If Looks Could Kill (8 page)

Jo poked around the little bits of Kinh-Sanhian junk—and junk from a dozen other countries. She found Chinese fans and handcuffs. Little Eiffel Towers. A vendor selling nothing but pirated American music on CDs. And clothes. Lots and lots of clothes.

Some of it wasn't too tacky, either.

Hmmm, maybe this country isn't such a nightmare after all, Jo thought. She browsed through a few racks, inspecting cuffs, hemlines, and collar styles with a trained eye.

Suddenly someone tapped her on the shoulder.

“Help you, pretty miss?” a wizened old Kinh-Sanh man asked. “Twenty dollar.”

Jo grinned wide, immediately slipping into superflirt mode. She spoke with a slight Spanish accent. “Ah, hello. You speak English?”

The man nodded. “Little enough.”

“Fantastic. I've been all over this city, and no one wants to help me,” she pouted.

“I help,” the vendor replied with a proud smile. “I get you supercool T-shirt. Twenty dollar.”

Jo grinned. “I'll buy five T-shirts if you can help me.”

The vendor's eyes lit up. “You make me very happy. I help!”

“Oh, thank you,” Jo said, touching the man's arm. “I've come all the way from Madrid, and I'm totally lost. Do you know anything about a man named West? Lucien West?”

The vendor's expression turned to disgust. “Ugh! You mean stinkball Luscious.”

Jo's heart jumped. “Yes, that's him. Luscious Lucien West. I've come to find him. I hear he's the superguru of Kinh-Sanh.” Jo leaned in close and elbowed the angry vendor.
“I hear Lucien West can sell inner peace to the Dalai Lama himself.”

“Beh!” the vendor growled, spitting. “All he do is set up shop in our beautiful country. Steal money. Steal lives. He evil man. I not help.” The man waved her away. “You go now.”

Jo slowly sulked away, pretending to be disappointed.

Hmmm.
That
was interesting. Not everyone thought Lucien was the cat's nip.

She moved on through the crowd. She tried to space them out, putting on her little Spanish girl lost act for a few more vendors. The reactions were all the same. “He set up shop. He evil man.” One supergenerous woman tried to convince Jo to come home with her rather than go to Lucien. Jo politely refused but bought a couple of the plastic key chains she was selling.

After a while Jo glanced at her watch. Wow! She'd spent three hours in the market. Well, she figured, that's nothing new. This was Kinh-Sanh's version of the mall, and three hours in a mall was just a warm-up for Jo. She was about to head back to the flat when she spotted something familiar.

A flash of color.

Silk blouses on a rack. The exact same pattern as the sleeve scrap they found in the warehouse!

Jo hurried over and snagged one off the rack. It was nice enough, but the print wasn't her at all. She checked the label—and her jaw dropped. The label said Girl Talk!

And it was in capital letters.
It was a knockoff of Theresa's mother's design!

Well, the fact that it was a cheap copy explained the obnoxious print. But how would a rackful of bogus Girl Talks find their way into a seedy market when they should be hanging out at Bogart's fifth floor?

Jo immediately bought one of every color for about ten U.S. dollars each.

As she hightailed it back to the flat, she couldn't help but grin. She had just combined the thrill of shopping, the excitement of finding an extreme bargain, and the rush of saving the world all at once!

Did she have the life or
what
?

•  •  •

The noonday sun beamed happily down on the garden near the main temple. Caylin sat with Jenny and a half
dozen other members she had just met. Her indoctrination had begun in earnest, and the members sat in the warm sun reminiscing about their first days in the compound. The one common thread Caylin found between all of them?

Too much money.

But Lucien was doing his best to help cure them of it.

“I feel so free,” a girl named Concetta said, holding her arms out to soak in the sunbeams. “Everything I used to worry about means nothing. It is true freedom, Caylin. You'll know what we mean very soon.”

Concetta came from Milan. From what she had said before, her father owned a vineyard that produced some of the finest wine in northern Italy. Big bucks. But for some reason, wine barrels full of cash weren't enough to fulfill Concetta's sense of self-worth.

“Listen to her, Caylin,” Barry from London advised. “She was one of the most lost causes you ever saw when she came in here. But look at her now. A veritable font of tranquility.”

The others laughed. Barry came from a distinguished
British publishing family. He fled Cambridge for a chain-smoking trip across Asia. Then he found Lucien, smoked his last butt, and never left. He didn't even miss the nicotine.

“Inner peace can be catching,” added Stanislaus from Prague.

There were others: Molly from Seattle (her father was a computer game designer); Ito from Nagasaki (his father was into Japanese steel and golf course development); Gunther from Zurich (banking); Heddy from Iceland (designer soft drinks); Louis from Jamaica (resort development and agriculture).

What was amazing to Caylin was that there were over sixty others who she hadn't met yet. What did
their
parents do? Best-selling authors? Tax lawyers? Senators? It boggled the mind.

She'd learned more about Jenny, too. Her mother was a real estate developer in the Chicago suburbs. Jenny had begun college but quickly fell into the wrong crowd. Drinking. Partying. Learning very little except how to skip class. Eventually Jenny scammed a hunk of money
from one of her tuition accounts and headed out. By the time she got to Lucien, the rest of her tuition money was safely in her bag, in cash, waiting for the proper moment to be spent.

That moment came on Jenny's second day at the compound. Since then she was able to get Lucien some other account numbers belonging to her mother. Jenny justified this by swearing that her mother had more than she could ever need. She said it with such shocking disgust that Caylin had to wonder what her mother ever did to deserve it.

“So what does your father do?” Ito asked her.

Caylin shrugged. “He's an oil rancher. So was my grandfather and my great-grandfather.”

“There's oil in Nebraska?” Molly from Seattle asked skeptically.

“No,” Caylin replied. “In Texas. We just live in Nebraska.”

“I hope you realize how important it is for us to help Lucien any way we can,” Jenny told her. “We were all unlucky to be born into unbelievable materialistic situations. Luckily we don't have to live with it.”

“It's also lucky that most of us are able to siphon some of
that wealth to Lucien,” Barry said. “I don't know what I would do if this place ever shut down. I'd have no place to go.”

Caylin smiled and nodded in agreement. But inside, she just couldn't believe it. Were their lives so bad? So empty? Actually, they sounded too
full.
The way she saw it, they were just a bunch of spoiled rich kids who suddenly realized that they were at an age when people expected them to take responsibility for their lives. Get the expensive degrees. Take over the family businesses. Make something of themselves.

Grow up.

None of them wanted to do that. They had taken their deep-seated aversion to real life and used it as a springboard to brainwashing. Lucien was a dream of an authority figure—he put no pressure on them as long as the cash rolled in. It was as if they were paying him to protect them from the real world.

Ha. Not a bad setup.

But Caylin also realized that she was being harsh. She doubted that any of their decisions had been conscious. They looked ahead at their responsibilities and couldn't
handle what they saw. Instinctively they rebelled. Fled to a place where the pastures were greener than any they had ever seen. Greener than cold, hard cash at any rate.

Yet down to the last one she had met, they seemed happy. Their “inner peace” was genuine. Inside these walls, stress was extinct.

Caylin couldn't really fault them for wanting true inner peace.

A bell rang from the temple. The group slowly got to their feet.

“What's that?” Caylin asked.

“The midday gathering,” Jenny said, offering a hand to help her up. “Come on.”

The group made their way toward the front of the temple. Small crowds of other members came out of buildings and copses of trees and other gardens. It was like a slow, serene stampede of white cloth.

Lucien calls, Caylin mused, and they come running.

She purposely lagged back from the group to watch them all more closely. But something distracted her.

A pair of sparkly white Range Rovers entered the
compound and drove toward them. Their arrival was rather shocking since Caylin hadn't seen any hint of outside technology within the compound (other than Lucien's computer room). The SUVs' windows were tinted black. As they passed, Caylin tried to see inside. But no dice.

The Rovers proceeded to the back of the main temple, disappearing around the corner.

Hmmm.

Caylin glanced around. The rest of the group was intent on getting to the gathering. No one paid any attention to her.

Perfect.

She edged through some shrubbery to the side of the building and peered around the corner to check it out. The Range Rovers were backing up to a pair of steel double doors. When the SVUs stopped, the drivers—both burly shaved heads—dismounted and went straight for the doors. One knocked while the other opened the hatchbacks of the Rovers. Something wasn't right with these guys. What was it—?

Caylin stiffened.

They wore the regular “spiritual” garb like all the others.
But in her spy training Caylin had seen enough concealed weapons to know that these two peace lovers were packing heat. The bulges were unmistakable.

What would cult members need with guns?

The double doors swung wide, and several more shaved heads carried out a bunch of large duffel bags. Judging by the effort, Caylin guessed the bags were full of something heavy. The guards tossed them into the back of the Range Rovers without a word.

In seconds the transaction was complete. The hatchbacks were slammed shut, the double doors closed, and the armed drivers got back in and put the SUVs in gear.

This was huge. She wasn't exactly sure what she'd seen, but weapons and bags and secret exchanges sure
felt
huge. Caylin had to get to her phone. She'd stashed it in her room, frustrated like crazy because she didn't have anywhere to carry it. But this definitely deserved a phone call to the other Spy Girls.

“Hey!” a voice called from behind her.

Caylin froze, fear streaking down her spine.

Somehow a phone call didn't seem to be in her future.

Caylin whirled.

Jenny!

“What are you doing?” she demanded.

Caylin grinned. “Just looking around. I'm still kind of lost around here.”

Jenny shook her head. “All you had to do was follow us. Come on, we'll miss the gathering!”

Caylin nodded and went with her, reminding herself to let out a really heavy sigh of relief later. That was close!

She had to be more careful. The new person would arouse the most suspicion if she were continuously caught poking her nose around corners.

The only problem was that there always seemed to be something suspicious going on around those pesky corners.

But, Caylin thought desperately, what did it all mean?

•  •  •

“Eureka!” Theresa shouted.

Jo bolted into the flat's computer room, wondering who won the lottery. There was Theresa, hair shooting up in all directions, bags under her bloodshot eyes, arms raised in victory. Her ridiculous grin made her look insane.

“What?” Jo asked.

“I did it!” She held up a sheaf of laser printouts. “I hacked that sucker wide open! Just call me Madam Machete!”

“If you don't get a grip, I'm going to start calling you Darla Demento,” Jo said.

“Jo, do you realize what I've just gone through?” Theresa said, her eyes wild. “The security? The dead ends? The mazes? I've just done an iron woman triathalon of a hack! And I got a ton!”

“A ton of what?” Jo asked, wrinkling her nose.

Theresa wiggled her eyebrows. “Numbers, my dear. Lots and lots of numbers. Take a look.”

Theresa scrolled down a screen filled with numerical entries. Figures flew by in a blizzard.

“Slow down!” Jo ordered. “What is all this?”

“It's one of Lucien's financial ledgers,” Theresa explained, brandishing a crumpled printout. “This is what we've been looking for.”

“That's great, but what's in it?” Jo repeated.

“Millions.” Theresa clicked the mouse as the numbers continued to fly. “He's got millions of dollars passing back and forth to various accounts. They all seem to start out as this vague description called ‘donations.' But that doesn't make any sense at all.”

“Why not?” Jo asked. “He's running a spiritual retreat, after all.”

Theresa shook her head. “We're talking nine figures here, Jo. Even if all the rich kids in the Western Hemisphere got together and pooled their trust funds, they'd never be able to slap together this kind of money. And they're all ‘cash' transactions that are basically untraceable.”

“So he is into something crooked,” Jo declared.

“Well, his books are crooked, that's for sure,” Theresa said, leaning back in her chair. “Just from an accounting standpoint, he's a first-rate con artist. But the real question is, where does the money come from?”

“Drugs?” Jo speculated, squinting at the screen.

Theresa shook her head doubtfully. “I think Uncle Sam would've known about that. No, this is something different. But what?”