Conspiracy Theory(10)

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.