“His name—or so he pretended—was Jacob Hope,” she said up at Storm. “And it is remarkably difficult to discover anything else specific about him. He was probably British, though he seems to have traveled extensively not only through Europe but in Africa, America and the Middle East as well. He appeared on the scene some thirty years ago. A drifter, traveling with other drifters, the new breed of young vagabonds—there were a lot of them at the time.” She paced away from Storm, her chin lowered pensively. Her stick bobbed up and down in the air in front of her as her wrist rose and lowered. “Hope claimed to have mystical powers. The power of prophecy, healing. The secret of eternal life as well. He promised eternal life to those who would believe in him, follow him. And many young people did believe him and did follow. Men and women both, but women especially; he had enormous sexual appeal. Women—girls—who had run away from home, who were lost and alone, on drugs some of them, some of them simply confused, gave themselves to him in great numbers, even eventually bearing his children, gladly.” She paused, turned, faced Storm again, the lenses of her spectacles awash in reflected flames. “His claims for himself, and his offers to his followers, became more and more inflated, more grandiose. He said he was an oracle. He said he was a son of God. Ultimately, a little over twenty-five years ago, Saint Iago—that’s what he was calling himself by then—led his people out of England, on a long pilgrimage. Some of the followers believed the exodus was to climax in the world’s final cataclysm. After which, I suppose, their boy was to be crowned king of heaven, his apostles at his right hand. In any case, they followed him. And the great journey took the cult through Spain and Western Africa and finally to South America. There, in the jungles of the Paraná Plateau, Saint Iago made camp, presumably to await the end.” She paced back towards Storm again.

He glanced at her, then went on studying the photo. “So how’d it come to this?” he asked her.

“There was one,” she said. “In the jungle,” in the compound—there was one disciple of this madman who finally—finally—began to guess the truth. Even in the depths of her enslavement to Iago’s charisma, there came the glimmer of understanding. She began to suspect that her master’s miracles and prophecies, his promised apocalypse, were not simply deceptions—but were deceptions intended to conceal another, more terrible agenda. Children of the camp—Iago’s children—had begun to disappear. Their mothers sometimes too. And one woman had gone raving mad and killed herself before anyone could stop her.