Tibor smiled slightly. Gregor stood up, thinking it made as much sense to call from the phone here as to go upstairs. Bennis wouldn’t be charging Tibor for the phone bill. Gregor got around the edge of the couch and headed for the bedroom. Bennis also had a phone in her kitchen, as he did himself, but for some reason that felt far too public for a call like this. Tibor had gone back to looking out the window, but not looking, the way he’d been staring at everything since Gregor had first seen him in the hospital after the explosion.
“It’s not just that people no longer have common sense,” Tibor said. “It’s that so many of them want to see evil with a capital E. It’s not enough anymore that there are people in the world who do bad things. It must be some big plot, some ultimate war against the forces of darkness. But I never thought the forces of darkness were like that. I always thought that Armageddon, when it came, would happen in a civil servant’s office, and most people wouldn’t even notice.”
“Well,” Gregor said, unsure where to go from there.
The door to Bennis’s apartment slammed open and Grace came running in. “Mr. Demarkian,” she said, breathless. “There’s a man on the phone and he says he has to talk to you right away, because Charlotte Deacon Ross is dead.”
PART TWO
Title: SEPTEMBER 11, 1990—PRESIDENT BUSH [Senior] PRESENTS SPEECH TO CONGRESS, “ TOWARD A NEW WORLD ORDER.” SEPTEMBER 11, 2001—MIGHTY BLOW STRUCK TO BRING ABOUT NEW WORLD ORDER— PRECISELY 11 YEARS LATER TO THE DAY. BUSH [JUNIOR] PRESIDENT.
Subtitle: Since “11” can rightly be thought of as the New World Order Number, this double “11” is most shocking. It seems to confirm the complicity of both Bush presidents and their CFR advisers in this most shocking of terrorist attacks. The number “11” simply surrounds the attacks and for very good additional reason: it is a primary number in Mind Control.
—FROM THE CUTTING EDGE AT
HTTP://WWW.CUTTINGEDGE.ORG/NEWS/N1541.CF
ONE
1
The good thing, if there could be said to be a good thing, was that this time Gregor Demarkian’s status in the investigation was far less ambiguous. Nobody could say that he was a suspect in the death of Charlotte Deacon Ross because, as far as he could figure out, he had spent the time of the shooting talking to two Philadelphia police detectives in Krystof Andrechev’s store. The worst thing of many bad things was what this death would do to the elaborate theoretical construct Frank Margiotti and Marty Tackner had made of the death of Tony Ross—or Anthony van Wyck Ross, as they called him, formally, whenever they launched into their theory about the case. All the way out to Bryn Mawr in the cab, Gregor thought about those two detectives and what they had considered self-evident about the shooting on the night of the charity ball. Gregor could not decide if he, himself, had thought the same things. He had always found it very difficult to get his mind around the existence of people like Tony Ross, even though he’d spent much of his early career working with them. That was what you did on kidnapping detail. You put in your time with the rich. Tony Ross, though, was more than rich. He was the kind of rich that most people never see and wouldn’t understand, because he made it a point to be both obscure and opaque. It was unlikely that any of his children would ever have been kidnapped. Potential kidnappers wouldn’t know that the name “Ross” meant anything—unlike a name like Rockefeller, or Vanderbilt, or Gates—and they probably wouldn’t find the Ross daughters all that rich-looking. Clothes from J. Crew and L.L. Bean and Abercrombie and Fitch, ten-year-old station wagons to get around town in, jewelry limited to sterling-silver hoops in pierced ears—no, these people were nothing at all like “rich” as it was defined in the celebrity press. They simply had more money, and more influence, and had had both for generations back in time.
Of course, Gregor thought, Charlotte Deacon Ross was something else again, a matron from an earlier brand of matrons, somebody who not only expected to look rich but expected other people to notice. Even so, a potential kidnapper spying her in a store in Philadelphia or New York would probably put her down as one of the second or third rank, a Society woman manqué. Understatement in everything, Gregor told himself, even understatement in in-your-face hauteur. Charlotte would have been completely obvious only to her own kind and the climbers who followed them. That would have been her point.
The front of the Ross estate was awash in searchlights. There were the regular security lights, but also new ones, brought by the police, meant to help in the combing of the area. Gregor sat back in the cab and tried to think. If they were combing the area near the gates, then they must expect that somebody had come in that way. The murder had not been committed by somebody already in the house. Or had it? It was not so easy to make that sort of determination. Gregor was a little concerned that Frank and Marty were so invested in their theory that they would still assume the truth of it in the face of a death that couldn’t possibly be part of that particular puzzle. Gregor leaned forward and tried to see out the windshield. The drive wound and curved and zigzagged, as if whoever had put it in was really trying to make an obstacle course for go-carts to race down.