“Who is Cisco Wheeler?”
“She’s a lecturer on the one-world conspiracy, satanic ritual abuse circuit. She claims to have come from one of the richest and oldest families in the country and to have been ritually abused as a child because, she says, that’s what these families do to their children to make sure they’re mind-controlled.”
“Okay.” Gregor was beginning to feel as if his head was about to explode.
“But the thing is,” Bennis said, “I’m from one of the country’s richest and oldest families and trust me, we all know each other. If we haven’t met directly, we’ve got connections through aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents. We go to the same schools. We go to the same dancing classes. We go to the same camps. We’re in each other’s weddings. And as for Cisco Wheeler, not only have I never heard of her, neither has anybody else I know. It’s remarkable what kind of bull you can throw just because most people don’t know what it takes to get into the Social Register.”
“What does it take?”
“Not a whole hell of a lot,” Bennis said. She grabbed her coat from the seat behind her—for some reason, Bennis couldn’t stand to drive wearing a coat— and popped open her door. “Listen,” she said. “This stuff is everywhere. We’re in the midst of a vast conspiracy to bring about a One World Government that will end freedom as the United States has known it. The conspiracy goes back to the Merovingian dynasty—”
“The what?”
“Ask Tibor. Back to the early Middle Ages. The very early Middle Ages. Anyway, it looks like people rise and fall in the hierarchies of the world, but it’s all a smoke screen. It’s all the same thirteen families, and then every once in a while they pick some talented kid from a poor background to advance. That’s just so that the rest of us won’t catch on that the game is always rigged. They picked Bill Clinton, for instance. They established contact with him at an early age and have been training him ever since. The Rhodes Scholarship program is actually a training ground for Illuminati operatives. The UN is an Illuminati institution, and any minute now it’s going to take over the whole world and impose One World Government on us. Then it will outlaw Christianity, and we’ll all be MKUltra mind slaves, which most of us are already, because the CIA has been brainwashing us through our television sets and the chemicals in fast food for years—”
“Wait,” Gregor said.
Bennis got out of the car. “Go look it all up on the Web. I’ve got to get Ti-bor or he’ll probably have a meltdown. The bed’s already made up in the second-floor apartment. Grace is going to come down and ask you for the key. She made Tibor something or the other and she wants to leave it on the counter in the kitchen. And don’t worry about this Harridan Report thing. There’s a ton of stuff like that out there. It’s harmless, it’s just completely nuts.”
“Timothy McVeigh wasn’t harmless.”
“Most of these guys are nothing at all like Timothy McVeigh. They’re people who are profoundly disappointed in their lives, and this gives them a way to feel important. They’re not unsuccessful cogs in a big machine run by people who are smarter and more ambitious than they are. They’re the last defense of freedom against an enemy so vast and so secret, most people don’t even know it’s there. But they know. They can see what other people cannot. They’re smarter than practically anybody. And that’s all they need.”
Bennis was all the way out of the car. She slammed the door shut. Gregor thought that her description would have fit Timothy McVeigh perfectly well, except that McVeigh had needed more than just to feel how smart he was. And there was the Posse Comitatus, whose members were accused in at least one murder of a federal officer in the eighties. Gregor was sure he had read something about the Posse Comitatus being opposed to One World Government. He opened his door and got out onto the street, feeling as if he was climbing out of a deep well. When Mercedes offered bucket seats, it meant bucket seats. He shook out his coat and then leaned back in to lock Bennis’s door. He locked his own and shut it. He had no idea what time it was, but the air was grey and dark and felt wet even though it wasn’t raining. If it did anything today, it would probably snow.
He went around to the sidewalk and then into the front door of his building, hearing the sounds of Grace’s harpsichord pounding down from the fourth floor as soon as he walked into the foyer. Maybe he should spend more time on the Internet. He had never paid much attention to conspiracy theories. The few he’d run into had been about the FBI, and they’d gotten so many of the details wrong that he hadn’t had the patience to take them seriously. He looked at the slip of paper Bennis had given him. Maybe, when he was finished calling the director and Jack Houseman both and letting them know how he felt about Walker Canfield, he’d brave the Internet on Bennis’s computer and go looking for David Icke and Cisco Wheeler and all the rest of them.