Conspiracy Theory (11 page)

“Timothy McVeigh was set up,” Michael Harridan had told her, the first time she spoke to him. “Never forget that. It's the best protection you have against being set up yourself.
They
want the American people to believe that
we're
the ones who are dangerous, that
we're
a bunch of kooks who'll blow a bunch of babies to hell just because of our paranoia. That's their word for us. Paranoid. That's what they said about Randy Weaver and David Koresh. But they weren't paranoid. They were right.”

Kathi had wanted to put up a little shrine to all of them, a long line of framed pictures, on the wall of her bedroom, but eventually she had decided against it. If she got arrested, or blown away by the enemy, they could use those pictures to “prove” that she was insane and dangerous. If you were insane, they could do anything they wanted to you. You didn't have any rights, the way you did if they arrested you in the ordinary way. Michael said there were hundreds of people, maybe thousands, locked away in mental institutions whose only real crime had been to understand what the Illuminati were doing and tell other people about it.

“Paranoid is a wonderful word,” Michael said. “They call it a disease. The symptoms are anything they want them to be. One minute you're on the street, getting people to really look at what has happened to America. The next minute, you're in the loony bin, and the only way they'll let you out is if you agree to stop talking about what you know.”

The problem was to strike a balance between being clean and being careful. Kathi couldn't help herself. Her nerves were shot. She wasn't Michael Harridan. She wasn't a professional on a mission. She was an ordinary forty-five-year-old woman, a little dumpy now at the beginning of middle age, easily tired at the end of a long day. She was only important because she knew what she knew, and because Michael trusted her. When the call came, she got Susan and went to work hiding the things they had to hide. They put the explosives in big black trash barrels in her basement and covered them with clothes that were so badly mildewed it was hard to be in the same room with their stench. They put the rifles in odd places that only women would think of: in the old washing machine that hadn't worked in all the time Kathi had rented this house; at the back of the cedar closet behind a cracked panel that opened into the hollow wall. All the walls in this house were hollow. It was a house that would be considered very shabbily made even today. It had probably been considered a gimcrack mess in 1894, when it was built. The Illumi-nati were operating here in those days too—in fact, George Washington himself was a tool of the Illuminati, a thirty-third-degree Mason who was head of his local lodge—but it took a long time for a population to be habituated to the internal rot the Illuminati had decreed for all human lives.

“They think in centuries,” Michael always said. “Most people think in days, or maybe weeks. They take their time. If they didn't, people would catch on, people would get frightened. Instead, it all looks normal. We make fun of the kind of people who talk about how things aren't as good as they used to be. We treat them like cranks.”

Kathi had not been able to give up all the guns. She could probably have hidden everything she had and hidden it well, but if she had, it would not have been available to her if something drastic happened. She hadn't been able to shake the feeling that something drastic was going to happen any moment now. There was a homeless man who rummaged through the garbage cans on her street every morning. He looked a lot more alert than he ought to, and lately he'd been staying closer than ever to her door. There were all the security cameras at work. Price Heaven photographed everything, even the ladies' changing rooms. There wasn't a moment when management couldn't zero in on anybody anywhere in the store. There were the transcripts she had made of the recordings from the party where Anthony van Wyck Ross had been killed. She still had them, the original and five copies, in the bottom drawer of the desk she kept in a corner of the dining room so that she could do her bills every month. She was sure they had been disturbed more than once while she was away from home, and that the desk had been moved too. It made her feel sick to her stomach to think of somebody coming into her house while she was away and going through her things. She'd rather have SWAT teams storm her front door.

The bottom line was this: Kathi no longer felt safe going anywhere, even to the bathroom, when she wasn't armed. She had therefore armed herself, out of the huge cache in the basement, as soon as Susan had left for the evening and she was alone with the nightly news. By then, of course, there were news bulletins flashing by every few minutes. CNN and CNBC were reporting the story as if it were a political assassination, which it might well be. Kathi knew nothing about pistols. She couldn't have recited the name of any to save her life. She'd simply picked out the biggest, blackest one in the pile, passing by the smaller “ladies' guns” that might have fit more easily into her everyday purse. She was sure bigger guns would pack more of a wallop than smaller guns. Bazookas and howitzers were huge, and they packed more of a wallop than rifles. It took her nearly an hour to get the gun loaded. She didn't know what any of the terminology was supposed to mean. She didn't know how to match the gun with the bullets that belonged to it. Some bullets didn't fit into the chambers, so she discarded them. Some bullets fit but were wrong for reasons she could not divine. Every time she found what she thought was the right ammunition, she took the gun up to her bedroom and fired into a big stack of pillows she used to prop her head up when she did
Penny Press
Fun and Easy Puzzles before dropping off to sleep. The gun kicked back against her hand painfully. She'd had no idea that firing a gun could set your bones on fire. Some of the bullets didn't fire at all, though, and there was no pain then. Some of the bullets seemed to half explode inside the chamber. Eventually, she discarded any bullet that did not fit exactly. Too loose a fit, she decided, was just as bad as too big to fit at all. It was only when it was all over, and she had the bullets she needed, that she wondered if she could have done herself some real damage by experimenting the way she had. Maybe one of the bullets that rattled around too much could have made the gun blow up in her hand. She had no idea. She only knew it hadn't happened.

It wasn't until much later that it occurred to her that she might have been heard by somebody in the neighborhood. All the houses here were very close together. When neighbors heard gunshots, they didn't come over to check, but they did sometimes call the police. She sat down on her couch and waited for three hours to see if somebody would come to the door, but nobody did. Maybe none of her neighbors was home. Maybe none of them was paying attention. Kathi had a vision of them all sitting in their living rooms, glued to their TV sets, listening to the first reports of the shooting. By then, CNN had camera crews on the spot. Kathi could see the tall wrought-iron gates that closed off the house. CNN must have had a helicopter too, because there were aerial shots of the house itself with dozens of police cars parked in front of it. People came and went on the ground: women in evening gowns; policemen in uniform; men who might have been guests or detectives or FBI agents.

“All men wear uniforms,” Michael always said. “That suit and tie that men wear to work is a uniform. So's the T-shirt and jeans they wear on the weekends. The trick is to narrow choices without letting you realize they've done it. They don't like individuality, those people. Individuality is dangerous to them.”

Kathi should have been at Price Heaven right this minute. Ten to six was her usual shift—but only four days a week, because Price Heaven didn't hire anybody full-time if it could help it. She had called in sick today, in spite of the fact that, being part-time, she would not get paid for being out. She had put the gun, fully loaded, into the big canvas tote bag she'd taken to carrying instead of her purse. There were laws against carrying a concealed weapon on the streets of Philadelphia, but they were the Illuminati's laws. One of the first things the Illuminati tried to do was to disarm the population. A disarmed population was unable to fight back.

The bus was bumping along on streets she didn't know. Like most people, she rarely left her own neighborhood except to go to work, and then she had a fixed routine for travel. She kept the tote bag on her lap with her hands wound through the handle. She had to physically prevent herself from reaching in to touch the gun. It gave her that much reassurance. The houses were nicer here than they were in her part of town. Most of them were brick. The people seemed to be better-dressed too. Either they had good dark coats that went all the way down past their knees, or those quilted-looking parkas people bought from L.L. Bean. Katy Davenport had had one of those parkas when they were together in school.

The bus pulled up to a stop. Kathi consulted her three-by-five card—she always wrote notes to herself on three-by-five cards; they were harder to lose than Post-it notes—and realized she was at her stop. She got up and waited for the bus's back door to open. She had the impression that people who got out the back door were less conspicuous than people who got out the front. On the street, she looked around, checking the street signs. In the rich towns out on the Main Line, there were sometimes no street signs at all. If you didn't know where you were, you didn't belong there.

“There are people who think they're well-off,” Michael said, “but they only think that because they don't know how really rich people live. Really rich people live as far out of sight as they can. They don't want people to know how much they really have.”

Kathi consulted her three-by-five card again. She had no idea what she was going to do now that she was here. Maybe there would be a diner where she could get a cup of coffee and some toast. It was just about all she could afford if she expected to have enough money to take the bus home. She folded the three-by-five card in half and put it in the pocket of her jacket, which was nothing at all like an L.L. Bean parka.
Cavanaugh Street
, she repeated to herself, in her head. Then she turned in the direction of the yellow police barriers that had been set up along the sidewalk two blocks down.

Ryall Wyndham had been waiting most of his life to be famous, and now that it had happened, he didn't know what to do with it. It wasn't that he minded the attention. There were people who got rabbit-caught-in-the-headlights syndrome, but he wasn't one of them. It hadn't occurred to him, at first, the kind of capital he would be able to make of this. He'd only wondered if he was going to be in for endless hassles of a legal nature, because there he was, just a few hundred feet away, and there was that prick Tony Ross exploding into pieces
right
in front of his face. The problems of a legal nature that he had envisaged were strictly of a procedural kind. It hadn't hit him until much later that he might be considered a suspect, not only because he'd been on the spot but because he'd been so public about the fact that he'd loathed Tony and all of his works. Of course, a lot of people loathed Tony Ross. Anybody in a position like that made enemies, without even trying, and on top of that Tony had the whole class thing: good-looking in an emaciated, English sort of way; tall and lean; good at sports; good with women; intellectually accomplished. Intellectually
snobbish
, that was what Ryall thought, but there was no way to fight that manner when you were confronted with it, unless you had it yourself. Ryall was one person who never misquoted that line from
Hamlet
that most people mistakenly thought said “to the manor born.” It wasn't “to the manor.” It was “to the
manner
,” and that alone made Ryall convinced that Shakespeare was a genius. There was something there he could write a book about some day. If you told a woman like Charlotte Deacon Ross that you thought Shakespeare was a genius, she'd think you were a middlebrow hick, and that would be the end of your invitations to her “intimate evenings.” The only way you could redeem yourself would be to give a lot of money to one of her projects. Ryall did not have that kind of money. Charlotte herself gave 150,000 dollars a year to the opera alone. Women who wanted invitations were known to give a fifth of that, first time out. For Ryall, there was no substitute for staying an insider. He might consider Shakespeare a genius, but he'd never say so where anybody could hear him, and he would always know the name of the literary genius of the moment. The literary genius of this particular moment was Cynthia Ozick, who wrote excruciatingly thin little novels about alienation and spiritual dislocation, laced through with Yiddish folklore. Charlotte liked Cynthia Ozick because Cynthia Ozick had once been quoted, in
Esquire
, saying, “I am not entertained by entertainment.” It was the kind of thing the queen of England would say. Charlotte liked that, in spite of the fact that she thought of the queen of England as hopelessly bourgeois.

I am now making no sense whatsoever
, Ryall thought, staring into the small screen of his television set. The very chicest thing was to have no television at all, and Ryall hadn't had one until three days ago, when he realized he wanted, passionately, to see himself on all these television programs he was doing. He wanted to see himself when the show aired, and he wanted to see himself on the videotape they gave him a day or two later, like a souvenir. He'd had to buy not only the television set, but a VCR as well, and that had left him not only dangerously out of pocket but upset as well. Apparently, nobody was buying videotapes anymore. They were buying DVDs. The clerk in the Radio Shack Ryall had gone to had been as disdainful as Charlotte Ross when confronted with a tourist from Topeka who “really loved art.” Ryall didn't care. He only wished he'd bought a bigger set, so that he didn't have to scrunch up his eyes to see himself on the screen. In a couple of days, he was supposed to be on
Larry King Live.
Practically everybody watched
Larry King Live
except those women who were too chic to own a television set, and their children watched it. He had no trouble imagining himself at the next big fund-raiser—when one of those women had the guts to give one—with all those college kids hanging off his elbows while he talked about what it was like to schmooze over coffee with Jesse Jackson and Barbara Ehrenreich.