Conspiracy Theory

by Jane Haddam

  She took twenty dollars and her driver’s license out of her wallet. When she hit the street, she carried neither her purse nor any significant amount of money. She took the gold chain off her neck and left it on top of her vanity table. The table seemed badly named, since the mirror was unusable and there was no sign of makeup on it. She brushed the hair out of her eyes again and vowed, for the thousandth time in the last two years, to let it grow out long enough to be held back in a rubber band. The three-by-five cards stuck into the mirror’s sides shuddered a little in the draft allowed by the fact that the windowpane here had a crack in it and three tiny pieces missing. Freedom from Religion Foundation: http://www.ffrf.org, one of them said. Lucinda’s birthday, June 26th, said another. Anne looked at the one with Father Kasparian’s name on it, said the name three times in her head and once out loud, and then gave the whole thing up.

  Out in the hall, the rest of the house felt deserted. It probably was. Six o’clock on a Friday night was not usually one of their busier times, although with the cold this bad it would get busy later. They’d start lining up outside the front door, looking for shelter, somewhere around ten. She looked at the drawings Lucinda had put up on the walls without really seeing any of them. They had a woman come in once a week who worked with the girls with what she called “art therapy.” Anne didn’t think she was doing any good, but she didn’t think she was doing any harm, and the girls seemed to like it. She got to the stairwell and went down. Nobody was in the foyer, and there was no sign of anybody on the porch. She checked her watch, a plain steel Timex she’d bought at Kmart for seventeen dollars. When she was seventeen, her mother had given her a gold dress watch from Tiffany’s. It had cost 1,500 dollars and she had lost it one day playing tennis at the Coach and Racquet Club. She had had it for less than two months.

  At the bottom of the stairs, she turned toward the back of the house. The walls here were lined with drawings too, a lot of them faintly obscene. The girls liked art therapy, but they laughed at the therapist, who always reminded Anne of the woman who had taught her dancing in kindergarten. Everything was cheerful. Everything was obvious. She got to the back of the house and pushed open the swinging door to the kitchen. Lucinda was sitting at the table with her feet propped up on another kitchen chair. The television was on, as it always was whenever Lucinda was near it. When they’d first met, Lu-cinda had announced, without embarrassment, that if she were rich she’d have a television in every room in the house, including the bathrooms. It had taken Anne a while to realize that that feeling she had, as if all the air had been knocked out of her lungs, was culture shock.

  Lucinda looked up as Anne came in, her enormous black helmet of hair bobbing vigorously above her thick neck. She had a Holy Bible on the table in front of her, unopened. Lucinda took a Holy Bible everywhere she went, but Anne hadn’t seen her open it yet.

  “So what’s it you’re doing?” Lucinda said. “Trying out for a part in The Matrix?”

  “Which one is The Matrix?”

  “It’s the one with the red pill and the blue pill. Never mind. It’s a movie. We ran it here about a month ago. You came.”

  “I get distracted.”

  “Don’t I know it. Seriously, though, you ought to wear some kind of reflective clothing. You’re going to get killed out there one of these days.”

  “Maybe,” Anne said, “but not in a car accident. Isn’t there something called vehicular homicide?” She opened the refrigerator and looked inside. There was a bucket of fried chicken. It was probably a good three weeks old. There was a package of celery, half-used. She closed the refrigerator door. Lucinda had a big piece of Swiss cheese on the table, with knife and crackers. Anne sat down and started on those. “I take it there’s no sign of our visitor,” she said.

  “He’s not due for half an hour, Annie, relax. There’s not going to be anybody out there cruising yet.”

  “They cruise all day.”

  “Not most of them, they don’t. They like the dark. You ever notice that? That’s what you should do, instead of taking pictures of their license plates. You should buy a whole bunch of big spotlights and set them up down there. That’d drive them off faster than anything.”

  “They’d only move to another street. The city’s already tried that.”

  “The city got bought off.”

  “Probably. What are you watching?”

  “Mother Angelica Live. I know she’s a Catholic, but she’s a good woman. Had a stroke, kept right on going. Reminds me of my grandmother.”

  “The queen of England reminds you of your grandmother.”

  “Well, you know how those things went, back in the colonies. Maybe we’re related.”

  Anne tried the cheese. It was hard as a rock. One of the things she would never be able to understand was why, now that she lived in a place where the food was both erratic and awful, she weighed so much more than she had when she’d been able to get the best food on the planet, simply for the asking. At least she’d rid herself of that prejudice about the lack of discipline and self-respect that so often made poor people so fat. Obviously, it just happened, even when you didn’t eat much of anything.

  She cut herself another piece of cheese and wrinkled her nose at it. She put the cheese on a Saltine cracker and hoped for the best. The television program went to commercial, except it wasn’t really a commercial. It seemed to be a public service announcement about some kind of novena. She wished Father Kasparian would get here, so that she could do what she had to do in the way of greetings, and then disappear. She was beginning to get hyped-up and adrenalized, the way she always did when she went out. In some ways, it was like a drug. By the time it was over, she’d be so pumped up she wouldn’t be able to sleep for hours. She wouldn’t even be able to think straight. That was when she would hit the Net and the Web sites she’d come to rely on—the Freedom from Religion Foundation; the World of Richard Dawkins; the Marbles game—so that she could keep her mind occupied enough so that she wouldn’t think. When she did think, she thought about what it would feel like to do something real about this. She imagined herself chasing them down on foot, pulling them out of their cars, beating her fists into their heads until the skulls cracked and the skin broke open to spill blood.

  “Oh, one thing,” Lucinda said. “Your brother called.”

  4

  At first, Kathi Mittendorf had been shocked to realize how easy it was to join America on Alert—easier than it had been to join the Girl Scout troop in Marshford Township where she grew up, where nobody got a chance to wear a green uniform unless Mrs. Davenport okayed it. Kathi missed Mrs. Davenport daily. She didn’t miss Mrs. Davenport’s daughter, Katy. It was hard to miss somebody who was so obviously destined to become one of the anti-American liberal elite. Kathi had known what they were when she was only ten years old, although she wouldn’t have been able to put a name to them. She thinks she’s so much, people used to say about Katy Davenport, and it was true too. She thought she was just wonderful, because she always got the best grades in school and because she read things from New York like the New York Times and the New Yorker magazine, instead of the things everybody else read, which Kathi had to admit wasn’t much. Still, that was suspicious in itself. Good people didn’t read all the time, and they certainly didn’t read things that made them argue with the teachers about what America had been doing in Vietnam, or why the electoral college should be abolished. Now that Kathi understood the way things worked—the way the Illuminati carefully chose from among the regular people, handpicking the ones who would be allowed to “succeed,” so that it wouldn’t look as if they were running the world the way they really were—she found she was a lot less angry with Katy Davenport. That was a good thing, because for a while there she had been caught up in an anger so deep and implacable that she sometimes found herself sinking in it. It had started on the day that the notice had gone up in front of the guidance counselor’s office, saying that Katy Davenport had been accepted to Yale. S
he remembered herself standing in the hall, staring at the little card with Katy’s name on it, and on all the other little cards, the kids who were going to Penn State and Swarthmore and Concordia and Duke. It had felt as if she were the only one in school who wasn’t going somewhere after graduation. Her shame had been so deep, it had wormed its way into every atom of her skin. She wanted to run away from home before graduation day. At the very least, she wanted to do something that would get their attention for once, instead of being the one whose name nobody would ever remember when the time came around for reunions, which she wouldn’t go to, because she wouldn’t want them to see that she was still in town and working at Price Heaven, when they were off being Important.

  Of course, the truth was, they would have remembered her. She hadn’t realized it then, but everything the Illuminati did, every single shudder in the military-industrial complex, was directed against people just like her, and nothing at all like Katy Davenport. This was one of the first things Michael had taught her when she’d gone to her first lecture, almost two years ago.

  “They make you think you’re nobody,” he said—not just to her, of course, but to all of them, sitting in a big huddle in the small side room of the Holfield Meeting Hall in south Philadelphia, his voice coming out of a speaker, and blasting out at the crowd. Everybody had drawn a little closer, moving their metal folding chairs silently along the linoleum, hungry. Even then, Michael was in far too dangerous a position to appear in person. “If you think you’re nobody, you think you’re powerless. You don’t do anything. You don’t even try to stop them. And they know that. They know the only force on earth capable of stopping them is real Americans, just like you, and that’s why they know every one of your names.”

  If Kathi had been running America on Alert, she would have gone about it differently. She would have made sure there were requirements for membership, maybe even an investigation into each and every person who wanted to come to meetings and join the organization and vote. No matter what Michael said, there was always the danger that the Illuminati would infiltrate them the way they had infiltrated so many other organizations, and good ones too. The John Birch Society was nothing these days if not an Illuminati front. They kept playing the same old record about “communism,” when it was obvious that the Illuminati weren’t interested in communism anymore. It had been a straw man right from the beginning. The real danger was far more insidious, made up of people who thought they were better than you were, smarter than you were, more—more worthy than you were. It had taken Kathi a long time to come up with that word. It contained everything that had ever bothered her about Katy Davenport and all the Katy Davenports she had met since: the politicians she saw on TV; the smug-suited “authors” who flickered by on Booknotes on C-Span; the supervisor at Price Heaven who sent his contributions to the ACLU from the office, brazenly, not caring at all that it would be a red flag to any good American on his staff. The supervisor Kathi Mittendorf worked under was a Jew. She’d found that out the very first week. She’d been ready to quit on the spot, but Michael had stopped her, because according to him some Jews were good Americans, a very few of them, the ones who did not think of themselves as citizens of Israel first. She thought she had known from the contribution to the ACLU that Mr. Goldman wouldn’t be one of those, but there was virtue in vigilance. The longer she stayed, the longer she could keep her eye on the things Mr. Goldman didn’t expect anybody to be looking for, like the ways in which he helped the Price Heaven corporation pump drugs into the air at the store so that the employees and the customers would be more easily bent to the Illuminati’s plans. As far as Kathi could tell, two-thirds of the population of the United States of America was drugged to the gills every day of their lives, programmed and brainwashed to do exactly as they were told. The programming came through their television sets.

  Now it was very nearly zero hour of her first important operation, and Kathi found that she was sweating. She had no idea if the nervousness was legitimate or provoked. They got to you in the strangest ways, when you weren’t expecting it. You turned around and realized you’d been caught. The only thing she could do about it was work through it. She went into the bathroom and rinsed her mouth out with water from the big glass tub she got delivered from Crystal Stream twice a week. Crystal Stream was an America on Alert company, owned by one of their oldest members, so you could be sure the water was pure. Tap water in Philadelphia had fluoride in it. Then she went back into the living room and watched Susan checking the switches on the main receiver set. Susan looked worried, but Susan always looked worried. She was in love with Michael, but Kathi didn’t care about that. Every woman in America on Alert was in love with Michael, one way or the other. He had more sense than to fall for any of them.

  “I wish he’d call in and tell us where he was,” Susan said. “I don’t like the thought of him wandering around out there in enemy territory. They’re bound to realize he isn’t anything at all like them.”

  “He’s done it before,” Kathi said. “I don’t see why there should be anything to worry about now. Have you checked the explosives?”

  “I don’t like handling the explosives. I know they’re supposed to be disconnected or whatever it is, but I can’t stop thinking about that time in Greenwich Village in the sixties. Do you know about that time in Greenwich Village in the sixties?”

  “I wouldn’t know anything about Greenwich Village no matter when it was,” Kathi said. “Why would I have to know about Greenwich Village?”

  “Some people had explosives there. They blew up a building. By accident. They were making a bomb and blew it up by accident. We ought to keep that stuff someplace else, where it couldn’t hurt us.”

  “It can’t hurt us here,” Kathi said. “Calm down. Are you getting anything yet?”

  “Just people talking about food.” Susan turned back to the receiver. The headset sat across her over-blond head like a snake. It made the color seem even falser than it was. Kathi’s own hair was the same color blond, but for some reason she liked the color better on herself than she did on Susan. What really mattered was that they colored their hair at all. Lesbians never colored theirs, and never wore jewelry, and never wore makeup, either. Once you understood how it worked, you could see all kinds of clues, all around you—the conspiracy at work.

  Kathi leaned over Susan’s shoulder and turned up the volume. A high, nasal female voice came pounding out, affected and obnoxious, superior. “I don’t care what the caterer told you, the ice swans do not go on the main buffet table. How we’re ever going to get through this, I really don’t know. There isn’t any room on the main buffet table. You have to put the ice swans with the rest of the pâtés.”

  “See?” Susan said.

  Kathi stood back. It made her stomach feel odd to know that she had just heard one of Them, a real one of Them, at home and in private, when she thought she wasn’t being watched. They always put on a mask for outsiders. Michael had told them that. Now there was no mask, and this woman seemed—

  Stupid, Kathi thought. She wiped the idea out of her head. The Illuminati weren’t stupid. They only wanted you to think they were. Maybe this woman wasn’t really in private. Maybe she was putting on a show for whoever she was talking to. Susan turned the volume back down.

  “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.