Conspiracy Theory(108)

“How big is this place?” Gregor asked. “How many bedrooms? How many square feet? And how many people stay here full-time?”

“Only Annie and I stay here full-time,” Lucinda said, “although there’s usually somebody or the other spending the night. And we’ve got, what, six bedrooms?”

“Seven, if you count what’s in the attic,” Annie said.

“Well, yes, but we never use the attic,” Lucinda said. “And that’s jury-rigged anyway, except for the bathroom, which is nicer than any of the other ones in the house.”

“What about the night Tony Ross died?” Gregor asked. “Was anybody staying in the house then?”

“I don’t remember,” Lucinda said. “There was somebody or the other doing something—a group, or something like that. There was a meeting. I remember that, because Annie here went out to take photographs while it was going on and we had Father Kasparian coming, and I was worried there wouldn’t be anybody to talk to Father Kasparian while he was here.”

“You could talk to Father Kasparian while he was here,” Annie said.

John Jackman came back into the room. “Gregor?” he said. “That was my office. We’ve got to go.”

“All right,” Gregor said.

Lucinda and Annie were both staring at Jackman, curious. “That doesn’t sound right,” Annie said. “What’s the matter, John? Has somebody shot the mayor?”

“No,” John said. “They’ve found somebody Mr. Demarkian has been looking for. Unfortunately, they’ve found him dead.”





PART THREE


In Germany, as in the United States, a virtual government was conceived with the trappings of democratic rule by the engineers of the Holocaust.

—FROM “PREAMBLE: ON THE ROAD TO A FOURTH REICH” FROM VIRTUAL GOVERNMENT: CIA MIND CONTROL OPERATIONS IN AMERICA BY ALEX CONSTANTINE





ONE



1


It was not the middle of the night, but the police cars and the evidence vans and the ambulances were lit up as if it must have been. In the end, it didn’t matter who among the civilians may have died. The town drunk and the president of the United States got differing levels of response, but neither got the response accorded to the lowest level of police officer. Even the death of police officers that other officers didn’t like rated a full-court press investigation. Even the deaths of police officers from other jurisdictions, or on vacation, or undercover, or in disguise—Gregor couldn’t remember when he’d known the death of a police officer not to bring out the visceral animal in the department who got the call. That was part reaction and part insurance. The safest course for any police department was to let it be known on the street that hurting one of their own would bring down the wrath of God and worse. The reaction was, Gregor supposed, inevitable. When you train men and women for months at a time and then make them work together for years under pressure, they begin to feel like part of a single organism. Crap, Gregor thought. Maybe it was none of these things. Maybe it was just the obvious, which is that people don’t like to feel personally attacked, and police officers always took the murders of police officers personally.

The odd thing, Gregor admitted to himself, was that the city police had been so quick to assume that Steve Bridge was one of their own. Not only did most local cops have very little use for the FBI—and often for good reason, Gregor had to admit—but Bridge had had the kind of job that local cops had the least use for. He was going undercover, but only to spy on a group whose ideas he and his bosses didn’t like. Gregor knew there had been a time when local cops had been just as zealous in the hunting down of Communists as they were at the hunting down of sneak thieves. In the red scares of the twenties and the McCarthy-inspired witch-hunts of the fifties, local police had gone out of their way to aid and abet first the paranoia of the United States Congress and then the Bureau at its worst; breaking up “radical” meetings, locking people in holding cells for attending union   organizing drives, shutting down printing presses to make sure no “subversive” pamphlets got out onto the street where somebody interested might read them. That was a long time ago. Somewhere in the sixties, a sea change had come. The Bureau was still too often preoccupied with “subversives,” and Gregor was sure there were sheriffs out in Omaha and Kansas City who were preoccupied with them too, but the local cops had come to their senses and decided to leave well enough alone. If it was armed, you had to worry about it. If it wasn’t armed, it didn’t matter if it was preaching the eventual second coming of the Great Banana, it made no sense to do anything except leave it alone.