Near Death (37 page)

Alarm bells went off in Washington as soon as Alex’s call for assembly went out. The news media with their bird’s-eye view helicopters buzzing the Bolz farm was a better source of real-time information than the static views at the law enforcement roadblocks. Every bureaucrat glued him- or herself to a cable channel of choice to
follow along.

The Bliss Task Force met telephonically in emergency session. It was decided that there was nothing inherently illegal about a mass gathering on private property and the vigorous enforcement of narcotics laws was not a winning strategy. The target of law enforcement efforts had to be Alex Weller. He was a known fugitive with a federal arrest warrant and therefore the operation to capture him was placed in the jurisdiction of the FBI with support from the U.S. Marshals. Bob Cuccio would be in charge of the exercise and manage it locally. The White House chief of staff was on the call and warned, “Do what you have to do, but for God’s sake, we don’t want another Waco.”

Cyrus rang Cuccio after the conference call was over. “Bob, I want in.”

“Don’t you think it’s too soon?”

“I’m already back at work. When Weller’s in custody, I’ll do my mourning.”

“Okay, Cy. You’re on the team. See you in Nebraska.”

Fifty-two

5 DAYS

Cyrus rested his head against the cold plastic window of the Learjet. Below him the land looked like a brown-toned patchwork quilt.

“The Earth is flat,” he said.

Emily craned to see out his side. “No, Nebraska’s flat.”

They were alone in the cabin. The pilot came over the intercom. “Well be landing in Lincoln in fifteen minutes.”

Cyrus didn’t give a damn about conflicts of interest. He was beyond that. He approached Stanley Minot and told him he needed a consultant psychiatrist at his side in Rising City to help him chart the best course with Alex Weller. He recommended Emily Frost for her expertise in the psychology of death and her direct knowledge of Weller’s personality. He neglected to mention that he and Emily were sleeping together and he didn’t much care if that lack of disclosure ever came back to bite him. Besides, they’d save the U.S. government the cost of a hotel room.

It was a magnificent sunny day and Alex was in a splendid mood, spending a rare few minutes on his own. That morning he’d toured New Rising City and was treated like a king visiting his subjects. The settlement had spread onto one of Erik’s western fields and now a full eighty acres was filled with acolytes. No one had a good count but it didn’t matter; Alex knew there were thousands and they were still coming.

More armed men were recruited to patrol the perimeter and they held their ground, keenly watched through high-powered binoculars by FBI agents who’d obtained permission from neighboring farmers to set up their own perimeter. Between the two groups was a no-man’s-land of untilled fields.

Helicopters crisscrossed overhead. Their constant droning was irritating at first but now was part of the permanent soundscape and Alex hardly noticed them. Some were news choppers; others were FBI and state patrol. When Alex walked among his flock he held an open umbrella over his head to protect himself from being a target. Everyone with an umbrella opened theirs too. From the air, umbrellas appeared to be sprouting around the farm like flowers opening in the morning sun.

After lunch, Alex took Bliss and when his trip was over and Jessie left for the kitchen, he lay propped on the pillow utterly peaceful and mellow. He opened his laptop set on his belly. Sam told him he’d posted a new magazine article on the IPC website and thought Alex would want to read it.

Alex found the piece from
BusinessWeek
. “Is Bliss a Threat to the Global Economy?” A photo of an executive carrying an attaché case and opening a glass office door was captioned,
Are your employees members of the Inner Peace Crusade?

         
Scott Truro, vice president of human resources at Manhattan-based French-Casper Publishing, is a worried man. Three times in the past month, he’s had to tell his boss, CEO Charlotte Giddings, that staffing problems were acutely affecting the company’s ability to produce product and compete for business. The problem isn’t labor unions or workplace illness. The problem is Bliss, the mind-altering drug that produces a spiritual high. Twice in two weeks Truro had to face critical manpower shortages at the company’s Newark production facility, literally shutting down the presses. It doesn’t stop there: In the company’s tony
midtown offices, the no-show rate in the ranks of designers, writers, and editors has been astronomical.

         
Across the country and the rest of the industrialized world, similar scenes have been playing out in shop floors and office. Fanning the flames of this disturbing trend is the elusive and murky organization known as the Inner Peace Crusade, founded by a Harvard doctor, Alex Weller—now wanted by the FBI for murder—which seeks to turn as many people as possible to their version of the path of righteousness. Using the Internet as its trumpet, the IPC has recruited unknown hundreds of thousands of followers into this virtually structureless organization. Like a latter-day Timothy Leary, the turn-on, tune-in, drop-out LSD guru of the sixties, Weller has galvanized the movement with his erudite and personalized accounts of glimpsing the afterlife and has promulgated an enigmatic Internet countdown clock, now standing at five days, which has rattled the nerves of authorities around the world as to its intent. Weller now claims to be inside a spontaneously growing tent and camper community on a farm in Rising City, Nebraska, which has swelled to thousands of
occupants. Surrounded by federal officers, there are mounting fears of a Waco-style standoff.

         
As the country heads back toward certain and deep recession, the ripple effects are being felt throughout the global economy. Bliss abuse in Europe and Asia hasn’t quite caught up with America but it’s gaining steam. Throughout Europe’s economic centers— Frankfurt, Paris, Milan, Geneva, London, and Madrid— output is down and all indices of economic productivity point to a distracted and disaffected workforce. Even Japan, a bastion of workplace loyalty and stability, is experiencing a wave of Bliss-induced production delays and plant closings.

         
One person whose business has been thriving is Dr. Vincent Desjardines, one of the country’s leading experts on the behavioral effects of Bliss. Spotting a need, the psychologist left his practice and set up Desjardines Associates, a consulting company that works with corporate clients to prevent Bliss abuse in the workplace and attempt to deprogram the hooked. Desjardines admits that prevention is easier than converting a user. “You have to understand,” he says, “this is a very powerful drug. For many people, their day-to-day existence becomes intolerably ordinary and
inconsequential. Waking up in the morning and going to work seems pointless. If they don’t opt for suicide, which is fortunately not terribly common, they tend to hang around their homes, taking repeated doses of the drug and spending down their savings. We’ve not had much success in winning these people back, even with immersion therapy techniques. The real hope, like many things in medicine, is prevention rather than cure.”

         
What kind of preventative measures work? So far, Desjardines claims that intensive mandatory companywide seminars to educate employees of the dangers of Bliss, complete with vignettes of suicides and family breakups, slow the rate of spread through an organization. But the most important maneuver, he claims, is to root out and expel any employees who seem to be followers or members of the Inner Peace Crusade. Desjardines gets animated when he talks about the IPC. “Some people who take Bliss don’t drop out and withdraw into a shell. Instead they become obsessed with spreading the word like missionaries looking for converts. They tend to be extroverts, people with strong convictions and beliefs to start with. Make no mistake about it: once they formally or informally ally themselves with this movement, they
become a dangerous and destructive fifth column within a company. Through persuasion or actual sabotage they will get converts.”

         
Meanwhile, at retailing giant Four Seasons Apparel in Atlanta, Georgia, Ann Rosenberg, the newly appointed human resources chief, has been getting an earful from the company’s chief financial officer on the deteriorating economic picture at the company. At the Four Seasons warehouse and distribution center in suburban Atlanta, a few employees started a chapter of the Inner Peace Crusade and wreaked havoc through the organization. And if that wasn’t enough, consumer demand throughout the retail sector is as weak as people can remember. Still, Rosenberg is pleased about her promotion even though she hasn’t had time to hang her pictures. “I’ve wanted this kind of job my whole career. I only wish the previous head of HR hadn’t quit after taking Bliss.”

         
Editor’s note: Last Wednesday
, BusinessWeek
experienced the ravages of Bliss firsthand. Writer Stephanie Vogt, 26, a contributor to this article and a four-year employee of the magazine, took her own life following a single dose of Bliss
.

Alex smiled and decided to add a post to a long comment thread attached to the article—but his train of thought was interrupted by loud percussive
whumps
from fast-approaching helicopter blades.

There were shouts outside and someone downstairs called his name.

He put on his shoes, ran down the staircase and headed for the back yard where Erik emerged from his RV. He and Steve were pointing toward the east.

“They’re coming!” Steve shouted at him. “It’s an attack!”

Four AH-64 Apache helicopters with U.S. Air Force insignia were coming in low and fast.

Alex was dumbfounded. The FBI had called the Bolz farm to try to set up a line of communication but he hadn’t allowed it. The previous day, there had been a leaflet drop over the fields asking people to leave the site and urging Alex Weller to turn himself in to the authorities and avoid confrontation. Would they ratchet things up so quickly? Risk mass casualties with a full assault?

Steve raised an elk rifle one of the militiamen had given him as a present.

“Don’t shoot!” Alex shouted. “Let’s see what they do.”
“Please Alex, go inside!” Steve insisted.

Alex ignored him, fascinated by the spectacle.

One chopper took the lead and three held back. The lead craft slowed to a hover less than thirty feet over the back yard, creating a deafening prop wash. A side door slid open and a helmeted soldier leaned out, a megaphone in one hand.

“Hold your fire!” he boomed. “We are not hostile!”

“Who are you?” Steve shouted at the top of his lungs.

“Major Ben Thomas, U.S. Air Force, Fifty-fifth Wing, Air Combat Command, Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska.”

Alex decided to speak. “What do you want?” he shouted.

“We want to join you and we want to help protect you!” the major thundered. “Me and my men don’t report to the United States government anymore. We report to God!”

Fifty-three

3 DAYS

As Moreno Stasi was wrapping up his RAINEWS 24 broadcast segment outside the Duomo in Milan, reporters in every major city on all continents were working on some variant of the same assignment.

TV screens in dozens of languages flashed the IPC countdown clock and quite a few producers had the same idea as Stasi: using churches, cathedrals, mosques, and synagogues as evocative props for their stories.

These looped reports combined with frequent live cut-ins to news chopper shots of the expanding humanity at the Bolz farm in Nebraska and the hapless road blocks keeping only the least-determined out.

There were new angles too. Many news crews in unmarked cars and vans simply drove off-road onto the farm, hitting holes in the FBI perimeter and joining the congregation. There, armed with cameras, satellite dishes, and battery packs they embedded themselves and roamed the dirt of New Rising City, interviewing anyone who’d talk to them and
turning long lenses on the federal agents staking out the other side of no-man’s-land. Erik Bolz was a plum target and occasionally he obliged; but the ultimate “get” was Alex Weller, who remained elusive, preferring the controlled medium of his own web videos.

The FBI set up its command center in the cafeteria of Rising City Elementary School. Public schools were shut down and parents were keeping their kids at home or sending them to relatives elsewhere. Led by Bob Cuccio, the FBI team, manned mainly by Washington and Quantico people, was supplemented by agents from the Omaha field division. The ever-expanding field perimeter was patrolled by agents and U.S. Marshals from contiguous states.

Cyrus and Emily arrived for Cuccio’s morning briefing from their Super 8 Motel in Columbus about twenty miles north of Rising City.

In the parking lot she asked, “Are you sure it’s okay for me to go to this?”

“Bob was impressed by what you had to say yesterday. You’re on the team.”

“This is a new experience,” she said, taking in the sea of police and FBI vehicles.

“It’s a new experience for everyone.”

Cuccio had played college basketball and still had a beanpole body. Set against the diminutive tables and chairs of the elementary school cafeteria he looked whimsical, like an elongated giant; but no one was sniggering. Cuccio’s message to the packed room was sobering.

“The president, the attorney general, the secretaries of Homeland Security and Defense, everyone, and I mean
everyone
has us under a microscope, ladies and gentlemen,” he began. “We’re sitting at T minus three days on the IPC clock and the closer we get to zero the more this situation turns into a tinderbox. Now we’ve all seen the theories about Weller’s intentions when the clock winds down. I know some think it’s a publicity stunt and nothing of substance is going to happen but we have to play out all the scenarios. The president, I know—because he’s told me directly—is concerned about worst cases, something apocalyptic, some call to violence or destruction or social disruption. Frankly, no one sitting in the White House Situation Room has the inclination to sit back and wait to see what transpires.”