fingers snapped. “Damnit. I can’t remember. He wore a frayed shirt to show off his muscles, had some kind of chain around his neck, like that Mr. T fella.”

  “Gold chains?”

  “Don’t think so. Had beads.”

  “Do you remember anyone who bought stuff from them? Someone from the building, maybe?”

  “Nope.” Her lipstick was feathered around the edges. “Look, exciting as this is standing around an empty room, do you think you could move it along? You’re not a tenant or anything, and I have responsibilities I have to get back to.”

  Including letting her cats resume their routine of pissing on her leg. From the Hennings to the Katie Kelners to this sad box of a room, Ms. Adair Peters ruling supreme from upstairs. With these options, Tim would’ve hopped the first flight to Jonestown.

  The pay phone from which Will had received the threatening call sat in a Lamplighter lobby six blocks up Van Nuys Boulevard. Was the caller a friend of Leah’s or her guard? The big guy who helped her move? The P.O. box was in the neighboring town—maybe cult headquarters was in the vicinity.

  Something scraped against the pane. Tim crossed the room despite Adair’s labored sigh and opened the window, which gave with some reluctance. Duct-taped to the sill outside were three homemade vases, made from glossy cardboard rolled into thin cones. The wind had claimed the contents of the first two, but a dead carnation leaned from the third, its brittle bud half eroded from rubbing the pane.

  FOUR

  As soon as Tim entered Haines Hall on UCLA’s North Campus, he heard a voice amplified off a lecture-hall ceiling. He followed the sound down a corridor and entered the arena-style room, standing with his back to the wall. Dr. Glen Bederman was pacing down below on a brief throw of stage, his hands clasped behind his back, bent slightly at the waist, studying the floor like a New England botanist on a stroll. A well-dressed man in his sixties, he walked gracefully, a microphone clipped to his oxford shirt.

  A podium stood ignored, home to a second mike and a small bottle of mineral water. Bose speakers adhered to the ceiling piped out Bederman’s voice a bit too loudly. The students attended his words diligently.

  “In Jonestown, children were kept in a six-by-three-by-four-foot plywood box for weeks at a time. They were dragged out, thrown in a dark well, and told that poisonous snakes awaited them there. Husbands and wives were punished if caught talking privately. Do you know how? Their daughters were forced to masturbate in front of the entire population.”

  A few hushed exchanges among the students. A girl raised a tentative hand. “But the cult heyday has passed. I mean, they were all over in the seventies and stuff, but now they’re kind of gone, right?”

  Bederman scowled thoughtfully, as if considering her point. “How many of you have been approached at some point on this campus by someone ready to tell you about a wonderful way to take control of your life?”

  Easily half of the students raised their hands.

  Bederman drew his lips tight and gave the girl in the front a little nod. “There are more than ten thousand destructive cults operating today. The terrorist campaigns that have so changed our world were hatched inside groups where cult mind control is law. As we’ve just seen illustrated, countless cults still operate insidiously all around us in our community. And—even better—mind-control techniques and hypnotic inductions aren’t even illegal. Literally millions of people are manipulated and indoctrinated without giving informed consent every year, and it’s all completely lawful.”

  He walked to the edge of the stage. “Let’s get back to Jonestown. Why did people obey? Why did they drink the Kool-Aid they knew would end their lives? Why did they squeeze cyanide from syringes down the throats of their own babies?”

  “Because they were sociopaths?” a student called out.

  “All nine hundred
ten of them?” Bederman shook his head. “No. Because they were healthy.”

  A chorus of disbelief from the crowd.

  “Stage hypnotists,” Bederman said, “will choose the most ordinary volunteers. At all costs they’ll avoid neurotics, who are all but impervious to suggestion. Con men and cult leaders go after similar targets. Statistics show that two-thirds of people who join cults are from normal, functioning families—whatever those are—and were demonstrating age-appropriate behavior at the time they joined. You see, the healthy remain attuned to the shifts around them, to suggestive cues in their environment. The human brain is a magnificently evolved tool, designed to adapt to an ever-changing—”

  He stopped abruptly and shaded his eyes, squinting up toward the back of the hall at Tim. The students shifted in their chairs, turning around. At once Tim felt the discomfort of five hundred sets of eyes on him.

  Bederman chuckled, and the students turned back to him, confused. “I just influenced the behavior of every last one of you. I indicated that there was key information over there—maybe a threat, maybe an opportunity—but something important enough to disrupt a lecture. Further, I am your professor, your authority figure. And if you believe you’re not impressed with authority, permit me to impart one of my favorite facts: Students perceive professors as being two and a half inches taller than students of the same height. When I, your towering professor”—a self-deprecating grin—”looked to the rear of the hall, most of you followed my lead, bringing social pressure to bear on the rest. We are wisely influenced by information around us. That’s what helps us function as healthy humans. Cults gain inroads to your brain by exploiting precisely such natural, unthinking reactions.”

  “Following your gaze is one thing,” a serious young man in a wool sweater called out. “But it’s not like we’d kill ourselves if you asked us to.”

  “Of course not. First I’d have to gain control over your thoughts, your emotions, your behavior. I’d get you off your turf and exploit the hell out of you.” Bederman rapped the podium with his knuckles. “That would disrupt the key markers by which you understand your world. Your neurotransmitters would reset at high levels, your stress hormones would burn out from continuous activation and stop secreting. I could traumatize you so greatly and repeatedly that your brain would be forced to call into question all it had ever learned. And then, everywhere you looked to gather information, I would present your new skewed reality.”