Conspiracy Theory

by Jane Haddam

  “Fine. We’re making progress. At least we’re finally talking about something the Bureau really does investigate. What about ATF?”

  “We got a guy at ATF we’re feeding information to, yes,” Canfield said, “but we’re trying to be careful. These conspiracist groups are paranoid as hell. They think there’s an agent of the New World Order behind every bush. We didn’t want to land a bunch of agents in their lap all at once, if you see what I mean.”

  “Yes,” Gregor said. “I do see. So you played backup, and your partner went undercover. Undercover as what?”

  “As somebody interested in joining the movement.”

  “And that’s possible? How do you make an approach in a case like that?”

  Canfield got up and started to pace. “It’s not like those Islamic groups, where you’ve got cells and nobody is supposed to know anybody else in the cells. The conspiracist groups are much more open, if that makes any sense. They give lectures that are open to the public, they sell books, like that. We sent Steve to one of the lectures.”

  “Steve was your partner?”

  “Steve Bridge, yeah. We went down to Price Heaven and got him a pair of chinos and a cheap polo shirt. He really looked the part. And he went to a couple of their lectures, and after a while he started getting asked to meetings.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing, really,” Canfield said. “He went to meetings, but they didn’t trust him right off. They wouldn’t. So he tried to be helpful and he tried to sound like he’d gotten religion, so to speak, and they seemed to be buying it. He got the names of the members, the real ones. We did some background checks.”

  “Why didn’t you raid them? You had the weapons violations. You knew where the weapons were. ATF should have been able to go in there and clean them out.”

  “We wanted to get a line on Michael Harridan himself.”

  “And did you?”

  “No,” Canfield said. “He didn’t come to meetings, at least not in the flesh. And he didn’t give lectures or attend them. We were pretty certain that the women had met him at some point, because they were always talking about him and the things he said and the things he did, but we weren’t able to figure out when they saw him or where.”

  “Did it occur to you that there might not be any him to see?” Gregor asked. “Maybe the two women invented him for reasons of their own—because the kind of men who join this kind of movement don’t take too well to leadership by women, or something like that.”

  “We thought of it, but we knew it wouldn’t fly,” Canfield said. “It really wouldn’t. Neither of them had the technical skills to produce the newsletter, for one thing. And it was more than that. At one point the group had a remote bug with a satellite relay planted at the offices of the City Planning Commission in Philadelphia. Not one of those deals where you had to have a van parked practically out in front of the place, but a real relay—”

  “You must be joking.”

  “I’m not. And it worked too. Steve sat in Kathi Mittendorf’s living room and listened to the feed for half an hour. He said the quality was lousy, but the thing worked. Neither of the women could have done that. Whoever this Michael Harridan is, he knows what he’s doing and he’s good at it. He’s also smart enough not to show his face.”

  “So Steve never actually saw him,” Gregor said.

  “Not as far as I know,” Canfield said.

  “Which means what?”

  Canfield looked at the floor, frowning. “Meaning, Steve might have seen him. Back at the beginning of last week, maybe three or four days before the Ross shooting.”

  “What makes you think that? Did he say so?”

  “No. He didn’t say anything. That’s the point.”

  “I’m not getting the point,” Gregor said.

  Canfield sighed. “That’s when Steve went missing. Poof. Gone. Disappeared. That’s the last time I saw or heard from him.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Gregor said. “He’s gone?”

  “I didn’t think anything of it at first,” Canfield said desperately. “It wasn’t all that unusual for me not to hear from him for a day or two. We really were being very careful to keep him undercover. But then the Ross thing happened, and he didn’t surface—”

  Gregor took a deep breath. “You haven’t told the Bureau,” he said. “You haven’t told anybody that he’s gone.”

  Canfield cleared his throat. “I didn’t know there was anything to tell,” he said carefully. “And then the Ross thing happened and I was distracted—”

  “Jesus Christ,” Gregor said again. “I walked in here and took one look at you and thought you were the kind of idiot who couldn’t imagine ever doing anything except by the book, and here you’ve got a special agent, your own partner, missing for—what?—ten days now? And you haven’t called anybody. You haven’t notified anybody. Have you done anything sensible? Have you searched the morgues?”

  “I couldn’t do that without—”

  “Never mind,” Gregor said. “Let’s get the two of them back in here and start making phone calls. Your career just died.”

  “There’s something else,” Canfield said.

  “What?”

  “Well, you saw that newsletter. Harridan already had his sights set on that party at the Ross’s. The last thing Steve told me the last time I talked to him was that there was supposed to be another feed. At the party itself. Harridan was going to bug the party and the women were supposed to sit somewhere and take notes and make tapes.”

  “Did you do a sweep of the house for bugs?”

  “Of course I didn’t. The secret service might have done a sweep for bombs and that kind of thing, though. Because the first lady was coming. We did inform the Bureau that America on Alert was interested in that party.”

  “Thank God for small favors.”

  “I’m not anywhere near as stupid as you’re trying to make me out to be,” Canfield said. “What I did made perfect sense, whether you’re willing to accept that or not. When somebody’s undercover, they often have to break off communications for short periods of time. It’s not unusual. I didn’t want to do anything that might blow his ID.”

  “Right,” Gregor said.

  Then he got off his chair, opened the door to the conference room, and called down the hall for Frank Margiotti and Marty Tackner to come back in.

  3

  Usually, Gregor Demarkian told Bennis Hannaford everything he was thinking. She was one of those people who made it almost useless not to, when she focused herself on you. Tibor sometimes said she had X-ray vision. This time, he was silent most of the way back to the city in the car, and she did not seem inclined to question him. The ride back was depressing in too many ways. Gregor hated this time of the year. What vegetation was visible from the highway was either dead or pinched. The evergreen trees looked as if they’d had all the sap drained out of them. There was far too much concrete. Gregor knew nothing about highway design, or about who designed them. He did know that in some places the highway didn’t block out all evidence of normal life, but that here it did. Government incompetence were the words going around in the back of his skull, but he wasn’t about to say them out loud. He hated those old men who had nothing to talk about except how much more awful young people were today than they had been back when they themselves had been young, and the government too. What bothered him was that he couldn’t keep his mind off Canfield and what he’d done, or not done. The fact of it was stuck in his brain, and he knew that in spite of the phone calls he’d made from the Bryn Mawr police station—and that he’d made Canfield make—he’d do some calling on private lines as soon as he got to his phone at home. Maybe all the complaining older people and conservatives did had some basis. Gregor couldn’t imagine anybody he’d been at Quantico with pulling a stunt like this. Then he thought about it some more, and decided it wasn’t true. He hadn’t heard of anybody doing exactly what Canfield did, but he had heard of them doing some pretty strange
and stupid things, and sometimes when the stupidity was especially high, people were killed. For some reason, it was always worse when Bureau agents got together with agents from Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Gregor could remember Jack Houseman the first time they’d had to deal with ATF in the flesh.

  “What the hell do these idiots think it means?” Jack had said. “Drink, smoke, and shoot at stuff?”

  They were off the highway and in the city. They must have been there for some time, because the neighborhoods were beginning to look familiar. Gregor suddenly remembered that Canfield had always spoken of Steve Bridge in the past tense. He’d done it right at the beginning: I had a partner. Gregor was not one of those people who pined for the glory days of the FBI. He had come in at the tail end of J. Edgar Hoover’s reign, and as far as he was concerned, the old man had been a raving psychopath. A raving psychopath with power was not a comfortable thing. Still, there were levels of minimum professionalism, the least to be expected code of conduct, something, and Canfield had passed all those things on his descent into absurdity. Gregor was still convinced that a man with a mission was the most dangerous man on earth, and that a man on a holy mission carved a special place for himself in hell. He now thought that a man who took nothing seriously might be almost as bad.

  They were on Cavanaugh Street. Gregor had no idea how they’d got there. He looked around and saw nobody he knew, and not much of anybody he did not know. Bennis had pulled up to the curb in front of the brownstone house where their apartments were.

  “Aren’t you going to park in the garage?” he said.

  “I’ve got to go pick up Tibor at the hospital,” Bennis said.

  “I thought you and Donna were going together and using her van.”

  “We are, but I don’t have the time to put this in the garage now, so I thought I’d leave it here. Are you all right?”

  Gregor reached in through his coat and jacket and came up with the folded wad of papers that were the copies he’d made of Canfield’s copies of The Harridan Report. He opened the wad and rifled through it. He found the one he wanted and handed it over.

  “Halfway down the page,” he said. “Tell me what you think of that.”

  Bennis checked the car clock out of the corner of her eye, but she took the papers and scanned them. “Oh,” she said. “Look at this. ‘Chairwoman of the event is Charlotte Deacon Ross, a Rockefeller on her mother’s side and married to a collateral member of the House of Morgan, who also happens to be Anthony van Wyck Ross, head of Lessard Cole, one of the world’s biggest and most important investment banks. Vice chairwoman is Bennis Hannaford, a member of the notorious Duke family.’ ”

  “Is that accurate?” Gregor asked her.

  “About what?” Bennis said. “Charlotte’s mother wasn’t a Rockefeller, she was only a second cousin or something. Not that you weren’t made to know that, Charlotte being Charlotte. Although she was good. You could never tell just how she got it across.”

  “What about what it says about you?”

  “It’s crap. Not only aren’t we members of the Duke family, my father wouldn’t talk to them at parties. The whole thing with Doris, you know—I mean, she was my father’s generation. One of the things about the old Main Line, and the people like them elsewhere, is that they have an incredible number of rules about how to bring up children, because you do have to worry about it. If you don’t give the child a decent foundation, he’s going to get hold of a forty-million-dollar trust fund when he’s eighteen or twenty-one or whatever and go completely nuts, which is what Doris did. My father thought that she’d been left to run wild as a child and not taught proper morals, which considering what he was like is something of a laugh. Of course, Doris wasn’t brought up in Philadelphia, but that wasn’t supposed to matter.”

  “Was she really,” Gregor checked the newsletter again, “ ‘ritually murdered in 1993’? What does that mean, exactly, ‘ritually murdered’?”

  “It means that Doris has been prime meat for tabloid journalism for most of a century. She did die in 1993. She was eighty, for God’s sake. And there was some suggestion of foul play, but mostly because Doris did the one thing every old money family has nightmares about, and that was leave a ton of money to her butler. I forget his name. People said he and a doctor had deliberately given Doris an overdose of morphine but, for goodness sake, how could anybody tell? She’d been drowning herself in alcohol and drugs since her teens, and in men too. Hot and cold running affairs all her life, and she was rich enough so that in the end she could buy what she couldn’t attract, and from all indications, she did just that. One of her cousins wrote the nastiest book about it about ten years ago.”

  “So what is this about ‘ritually murdered’?”

  Bennis sighed. “You ought to spend more time on the Internet,” she said. “These guys are all over the place. Your basic choice is between the religious ones and the secular ones, but even the secular ones go on about satanic ritual abuse, which is supposed to be going on everywhere, right under our noses, and the reason we never find any of the bodies of the tens of thousands of infants supposedly murdered in rituals every year is that the Illuminati eat them, or something.”

  “What?”

  Bennis pulled down the visor over the steering wheel and got one of the deposit receipts she kept there. She checked the date, then reached for the pen in the cup holder. Then she put the deposit slip on the steering wheel, wrote something on it, and passed the slip to Gregor.

  “There,” she said. “While I’m out getting Tibor, get on-line and go to that. It’s an ad for tapes and things that they’re selling, but if you scroll down you’ll find complete descriptions of what’s on the tapes, and that should give you a pretty good idea of what is going on.”

  Gregor looked at the slip of paper. Written on it was a single line in dark red ink: http://home.inreach.com/dov/cdlcons.htm.

  “While you’re at it,” Bennis said, “you might do searches for David Icke and Cisco Wheeler. Icke is supposed to be an ‘investigator.’ They all give themselves these titles, you wouldn’t believe it. Anyway, he’s got nothing in the way of serious journalistic credentials, but he does run a Web site. Cisco Wheeler is even better.”

  “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 r
est 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.