Chris Jordan - Torn

“Oh, Maggie.”

“Don’t you dare cry on me, Randall.”

Nobody calls him Randall. He grins, eyes glistening. “I’m so happy for you.”

“It’s amazing, it really is,” she says eagerly, her pixie features lighting up. “I had no idea what it was like, walking down the street without my sticks. The weird thing is, sometimes I even miss them. You know, when I want to club a baby seal or whatever.”

That gets Shane laughing, and something that has been tight around his heart for years lets go. “Wow,” he says, hand on his chest. “I’m getting a contact high.”

“There’s only one cure for that,” says Maggie, lifting her menu. “A Cheeseburger Royal.”

They order, eat, reminisce, catch up. An hour passes and Shane is having so much fun he doesn’t want to spoil the reunion by bringing up current business. She knows this, of course, has anticipated his hesitation, and apparently finds it endearing, or at least familiar. She waits until he fingers up the last crumb of piecrust, then leans in, her voice low and seductive.

“Still no motel, huh?” she says, batting her long lashes. “The only reason you call is to pick my brains. Some girls would consider that an insult.”

“I love your brains,” he says. “Is that so wrong?”

“Relax, Randall. I got the goods for you. Everything you ever wanted to know about the Rulers and were afraid to ask.”

“Dazzle me.”

Maggie Drew never reads from notes. She’s always had an uncanny ability to absorb and retain pretty much anything she reads. Retain, evaluate, reason through, she’s able to sift through the chaff, locate the kernels of truth, and explain it all in a way that makes sense to the big bosses and also, generously, to lowly SAs looking for guidance. Which is how she and Shane first crossed paths.

“How much do you know?” she asks. Not an idle question.

“The very basics. Guy writes a self-help book, makes a mint. The book turns into a cult. He makes even more money. He becomes an eccentric recluse. Howard Hughes without the airplanes.”

“Cute.”

“Got it from People magazine. An old issue.”

“It would be old,” she says. “The Arthur Conklin organization has ongoing lawsuits with every popular magazine, most tabloids, network and cable news organizations, and poor little Wikipedia. Basically if you publish a word about him that isn’t from an official Conklin Institute PR release, you’ll be sued. God forbid if you say something critical about him or the Rulers or what they believe in. Repeat a rumor, mention an allegation that can’t be substantiated in court, libel lawyers descend from the heavens like intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuking your ass into bankruptcy.”

“Which explains why I can’t find anything solid on the Net.”

“Yep.”

“And why I need to consult with the foremost cult expert in America.”

“You flatter me,” she says, obviously pleased. “Although it happens to be true. There are young pups nipping at my heels, but I’ve forgotten more than they know.”

“And you don’t forget anything.”

She shrugs, admitting it. “What can I say? Understand, for the last few years my department has been focusing on the international side. Mostly suicide bomber cults. Not much focus on the domestic cults, unless they happen to utter a chant to Allah. I just got back from Birmingham, England. I’m writing a paper on how Islamists persuade native-born lager louts to don very fashionable explosive vests and blow themselves to bits. On loan to MI5, more or less. So I haven’t had a look at the Rulers recently.”

“Whatever you’ve got.”

“Okay. Let’s start with the basic history. In 1969 Arthur Conklin is a forty-five-year-old professor of entomology at UC Berkeley, married to a former student twenty years his junior. Nice for him. His special interest is bees. He’s widely published on hive behavior. A tenured professor, well respected in his field, but something happens-there was a lot of radical stuff going down that year at Berkeley, chaotic behavior he took exception to, he’s a pretty conservative guy, is Professor Conklin-and he resigned from his professorship and severed all ties with the university. He and his wife-they have no children-move to a rural area of Colorado, where they live in a remote cabin in the mountains while he writes his famous book.”

“They have no children?”

“Not then. After the book is published his wife gets pregnant and they have one child, a boy. Bit of a miracle baby because Professor Conklin has a very low sperm count, result of a fever when he was a child. They name the miracle baby Arthur J. Conklin. Different middle name so he’s not a junior.”

“J for Jedediah.”

“Correct. Very good. So Professor Conklin writes his book, gives it a catchy title The Rule of One. The book lays out his theory about how human beings can learn from the example of insects and reorganize the brain for success. It’s all very complicated-unreadable nonsense in my never-humble opinion-but aside from improving your brain power, the book promises to make you rich. Conklin published the book with a small but legit publisher and that first year he sold less than five hundred copies. So he decides to take back the contract and publish it himself. Good move on his part. He expands the title to The Rule of One: How to Unleash the Hidden Powers of Your Mind. He sets up seminars-get this, he charges to explain his own book, then sells it to you. And he doesn’t sell you one copy, he sells you a hundred and tells you how to make money selling it to your friends and neighbors, and how they’ll get rich selling it to their friends and neighbors.”

Shane chuckles and shakes his head. “It never changes, does it? The old scams are the best.”

“True,” Maggie agrees, “but Conklin added a few variations of his own. Pretty soon he’s moving up to ten thousand copies a week in hardcover. Then nearly a hundred thousand copies a month in the trade paperback edition. He’s advertising on cable TV, buying thirty minutes at a time, promoting his book, his secret system for accumulating wealth. He gets very wealthy. Some of his devout readers become his followers and take to calling themselves ‘Rulers.’ They call Conklin the ‘Profit,’ as in making a profit.”

“I heard that,” says Shane. “I thought it was a joke.”

“No joke. Believe me, these folks are very serious. At this point, the late 1970s, his organization has all the makings of a nascent cult, with the author as the charismatic leader, but it’s not quite there yet. The Rule of One has a core philosophy-the individual transforms himself by tuning into what he calls ‘hive think,’ or group intelligence, and then utilizes newfound brain power to dominate the unenlightened. The average saps that Conklin calls ‘drones.’ That’s all very much standard cult, but what the Rulers lack is the origination myth associated with most religions. Conklin has nothing whatever to say about a supreme being, no theory about how the universe began. He does not promise an afterlife-indeed he discourages any such beliefs. For Rulers, the only thing that counts is the here and now.”

“Greed is good.”

Maggie smiles. “Not quite. Conklin believes that greed is an effective stimulant for the higher evolution of the mind. He has no particular use for ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ But he very effectively uses greed to bind his followers together. Many of the original Rulers, the first few hundred, they also get rich, mostly by running seminars that charge upward of five thousand dollars per person, more or less guaranteeing that true believers will turn that initial investment of five grand into fifty thousand in six months or less. And many of them do.”