Conspiracy Theory(21)

He put his newspaper down on the counter next to the cash register and said, “Good evening.” He put his money down on top of the cash register and waited. The man behind the counter said nothing, and didn’t look up. Grace Feinman said he made her nervous, but everybody made Grace nervous, especially the audiences she played for in the early-music quintet she had come to Philadelphia to join. Hannah Krekorian said he made her think of evil, but Hannah had written a fan letter to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. To Tibor, he just looked like a man, too heavyset for his own good, with hair that somebody cut for him at home. He took the two dollar bills and made change. Tibor put the change in his coat pocket and said thank you. There was a country-music station playing softly in the background: Garth Brooks.

“Have a good evening,” Tibor said, suddenly hyperaware of his accent, which was very thick, and always would be. The man grunted and Tibor went out onto the street again. The windows at Lida’s were dark. The windows at Bennis and Gregor’s were dark too, although, these days, the windows at Ben-nis’s were always dark, because Bennis was never there. He tucked the paper under his arm and walked another block up. If he went one block more, he could go to the Ararat and have some coffee. There would be somebody there to talk to, even if it was only old George Tekemanian, who showed no signs of wanting to move to Florida. The spotlights outside the church were lit up, which was how he had left them. Part of him hoped that homeless people would find out the church was unlocked and move in at night to get out of the cold, the way they did at that Catholic church downtown. Maybe Cavanaugh Street was too far off the beaten path as far as homeless people went. Whatever the reason, none had ever shown up. Tibor considered going back to his apartment, but didn’t want to. He considered going in to the church and checking things out, but he didn’t want to do that, either. He felt restless and dissatisfied in every possible way. Maybe when he got himself sorted out, he would sit down with St. John of the Cross’s Ascent of Mount Carmel and make himself feel perfectly guilty by witnessing the life of a real ascetic. These days, he could barely make himself give up coffee for Lent.

He went up to the next block, until he was directly across the street from the Ararat. Gregor was always warning him against jaywalking, but he could never take the warnings seriously. There was never any traffic to speak of on Cavanaugh Street. He crossed the street and tried to get a look into the Ararat’s big plate-glass front windows at the same time. They’d gone to candlelight and wall-dimmers already. It was hard to see anything or to know who was inside. Halfway across the street, he looked back over his shoulder at the church, reflexively. He was always checking to be sure it was there. For some reason, a vision popped into his head of that pastor in New Mexico who had burned a lot of Harry Potter books. When, he wondered, did we get to the point where we stopped understanding that witches aren’t real? At least, those kinds of witches, the Harry Potter kind, weren’t real. He started to turn back to the Ararat, to finish crossing the street.

That was when Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church exploded. At first it was just a light, an inexplicable light, blinding, like Saul on the Damascus road. Tibor half thought he had been granted a vision from God. Then the noise came and suddenly the air was full of stones and bricks and glass. They were everywhere. Noise was everywhere. Fire was everywhere too, and in the heat and madness, Father Tibor Kasparian passed out cold.





PART ONE


I reveal how a global secret society called the Illuminati (the “Illuminated Ones” as they call themselves) have been holding the reigns of power in the world since ancient times, expanding their power out of the Middle and Near East (and other centres) to control first Europe and then, thanks to the British Empire and other European empires, to take over in the Americas, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Asia, and elsewhere. When those empires appeared to withdraw from these regions, the Illuminati left behind the secret society networks and the Illuminati bloodlines and these have continued to control and orchestrate events ever since.

—“WHO REALLY RULES THE WORLD?”

BY DAVID ICKE AT

HTTP://WWW.DAVIDICKE.COM/ICKE/VISITOR.HTML





ONE



1


In the first few days after the explosion, Gregor Demarkian found himself getting up in the middle of the night to look at what was left of Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church. It wasn’t easy. Even in the days when the church was still standing in the ordinary way, even when it was decorated top to bottom by Donna Moradanyan Donahue on one of her periodic holiday enthusiasms, it was still more than a block away and set back from the sidewalk to make room for the three shallow steps that led to its front doors. Gregor had never had any idea what the steps were for. Maybe the men and women who built the church believed that people should ascend on their way to talk to God. Maybe the church had been built before the sidewalk and the street paving had been put in, and there was some worry that without a few steps to wipe their feet on, people might track mud into the church. None of these thoughts made any sense at all, and none of them mattered, but Gregor found it hard to look up the street without thinking about something besides the obvious. It was a good thing the bomb had not been as big as it had sounded to Tibor on the night it went off. There was some of Holy Trinity Church still left, even if it wasn’t of much good to anybody. Even more important, only the buildings directly next to the church had been in any way damaged. According to the bomb expert sent out by the police on the morning after, and according to the bomb expert at the FBI, for whom Gregor had pulled in a few markers for him to come out and look at the scene, much more firepower and all the buildings on the block, on both sides of the street, might have suffered “structural damage.” Gregor had heard the words structural damage a thousand times before without knowing what they meant, or even wondering. Now he knew. They meant that the ground had rattled so much, it had made the foundations of the buildings disorganized and unsafe.