“I don’t like handling the explosives. I know they’re supposed to be disconnected or whatever it is, but I can’t stop thinking about that time in Greenwich Village in the sixties. Do you know about that time in Greenwich Village in the sixties?”
“I wouldn’t know anything about Greenwich Village no matter when it was,” Kathi said. “Why would I have to know about Greenwich Village?”
“Some people had explosives there. They blew up a building. By accident. They were making a bomb and blew it up by accident. We ought to keep that stuff someplace else, where it couldn’t hurt us.”
“It can’t hurt us here,” Kathi said. “Calm down. Are you getting anything yet?”
“Just people talking about food.” Susan turned back to the receiver. The headset sat across her over-blond head like a snake. It made the color seem even falser than it was. Kathi’s own hair was the same color blond, but for some reason she liked the color better on herself than she did on Susan. What really mattered was that they colored their hair at all. Lesbians never colored theirs, and never wore jewelry, and never wore makeup, either. Once you understood how it worked, you could see all kinds of clues, all around you—the conspiracy at work.
Kathi leaned over Susan’s shoulder and turned up the volume. A high, nasal female voice came pounding out, affected and obnoxious, superior. “I don’t care what the caterer told you, the ice swans do not go on the main buffet table. How we’re ever going to get through this, I really don’t know. There isn’t any room on the main buffet table. You have to put the ice swans with the rest of the pâtés.”
“See?” Susan said.
Kathi stood back. It made her stomach feel odd to know that she had just heard one of Them, a real one of Them, at home and in private, when she thought she wasn’t being watched. They always put on a mask for outsiders. Michael had told them that. Now there was no mask, and this woman seemed—
Stupid, Kathi thought. She wiped the idea out of her head. The Illuminati weren’t stupid. They only wanted you to think they were. Maybe this woman wasn’t really in private. Maybe she was putting on a show for whoever she was talking to. Susan turned the volume back down.
“I’m recording everything,” Susan said, “just like Michael told me to. But so far, this has been all there is. Food. And music too. There are going to be bands. Do you realize there are going to be thousands of people at this thing?”
“Only fifteen hundred,” Kathi said. “Michael has the guest list.”
“Still. Fifteen hundred is a lot. Maybe we should take those explosives over there tonight and set them off. That would get rid of a lot of them, wouldn’t it?”
“You’re crazy.”
“Maybe I’m crazy,” Susan said. “But it seems to me that it would make more sense than what we are doing. If they really are evil people who want to take over the world, why don’t we just get rid of them? We wouldn’t get them all at once—”
“We wouldn’t get the most important ones,” Kathi said. “Can’t you see that? The ones who run the really big banks, the ones in Europe. They won’t all come to something like this. Only the Philadelphia ones will. And then the rest of them will be on their guard. And they’d find us. And then what would happen?”
“Maybe we’d wake up the rest of the country. Michael is always saying that most Americans would agree with us if they only understood what was going on. Maybe this would be the way we could tell them what was going on.”
“Did Timothy McVeigh tell them what was going on?”
“Michael said McVeigh doesn’t count. He wasn’t really one of us. If he was, he wouldn’t have blown up a building with a lot of babies in it. He was a plant. That’s how the Illuminati work. They close off all the avenues of action. They pre-opt everybody. This would be different.”
“You think blowing up a lot of women in evening gowns would be different?”
“It would really be blowing them up,” Susan said, stubborn. “I don’t understand what goes on here sometimes. You all say you’re patriots, and you all worry nonstop about how the Illuminati have taken over the country, but you won’t do anything about it. You don’t do anything but give speeches and sit around here and—”
“We bugged them tonight. And we have to give speeches. We have to convince the American people—”
“You’re the one who says the American people are all brainwashed. And I believe it. I believe it. If they hadn’t been brainwashed, they’d never have believed all those things about the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. They’d have seen in an instant that a bunch of Stone-Aged Arabs couldn’t have done anything like that, but—”