Conspiracy Theory (28 page)

“Then there isn't really anything odd about Michael Harridan not being named Michael Harridan,” Gregor pointed out.

“No, but it was a compilation of things. The more we checked, the odder it got. We got hold of their mailing list and did gun checks. Practically everybody on it had at least one gun license. The more we looked into it, the creepier it got. And Harridan himself, that newsletter, it was so—”

“So what?”

“So targeted,” Canfield said. “Most of these newsletters just give you big long lists of names. These are the people who were at the Bilderberger retreat this year. These are the people who work for David Rockefeller. That kind of thing. But
The Harridan Report
was always talking about specific people doing specific stuff. Charlotte Deacon Ross giving that party. That kind of thing.”

“Okay,” Gregor said. “So you got assigned to come up here, and you came. Then what?”

“Then we came,” Canfield said. “And Steve went to one of their lectures, and then he went to another one, and then he joined up and started going to meetings.”

“And?”

“There isn't much else. It's like I said. Nobody ever sees Michael Harridan, and nobody ever claims to have seen him except this one woman, Kathi Mittendorf. She says she went to a lecture Harridan gave personally. Steve and I didn't know whether to believe her or not. She could be telling the truth, but she could just be, you know, making herself hot. She doesn't have much else going for her to make herself hot. She's middle-aged. She works on the floor at Price Heaven. Part-time, by the way. Hell, she might not even have that for a while. From what I can tell from the papers, Price Heaven seems to be exploding.”

“Did you check into Kathi Mittendorf? Or any of the others?”

“Of course we did,” Canfield said. “Mittendorf and this other woman, Susan Hester, went to gun shows a lot, and sometimes they bought, but not usually. Steve and I were both convinced that they were buying on the black market, but we couldn't prove it, and until we could—” He shrugged. “You know how that is.”

“How did Harridan keep in touch with the group?” Gregor asked. “Did he send letters? Send e-mail? Set up chat rooms?”

“He made conference calls,” Canfield said. “Steve was there for one. They set up a speakerphone so that everybody could hear. Sort of a low-tech virtual meeting.”

Gregor thought it over: the letter to the Bureau; the meeting-by-speaker-phone; the gun shows. He tried not to think about Walker Canfield.

“All right,” he said. “I'm going to want some contact information on a couple of people, if you have it. And if you don't have it, I'm going to need to know where to get it.”

He began by going to the Price Heaven on Altaver Street, a small store without distinction crammed into a row of other stores, not the sort of place he associated with Price Heaven at all. Maybe this was what the papers meant when they said that Price Heaven had made the mistake of hanging on to older, outmoded stores that they would have done better to close down in order to give themselves more resources to compete in the suburbs. At least the people going into this store looked as if they needed a bargain outlet. The kind of people you saw going in to Price Heavens in the malls often looked as if they'd been just as comfortable at L.L. Bean or Coach. He looked around inside for a while, noting a few things that made no difference. Most of the shoppers were African-American or Latino. Most of the saleswomen were white. All of the managers were white. The clothes hanging on the racks in women's wear were stretched against their hangers. The wide-open plan of the store made it feel oddly empty, in spite of having far too many small and inconsequential things crammed into it. He did not intend to question Kathi Mittendorf in Price Heaven. He didn't even intend to introduce himself to her. Doing something like that could get someone fired, especially from a place like this. All he wanted to do was to get a look at her.

Gregor went to the two departments where she was supposed to work, but saw nobody answering to her description, and nobody wearing a name tag with her name on it. In toys, a very small boy was sitting on the floor, having a screaming fit over something his mother would not let him have. In house-wares, a rickety old woman was pawing through box after box of blue ceramic dinner plates, as if the next box she found would be something else, like a dinner plate. The longer he stayed, the more depressed he became. The very air in the store was depressing. The saleswomen were all wearing dirty aprons. The cashiers all looked bored.

He went back out onto the street to look for another cab. It took him four blocks to find one, by which time he was in another neighborhood entirely. He gave the second address on the list Walker Canfield had given him and sat back to think. He didn't recognize the street, but that wasn't necessarily significant. He didn't know much about Philadelphia anymore. Since he'd come back from Washington to live, he'd restricted himself to Cavanaugh Street, a few neighborhoods in the center of the city where there were restaurants he liked and things he liked to do, and crime scenes. With crime scenes, he was never 100 percent sure where he was. Streets full of brick and stone houses went by, the kind of places that had either been cut up to make cramped apartments or renovated and restored by rich people who didn't want to live in the suburbs. Those turned into streets full of clattering industrial equipment, doing Gregor did not know what.

The street Kathi Mittendorf lived on might have been in the city of Philadelphia proper, or it might not have. It was in that grey area of small wooden frame houses and small stores and strip shopping centers that made the transition between the city and its suburbs, so that there was never a place where the city actually stopped. It just petered out. Gregor looked at the meter and winced. He'd have to find a cash machine after this was over. Either that, or call Bennis to rescue him. The cab pulled up to the curb in front of a small grey house with a porch that sagged slightly in the middle. The porch had a glider on it, but the glider was pushed into a corner, out of the way. There was a driveway, of sorts. Two thin strips of concrete vanished out of sight between this house and the one next door. No car was visible. Gregor got out, took the fare from the money in his wallet and added a very generous tip, and looked around. No children were playing in the yards. No housewives were washing their front windows. This was a neighborhood where people worked. In the daytime, it would tend to be deserted.

Gregor climbed the porch steps and crossed the porch. He rang the bell and waited. He didn't expect Kathi Mittendorf to be home. Just because he hadn't found her at Price Heaven didn't mean she hadn't been there, on her break, or in the back inventorying stock or putting away boxes. Even if she hadn't been there, it made sense that she would use her day off to do errands. He only wanted to make sure he had done everything he could to find her.

Behind the narrow front door, locks came undone. There were a number of them, including one bolt. Gregor knew the sound of a bolt being drawn back. He straightened up automatically. The door opened and a middle-aged woman stood framed in the doorway, her too-blond hair pulled back in elastic so tightly her hair looked ready to scream. The skin on her face sagged. There were frown lines around the corners of her mouth. Her eyes were heavy and had too many bags under them. Her body was shapeless in the way the bodies of women in their fifties got if they hadn't been very diligent about working out.

“Yes?” she said.

“I'm looking for Kathi Mittendorf,” Gregor said.

Kathi Mittendorf stared back at him, placid but suspicious. Gregor was sure she was Kathi Mittendorf, even though she hadn't said so. She fit the description perfectly. What he would do if she decided to say she was somebody else, Gregor didn't know.

“Who are you?” she said instead.

“My name is Gregor Demarkian. I work, sometimes, as a consultant to police departments.”

“Are you working as a consultant to police departments now?”

“Not officially, no. Unofficially, yes.”

“And is that what this is about? Something to do with police departments?”

“Something, yes,” Gregor said. “But mostly I'm here on my own. Nobody knows I came. This is not official. I'm trying to find a man named Michael Harridan.”

“I don't know anybody named Michael Harridan.”

“You told someone that you did.”

“Who?”

“A friend of a friend of mine. It's not important. I know you're a member of America on Alert. That's Michael Harridan's organization.”

“That's public information,” Kathi Mittendorf said. “Our membership lists aren't secret. We place ads for our lectures. My name is on them most of the time.”

“So tell me something about what's public information,” Gregor said. “I don't know much about this kind of thing. I don't even know what I'm looking for.”

“I thought you said you were looking for Michael Harridan.”

“Yes, I did. I am. But I don't think that's as straightforward as it sounds.”

Kathi Mittendorf seemed to look up, past Gregor's shoulder, to the distance. It took everything Gregor had not to turn around to see if somebody was behind him. He was cold as hell. The wind out here was really wicked, unbroken by the tall buildings and the traffic in the center of the city. Kathi Mittendorf looked down again and then backed up, away from the doorway.

“Come in and sit down,” she said. “It's not like I can tell you anything.”

Kathi Mittendorf's living room was what Gregor had expected from his view of the porch: small, box-like, and claustrophobic. He was sure the ceiling was lower than the now-standard eight feet. He was sure the room could be no more than ten feet across. There was too much furniture, and it was too shabby, worn away in some places, stained in others. The walls had not been painted in a long time.

“Don't bother to tell me what a nice room it is,” Kathi Mittendorf said, closing the door and throwing a few of the locks. “I know it isn't.”

“I was going to thank you for being willing to talk to me,” Gregor said.

“Sit down. I'm not willing to talk to you. I want to hear you out. I want to know what you're going to say that you think is going to work on me.”

“I don't know that I'm trying to get anything to work on you.” Gregor sat down on the couch. It was too soft. He sank into it. “I don't even know what I'm really looking for. And I'm not an official police presence, as I said. You don't have to talk to me.”

“I don't have to talk to your official police presence, either. I don't have to talk to anybody. You're not used to people who say that to you, are you?”

“People say it to me all the time.”

Kathi Mittendorf seemed not to have heard. “The biggest problem is that people don't really know what their rights are. They think they do, but they don't. They see these cop shows. Everybody talks all the time. All the criminals. They think that's what criminals are. A lot of low lifes in dirty clothes. That's what they're supposed to think criminals are. They're not supposed to realize that criminals are people just like them who get on the wrong side of the secret government.”

“That's Michael Harridan, isn't it?” Gregor asked. “He writes about the secret government. I've seen a couple of copies of
The Harridan Report
.”

“Everybody's seen copies of
The Harridan Report
. We distribute it all over the city. It's free. And it's up on a Web site.”

“And I want to know something about the man who wrote it,” Gregor persisted. “I want to know what he's like.”

“You want to know where he is,” Kathi said, “but I can't tell you. I can't tell you anything, just that you'd better understand it. It's not going to last forever. People are getting wise to the people you work for. We know what's going on now. We aren't fooled. Anthony van Wyck Ross was a Mason, did you know that?”

“No,” Gregor said. “And I'd be very surprised if it were true. People on that level don't usually belong to the Masons. It's—well—it's not considered a good thing to be. The people who belong to the Masons are small-time lawyers and doctors and that kind of thing.”

“That's just the Masons you know about,” Kathi said. “Those are the low-level Masons. They're just a front. The real Masonic organization is made up of the men who reach the thirty-third degree. They're the ones who understand. The Illuminati. Have you heard of the Illuminati? They're the ones who run the Masons.”

“I don't know much about the Masons,” Gregor said.

“It's hard to understand at first, because it looks like there are so many different organizations. The Masons. The Vatican. The Bilderbergers. The Trilateral Commission. Even the governments. It all looks separate, but it isn't. It's all one thing. They decide who will be in charge of the banks and the corporations and the governments too. They're the ones who decide who'll run for president and all that kind of thing. They make it look like you have a choice, but you really don't. It's a closed circle. That's why they founded America. They wanted a base of operations and they knew that Europe was too old. People were too suspicious of it. That's why they came here.”

“Who?” Gregor asked. “The Masons?”

“Did you know that all but four of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were Masons?” Kathi said. “George Washington was a Mason. He was master of his lodge in Virginia. They were looking to create the New World Order.
Novus Ordo Seclorum
. It's right there on the things they wrote. Thomas Jefferson said it. Thomas Jefferson was a Mason. He was a member of the Illuminati. They wanted to create a New World Order and they put Masonic symbols on all our money.”