The illuminatus! trilogy (3 page)

He did not know that he would have another $5 million, and incidentally become the most important human being on earth, before May 1. If you tried to explain it to him, he would have brushed everything else aside and asked merely, “The five million—how many throats do I hafta cut to
get my hands in it?”

But wait: Get out the Atlas and look up Africa. Run your eyes down the map of the western coast of that continent until you come to Equatorial Guinea. Stop at the bend where part of the Atlantic Ocean curves inward and becomes the Bight of Biafra. You will note a chain of small islands; you will further observe that one of these is Fernando Poo. There, in the capital city of Santa Isobel, during the early 1970s, Captain Ernesto Tequilla y Mota carefully read and reread Edward Luttwak’s
Coup d’Etat: A Practical Handbook
, and placidly went about following Luttwak’s formula for a perfect coup d’etat in Santa Isobel. He set up a timetable, made his first converts among other officers, formed a clique, and began the slow process of arranging things so that officers likely to be loyal to Equatorial Guinea would be on assignment at least forty-eight hours away from the capital city when the coup occurred. He drafted the first proclamation to be issued by his new government; it took the best slogans of the most powerful left-wing and right-wing groups on the island and embedded them firmly in a tapiocalike context of bland liberal-conservatism. It fit Luttwak’s prescription excellently, giving everybody on the island some small hope that his own interests and beliefs would be advanced by
the new regime. And, after three years of planning, he struck: the key officials of the old regime were quickly, bloodlessly, placed under house arrest; troops under the command of officers in the cabal occupied the power stations and newspaper offices; the inoffensively fascist-conservative-liberal-communist proclamation of the new People’s Republic of Fernando Poo went forth to the world over the radio station in Santa Isobel. Ernesto Tequilla y Mota had achieved his ambition—promotion from captain to generalissimo in one step. Now, at last, he began wondering about how one went about governing a country. He would probably have to read a new book, and he hoped there was one as good as Luttwak’s treatise on seizing a country. That was on March 14.

On March 15, the very name of Fernando Poo was unknown to every member of the House of Representatives, every senator, every officer of the Cabinet, and all but one of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In fact, the President’s first reaction, when the CIA report landed on his desk that afternoon, was to ask his secretary, “Where the hell is Fernando Poo?”

Saul took off his glasses and polished them with a handkerchief, conscious of his age and suddenly more tired than ever. “I outrank you, Barney,” he began.

Muldoon grinned. “I know what’s coming.”

Methodically, Saul went on, “Who, on your staff, do you think is a double agent for the CIA?”

“Robinson I’m sure of, and Lehrman I suspect.”

“Both of them go. We take no chances.”

“I’ll have them transferred to the Vice Squad in the morning. How about your own staff?”

“Three of them, I think, and they go, too.”

“Vice Squad’ll love the increase in manpower.”

Saul relit his pipe. “One more thing. We might be hearing from the FBI.”

“We might indeed.”

“They get nothing.”

“You’re really taking me way out on this one, Saul.”

“Sometimes you have to follow your hunches. This is going to be a heavy case, agreed?”

“A heavy case,” Muldoon nodded.

“Then we do it my way.”

“Let’s look at the fourth memo,” Muldoon said tone-lessly. They read:

ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #4

7/24

J.M.:

Here’s a letter that appeared in
Playboy
a few years ago (“The Playboy Advisor,”
Playboy
, April, 1969, pages 62-64):

Playboy
, of course, puts down the whole idea as ridiculous and gives the standard
Encyclopedia Britannica
story that the Illuminati went out of business in 1785.

Pat

  Pricefixer stuck his head in the cafeteria door. “Minute?” he asked.

“What is it?” Muldoon replied.

“Peter Jackson is out here. He’s the associate editor I spoke to on the phone. He just told me something about his last meeting with Joseph Malik, the editor, before Malik disappeared.”

“Bring him in,” Muldoon said.

Peter Jackson was a black man—truly black, not brown or tan. He was wearing a vest in spite of the spring weather. He was also very obviously wary of policemen. Saul noted this at once, and began thinking about how to overcome it—and at the same time he observed an increased blandness in Muldoon’s features, indicating that he, too, had noted it and was prepared to take umbrage.

“Have a seat,” Saul said cordially, “and tell us what you just told the other officer.” With the nervous ones it
was sound policy to drop the policeman role at first, and try to sound like somebody else—somebody who, quite naturally, asks a lot of questions. Saul began slipping into the personality of his own family physician, which he usually used at such times. He made himself
feel
a stethoscope hanging about his neck.

“Well,” Jackson began in a Harvard accent, “this is probably not important. It may be just a coincidence.”

“Most of what we hear is just unimportant coincidence,” Saul said gently. “But it’s our job to listen.”

“Everybody but the lunatic fringe has given up on this by now,” Jackson said. “It really surprised me when Joe told me what he was getting the magazine into.” He paused and studied the two impassive faces of the detectives; finding little there, he went on reluctantly. “It was last Friday. Joe told me he had a lead that interested him, and he was putting a staff writer on it. He wanted to reopen the investigation of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and the Kennedy brothers.”

Saul carefully didn’t look at Muldoon, and just as carefully moved his hat to cover the memos on the table. “Excuse me a moment,” he said politely and left the cafeteria.

He found a phone booth in the lobby and dialed his home. Rebecca answered after the third ring; she obviously had not gotten back to sleep after he left. “Saul?” she asked, guessing who would be calling at this hour.

“It’s going to be a long night,” Saul said.

“Oh, hell.”

“I know, baby. But this case is a son-of-a-bitch!”

Rebecca sighed. “I’m glad we had a little ball earlier this evening. Otherwise, I’d be furious.”

Saul thought, suddenly, of how this conversation would sound to an outsider. A sixty-year-old man and a twenty-five-year-old wife. And if they knew she was a whore and a heroin addict when I first met her …

“Do you know what I’m going to do?” Rebecca lowered her voice. “I’m going to take off my nightgown, and throw the covers to the foot of the bed, and lie here naked, thinking about you and waiting.”

Saul grinned. “A man my age shouldn’t be able to respond to that, after doing what I did earlier.”

“But you did respond, didn’t you?” Her voice was confident and sensual.

“I sure did. I won’t be able to leave the phone booth for a couple of minutes.”

She chuckled softly and said, “I’ll be waiting….”

“I love you,” he said, surprised (as always) at the simple truth of it in a man his age. I won’t be able to leave the phone booth at all if this keeps up, he thought. “Listen,” he added hurriedly, “let’s change the subject before I start resorting to the vices of a high school boy. What do you know about the Illuminati?” Rebecca had been an anthropology major, with a minor in psychology, before the drug scene had captured her and she fell into the abyss from which he had rescued her; her erudition often astonished him.

“It’s a hoax,” she said.

“A what?”

“A hoax. A bunch of students at Berkeley started it back around sixty-six or sixty-seven.”

“No, that’s not what I’m asking. The original Illuminati in Italy and Spain and Germany in the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries? You know?”

“Oh, that’s the basis of the hoax. Some right-wing historians think the Illuminati still exist, you see, so these students opened an Illuminati chapter on the campus at Berkeley and started sending out press releases on all sorts of weird subjects, so people who want to believe in conspiracies would have some evidence to point to. That’s all there is to it. Sophomore humor.”

I hope so, Saul thought. “How about the Ishmaelian sect of Islam?”

“It has twenty-three divisions, but the Aga Khan is the leader of all of them. It was founded around—oh—1090 A.D., I think, and was originally persecuted, but now it’s part of the orthodox Moslem religion. It has some pretty weird doctrines. The founder, Hassan i Sabbah, taught that nothing is true and everything is permissible. He lived up to that idea—the word ‘assassin’ is a corruption of his name.”

“Anything else?”

“Yes, now that I think of it. Sabbah introduced marijuana to the Western world, from India. The word ‘hashish’ also comes from his name.”

“This is a heavy case,” Saul said, “and now that I can walk out of the phone booth without shocking the patrolman
in the hall, I’ll get back to work on it. Don’t say anything that’ll get me aroused again. Please.”

“I won’t. I’ll just lie here naked and …”

“Good-bye.”

“Good-bye,” she said, laughing.

Saul hung up frowning. Goodman’s intuition, the other detectives call it. It’s not intuition; it’s a way of thinking beyond and between the facts, a way of sensing
wholes
, of seeing that there must be a relationship between fact number one and fact number two even if no such relationship is visible yet. And I know. There is an Illuminati, whether or not those kids at Berkeley are kidding.

He came out of his concentration and realized where he was. For the first time, he noticed a sticker on the door:

He grinned: an intellectual’s kind of joke. Probably somebody on the magazine.

He walked back to the cafeteria, reflecting. “Nothing is true. Everything is permissible.” With a doctrine like that, people were capable of … He shuddered. Images of Buchenwald and Belsen, of Jews who might have been him….

Peter Jackson looked up as he reentered the cafeteria. An intelligent, curious black face. Muldoon was as impassive as the faces on Mount Rushmore. “Mad Dog, Texas, was the town where Malik thought these … assassins … had their headquarters,” Muldoon said. “That’s where the staff writer was sent.”

“What was the staff writer’s name?” Saul asked.

“George Dora,” Muldoon said. “He’s a young kid who used to be in SDS. And he was once rather close to the Weatherman faction.”

Hagbard Celine’s gigantic computer, FUCKUP—First Universal Cybernetic-Kinetic-Ultramicro-Programmer— was basically a rather sophisticated form of the standard self-programming algorithmic logic machine of the time; the name was one of his whimsies. FUCKUP’s real claim to uniqueness was a programmed stochastic process whereby it could “throw” an
I Ching
hexagram, reading a random open circuit as a broken
(yin)
line and a random closed circuit as a full
(yang)
line until six such “lines” were round. Consulting its memory banks, where the
whole tradition of
I Ching
interpretation was stored, and then cross-checking its current scannings of that day’s political, economic, meterological, astrological, astronomical, and technological eccentricities, it would provide a reading of the hexagram which, to Hagbard’s mind, combined the best of the scientific and occult methods for spotting oncoming trends. On March 13, the stochastic pattern spontaneously generated Hexagram 23, “Breaking Apart” FUCKUP then interpreted:

“My
ass
, no blame,” Hagbard raged; and rapidly reprogrammed FUCKUP to read off to him its condensed psychobiographies of the key figures in world politics and the key scientists in chemobiological warfare.

The first dream came to Dr. Charles Mocenigo on February 2—more than a month before FUCKUP picked up
the vibrations. He was, as usual with him, aware that he was dreaming, and the vision of a gigantic pyramid which seemed to walk or lumber about meant nothing and quickly vanished. Now he seemed to be looking at an enlargement of the DNA double helix; it was so detailed that he began searching it for the bonding irregularities at every 23rd Angstrom. To his surprise, they were missing; instead, there were other irregularities at each 17th Angstrom. “What the devil …?” he asked—and the pyramid returned seeming to speak and saying, “Yes, the devil.” He jolted awake, with a new concept, Anthrax-Leprosy-Mu, coming into consciousness, and began jotting in his bedside pad
.