“I still say we ought to be careful,” Susan said, flipping her blond hair from the front of her shoulders to behind. She had had the top of it cut short and curled into ringlets. She reminded Kathi of Tonya Harding at her worst. “I know Michael is a genius, and I know he’s in charge of this operation, but we’re talking about a serious weapons charge here—”
“There won’t be any weapons charge,” Kathi said. She was trying to sound patient. She only sounded panicked. “There won’t be any arrests. We’re not supposed to be arrested. We’re supposed to end up dead.”
“Then maybe the smartest thing for us to do would be to run,” Susan said. “Let’s take off. We’ve got those fake identities—”
“What if they’ve been found out?”
“We’ve got them,” Susan insisted. “And from what I understand, it isn’t that hard to get more. Why don’t we take off and go into hiding? You may look forward to an all-out gun battle against the United States government, but I don’t—”
“We can’t run,” Kathi said. She was feeling not only panicked, but desperate. “They know who we are. They know what we look like. They know we were involved—”
“I wasn’t involved. I had no idea ‘we’ were involved.”
“Do you think it would matter?” Kathi said. “Do you think they care who really killed Tony Ross or blew up that church or did any of the rest of it? Or that—FBI agent? Did you know he was an FBI agent? Michael knew.”
“Yes, Michael knew,” Susan said. “And he told us. And we expelled him from the group. And now they’ve found his body. That’s a problem in and of itself, don’t you think?”
“They don’t care who does what,” Kathi repeated stubbornly. “It isn’t about law and order. It isn’t about truth and justice. It isn’t about murder. It’s about control of the world and a One World Government that will put an end to freedom once and for all. They’re moving in. You can see it. They’re not just moving in on us. They’re moving in on the whole country. The homeland security czar—they even call him a czar. And those people in Washington. They think they have the country fooled, because they call themselves Republicans, and people think only Democrats want to turn the United States into a police state.”
“How did we get to homeland security from this?” Susan asked. “I’m talking about this. I’m talking about the simple fact that if we do what you’re suggesting we do—”
“I didn’t suggest it. I don’t suggest anything. I’m not smart enough to plan. It’s Michael who suggested this.”
“Fine. It’s Michael who suggested this. I think Michael is smart too. But I don’t think he’s God, and that’s what you’re treating him as. I think this is nuts, and so would you if you thought about it for only a couple of minutes. What have we actually done that could get us in trouble? Nobody is going to believe that a couple of middle-aged women—”
“Ethel Rosenberg was a middle-aged woman,” Kathi said. “They gave her the electric chair. That woman who died after the assassination of Lincoln was a middle-aged woman—”
“We haven’t been collaborating in the assassination of a president,” Susan said. “We haven’t been doing much of anything except going to lectures and listening to speeches and, okay, working with a couple of wiretaps. But they don’t execute you just for wiretaps.”
“It’s not the wiretaps, and you know it. It’s Anthony Ross. And his wife. And that—the FBI agent.”
“Right. Yes. I understand. They like to pin their own crimes on the people because that keeps the people divided, and we’re it at the moment because we’re here and available and—”
“And because we’re dangerous to them,” Kathi said. “Never forget that. We’re dangerous to them.”
“Yes, right. We’re dangerous to them because we tell the public what they’re doing, the way they’re all subverting the Constitution, the Republicans and the Democrats both, the way they’re trying to stamp out freedom and make us all part of a single dictatorship that will rule the whole world. We know what the UN is really for and what they’re doing. We know the way the courts really run. We know who they are. But what good do you think it’s going to do if we get blown away on some backstreet in Philadelphia and they can go on the network news and tell everybody how we were a bunch of domestic terrorists plotting to blow up churches from one end of Pennsylvania to the other? What good did it do Timothy McVeigh?”