Conspiracy Theory (4 page)

“I'm recording everything,” Susan said, “just like Michael told me to. But so far, this has been all there is. Food. And music too. There are going to be bands. Do you realize there are going to be thousands of people at this thing?”

“Only fifteen hundred,” Kathi said. “Michael has the guest list.”

“Still. Fifteen hundred is a lot. Maybe we should take those explosives over there tonight and set them off. That would get rid of a lot of them, wouldn't it?”

“You're crazy.”

“Maybe I'm crazy,” Susan said. “But it seems to me that it would make more sense than what we are doing. If they really are evil people who want to take over the world, why don't we just get rid of them? We wouldn't get them all at once—”

“We wouldn't get the most important ones,” Kathi said. “Can't you see that? The ones who run the really big banks, the ones in Europe. They won't all come to something like this. Only the Philadelphia ones will. And then the rest of them will be on their guard. And they'd find us. And then what would happen?”

“Maybe we'd wake up the rest of the country. Michael is always saying that most Americans would agree with us if they only understood what was going on. Maybe this would be the way we could tell them what was going on.”

“Did Timothy McVeigh tell them what was going on?”

“Michael said McVeigh doesn't count. He wasn't really one of us. If he was, he wouldn't have blown up a building with a lot of babies in it. He was a plant. That's how the Illuminati work. They close off all the avenues of action. They pre-opt everybody. This would be different.”

“You think blowing up a lot of women in evening gowns would be different?”

“It would really be blowing them up,” Susan said, stubborn. “I don't understand what goes on here sometimes. You all say you're patriots, and you all worry nonstop about how the Illuminati have taken over the country, but you won't do anything about it. You don't do anything but give speeches and sit around here and—”

“We bugged them tonight. And we have to give speeches. We have to convince the American people—”

“You're the one who says the American people are all brainwashed. And I believe it. I believe it. If they hadn't been brainwashed, they'd never have believed all those things about the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. They'd have seen in an instant that a bunch of Stone-Aged Arabs couldn't have done anything like that, but—”

The receiver cracked. Kathi leaned forward and turned the volume up again. This time, the voice coming through was neither high nor nasal, although it still had that accent she thought of as “snobby.” They all had that accent. It was as if they had all been taught to speak by the same computer program, and maybe they had.

“No,” the voice said. “It's all right. Put the rose centerpiece with the swans, just the way the plan calls for, but put them all with the pâtés, and that way we don't have to worry about Charlotte having another fit. And don't cry. It's useless to cry about the way Charlotte behaves. She's a spoiled brat.”

“Charlotte,” Susan said. “That's Charlotte Deacon Ross. She's right there. And Michael is there too. We could have sent a nice little package in with him, and nobody would have known—”

“Of course they would have known,” Kathi said. “They probably have X-ray machines, out of sight, so that the guests don't notice. They probably have all kinds of security.”

“Maybe we should just gag Charlotte and lock her in a closet,” the voice on the receiver said. “God only knows, that's the only way we're getting through until midnight without my killing her. Or worse.”

Kathi turned the receiver down, again. “We're supposed to make a transcript. We'll make a transcript. Michael is supposed to find out what they're going to be up to next. Maybe we'll get lucky, and they'll have a ritual right there in the open, and we'll get it all on tape.”

“I don't care how reasonable you think you are,” Susan said. “You're going to have to use them sometimes. You can't just keep them here in your living room forever.”

“Make a transcript,” Kathi said.

Then she retreated into the front hall, where it was quiet, a claustrophobic space not even large enough to hold a little table. Michael had warned them all about people who tried to push the organization into ill-considered violence. They were almost always enemy agents, pilot fish for the shock troops whose only purpose was to destroy little groups just like this one. If Susan was a pilot fish, they would have to find a way to get rid of her—move the meeting places, change the phone numbers, hide the mailing lists. They wouldn't hide the literature, because as far as Michael was concerned, the more people who saw the literature the better. Even some of Them might be convinced, or enlightened, or deprogrammed, by reading the truth about who and what they were.

Still, no matter how enormously satisfied Kathi would be if it turned out that Susan was one of Them, the fact was that she was telling the simple truth. They would have to use the explosives some day. They even intended to, and there were a lot more of them than Susan realized. In this house alone, there were at least two-dozen small cluster bombs, made of dynamite and grenades bought on the military hardware black market, any one of which could destroy a store the size of an ordinary 7-Eleven in a couple of seconds flat. There were other things too, bits and pieces of things that could be put together to make a bigger bang than any single piece could do, if you didn't care too much about precision or accuracy or being able to recognize the target when the mission was over. Then there were the weapons, the ones Michael had shown Kathi how to shoot: Soviet military issue, most of them, bought over the Internet, sent to an address without a real name attached to it, stockpiled in another state. Timothy McVeigh had been an idiot to rely on a fertilizer bomb. He could have done three times the damage if he had known how to go about doing what he was doing.

If the World Trade Center attacks had been for real, instead of for show, they wouldn't have been carried out with commercial airlines, and they wouldn't have left those buildings standing for an hour after the explosions went off. The Illuminati were sly. They knew what frightened people. They knew how to make people behave.

Kathi opened the front door and stepped out onto the sidewalk, the cold, the dark. In the middle of the city like this, it was impossible to see the sky. Someday, they would level all the cities. They would flatten all the tall buildings and grids of wires that shut out the stars and the sun and kept them all docile and ready for the kill, and America would be America again, perfect as it had been on the day it was founded, cleansed of all the evil that had come upon it since, the paper money, the multinational corporations, the bureaucrats with their agendas of “health” and “sanity” and tyranny and control.

All that would be gone, and Katy Davenport would be gone with it.

Ryall Wyndham had never understood how anybody, anywhere, could go about life haphazardly. It wasn't just a question of money, although money counted. He could name two-dozen people in his class at Brown whose approach to money was a lot like their approach to cheeseburgers: Eat it up fast, before it had a chance to get away. None of them seemed to be able to wrap their minds around the idea that someday they would be old. They lived in a continuous present, and that present was filled with enough in the way of alcohol and drugs to addle God himself on a bad day. They were that way about women too, and that was worse. Ryall could remember a time when men worked very hard not to marry. Now they married all the time, for no reason at all, because it was Tuesday. They married women with money and women without it. They married women with background and women without it. Mostly, they seemed to marry women their parents wouldn't approve of, as if that, and that alone, was enough to qualify a human female to be the mother of children. Ryall Wyndham did not have a wife, and he did not have children, and he did not expect to acquire either until the time was right. The time would be right when he could get one of these silly debutantes he escorted to all the best places to fall hideously, ridiculously in love with him.

The problem, he decided, checking out his tie in the mirror, was that the women he knew did not seem to go about life as haphazardly as the men he knew. Even the really ugly debutantes realized they were sitting on gold mines, and not just their crotches, either. God, he would love it, one day, to go in to one of those places and use a word like
crotch
. Or
cunt
.
That
was a good one. They really hated that one. They'd use words like
crotch
every once in a while just to show how down-to-earth and unaffected they were, but they'd never use a word like
cunt
, because it smelled of real vulgarity. The only people who could get away with real vulgarity were members of the Blood Royal. That was what all these people wanted to be, even though they'd never say so out loud. That was why they sent their children to those schools where the teachers worked overtime to instill true liberal guilt. The rich in America hate the poor everywhere in the world. The people of the Third World want only to rise up and throw off their capitalist oppressors and take on the mantle of vanguard communism for the new millennium. The real problem with this country is the Consumer Mentality. Oh, yes. Groton and St. Paul's, Exeter and Choate. All those places positively despised the Consumer Mentality. It was just so damned tacky, and bad for you. McDonald's hardened your arteries and ruined the landscape in pristine wildernesses from Maine to California. Television was a drug, meant to take your mind off Really Serious Things and keep you stupid and happy. Wal-Mart was the worst, because it not only did everything morally wrong, from refusing to carry emergency contraception to resisting the formation of workers' unions, but it killed the very heart of America, the American small town. America had been a much better place when people had been forced to pay very high prices for bedsheets and electronics on their very own local Main Streets. Ryall was sure these people had seen a Main Street or two, once or twice in their lives. There was one in Stowe where they went to ski. There was another in Bar Harbor.

Tacky, tacky, tacky,
Ryall thought. Then he closed his eyes and put his forehead against the mirror's glass. He was very revved up, and he hadn't even taken anything yet. He hated to medicate himself before he absolutely needed to. It was getting harder and harder for him to keep his mind on the subject when he went to one of these affairs, and yet everything—his whole life—depended on his remembering what he had seen and
not
writing it down until he was safely in the car and on the way home. Of course, he could cheat a little. He could find his way into the bathroom a couple of times every night and take out his notebook then, getting the details down before they disappeared forever from his head. It wasn't as good as having the nearly total recall he'd had when he'd started, but it helped. The problem was that it had its natural limits. If he started hitting the bathroom every hour, rumors would be in full swing by the end of the night. They'd have him half-dead of AIDS or addicted to crack before he'd had a chance to file his column in the morning. That would be the end of everything. Reliability was the key. The women really weren't as addled as their men. They kept their heads, and they kept their eyes on the main chance, and they weren't about to jeopardize the only thing that mattered to them to hold on to a pudgy little dork whose only amusement value lay in his ability to get their names in the papers. There was a contradiction for you. The men really did things. They ran banks. They determined the economies of nations. The women did nothing but go to parties, and they were the ones with their names in the papers.

Ryall stepped back, reached around on his bureau top for his tape recorder, and switched it on. He really was pudgy, in the way unatheletic teenagers are pudgy. He was round and white and soft, like something that had lain for a long time in the water and bloated. He rubbed the side of his face. His fingers were stubby too. It didn't make much of a difference that he was always careful to keep them very well-manicured.

“This is Ryall Wyndham reporting from the Around the World Harvest Ball, Philadelphia's most talked-about event of the preChristmas social season.”

He switched the recorder off.
Christ,
he thought. He sounded like a Walter Winchell imitation in a forties movie. What was
wrong
with him these days? If he'd had more money, he could have been married ages ago. The problem was, he could never understand how to get money, and that in spite of the fact that he was very good at keeping it. He tried to imagine himself going in to work every day as a banker, and all he got was an image of Porky Pig in a bow tie. He had actually tried law school—at Georgetown, acceptable but not stel-lar—and lasted less than a month. He could still hear his old English teacher at Canterbury—one more time, acceptable but not stellar—telling him that he just didn't have a knack for respectability.
Respectability
. He ought to go into one of these things wired sometime.
That
would blow the game to pieces in no time at all. He could just imagine the look on Charlotte Ross's face when she heard her voice coming out of a little black box, screeching,
“I'm not going to have some goddamned car salesman spilling drinks on me all night just because he's got his own foundation.”
Car salesman. That's what Charlotte Ross called the Ford, who didn't have the right kind of money.

Ryall got his cell phone, and switched it on, and punched in the numbers for his office. He hated to say that he “dialed” the cell phone, even though everybody did, because he so obviously
didn't
dial it. A dial was round. He listened to the ring and checked out his cuff links while he waited. They were good gold cuff links, engraved, from Tiffany's. In the position he was in, he could not afford to settle for the fake.
They
settled for it, though. It wasn't only Barbara Bush who wore faux pearls in the daytime.