Conspiracy Theory

by Jane Haddam

  Gregor Demarkian was not a conspiracist. He did not believe that everything that happened in the world—or much of anything—was being controlled and directed by any central force. He did not work himself into a sweat over the possibility of a coming One World Government. In fact, he vaguely liked the idea, at least in principle. Tibor was right. Who wouldn’t prefer to see the Arabs and Israelis suing each other in an international court rather than doing what they did now? When it came to things like MKUltra Mind Control, and the CIA running a project that was systematically brainwashing half the population of North America, he wanted to laugh hysterically. The CIA were the same people who had managed to fail to assassinate Fidel Castro in the middle of a civil war. Secret rituals held in the basement dungeons of rich New Yorkers where thousands of babies a year were sacrificed in orgies of satanic ritual abuse. Catholic Mormon Freemasons who were the real power behind the spread of communism. A secret government made up of Rockefellers and Roo-sevelts who made all the decisions that only seemed to be made by people like the president and the United States Congress. The content of these ideas was ludicrous, but the content was not the point. It was the atmosphere they created that was the point. Tibor seemed to think that that atmosphere had somehow sprung into being with the disasters of September 11. In reality, it had been around a long time, making its way around the American South and Midwest in waves throughout the twentieth century. It had existed before then too, in Europe. The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion was a conspiracist holy text, entirely fabricated but fervently believed by that wing of the movement that saw the Jews as the cause of all the world’s problems. The Turner Diaries was a conspiracist holy text too, but only in the United States, among people who had given up anti-Semitism in favor of the imminent arrival of the apocalypse. If you tried to undo the strands and make it all make sense, you’d go crazy.

  Gregor let himself in to his apartment. Bennis wasn’t home, which was just as well, since he didn’t want to talk to anybody but the people he needed to call. Upstairs, Grace Feinman was pounding away on one of her harpsichords. Gregor thought he remembered someone saying that she now had three up there, plus the virginals. He put his coat on the hook of the coat stand and went into the living room to sit down on the couch. He pulled the phone to him and started dialing.

  Later on, when he was finished with these, he would have to find a way to talk to Kathi Mittendorf again.

  3

  It wasn’t until it was over that Gregor Demarkian admitted to himself that it was a relief to talk on a regular, rather than a cell, phone. Not only couldn’t you be intercepted out of thin air—he had visions of vans roving throughout the city, randomly snatching messages in mid-flight in the hopes of being the person who picked up the next phone call from Monica Lewinsky—but you didn’t have to worry about the sound quality fading out on you or disappearing altogether. Gregor did not remember either of those things ever happening to him. Bennis was too much of a stickler for getting exactly what she wanted and too willing to pay lots of money to get it to be saddled with inefficient cell phone service. Still, that sort of thing was always happening to Howard Kashinian, and Gregor was sure that if something could happen to Howard, it could happen to him.

  He looked down at the notebook he’d been jotting things down in for the past hour of phone calls and hoped he’d be able to decipher it when the time came. He had very neat handwriting, but he’d not only written lists and words but drawn arrows and made symbols, all in an attempt to straighten out the complexities of just who could or could not have fired a rifle at Tony Ross on the night of the party. The short explanation was that anybody who had already been on the grounds at the time and who had already had access to a gun there could have committed the murder. That was less helpful than it seemed, because although the secret service had screened the area early on the day, they hadn’t been able to keep it absolutely secure because of the right-of-way granted to the riding club. Besides, the secret service simply didn’t apply the same level of scrutiny to the arrangements for the first lady as they did for the president himself, unless there was some indication that the first lady was in direct and immediate danger. They had provided near-paranoid security for Hillary Clinton, because the media had been full of furious denunciations of her almost from the day her husband began running for office. This first lady was far less controversial. She was also far less interesting, but Gregor had to admit that interesting people were more likely to be vilified than uninteresting ones. The simple fact was that the secret service had not been all that concerned about a party given by Charlotte Deacon Ross. It was unlikely to be dangerous. The first lady didn’t have legions of enemies hoping to get rid of her at the first opportunity. Charity balls were a regular feature of a first lady’s life, and if they had to do a full security sweep on every one of them, they’d have to double their numbers and never do anything else.

  The problem, Gregor decided, was not how the murderer got on to the estate. He—or she, he amended, for the sake of the voice of John Jackman in his head—could have managed that any of a number of ways, including simply walking in through the front gate. The problem was how the murderer got out again after the murder, which was by no means an easy thing. The first lady had not arrived and never did arrive. The secret service had turned the car around and taken her right back to Washington. The security already in place on the estate had locked into place only seconds after the shots were fired. It wasn’t as good, or as tight, as the secret service would have been, but it would have made just strolling out the front gate a near impossibility. It would have meant strolling out the bridal path a near impossibility too, because there had been a man stationed at that entrance. That left only a very few options for escape, and he understood why Michael Harridan hadn’t liked any of them.

  He folded the notebook up and put it back in his pocket. It was after six. He wondered where Bennis was. He grabbed his coat from the coatrack in the hall and headed out down the stairs. He could still hear laughter coming up from old George Tekemanian’s apartment, but Grace was no longer playing her harpsichord. Maybe she’d gone to rehearsal, or to play a concert. He went down one flight and knocked on Bennis’s door. He would always think of that apartment as Bennis’s apartment, even though she never went there anymore except to work. They really ought to knock the two apartments together and make a duplex, even if it did mean confirming in public what everybody on Cavanaugh Street already knew.

  There was a shuffling sound on the other side of the door and then it was pulled inward. Tibor stood in the doorway in a pair of black trousers, a white shirt, a tie, and an expensive, thick cotton sweater that looked both very new and very orange. Gregor raised his eyebrows. Tibor shrugged.

  “Bennis sent for it for me from Land’s End,” he said carefully. “She thinks I do not have enough clothes. She thinks the clothes I have are too depressing. Come in, Krekor. I have been trying to pay attention to blueprints.”

  Gregor went in. The apartment looked the way it always looked. Tibor was not doing much in the way of redecorating it for his stay. The papier-mâché models of Zed and Zedalia had been taken off the end tables in the living room. The coffee table had been cleaned of trays and now held only a single cup of coffee and a small plate of butter cookies. They looked like very good butter cookies. Gregor had to restrain himself from taking one.

  “I thought I’d come along and get you to go to the Ararat for dinner with me,” he said. “Bennis is missing in action, I have no idea where. And you’ve barely been to the Ararat since the explosion. Maybe I think you’re depressed.”

  “I have only been to the Ararat once or twice,” Tibor said. “I find it difficult to walk by the church. I try to look on the positive side, as Bennis tells me to. We’ll have a new church. I’ll have a new apartment. And this church will be built just for us. It will not be something we take over from somebody else. Still. I have made arrangements today for preserving the icons.”

  “
Are they the kind of icons that should be preserved? I have no idea where Orthodox churches get their icons. I supposed I always half-thought that there were factories someplace.”

  “I don’t think so, Krekor, no. And especially not a hundred years ago, when Holy Trinity was first built. They would have had to send for them to Greece, to be painted by artists who specialized only in icons. There are still such artists now, but perhaps there are factories too. I was thinking that the people who first built this church worked very hard to have the icons here, and we should not destroy them, or put them in storage where nobody can see them. Isn’t it too early for the Ararat?”

  “A little.” Gregor took a seat on one of the big black leather chairs. “I thought I’d ask you about something first, if you’re up for it.”

  “About something that has to do with the investigation? Because if so, Krekor, I will not be of a great help. I went to Adelphos House. I stopped at that man’s newsstand and bought something. I walked down the street to the Ararat to get coffee and the building exploded behind me. If I had had any kind of real information, I would have told you about it long ago. I know what to worry about. Did I see any unusual person around the church at any time in the month or so before the bombing? No, I did not. Did I see any unusual person around the church on the day of the bombing? No, I did not. Did I see any unusual person—”

  “That’s all right,” Gregor said. “I’m not worried about your seeing unusual people. It’s a theory I wanted to ask you about. Or maybe you could get on the Internet and ask the people at RAM.”

  “You want to know which mystery novels to read when you take your vacation?”

  “I didn’t think RAM ever discussed mystery novels,” Gregor said. “Last time I checked into there, you were all discussing the War on Terrorism and responses to September eleventh.”

  “Everybody was discussing that then. Grace’s harpsichord newsgroup was discussing that then. Now we are discussing formula in crime fiction. It’s very interesting.”

  “I’m sure,” Gregor said. “I want to discuss One World Government.”

  “Oh,” Tibor said. “Please no, Krekor. It gives me a headache. The people who are always harping on it give me an even bigger headache.”

  “There are people who harp on it on RAM?

  “One or two.”

  “Anybody named Kathi Mittendorf? Or Susan—wait, I’m going to have to look up the last name—”

  “Don’t bother,” Tibor said. “There were no women. Only men.”

  “How about Michael Harridan?”

  “Pfft,” Tibor said. “What do you take me for? If I had seen that name on RAM pushing conspiracy theories, I would have told you about it. But no. These were just two, maybe one and a half—they would get on and talk about satanic ritual abuse, and how the FBI was covering up this abuse of children. And for a while I tried to check that out, Krekor, because of course you never know. It is not a good thing to trust government agencies. But it turned out to be craziness. The FBI keeps numbers on all the missing children. There are only a hundred or so a year who are not accounted for. The files are all open and public knowledge. And when you say that to these people, the ones who have the conspiracy theories, they say that the infants who are killed in sacrifices are not recorded anywhere because they have been born especially for this and their births have not been registered. It is a truly crazy thing, Krekor.”

  “I agree with you,” Gregor said. “But I want to understand it. There seem to be a lot of people out there who believe it.”

  Tibor shrugged. “Believe what? There is more than one version of it. There is the Islamic version of it. There is the fundamentalist Christian version of it. There is the secular version of it.”

  “Are the versions substantially different?”

  “Not so different as you’d think,” Tibor said. “And with the fundamentalist Christians and the secular conspiracists, there’s a great deal of overlap. They read each other’s material. They believe each other’s ‘evidence,’ except it isn’t really evidence. Krekor, these things—”

  “Start from the beginning,” Gregor said, giving up and snagging one of the butter cookies. Whoever made them must have used pounds of the stuff. “There’s a conspiracy to bring the United States under the aegis of a One World Government—”

  “No, no,” Tibor said. “You must start from the beginning. First, a race of aliens came to earth and mated with human women. To the fundamentalists, it was Satan and his angels who did this. They mated with human women, and produced offspring who looked human, but were really reptilian.”

  “Reptilian as in snakes?”

  “And lizards and that sort of thing,” Tibor said. “Yes. And this race was very powerful, because they were smarter and more ruthless than real human beings. They were geniuses. They had better memories, and they could create things that we could not, and they had access to the technology of their home planet, and the advanced science there.”

  “So far,” Gregor said, “there’s nothing so very odd about this. Oh, it’s odd enough to think the world is full of people who are half-human and half-reptiles, but you can find dozens of societies through the ages who have looked on more technologically advanced societies as practicing magic, because they can’t imagine actual people being capable of that kind of creativity. That’s a persistent theme in human history.”

  “Very nice,” Tibor said. “This is a persistent theme among truly insane people, except they’re not the ordinary kind of insane. Now, listen. There arose this race of half-human, half-alien or satanic whatever you want. And they intermarry only with each other. And they formed the world’s thirteen richest families. And they spread throughout Europe. First, they founded the Merovingian dynasty, which was a dynasty in Europe in the area that is now Germany and Austria. And this is where it begins to get truly insane, Krekor, because there was a Merovingian dynasty in Europe, in the seventh and eighth centuries. And they were not a race of superbeings. They were idiots. Complete and utter idiots. I am not joking here, Krekor. There are factory chickens less stupid than the Merovingians were, especially at the end. They died out in the ninth century. But not according to this theory, of course, where they only pretended to die out. Do you know that we have nearly complete records of monarchical succession throughout that period of the Middle Ages, right down to our own day in some places. But when you tell these people that they tell you that these are only the fake records, the real records are hidden from sight or have been destroyed so that the conspiracy is not derailed by an outraged populace. How do they know this? They know it because once a mayor of a town in France had the basement of his town hall dug up and in that basement people say he found papers that people say were the real succession records of the Merovingian dynasty.”

  “What ‘people say’?”

  “People,” Tibor said. “That’s it. Not any people in particular. And there are no records of these people or of what exactly they were supposed to have said. But if you try to explain that this means you should not believe them, they tell you that it would be close-minded not to say that it’s at least possible that these were the real records of the Merovingian dynasty. Can you see this rule applied to logic everywhere? Your mother’s uncle’s cousin’s aunt heard that ‘people say’ the Liberty Bell is made out of Roquefort cheese, so you should ignore all the reports of all the people who have actually seen the Liberty Bell and think that it might just be made of Roquefort cheese. I could think better than this when I was in primary school, Krekor.”

  “Stuffed animals could. How do we get from the Merovingian dynasty to now?”

  “Ah, well. The years went on and all these people wanted was control of the earth, but the technology had not reached a stage where that was possible. The reptilians were the ruling families of Europe, and they were in control of their territories, more or less. They founded all kinds of institutions to recruit people to their cause and to keep their power in place. They founded the Catholic
Church and put the pope and the cardinals in the Vatican and sent bishops everywhere to keep the people under control. They founded the Freemasons, where they recruited men to their causes and swore them to blood oaths to advance the reptilian hegemony. Then, in the eighteenth century, there came the great danger to their rule: the English colonies in America, which were threatening to establish a society based on the freedom of the individual human person. The reptilians went into action. They put their own people, high-level Freemasons, into positions of power in the new rebellion. And in 1776 they formed a special section of Freemasonry called the Illumi-nati, who were the most powerful of all the Masons and who were always real reptilians, not just recruits. And they got together and made their plans to bring the whole world under a single world government, controlled by them. In this, America was supposed to be key. America is supposed to be a Masonic country. There are supposed to be Masonic symbols on our money. And all of America’s presidents are supposed to have been Freemasons, including George Washington.”

  “Were they?”

  “George Washington was, Krekor, yes, but that is not all that surprising. The Freemasons were a group of men who ascribed to Deism, which was a religious idea that said that God existed, but all He did was to make the universe, establish the laws of nature, and then completely ignore His creation ever afterwards. It was really atheism for people who did not know enough about science to find atheism plausible—they knew nothing about the big bang, you know, or about evolution. In most places, it was dangerous to be a Deist. It was considered heresy, and you could be fined or imprisoned for it, or ostracized by your neighbors. So George Washington went every week to an Episcopal church and he was a Mason in his private life, because that was prudent. If he had been outspoken in his Deism, he would have had a lot of trouble. The same was true of John Adams and James Madison and John Quincy Adams. If you think the United States was founded as a Christian country, you should read what some of these people had to say about Christianity, in private, in their letters, where they did not expect to be overheard. Of course, Thomas Jefferson was outspoken in his Deism, and he still was elected president, but they called him a lot of names.”