“Timothy McVeigh was set up,” Michael Harridan had told her, the first time she spoke to him. “Never forget that. It’s the best protection you have against being set up yourself. They want the American people to believe that we’re the ones who are dangerous, that we’re a bunch of kooks who’ll blow a bunch of babies to hell just because of our paranoia. That’s their word for us. Paranoid. That’s what they said about Randy Weaver and David Koresh. But they weren’t paranoid. They were right.”
Kathi had wanted to put up a little shrine to all of them, a long line of framed pictures, on the wall of her bedroom, but eventually she had decided against it. If she got arrested, or blown away by the enemy, they could use those pictures to “prove” that she was insane and dangerous. If you were insane, they could do anything they wanted to you. You didn’t have any rights, the way you did if they arrested you in the ordinary way. Michael said there were hundreds of people, maybe thousands, locked away in mental institutions whose only real crime had been to understand what the Illuminati were doing and tell other people about it.
“Paranoid is a wonderful word,” Michael said. “They call it a disease. The symptoms are anything they want them to be. One minute you’re on the street, getting people to really look at what has happened to America. The next minute, you’re in the loony bin, and the only way they’ll let you out is if you agree to stop talking about what you know.”
The problem was to strike a balance between being clean and being careful. Kathi couldn’t help herself. Her nerves were shot. She wasn’t Michael Harridan. She wasn’t a professional on a mission. She was an ordinary forty-five-year-old woman, a little dumpy now at the beginning of middle age, easily tired at the end of a long day. She was only important because she knew what she knew, and because Michael trusted her. When the call came, she got Susan and went to work hiding the things they had to hide. They put the explosives in big black trash barrels in her basement and covered them with clothes that were so badly mildewed it was hard to be in the same room with their stench. They put the rifles in odd places that only women would think of: in the old washing machine that hadn’t worked in all the time Kathi had rented this house; at the back of the cedar closet behind a cracked panel that opened into the hollow wall. All the walls in this house were hollow. It was a house that would be considered very shabbily made even today. It had probably been considered a gimcrack mess in 1894, when it was built. The Illumi-nati were operating here in those days too—in fact, George Washington himself was a tool of the Illuminati, a thirty-third-degree Mason who was head of his local lodge—but it took a long time for a population to be habituated to the internal rot the Illuminati had decreed for all human lives.
“They think in centuries,” Michael always said. “Most people think in days, or maybe weeks. They take their time. If they didn’t, people would catch on, people would get frightened. Instead, it all looks normal. We make fun of the kind of people who talk about how things aren’t as good as they used to be. We treat them like cranks.”
Kathi had not been able to give up all the guns. She could probably have hidden everything she had and hidden it well, but if she had, it would not have been available to her if something drastic happened. She hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that something drastic was going to happen any moment now. There was a homeless man who rummaged through the garbage cans on her street every morning. He looked a lot more alert than he ought to, and lately he’d been staying closer than ever to her door. There were all the security cameras at work. Price Heaven photographed everything, even the ladies’ changing rooms. There wasn’t a moment when management couldn’t zero in on anybody anywhere in the store. There were the transcripts she had made of the recordings from the party where Anthony van Wyck Ross had been killed. She still had them, the original and five copies, in the bottom drawer of the desk she kept in a corner of the dining room so that she could do her bills every month. She was sure they had been disturbed more than once while she was away from home, and that the desk had been moved too. It made her feel sick to her stomach to think of somebody coming into her house while she was away and going through her things. She’d rather have SWAT teams storm her front door.
The bottom line was this: Kathi no longer felt safe going anywhere, even to the bathroom, when she wasn’t armed. She had therefore armed herself, out of the huge cache in the basement, as soon as Susan had left for the evening and she was alone with the nightly news. By then, of course, there were news bulletins flashing by every few minutes. CNN and CNBC were reporting the story as if it were a political assassination, which it might well be. Kathi knew nothing about pistols. She couldn’t have recited the name of any to save her life. She’d simply picked out the biggest, blackest one in the pile, passing by the smaller “ladies’ guns” that might have fit more easily into her everyday purse. She was sure bigger guns would pack more of a wallop than smaller guns. Bazookas and howitzers were huge, and they packed more of a wallop than rifles. It took her nearly an hour to get the gun loaded. She didn’t know what any of the terminology was supposed to mean. She didn’t know how to match the gun with the bullets that belonged to it. Some bullets didn’t fit into the chambers, so she discarded them. Some bullets fit but were wrong for reasons she could not divine. Every time she found what she thought was the right ammunition, she took the gun up to her bedroom and fired into a big stack of pillows she used to prop her head up when she did Penny Press Fun and Easy Puzzles before dropping off to sleep. The gun kicked back against her hand painfully. She’d had no idea that firing a gun could set your bones on fire. Some of the bullets didn’t fire at all, though, and there was no pain then. Some of the bullets seemed to half explode inside the chamber. Eventually, she discarded any bullet that did not fit exactly. Too loose a fit, she decided, was just as bad as too big to fit at all. It was only when it was all over, and she had the bullets she needed, that she wondered if she could have done herself some real damage by experimenting the way she had. Maybe one of the bullets that rattled around too much could have made the gun blow up in her hand. She had no idea. She only knew it hadn’t happened.