by Jane Haddam
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?” Ka
thi 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.”
“But that isn’t what it means,” Gregor said, dredging up the Latin he’d learned in high school, so long ago he could no longer remember the name of the woman who taught it to him. “Novus Ordo Seclorum. It doesn’t mean New World Order. It means A New Order of the Ages. That’s what they thought they had, people like Jefferson, because they were getting rid of monarchy for democracy—”
“They didn’t get rid of monarchy,” Kathi corrected. “They only pretended to. The world is still run by the same thirteen families it’s been run by for a thousand years. Maybe longer. They’re the real Merovingian dynasty. It’s supposed to have died out, but it didn’t. It’s still around. Anthony van Wyck Ross was a member of that dynasty. So is George Bush and George W. Bush. So is Al Gore. They never give you a choice between one of them and a real person. They don’t want you to have a choice. They’re the only ones who are ever allowed to be in control. They look like people, but they aren’t really. They’re reptilian. They’re the offspring of humans who mated with a reptilian race and now they can do things nobody else can do. They can learn faster than real humans. They can remember more. They can invent things. You don’t think people could have invented space travel, do you? We’re not that intelligent. We’re not that creative. But they can’t just do it on their own, because they want to. They need us. They need to have us subjugated.”
This was, Gregor thought, the talk she gave people who were already slightly involved in the movement, the ones who had the specifics down and only needed somebody to put them together. Since he knew nothing at all about any of this, it wasn’t making sense. The Merovingian Dynasty was, he thought, something from the early Middle Ages—Pepin the Short, and a line of kings so incompetent they had collapsed under the weight of their own stupidity. What exactly that had to do with the Masons, or a race of reptiles, or George W. Bush, he wasn’t sure. He wasn’t completely convinced that Kathi Mittendorf was sure.
She had been standing in front of him, rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet. Now she turned abruptly and walked out of the room. A moment later, she was back, carrying a thick book and a small sheaf of papers.
“Here,” she said. “Read it all. You’ll be able to understand if you let yourself. There is no such thing as a coincidence. Everything is orchestrated. Everything. We’re already more than halfway to a One World Government. Once that government is in place, they’ll have what they want. They’ll be able to control everything, even people who know them for what they are. Look at what’s happening around you. The United Nations. All those appeals to ‘international law.’ There is no international law. They only want you to think there is so that they can talk you into letting them run your life and everybody else’s. So that they can have control.”
“Why?” Gregor said.
“Some of the people in the movement think they’re really Satan,” Kathi Mittendorf said. “They see that the Illuminati subject their own children to satanic ritual abuse and they think that means the Illuminati are in league with Satan. They see that the Freemasons worship Satan and they think the same thing. But it isn’t true. There is no Satan. Religion is something they invented, the Illuminati, to make it easier to control ignorant people. But it doesn’t matter. We make common cause with the Christian freedom fighters. They are freedom fighters. They’ve just accepted the metaphor as the reality. And they’re looking for the bodies.”
“The bodies?”
“The bodies of the infants,” Kathi Mittendorf said. “The Illuminati make their children participate in rituals. They sacrifice infants. They’ve sacrificed hundreds of thousands of them in the last twenty years alone. Then they subject these children to ritual sexual abuse. It’s the MKUltra mind control system. It was invented by the CIA. Do you know that the FBI doesn’t even bother to track the numbers of children that go missing every year.”
“That’s not true,” Gregor said. By now, he was beginning to feel desperate. “There’s an organization called the Center for Missing and Exploited Children. There’s a special agent of the FBI attached to it. They collect all the figures every year, how many children are missing, how many children are found, what happened to them—you can get that information on-line any time you want to. They publish it.”
Kathi Mittendorf seemed to hesitated for a moment. Then she smiled. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “They probably make it all up. They don’t dare collect the real figures. Then they’d know that there is no such thing as False Memory Syndrome. The memories are all real. The children really did see infants sacrificed and small animals mutilated. It happens all the time. It happens in day-care centers. It happens in schools. They have to get to as many people as possible to make sure that they’re brainwashed. They can’t afford to leave any serious opposition. That’s why they’re trying to kill us.”
“What?” Gregor said.
This time, Kathi Mittendorf’s smile was wide and glittering. “That’s why they’re trying to kill us,” she repeated. “That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it? To see if you can get the information out of me. And if you don’t you’ll go back and tell them, your reptilian masters, and they’ll send somebody out to kidnap me. They’ll bring me in and torture me. And when they’re finished with me, they’ll kill me, because they know that as long as I’m alive, I’m a danger to them. I’m as much of a danger to them as somebody like Michael, because I’m just an ordinary person. I’m not some kind of nut. People will see me and realize that you don’t have to be a lunatic to see the conspiracy. And they’ll start to think. I know who you are, Mr. Demarkian. I pretended not to know when you got here, but I know. You’re one of them. You live with a reptilian master, with that Bennis Hannaford woman, whose bloodline goes all the way back to the Merovingians through the British monarchy. You know I’m telling the truth. And you can’t let me get away with it. But watch out. This whole house is wired. Cameras have been taking down this entire conversation and sending it to people I trust. They won’t let you get away with it. They won’t let you win. It doesn’t matter if you stand there right now and shoot me dead.”
FOUR
1
By early afternoon, Ryall Wyndham was as wound up as he ever thought he could be—too wound up to function, really, but he wasn’t as worried about functioning as he used to be. It was a big day. Murder or no murder, the Philadelphia social season was in full gear. In the next few weeks, there were enough hunt balls to make you think foxes were about to become an endangered species, and that in spite of the fact that this wasn’t the big season for hunting. Then there were the private debutante balls, the really important parties that marked a girl’s “honest” coming out, in contrast to the mass presentation balls, which were tacky, but everyone “did” them. Ryall would never have admitted it in public, but the truth was, he liked new-money debutantes more than he liked old-money ones. Old-money debutantes had no sense of fun. Half of them got their ball gowns at Sears, and he knew at least one, only two years ago, who had arrived at the Philadelphia Assemblies with a pair of sneakers on under her dress. New-money debutantes liked to make a splash. Ryall was all for splashes. He liked to make splashes himself. This year, the big status symbol for new-money debutantes was to have two dresses for every ball. They danced until midnight, then repaired to the powder room or a convenient bedroom and changed clothes: dress, shoes, gloves, jewelry. It was not only extravagant, but utterly mindless. That was the way it was supposed to be. Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn would never have made a go of The Philadelphia Story if the general public had ever known what really went on in those big old-money houses on the Main Line.
Today, the important t
hing was to look solemn, and to make sure not to say anything stupid while on the air. He was due to tape at four-thirty. He was going to be expected to say something about the murder of Charlotte Deacon Ross, and the trouble was that he had a lot to say. Which was that the old cow deserved to be dead, for one thing—God, how he hated those patronizing people, the ones who treated him as if he were their personal publicity agents, but too damned dumb and uncultivated to know the difference between Shakespeare and Dohnanyi. But it wasn’t just that. It was the attitude, that half-distracted look that told you you weren’t really on the same planet with this great, good, and important Goddess. She listened to you like she listened to the stereo when she’d put it on as background music. She’d notice if you were annoying, and she’d do something about you too, but otherwise you might as well have been in the next state. It was too bad he still needed to be careful about what he had to say about these people. He could tell the world a lot about Charlotte Deacon Ross: her rages, smashing crystal and dinnerware on hardwood floors when she wasn’t getting exactly what she wanted exactly as she wanted it; the way she fired help without cause or warning, sometimes in batches of twos and threes; her relationship with her oldest daughter, which resembled the relationship Medea might have had with her children if she’d allowed them to grow up. The only thing Charlotte didn’t do was screw. That made her infinitely different from most of her friends, who engaged in adultery the way they kept up their tennis, but it was mostly a matter of intelligence. Ryall Wyndham might have been a bug on the wall as far as Tony Ross was concerned, but he’d known that man well enough to know that if Charlotte ever gave him cause, he’d be out of that marriage in a shot. There was something for the tabloids and the infotainment programs. Men like Tony Ross do not get divorced, not ever. Men just a rung below them on the ladder sometimes did, but men like Tony did not. It was too damned dangerous, and too expensive. Still, Tony was looking for a reasonable excuse to get a divorce from Charlotte, and even Charlotte knew about it.
