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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—”
    â€œWe bugged them tonight. And we have to give speeches. We have to convince the American people—”
    â€œYou’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—”
    The receiver cracked. Kathi leaned forward and turned the volume up again. This time, the voice coming through was neither high nor nasal, although it still had that accent she thought of as “snobby.” They all had that accent. It was as if they had all been taught to speak by the same computer program, and maybe they had.
    â€œNo,” the voice said. “It’s all right. Put the rose centerpiece with the swans, just the way the plan calls for, but put them all with the pâtés, and that way we don’t have to worry about Charlotte having another fit. And don’t cry. It’s useless to cry about the way Charlotte behaves. She’s a spoiled brat.”
    â€œCharlotte,” Susan said. “That’s Charlotte Deacon Ross. She’s right there. And Michael is there too. We could have sent a nice little package in with him, and nobody would have known—”
    â€œOf course they would have known,” Kathi said. “They probably have X-ray machines, out of sight, so that the guests don’t notice. They probably have all kinds of security.”
    â€œMaybe we should just gag Charlotte and lock her in a closet,” the voice on the receiver said. “God only knows, that’s the only way we’re getting through until midnight without my killing her. Or worse.”
    Kathi turned the receiver down, again. “We’re supposed to make a transcript. We’ll make a transcript. Michael is supposed to find out what they’re going to be up to next. Maybe we’ll get lucky, and they’ll have a ritual right there in the open, and we’ll get it all on tape.”
    â€œI don’t care how reasonable you think you are,” Susan said. “You’re going to have to use them sometimes. You can’t just keep them here in your living room forever.”
    â€œMake a transcript,” Kathi said.
    Then she retreated into the front hall, where it was quiet, a claustrophobic space not even large enough to hold a little table. Michael had warned them all about people who tried to push the organization into ill-considered violence. They were almost always enemy agents, pilot fish for the shock troops whose only purpose was to destroy little groups just like this one. If Susan was a pilot fish, they would have to find a way to get rid of her—move the meeting places, change the phone numbers, hide the mailing lists. They wouldn’t hide the literature, because as far as Michael was concerned, the more people who saw the literature the better. Even some of Them might be convinced, or enlightened, or deprogrammed, by reading the truth about who and what they were.
    Still, no matter how enormously satisfied Kathi would be if it turned out that Susan was one of Them, the fact was that she was telling the simple truth. They would have to use the explosives some day. They even intended to, and there were a lot more of them than Susan realized. In this house alone, there were at least two-dozen small cluster bombs, made of dynamite and grenades bought on the military hardware black market, any one of which could destroy a store the size of an ordinary 7-Eleven in a couple