“I apologize for arriving a little late, Mother.” Kian walked over to the goddess and kissed her cheek. “I had an interesting call from Turner.”
“I have no excuse.” Amanda walked over and kissed her mother as well. “Not a good one anyway.” She winked at her mate before taking a seat next to the goddess.
The lack of response from Annani indicated that she had no problem with her children sharing that kind of information with her. For someone so ancient, she was surprisingly progressive. David would have never dared talk like that in front of his father or his mother.
“What was the call from Turner about?” Kalugal asked.
“A new case that he’s working on. As you know, he runs a hostage retrieval operation. People come to him when all other options have been exhausted. This time, however, it’s not about a hostage but about a woman who joined a cult voluntarily and doesn’t want to be rescued. He asked me to lend him a couple of Guardians.”
“What does he need the Guardians for?” Amanda asked.
“He can’t get her out against her will, and his own thralling ability is so-so. He needs a Guardian to thrall her so she leaves voluntarily. Or at least it seems so.”
“He could use Kri,” Amanda suggested. “As a woman, she would attract less suspicion.”
“That’s a good idea.” Kian pulled out his phone. “I’ll have Onegus suggest her to Turner. It’s a low-risk mission, and Kri would love to see some action.”
“Maybe she’s happy in the cult?” Jacki asked. “What if the Guardian forces her to leave, and then she throws a tantrum about having been abducted?”
“She might.” David leaned forward so Jacki could see him. “She probably thinks that the cult leader is her savior and that he loves her. It will take a lot of work to undo the unhealthy attachment.”
Kian lifted a brow. “Can you explain?”
“I’m not an expert on the subject, but I can give you an overview that will shed a little light on how totalitarian systems work. Cults, dictatorships, terrorist groups, even abusive partners and some political movements are all totalitarian systems that use similar methods. They distance their members from family and friends, often alienating them by painting them in horrid colors. They create an isolated and self-contained environment and supply a total world view and a total ideology that has all the answers. People need to belong, to be loved, and to feel safe, and since those are basic survival instincts, they are hardwired into us. Those needs are exploited by cults. When we are isolated, overwhelmed, and insecure, we seek all that from the authority figure in charge.”
“Do they also use intimidation methods?” Jacki asked. “I don’t think that isolating people from family and friends and supplying them with a complete world view is enough to brainwash them.”
David nodded. “A cycle of punishments and rewards keep members off-balance and vulnerable, allowing an unhealthy attachment to replace the healthy ones that existed prior to the indoctrination.”
“You mean that they feel attached to the cult leader,” Jacki said. “Or the commander of the terrorist group. Now I understand why Director Simmons isolated us from the outside world, and why they drowned us in work. They were using the same tactics in the program.” She chuckled. “But something must have been missing from the mix because I never liked the bastard, let alone felt attached to him.”
David frowned. “What program are you talking about?”
“The government collects people with paranormal abilities and trains them in a secret facility. I was part of that program, but the clan got me out.” She smiled. “I wanted to leave, though. No one needed to thrall me to do that. Not that they could. Even as a human, I was immune to mind manipulation.”
David had read about the military and the intelligence community’s investigation of paranormal phenomena. The program had existed from the fifties all the way to the nineties, but he’d thought that it had been shut down after the Cold War had ended.
The arms race with the Soviets was over, including the psychic one.
Apparently, though, there was a renewed interest in the subject, and he wondered about the reason for it. The original program had been created after both the Soviets and the Americans had discovered research done by the Nazis on what they’d called the occult sciences, aka paranormal abilities.
As far as he knew, the success of that program had been very limited, which was an additional reason for its termination.
What could have been the impetus for its revival?
Perhaps Jacki could shed some light on that. “What did they train you for?”
Jacki shrugged. “To be spies, I guess. What else are paranormal talents good for?”
“Creating super-humans,” Kalugal said. “Did you forget about the breeding program?”
“Right.” Jacki turned to David. “They had a compeller whose job was to make us hook up with complementary talents so we would produce super babies.” She chuckled. “They wanted to jump-start the next step in human evolution.”
Images from the X-men movies came to mind.
“Unbelievable.” David rubbed a hand over his jaw. “If Sari’s story about gods and immortals was the stuff of myths and legends, what you are telling me now sounds like the stuff of comic books.”
“Or science fiction.” Sari put a hand on his shoulder. “Aren’t you glad that you accepted Kalugal’s invitation? Just think of all the ideas for stories you are collecting here.”
He took her hand and kissed it. “Kalugal has my eternal gratitude because he brought me to you. The story ideas are just a nice bonus.”
4
Sari
Kalugal dipped his head. “Your gratitude is appreciated, David. I’ll send you the bill later.”
The teasing was just what had been needed to break the uncomfortable silence that had followed David’s public declaration. He hadn’t mentioned the word love, but his meaning hadn’t been lost on anyone around the breakfast table.
Sari assumed that the discomfort was about the uncertainty of his future, and not about David as a person or as her partner. He was an exceptional individual, and she couldn’t conceive of anyone finding fault with him.
“Fascinating subject.” Amanda put her hand on Dalhu’s shoulder. “What you said about the unhealthy attachment replacing healthy ones is also true in reverse. To free a person from a cult, a new healthy attachment is needed. When Dalhu decided to tie his life to mine, it enabled him to break free from Navuh’s compulsion. We thought it was the mated bond that did that, but perhaps another healthy attachment could have done it as well. The bond doesn’t even have to be romantic in nature. A bond between a parent and child or even a close friendship might work just as well.”
“The distance also had something to do with it,” Kian said. “There is a good reason Navuh requires all his men to return to the island at least once a month. He needs to reinforce the compulsion periodically.”
Amanda waved a dismissive hand. “I’m not talking about the compulsion. In my opinion, it is used to reinforce the underlying organizational structure of the Brotherhood, which operates like a cult. Its members remain loyal to Navuh even when they are away from the island for extended periods of time and the compulsion loses its hold on them. The main reason that Dalhu was able to break free of the cult’s brainwashing was his new bond with me, not the weakening of Navuh’s influence. But what I’m trying to say is that any healthy bond could have done it. Right, Dalhu?”