Conspiracy Theory

by Jane Haddam

  “All right,” Gregor said. “So we get the Freemasons, and a special inner group of them called the Illuminati. Then what?”

  Tibor threw his hands in the air. “Then, who knows? There are books and books of this sort out there, Krekor. These people have their own magazines. They’ve founded their own publishing houses. They have Web sites. In the end, what it comes down to is that the conspiracy is in place, and everybody is in on it. It looks like the world is being pulled every which way by opposing forces, but that is only a delusion. Everything is working to the same end, to bring the world under a single man’s rule. For the Christians, this is Satan, and we are headed for the apocalypse and the end of the world. For the secularists, this is just a dictator to give the reptilians complete power over all people. Everything we think we see is a sham. Democracy is a sham. Always, in the United States, both of the candidates running from the major parties will be chosen by the Illuminati. Nobody the Illuminati does not control will even be able to run. Everything else that happens, like plant closings, or nuclear plant accidents, is part of the same all-controlling plot. There are no coincidences, and there are no accidents. Three Mile Island was planned and carried out by the agents of the Illuminati. The September eleventh attacks were planned and carried out by the agents of the Illuminati. Alan Greenspan is an agent of the Illuminati.”

  “And nobody but this group of conspiracy theorists ever notices?”

  “They cannot notice,” Tibor said, “because they are mind-controlled. There were secret CIA experiments called MKUltra Mind Control to brainwash as many Americans as possible into thinking they were in favor of the Illuminati’s plans. Did I tell you that everybody at the UN is supposed to be an agent of the Illuminati?”

  “No,” Gregor said. “But if I’d thought about it, I could have guessed.”

  “In Illuminati families and families closely connected to them, they control the children through ritual abuse,” Tibor said. “They breed infants for sacrifice, and then take their own children and make them take part in these sacrifices and then abuse them, over and over again, until they’re unable to think for themselves. Don’t ask me how such children are supposed to grow up into adults who can rule the world, Krekor, because I don’t know. I don’t think they know either.”

  “So,” Gregor said. “Where does Holy Trinity come in? Why blow up the church?”

  “You think it was these people who blew up the church?”

  “Not exactly. It’s a little complicated. Still, the question remains. Why blow up the church? Why this particular church?”

  Tibor shrugged. “For the Christian fundamentalist conspiracists, we are devil worshipers. That’s what the notes say. To the secular ones, devil worship is just a ploy by the Illuminati, a cover for really heinous doings, like plotting to make the United States part of the International Criminal Court. Krekor, it doesn’t do to look too long at what it is these people are thinking. It’s not only that it doesn’t make sense. It’s that it’s all about fear. They fear change. They fear the future. And they are disappointed people, most of them. They feel insignificant and as if their lives are out of control. So they look for a way to be important, and this is it. It is not true that Alan Greenspan doesn’t know who they are or care about what they do. Alan Greenspan cares desperately. So does the president of the United States. So does the pope. So do all those shadowy people who run the international banks. Those people know the names of every conspiracist, because conspiracists are the one true danger to their rule. You can change the scenario a little for each of the different kinds of conspiracists. The Muslim conspiracists know that they do not really come from cultures that have failed to develop technologically and scientifically— rather, their inventions and discoveries have been stolen by the Conspiracy and ascribed to other people, to Jews, mostly. The Christian conspiracists know that they are not the last gasp of a dying religious culture. Instead, they alone hold the power of Christ up to a corrupt and satanic world, and in the end at the great battle it is the believers and not the Conspiracy who will win. It goes around and around. Some of them commit violence, and then we hear about them. Most of them just go to each other’s lectures and buy each other’s books and visit each other’s Web sites and we don’t hear about them at all. I wonder sometimes if men and women always felt so little in control of themselves and their world. Because I think really, Krekor, that we have more control over it now than we did three hundred years ago, but more people are anxious and afraid now than were then.”

  Gregor tilted his head back and looked at the ceiling. It had been washed, and recently. The women must have come in to make sure that Tibor was “comfortable.” “All right,” he said. “It’s got to be about time to go to the Ararat now, isn’t it? Let’s go get something to eat. Just tell me one thing. Do you think the people who peddle this stuff, not the rank-and-file believers but the people like Michael Harridan—do you think they believe all this, or do you think they’re conning?”

  “Some of them believe it,” Tibor said. “It’s obvious from the way they write. But go look at the Web sites, Krekor. A lot of them are conning. They make their money this way. Sometimes the rank-and-file believers, as you call them, catch them at it.”

  “Then what happens?”

  Tibor shrugged. “Some of the rank-and-file believers desert them. Others stay on and defend them. It’s like it is with mediums and people who claim to be able to speak to the dead. Sometimes, it’s so damned important to some people to believe, they’ll do whatever they have to do to go on believing. I know what this is, Krekor, I’ve seen it before. It’s what happened with the hard-core Communists. The Stalin show trials. Genocide. Decades of support for dictatorships. Decades of indulgence in repression, torture, and summary execution. The fall of the Soviet Union. To some people, it made no difference. They would not see, or they would explain it away. Maybe we all do that with what we believe. Maybe we all need not to be forced to let go of our delusions.”

  “Let’s go get something to eat,” Gregor said again. “I don’t care about my delusions. I just want to know what Michael Harridan thinks he’s up to.”

  TWO

  1

  David Alden understood that there was no way he could stay in Philadelphia nonstop and indefinitely, no matter how much he might want to in order to follow the investigation into the deaths of Tony and Charlotte Ross, or how much the police wanted him to because they feared he might suddenly abscond to Switzerland and completely remove himself from their control. The simple fact of the matter was that he wouldn’t be able to follow the police investigation even if he stayed put. He was not Gregor Demarkian. Nobody was in the least bit interested in giving him information. He learned what he knew about weapons, and bullets, and the way the police were thinking from the newspapers and the television news, just like everybody else. He didn’t know much, and he wasn’t likely to know much more, no matter what he did, until the case was solved or abandoned. As for police fears that he was planning to jump ship to Europe or South America, they were ludicrous. He had far too much work at the office. The Price Heaven mess was becoming an utter meltdown, complete with competing sets of lawyers, competing sets of accountants, and competing sets of board members at the bank, with everybody pointing fingers at everybody else and nobody making any sense. David had no idea if things would have gotten this bad if Tony had lived. He had a gut feeling that they wouldn’t have, because Tony was the kind of man who commanded both obedience and respect. Since he himself was not that kind of man, he would have to go with what he had. That amounted to relentless common sense and all the facts, laid out in thousands of document pages that he alone had read every one of. By now he knew more about the inner workings of Price Heaven than the executives of Price Heaven did. It was more than possible that he had known more than they knew all along. Just thinking about it gave him a headache. When he remembered that the regulators would be descending—why was it that whenever there was a serious bankruptcy, th
e U.S. Congress felt it necessary to hold hearings into matters they didn’t understand, couldn’t be made to understand, and didn’t want to under-stand?—it was more than his head that ached. Maybe he was lying when he said that what he really wanted was Tony Ross’s life, with Tony Ross’s job to go along with it. This was like a dress rehearsal, and it was awful. He wanted to go to bed for a week. He wanted to take all these papers and stuff them in a bonfire somewhere in the darker reaches of Central Park. He wanted not to read anything but the collected works of Elmore Leonard until it was at least July.

  Instead, he shifted slightly on the seat of the limousine that was taking him in to New York and watched the dawn come up outside, glaring and orange. Out there it was cold. When they passed people in their yards, taking garbage cans out from behind their houses or going to their garages to get their cars, the people were always well wrapped up in parkas and hats. He found himself wondering what it was like to live in a house that backed directly onto the interstate, so that you had to have a tall chain-link fence around your property to make sure your children didn’t run right out into the sixty-five-mile-an-hour traffic when they were playing in the yard after school. He had, he realized, absolutely no idea how “ordinary” people lived. Even though his family had never been really rich—or never in this century; they had been rich enough in the age of the robber barons, and before that in the Colonial and Revolutionary eras, when to be rich in America meant to be a prosperous lawyer in one of the better cities—even so, they had always been oriented toward the rich. It had no more occurred to David’s parents to send him to public school than it had occurred to them to serve toasted grubs at their cocktail parties. In one way or another, they had done what they had to do to make sure he got through good private elementary schools, a good prep school, and, of course, the Ivy League when the time came, all without student loans or any other encumbrance on his future or career. They had managed all the things that had to go along with it too. He hadn’t seen a television set until he was six. His parents owned only one, which they kept in their own bedroom for emergencies, like major assassinations. He hadn’t eaten in a fast-food restaurant, or a popular restaurant chain, until he was in prep school and out for the weekend on senior privilege with friends. Then he’d had a single Big Mac and never gone back for another. It hadn’t been all that popular a pastime in Boston and New Haven anyway, where his friends tended to be drawn to small ethnic restaurants featuring the cuisine of countries only very rich and very pampered people could go to. Sometimes, the things that he had never done in his life truly astonished him. He had never been shopping in Price Heaven or Kmart or Wal-Mart. He’d never spent any time in a mall except to look it over for the bank when they were considering loaning its owners money. He’d never had a car loan. He’d never been to a prom, or even to a school that gave a prom. He’d never been late paying a bill. He’d never had to apply for a mortgage. He’d never had a summer job. He’d never been inside a T.G.I.Friday’s, a T.J. Maxx, a Marshall’s, or a Bradlees.

  It was more than money, he thought now, feeling more and more uncomfortable as the landscape changed inexorably and they were not only out of Philadelphia, but nearly out of Pennsylvania. Tony used to harp on this point all the time, because he was extremely worried about it. Too many of the people at the bank—too many of the people at all the banks, and in Congress, and on the boards of all the institutions from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Red Cross—lived in a kind of parallel universe that rarely intersected with what most Americans would call normal life. They wore ties and blazers to school as early as first grade. They spent first Friday afternoons, then Friday evenings, then Saturday evenings at the formal “dancing classes” that taught them not how to dance but how to behave. They spent their summers in Martha’s Vineyard or Greece. They went to the opera instead of the movies and to museums instead of the mall. They played lacrosse and squash instead of football and basketball. They went to coming-out parties and expected to have to wear a dinner jacket at least four times a week between Thanksgiving and Easter every single year.

  “The reason the men who create great business empires always seem to come up from the bottom,” Tony used to say, “is because those are the people who know what most Americans want to buy. The reason the business empires fail when those men die is that they’re taken over by people like us, who know nothing of the kind. No prep-school boy could have created Wal-Mart. No prep-school boy could even have conceived it. And it works the same way in art. Steven Spielberg makes the movies he wanted to see when he was growing up in a subdivision in southern California. Stephen King writes the books he wanted to read when he was growing up poor in rural Maine. And don’t kid yourself thinking that there’s something called Great Art going on in all those books we read that sell two thousand copies and that they’ll be rescued from obscurity after their authors are dead. One or two might be, but most of them will just disappear. In the meantime, this culture, the culture of the whole world, is determined by the very people you and I have nothing to do with most of the time and probably wouldn’t like very much if we had. The only thing I can’t figure out is if this is a flaw in capitalism or a virtue. Maybe that’s the way it is to ensure that nothing like a real and stable aristocracy will ever exist again.”

  Dozens of Price Heaven papers were spread out across the seat next to him. The window between the passenger compartment and the driver’s compartment was firmly shut. Maybe Tony had been right all along, and he was constitutionally incapable of solving the Price Heaven mess, because he didn’t understand enough about what the business needed to run, or to appeal to people. Maybe he should have done what Tony had urged him to do months ago and tried to live “normally” for a month or two, rent an apartment, put himself on a budget, shop at the very places Price Heaven’s customers liked to shop. Now it was too late. He was too aware of the fact that Price Heaven was his test. If he solved it, he would go on at the bank, or at another bank. He would have the career he had been trained to have. If he did not solve it, he would be shunted off to the sidelines. They wouldn’t fire him right away. It would look bad, and give the regulators ideas about who should be investigated in the Price Heaven collapse. Still, they’d fire him eventually, and when he found himself out on the street with his pockets out, he’d also find himself without an open sesame to other banks or to brokerages or to any of those places where someone like him expected to work. He was fitted to do nothing else but what he did. His accent would disqualify him for a job in any but about two-dozen firms. His taste in clothes would make him conspicuous in any retail operation.

  He looked out the windows again and saw that they were going through country now. Great rocky outcrops rose up on either side of the road. On this part of the interstate, it was as if America were largely uninhabited. Everything was country. Everything was pristine. He didn’t know what he was worried about. It was true that the very idea of living the kind of life Tony had suggested he sample made him break out in a cold sweat. He didn’t want to eat at McDonald’s or buy the kind of clothes that could be bought at Price Heaven. He didn’t want to see movies about aliens from outer space or Hob-bits or vigilante heroes who machine-gunned the landscape to save the damsel in distress. He didn’t want an SUV with a Britney Spears CD in the CD player. He didn’t want “entertaining” to mean a big Thanksgiving dinner with a thousand relatives in attendance and all the women in the kitchen afterward, cleaning up. He didn’t want to set his table with Martha Stewart Everyday dishes and glassware bought in big cardboard boxed sets at the local warehouse store. He didn’t want … to know any of those people, who were impossible to talk to, and who seemed to care about nothing he understood.

  But then, he thought, he didn’t have to. Even if he was eased out at the bank, even if he made such an utter disaster of the Price Heaven fiasco that he would never be hired by another financial institution anywhere, he still didn’t have to. He had money in the bank, and money in investments, and a
decent severance package that wasn’t quite a golden handshake, but came close. He didn’t care what people said about the virtues of ordinary life or the deep inner nobility of the common man and woman. He liked living the way he lived.

  He got his cell phone out and punched in a number. The sound system was working, but the radio was tuned to NPR and the announcer’s voice was so low, David couldn’t make out the words. The police had discovered the dead body of an FBI agent who had gone undercover to infiltrate one of the conspiracist organizations. David wasn’t worried about it. It was the kind of thing FBI agents undercover were likely to have happen to them. He was worried about the deaths of Tony and Charlotte Ross, but that was entirely natural. Tony had been his friend. Charlotte had been, if not a friend, an acquaintance of long standing.

  Adele picked up on the other end. He must have gotten her at home. She sounded sleepy.

  “Adele?” he said. “Sorry to wake you.”

  “You didn’t wake me. I’m having coffee. Where are you?”

  “On the road back from Philadelphia.”

  “You’re spending a lot of time on the road.”

  “I’ve been going home, that’s all. And Tony and Charlotte—”

  “Yes,” Adele said. “Do they know anything about that yet? Everybody is upset. Tony was bad enough, but with Charlotte on top of it, people are getting paranoid.”