matter when it was,â Kathi said. âWhy would I have to know about Greenwich Village?â
âSome 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 couldnât hurt us.â
âIt canât hurt us here,â Kathi said. âCalm down. Are you getting anything yet?â
âJust people talking about food.â 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. Kathiâs 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 youâthe conspiracy at work.
Kathi leaned over Susanâs shoulder and turned up the volume. A high, nasal female voice came pounding out, affected and obnoxious, superior. âI donât care what the caterer told you, the ice swans do
not
go on the main buffet table. How weâre ever going to get through this, I really donât know. There isnât any
room
on the main buffet table. You have to put the ice swans with the rest of the pâtés.â
âSee?â 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 wasnât being watched. They always put on a mask for outsiders. Michael had told them that. Now there was no mask, and this woman seemedâ
Stupid, Kathi thought. She wiped the idea out of her head. The Illuminati werenât stupid. They only wanted you to think they were. Maybe this woman wasnât really in private. Maybe she was putting on a show for whoever she was talking to. Susan turned the volume back down.
âIâm recording everything,â Susan said, âjust 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?â
âOnly fifteen hundred,â Kathi said. âMichael has the guest list.â
âStill. 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, wouldnât it?â
âYouâre crazy.â
âMaybe Iâm crazy,â Susan said. âBut 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 donât we just get rid of them? We wouldnât get them all at onceââ
âWe wouldnât get the most important ones,â Kathi said. âCanât you see that? The ones who run the really big banks, the ones in Europe. They wonât all come to something like this. Only the Philadelphia ones will. And then the rest of them will be on their guard. And theyâd find us. And then what would happen?â
âMaybe weâd 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.â
âDid Timothy McVeigh tell them what was going on?â
âMichael said McVeigh doesnât count. He wasnât really one of us. If he was, he wouldnât have blown up a building with a lot of babies in it. He was a plant. Thatâs how the Illuminati work. They close off all the avenues of action. They pre-opt everybody. This would be different.â
âYou think blowing up a lot of women in evening gowns would be different?â
âIt would really be blowing them up,â Susan said,
Margaret Weis;David Baldwin