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Conspiracy Theory(8)

By:Jane Haddam


Of course, the truth was, they would have remembered her. She hadn’t realized it then, but everything the Illuminati did, every single shudder in the military-industrial complex, was directed against people just like her, and nothing at all like Katy Davenport. This was one of the first things Michael had taught her when she’d gone to her first lecture, almost two years ago.

“They make you think you’re nobody,” he said—not just to her, of course, but to all of them, sitting in a big huddle in the small side room of the Holfield Meeting Hall in south Philadelphia, his voice coming out of a speaker, and blasting out at the crowd. Everybody had drawn a little closer, moving their metal folding chairs silently along the linoleum, hungry. Even then, Michael was in far too dangerous a position to appear in person. “If you think you’re nobody, you think you’re powerless. You don’t do anything. You don’t even try to stop them. And they know that. They know the only force on earth capable of stopping them is real Americans, just like you, and that’s why they know every one of your names.”

If Kathi had been running America on Alert, she would have gone about it differently. She would have made sure there were requirements for membership, maybe even an investigation into each and every person who wanted to come to meetings and join the organization and vote. No matter what Michael said, there was always the danger that the Illuminati would infiltrate them the way they had infiltrated so many other organizations, and good ones too. The John Birch Society was nothing these days if not an Illuminati front. They kept playing the same old record about “communism,” when it was obvious that the Illuminati weren’t interested in communism anymore. It had been a straw man right from the beginning. The real danger was far more insidious, made up of people who thought they were better than you were, smarter than you were, more—more worthy than you were. It had taken Kathi a long time to come up with that word. It contained everything that had ever bothered her about Katy Davenport and all the Katy Davenports she had met since: the politicians she saw on TV; the smug-suited “authors” who flickered by on Booknotes on C-Span; the supervisor at Price Heaven who sent his contributions to the ACLU from the office, brazenly, not caring at all that it would be a red flag to any good American on his staff. The supervisor Kathi Mittendorf worked under was a Jew. She’d found that out the very first week. She’d been ready to quit on the spot, but Michael had stopped her, because according to him some Jews were good Americans, a very few of them, the ones who did not think of themselves as citizens of Israel first. She thought she had known from the contribution to the ACLU that Mr. Goldman wouldn’t be one of those, but there was virtue in vigilance. The longer she stayed, the longer she could keep her eye on the things Mr. Goldman didn’t expect anybody to be looking for, like the ways in which he helped the Price Heaven corporation pump drugs into the air at the store so that the employees and the customers would be more easily bent to the Illuminati’s plans. As far as Kathi could tell, two-thirds of the population of the United States of America was drugged to the gills every day of their lives, programmed and brainwashed to do exactly as they were told. The programming came through their television sets.

Now it was very nearly zero hour of her first important operation, and Kathi found that she was sweating. She had no idea if the nervousness was legitimate or provoked. They got to you in the strangest ways, when you weren’t expecting it. You turned around and realized you’d been caught. The only thing she could do about it was work through it. She went into the bathroom and rinsed her mouth out with water from the big glass tub she got delivered from Crystal Stream twice a week. Crystal Stream was an America on Alert company, owned by one of their oldest members, so you could be sure the water was pure. Tap water in Philadelphia had fluoride in it. Then she went back into the living room and watched Susan checking the switches on the main receiver set. Susan looked worried, but Susan always looked worried. She was in love with Michael, but Kathi didn’t care about that. Every woman in America on Alert was in love with Michael, one way or the other. He had more sense than to fall for any of them.

“I wish he’d call in and tell us where he was,” Susan said. “I don’t like the thought of him wandering around out there in enemy territory. They’re bound to realize he isn’t anything at all like them.”

“He’s done it before,” Kathi said. “I don’t see why there should be anything to worry about now. Have you checked the explosives?”