Conspiracy Theory (23 page)

It was too cold to be standing outside like this. The wind was too harsh. Gregor snapped up the collar of his coat and put his hands in his pockets.

He wanted to make copies of all the Harridan newsletters and read them in as close to chronological order as he could get them. He wanted to do that tonight.

There were police everywhere. Kathi Mittendorf had seen them, or the traces of them, tucked out of sight in the bushes that marked the edge of the little park at the end of the street, slipping into bathrooms in the small branch of the public library where she went to get her romance books. She had been very careful, since the death of Anthony van Wyck Ross, not to look too dedicated to the cause of America on Alert. She knew the way the Illuminati could make the sanest, most ordinary citizen look like a “fanatic.” She was even a little proud of herself. She had always wondered what would happen to her if the Illuminati began to put the pressure on. She hadn't really imagined that she would ever be important enough for them to bother with. America on Alert was dangerous to the Illuminati and their plans for a One World Government. Michael was dangerous to them. Kathi saw herself as a foot soldier for the movement, one of those absolutely necessary people who filled the ranks behind the leaders who knew what the score was and how to negotiate it. Her newfound importance had come on her very suddenly. It was the result of a combination of factors, no one of them individually significant: that she lived in the house where they stored the weapons; that she was the one who had picked up the phone when Michael needed to talk; that she had been the only one to be really friendly with Steve. Things came together and you used them. You used every advantage you could find. They were few and far between. Kathi didn't care that she was an accident. Sometimes she found herself stopping in the middle of the day, caught and startled by the way her life had changed, and it was almost like being drunk—almost, because Kathi didn't get drunk. She'd tried it once back in high school and ended up sick and embarrassed in the back of somebody's pickup truck. She wondered what would happen to her now that she had become the focal point of an entire operation. She did not expect to live through it, or to become somebody like Michael. She couldn't see herself as a seasoned leader with a history of operations to her credit. What she hoped for, in the long run, was what Timothy McVeigh had accomplished—not the bombing, but the martyrdom. She'd be smarter about it than McVeigh had been, though. She wouldn't keep her mouth shut. She'd talk to every reporter who asked for an interview. She'd tell them everything she knew about the Illuminati, and the way the world's secret power elite was manipulating events behind the scenes to destroy the freedoms Americans had won for themselves in the Constitution and to bring the American government and the American people under the control of the United Nations. She'd tell them the truth about Timothy McVeigh and the World Trade Center bombing. She'd expose the CIA and the Bildebergers and the Trilateral Commission and the Rhodes Scholarship program and the way they were all run by the same people and working together to accomplish the same thing. It didn't matter that not many people would believe her, some would. It didn't matter that the press would make her sound like a psychiatric case, the way they had with David Koresh and Randy Weaver. There were people out there who didn't know the truth but expected it. There were other people who only knew that things were terribly wrong and they were terribly unhappy. Those people would hear her in a way the brainwashed people wouldn't. That was the way it worked. When the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms destroyed Koresh and the Branch Davidians, and the footage was played on television for the world to see,
some
people began to realize that it was not paranoid to believe that America was run by a secret government that hated the Bill of Rights. It was only sensible. When the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms killed Randy Weaver's wife and son with high-powered rifles because the Weavers wouldn't let the evil agents of the illegitimate secret government onto their private land,
some
people began to wonder if the things they'd heard about the FBI—those un-corruptable agents of law and order—were nothing but propaganda. What kind of a government engaged in propagandizing its own citizens? It was like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle. Until you'd fit at least some of the pieces together, it made no sense at all. Kathi had seen the puzzle almost complete. That was what Michael Harridan had done for her, and she would never be able to thank him enough.

The truth of it was that she was more than a little excited at the thought of becoming a martyr. It made her happier than she had ever been, and the thought of herself being interviewed on
60 Minutes
by a somber-faced Ed Bradley made her feel as if her body were expanding endlessly, ballooning into space. There was always the possibility that the Illuminati would get wind of what she was doing and shoot her instead of taking her alive. There was an even better possibility that they would make sure she died in prison, and early, in one of those prison murders the authorities always claimed it was impossible to solve. She would have to be careful about both those things.

At the moment, she had to be careful to be as normal as she always was, a middle-aged woman who worked at Price Heaven and wasn't even a supervisor, although women half her age who had been working at Price Heaven far less long had advanced that far. She had checked and rechecked the guns and the explosives. They were safely in place in the hollows between the walls, under the floor in the basement, disguised by wads of yellowed newsprint in the old woodstove nobody had used for as long as Kathi could remember. It was not the arms she was worried about. Nobody could claim she was about to shoot anybody any time sooner. It would take a good half hour to unearth anything useful. She wasn't worried that the arms would be confiscated, either, because of course this was not the only house where they kept weapons and explosives. There were houses all around the city, and only Michael knew where they all were. Everything was ready. Everything had been carefully planned. If the need arose, America on Alert—or at least the core of it— could be out of sight and undetectable in an instant. What worried her was the police, slithering as they were in bushes and bathrooms, staying out of sight. Something was about to happen. She could feel it. She didn't know what it was. It was one thing to wait in expectation for martyrdom. It was another to just wait, not knowing what would happen next, not being sure what you were supposed to do.

It was seven o'clock in the morning. Her shift started at ten. She had taken her shower, and eaten her breakfast, and gotten dressed in plain black slacks and a white blouse. Later, at the store, she would put on the green apron she was required to keep there and be in full uniform. The uniform bothered her to no end. For one thing, she had had to buy it, or rather the slacks and blouse, from Price Heaven itself. She had been told she was being given an “employee discount,” but there was no way to prove that. Price Heaven didn't sell its uniform pieces to the general public. The pieces weren't out on the floor with price tags on them so that she could check to see if she was getting any discount at all. For another thing, there was the simple fact that it was a uniform. That was what the Illuminati liked to do to people. They liked to turn them into cogs in a machine, ciphers without individuality. Ending individuality was one of the things they cared about most.

She did not have a television set. She'd thrown out the one she had at the end of her first month in America on Alert. She'd finally understood how that set was destroying her, because it was sending out the signals that brainwashed her into passivity while she thought she was just watching
Golden Girls
. She didn't get the newspaper, either, because she didn't want the newspaper delivery man coming to her door. Everybody knew that newspapers were one of the greatest bastions of evil in America. Even people who would say that America on Alert was full of kooks knew that. Kathi didn't want to give the newspaper a chance to plant a bug on the premises. As it was, Michael came in once a month while she was at work and swept the place for bugs and did whatever else had to be done to make sure that any bugs he didn't catch wouldn't work. She knew he'd been there because he always left a little box of four Russell Stover chocolates on the dining room table for her to find. She was restless and a little upset. She could read
The Harridan Report
, but she'd read all the issues of it she had. She could look through the longer literature America on Alert put out for the public, but she'd read all that too. She could recite some of it by heart. This was how she knew television was an addiction. It had been years, but the simple fact that the set wasn't in the house for her to turn on to pass the time made her the next best thing to panicked.

The phone rang. She had call-waiting—Michael paid for that; she couldn't have afforded it herself, since Price Heaven paid not much better than minimum wage and never gave anybody enough hours to be “full-time”—and she raced across the dining room into the living room to look at the numbers on the little screen. Sometimes she just turned the ringers off on all the phones and left the machines on. If it was somebody from America on Alert, they would said “bloody wrong number” into the machine and then hang up. She would turn the ringer on on one of the phones and then wait until it rang. Nobody from America on Alert would leave a real message on an answering machine, of course. It was virtually impossible to erase an answering machine tape, at least in any practically useful way. That was the kind of thing that showed up in evidence at trials and, worse, got used to track down the members of an organization when one of their number was captured but would not talk. She wished she had kept just one of the guns out for herself to use. She understood why Michael got upset at the very idea of that—if she had a gun on her, they could shoot her dead and claim she had shot first. They could claim that even if the gun was in her purse and her purse was lying on the ground next to her—but she would have felt safer if she had been armed. She found it hard to sleep knowing that there was no longer a loaded Luger on her nightstand next to the glass-based table lamp with its sky blue polyester shade.

The phone number on the screen was not one she knew. She stood still and waited. The answering machine kicked in. A moment later, she heard Michael's voice say, “bloody wrong number.” The
bloody
was a work of genius. It didn't mean anything. It was some swear word people used in England. It wasn't the kind of thing anybody in America would use. Unless, of course, the Illuminati got wind of what was going on. Then they could use it to try to trick her into betraying herself, or Michael. In this case, though, Michael's voice had been clear and unmistakable. She turned the ringer on and waited.

The phone rang. The bell was harsh and overloud. The call-waiting screen flickered. Kathi picked up.

“Yes?”

“Have you seen the news today?” Michael asked.

“No.” Kathi bit her lip. She didn't want to defend herself. It made her feel small. Michael should know by now that she never saw the news before she went out in the morning, and then she only saw it, or heard about it, secondhand.

“Go out and buy yourself a paper,” Michael said. “Don't read just the front page.”

“What I'm looking for isn't on the front page?”

“Some of it is. Read the business section too. The really important thing is in the business section.”

“Is there something in particular in the business section?” Kathi hated this part. She hated the business section. It always seemed written in code.

“Don't worry,” Michael said. “You'll see what it is as soon as you lay eyes on it. And you'll see the other thing too. On the front page. The small thing they're going to pretend is the big story. Go now. I'll call you back at eight and we can go over what our response should be. Can you get hold of Susan?”

“Yes.” Kathi didn't want to.

“Good. Get hold of her and have her at your place at eight. Turn on the speaker on the speakerphone. We'll have a conference call. Now I've got to go.”

“But—” Kathi said.

The phone had gone to dial tone in her ear. She hated that sound. She hung up. Her coat was lying across the couch that wasn't really a couch. It was too small. A “love seat,” people called them. She made a face at it and at the worn spots in what had once been fake velvet but now looked like matted mush. She put her coat on and took her wool hat out of the left-hand pocket. Her gloves—wool gloves, not leather ones—were inside the hat. She hated going out before she had to. Being outside was different from being at home. You were much more exposed. Somebody could shoot you and take all your identification, and even your best friends wouldn't know for weeks that you were dead.

She went out and locked the door behind her. She had triple locks on all the doors, although she wasn't in the least worried about ordinary, garden-variety burglars and rapists. She went down the front steps and up the block. This was not a good neighborhood, although it was not one of the worst, either. Here, the houses were interspersed with dry cleaning stores and candy stores and hardware stores. None of the big chains had bothered to venture here except for McDonald's and Dunkin' Donuts. To go to the bookstore, to go to Starbucks or Radio Shack, you either had to go to better neighborhoods or to the Main Line to the malls.

There was a candy store at the corner that served as a newsstand. The newspapers were out front in a wire rack. There were lots and lots of copies of the
Philadelphia Inquirer
and a few of both the
New York Times
and the
Washington Post
. The headlines in the
Times
and the
Post
were about something President Bush was doing that involved Attorney General John Ashcroft. The headline on the
Inquirer
said:

Kathi picked up a copy, found some change in her pocket, and went into the store. The picture of Charlotte Deacon Ross was a posed one that had been taken in a studio. She was shown only from the shoulders up, looking as if she were wearing nothing but pearls.