It was a question of making lists, and making sure everything was in its proper place in line, and not getting blinded to the obvious by the obscure but interesting. Gregor Demarkian didn’t think he would have expressed it like that to anybody, but that was how he felt. The first thing he did when he woke up on the morning after the Philadelphia police found the body of Steve Bridge was to get on the phone with the Lower Merion police, and for once he did not feel guilty for getting anybody out of bed. The whole thing was beginning to feel more and more wrong to him, not because he expected another murder— he was fairly sure that this murderer would not kill again, unless something very unusual happened, or unless he was cornered in the wrong way, which Gregor prided himself on knowing how not to do—but because some of the elements in motion here were not under anybody’s control, and never had been, no matter what they’d looked like a week ago. He did not examine the fact that he got a great deal of satisfaction out of waking the director out of a sound sleep to get information that he could have gotten by asking Walker Canfield. He never had examined his feelings for directors of the Federal Bureau of Investigation generally. It would have been embarrassing to admit that he had never entirely recovered from his deep, abiding, and well-founded hatred of J. Edgar Hoover. It would have been even more embarrassing to admit that he now somehow held the office of director as tainted, as if Hoover was haunting it.
“I could have faxed you this from the office if you’d waited an hour,” Frank Margiotti had complained as he reeled off the one list Gregor really cared about.
Gregor hadn’t answered him. There was no point. He wrote the list down carefully. He made notations next to two or three of the names. Then he hung up.
By ten o’clock, when Bennis came back from Donna’s house after a morning of consulting on What to Do About Tibor—as far as Gregor could tell, Tibor was doing fine, and busily involved in planning the building of a new church, which is what he ought to be doing—Gregor had sheets of paper full of lists spread out all across the kitchen table. His coffee was in a mug on one of the kitchen counters, because he didn’t want to spill any. He’d put together a plate of toast and forgotten about it. He heard her come in and grunted in her direction. A second later, it occurred to him that he was behaving as if they were married.
“So,” she said, “what exactly is this?”
He took the paper out of her hand. “This is a list of all the people on the grounds at the time the gates were closed just after the shooting.”
“Not at the time of the shooting?”
“No, there’s no way to know that. If the secret service had already arrived in force, we’d be in better shape, but as it is we have to rely on Tony Ross’s security, which was goodish but not really what I’d call professional. Also, it wasn’t blanket, and wouldn’t be until the federal officers got there. That means that the shooting happened and there was a window of about three minutes when all kinds of things could have happened.”
“Three minutes isn’t very much time.”
“It is if you just want to step back across a gate you’re not very far from, especially if the guard was distracted.”
“Was he?”
“Well,” Gregor said, “according to Margiotti, he wasn’t. The guard says he wasn’t. Which is what the guard is going to say. And I haven’t talked to him myself. However, I do have something else here—the times people say they came in.”
“And that would be accurate?”
“No,” Gregor said drily, “that would indicate that there was, at the time of the shooting, a fairly heavy load of traffic coming through that gate. I thought rich people were supposed to be fashionably late.”
“Really rich people are never late,” Bennis said. “Punctuality is the courtesy of kings.” She picked up the list. “All these people were there? Why didn’t I see them?”
“They weren’t there, as in at the party,” Gregor said. “They’d either just come in at the gate or were on their way down the drive. That’s my point. If you were really going to control who came in and who came out of that place on the night in question, you didn’t need a guard on the gate. You needed six, and you needed a couple of backup people to police the perimeter.”
“Oh, Gregor, for God’s sake. They’ve got one of those fancy Victorian gates out there, wrought iron with the arrow spikes on the top for decoration. There’s no way to climb them except maybe to throw a mountain-climbing rig over the top horizontal bars and pull yourself up, but if you tried it you’d probably pull the gate over. It wasn’t meant—”
“To protect against serious danger, I know,” Gregor said. “You still would have needed some people policing the perimeter, because you have no idea the kinds of things people can think up to get around security.”
“Well, did anybody think of anything this time?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea. You forget, the problem isn’t just with the murderer. Lots of other people might have had reason not to want to be at that place in the middle of a police investigation, or what was going to become a police investigation. Even perfectly innocent people are often very anxious to stay out of the way of the police or to make sure their names aren’t connected with a scandal or a crime, even as innocent bystanders.”
“Does it matter that somebody might have got in or out of the gates?”
“It depends on how the prosecutor presents the case in court,” Gregor said. “A rich man with a rich man’s lawyer might be able to argue that the place was a sieve and for all we know the real murderer could have been climbing over the gate and on his way to Canada while the Lower Merion police were annoying his client. Which, of course, was the reason for all this incredible nonsense. I should have realized that the times didn’t match up.”
“What times?”
“Let me ask you something,” Gregor said. “Look at this list. Is there anybody on it you don’t know?”
Gregor sat back as Bennis took the paper back again, and frowned.
“Well,” she said. “It all depends on what you mean by ‘know.’ I mean, there’s you and me. Obviously, I know us. And there’s Charlotte and Tony. And I know them. Knew them. Ryall Wyndham. I know him slightly. Margaret and Hamilton Cadwallader. Lee and George Foldenveldt. Alison and William Pomfret. Virginia Mace Whitlock. David Alden. Martin Cameron. Where were all these people? I don’t remember any of them at the time Tony died, and as for later—”
“As for later, there were a lot of people milling around and you weren’t paying too much attention,” Gregor said. “Most of the people on that list had just come through the gates and were headed down the drive to the party. Do you know them?”
“Slightly,” Bennis said. “You know what I mean. I’ve been to parties where they’ve been to parties. I ran across most of them while I was growing up. God, the Main Line doesn’t change much, does it? I never did understand how all those people could stand it to see nobody else but each other. I mean, you’d think you’d get bored seeing the same faces day after day without a break for fifty years.”
“Of course, there’s one person who isn’t here,” Gregor said. “But I’m willing to bet she was inside the gates when the shots were fired and just managed to get out again in the ensuing confusion.”
“Who?”
“Anne Ross Wyler.”
“Annie? Oh, Gregor. You can’t really think Annie shot her own brother. I mean, for goodness sake, it’s not like she needed his money, at least not unless she’s been incredibly stupid over the last thirty years, and I don’t believe it when it comes to Annie.”
“No,” Gregor said. “I don’t think she killed her brother. I think she thinks she knows who did.”
“Who does she think it was?”
“Lucinda Watkins.” Bennis was obviously drawing a blank. Gregor shook his head. “You never pay attention when I talk to you,” he said. “Lucinda Watkins is—”
“The social worker at Adelphos House,” Bennis said suddenly. “I remember her. She’s a very strange woman. I mean, to look at her, you’d think she was—” Bennis flushed.
“Trailer trash,” Gregor said firmly. “I know. I think she was, once. That that’s what her family was. And I agree with you. In some ways, she’s a very strange woman. My guess is that, philosophically, she isn’t much different from Kathi Mittendorf. But she didn’t kill Tony Ross.”
“But Annie thinks she did? Why?”
“Because at the time her brother was killed, Anne Ross Wyler was following Ryall Wyndham into that party. She says she only went as far as the gate and stopped, but I’m about ninety-nine percent certain that wasn’t true. You see that name on the list—Virginia Mace Whitlock?”
“What about it? She’s a real pain in the ass, but I don’t think she’s sinister. I mean, she’s just trying to be a legend in her own time, if you know what I mean. Buys her clothes at Price Heaven. Makes a fetish of being cheap. There are always people on the Main Line like Virginia, they’re just—”
“The reason why there’s a star next to her name,” Gregor said, “is that at the time of that party, Virginia Mace Whitlock was in the hospital in Boston having a hip replacement.”
“Oh,” Bennis said.
“My guess is that Anne Ross Wyler simply gave the wrong name at the gate. Like I said, the security was very uneven, and there were a lot of people arriving, and I’d guess that the single guard on wasn’t being all that careful. It’s easy to look back now and talk about how important it was for Tony Ross to have real security in place, but you know what life is like. None of us think we need real security in place. Most people get annoyed with security in no time at all, unless they’re very fearful people. Would you say Tony Ross was a fearful person?”
“Of course not,” Bennis said.
“What about Charlotte Deacon Ross?”
Bennis snorted. “She was one of those women who would have offed the burglar in a split second if there had ever been one stupid enough to enter her house. And she probably had the arms in that place to do it.”
“So,” Gregor said, “trust me, neither one of them would be likely to put up with anything like real security for long, because real security is a pain in the ass. And in fact they didn’t, and we know they didn’t. Margiotti and Tackner commented at the time on the fact that there was less of that sort of thing than they’d expected there to be, although I don’t see why. I can’t imagine that most of those houses in Bryn Mawr are tricked out with a full array of security devices. Three quarters of an hour later, of course, it would have been different, because the first lady would have arrived and the feds would have been there in force.”
“But you still haven’t said,” Bennis said. “Why does Annie think Lucinda Watkins killed her brother?”
“Because at the time of the shooting, the murderer was wearing Lucinda Watkins’s clothes, or something very much like them.”
“What?”
“And standing in a tree,” Gregor said. “I didn’t realize what was going on until I actually saw Lucinda Watkins. And heard her. I’d expect Annie Ross has spent a long time listening to Lucinda’s tirades about the evils of the upper class, or however it is she puts it when they’re alone and she can really let loose. With me, she was a little strained.”
“I can bet. Where did the murderer get Lucinda Watkins’s clothes?”
“From Lucinda Watkins’s closet.”
“So who’s the murderer? Annie Ross?”
“Michael Harridan,” Gregor said.
Bennis sat down. “Listen,” she said. “You’ve spent the last week telling me that Michael Harridan doesn’t exist—”
“Not exactly.”
“And that the killing of Tony Ross had nothing at all to do with America on Alert and domestic terrorism and conspiracy nuts—”
“Not exactly,” Gregor said. “It’s like that thing you said about ‘knowing’ the people at the party. What does ‘know’ mean? Well, what does ‘have to do with’ mean?”
“I’m beginning to think you need medication.”
“What I need is my coat,” Gregor said. “Jackman is due to pick me up in five minutes.”
Even with Bennis there to keep him company, Gregor couldn’t sit still in his apartment to wait for John Jackman. It was odd how that worked. He’d been in situations where time really mattered: where there were hostages; where the murderer was waiting to strike again; where evidence would be destroyed if it wasn’t secured quickly. As far as he knew, there was now no urgency. He was a little concerned about Kathi Mittendorf and the other strongly committed members of America on Alert, but not very, because as far as he could tell, they never did anything without Michael Harridan’s having commanded it first. He didn’t think Michael Harridan was in the mood to command any more murders, or church bombings, or violence. In fact, he was willing to bet that Michael Harridan did not usually think of himself as a violent man. It always amazed him how many men did think of themselves as violent, though— as if violence were the hallmark of virility, or a kind of merit badge. The Michael Harridans of this world tended to sign on to Asimov’s famous dictum. Violence is the last resort of the incompetent. It was true too. The people who blew up churches, the people who gunned down other human beings, the people who flew commercial airliners into the sides of skyscrapers on sunny late-summer mornings, were marked first and foremost by their inability to cope with the day-to-day necessity of practicing decency in ordinary life. Michael Harridan wouldn’t see himself in that, either, but it was as true of him as it had ever been of Charles Manson. People who were able to earn money and respect and position did not need to kill for it.
Gregor went downstairs and onto the street in a frenzy of sheer restlessness. He walked up to the church one more time, but the scene had ceased to have the power to depress him. Maybe it was because he had seen Tibor this morning and it had become obvious that the scene had ceased to have the power to depress Tibor too, and all along it was what was happening to Tibor that had most concerned him. He stood for a while and looked at the rubble and then through the rubble to the icons and the pews and the ceiling that really was going to come down in a day or two. Then he walked up the street a short ways and bought a copy of the morning paper at Ohanian’s Middle Eastern Foods. If Mary Ohanian had been manning the cash register, he would have stopped to talk. Mary, however, was away from home at her freshman year at Harvard, and the cash register was being manned by her younger brother Jared, who gave new depths to the word surly. Gregor could not remember if he had been that morose and sullen at the age of fifteen. Psychologists and women’s magazines were always harping on the idea that sullenness was natural to teenaged boys, but Gregor had the idea that if he’d behaved in public the way Jared was now behaving, his father would have beaten him to a bloody pulp and his mother would have followed that with a month of guilt trips, resulting in a teenaged Gregor with all the hearty cheeriness of Mickey Mouse greeting visitors to Disney World. He took the paper and looked without much interest at the front page. There was a story on the finding of the body of Steve Bridge, but it had been beaten out from the top spot by the story on the Price Heaven collapse, which seemed to be total and threatening to put a thousand people out of work in the Philadelphia greater metropolitan area alone.
He walked back up the street, past the Ararat, past the church, to his own front steps. The Ararat was mostly deserted. It was too late for breakfast and too early for lunch. The church was still what it had been when he’d looked at it a few moments before. He thought about buying one of those posters of the Twin Towers lit up at night and having it framed, the way Bennis had had one framed for Tibor. He was in the oddest mood, and not one he trusted. He felt as if he had arrived at the unified field theory of all existence. He knew not only the meaning of life, but the combination code to unlock its intelligibility.
It’s a good thing I don’t drive, he thought, letting himself recognize that the mood he was in was very much like being on a drunk. It had been years since he’d been on a drunk, or even been a little bit tipsy. Drinking was the kind of thing you did in the army and then were a little ashamed of afterward, mostly because it was hard not to recognize what an idiot you’d been while indulging. He wondered if things would be different if young men were required to go into the army as a matter of course, the way the men of his own generation had been. He wasn’t really in favor of a peacetime draft, or of any draft. He wasn’t sure that a draft did much of anything for the country except give the worst of its leaders the means to wage war when no war was necessary. Still, he wondered what would have become of Michael Harridan if he’d had to spend two years practicing military discipline, in an environment where, in the best cases, there were neither distinctions nor excuses. Maybe the answer was that Michael Harridan would have become exactly what he did become. Tim McVeigh had been in the military. It hadn’t recruited him to the defense of civilization.
John Jackman’s car pulled onto Cavanaugh Street—not the official limousine this time, but the black Cadillac two-door he kept for personal use. It was a tribute to Jackman’s finely tuned political sense that it was a Cadillac and not a Mercedes. Gregor grabbed the passenger-side door as soon as the car began to ease up along the curb. He had the door open and was climbing inside before Jackman had actually stopped.
“What’s the matter?” John said. “We can’t go up to your place and talk in peace?”
“I’m too antsy for my place.”
“How about the Ararat?”
“For Christ’s sake,” Gregor said.
John pulled the keys out of the ignition and dropped them in his pocket. “I never understand you when you get like this,” he said. “Why not just tell us who it is and get it over with? Let our guys pick him up, or let Lower Merion pick him up—”
“I don’t have the faintest idea where he is this morning,” Gregor said. “But what I said to you on the phone holds. I’m ninety-nine percent certain. I want to clear up the other one percent. Did you bring what I asked you to?”
“A picture of Kathi Mittendorf, a picture of Susan what’s-her-name, and four more pictures to create a diversion, yes. You could have waited for this, you know. I told you yesterday that I would get the boys on it and I had gotten them on it, they were just—”
“Doing business as usual,” Gregor said. “Yes. I know. I’m not criticizing. I’m just in a hurry. What about the rest of it?”
Jackman reached inside his coat and took his notebook out of his pocket. “One, yes, Ryall Wyndham owns stock in Price Heaven. It’s registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission and he votes in stockholder elections. Oh, and he’s taking a bath. A big one. He bought at a hundred and two. The stock is now trading at seventeen. There’s no indication he got out in time on any of it.”
“Excellent,” Gregor said. “What about Anne Ross Wyler?”
“Lower Merion did that one. Sent that guy, Frank—”
“Margiotti.”
“Yeah, him. Sent him out there in the middle of the night last night. Not to Lower Merion, he was already there, but out to the Ross estate. Did not go over too well with the eldest daughter, Marianne. Anyway, Margiotti found the guard and showed him the picture. He ID’ed it. Sort of. It was dark. He was busy—way busier than he should have been. Like that. But we got a tentative positive that it was Mrs. Wyler in at least one of the cars. He doesn’t specifically recall which one. He doesn’t really remember what the woman calling herself Virginia Mace Whitlock looked like.”
“In other words, that one’s a wash,” Gregor said. “Of course he can identify Anne Wyler. She was Tony Ross’s sister. She was probably on the premises a number of times. All right. I don’t think that will matter too much. I wasn’t really convinced he’d have noticed her anyway. She must have done at least a little to disguise herself, since there was always the chance he’d recognize her then. I just hate not having the loose ends tidied up. What about the clothes?”
“That one we’re going to need a search warrant for,” Jackman said. “According to Margiotti, the eldest daughter is a cross between Medea and a nuclear warhead. Anyway, she isn’t having any. No police in the house. Nothing. You’ve got to wonder what these people are thinking sometimes. Her parents are dead, killed within a week of each other, and she won’t cooperate with the police? It’s a good thing she was well out of town at the time of that first murder, because if I were still on the force in the ordinary way, I’d be ready to suspect the hell out of her right now.”
“Maybe we can make this part a little easier for everybody,” Gregor said. “I don’t think it’s necessary to send detectives in to do the searching. Ask Ms. Ross to ask her laundress if she’s found anything that doesn’t belong to the house in the wash. My guess is that we’re looking for a black skirt, long, jersey-knit, that kind of thing, something cheap and in a very large size. Also maybe a black cardigan, or some other kind of button-up top, also in a large size, also cheap.”
“So what did Michael Harridan do?” Jackman asked. “Stuff the clothes with pillows so that he looked like Lucinda Watkins?”
“No, of course not. That would have been unwieldy as hell and it would have taken far too much time. He wasn’t trying to look like Lucinda Watkins. He was just concerned to wear something dark, so that he couldn’t be spotted, and large, so that he’d be well-covered, and belonging to somebody else, so that it couldn’t be traced back to him. It was just an accident that Annie saw the clothes and thought she’d seen Lucinda as well. If the two of them had been physically closer or the light had been better, Annie would never have made the mistake. My guess is that there’s a little nugget of doubt in the back of her mind even now.”
“There’s a little nugget in the back of my mind,” Jackman said. “It’s not just that you’re crazy. It’s that every time I have to work with you, everybody is crazy. I hope to hell that this guy has a motive that won’t sound idiotic to a jury.”
“He’s got the best motive in the world,” Gregor said. “Don’t worry about it. And there’s always the chance that somebody on Cavanaugh Street will recognize him. He was here, after all. I realized when I was talking to Kathi Mittendorf that he must have planted the bomb in Holy Trinity Church all by himself.”
“Why? I thought you said she was a complete true believer conspiracy nut.”
“She is. But even complete true believer conspiracy nuts have their codes of ethics, and in this case she’s got an interior image of herself, and of America on Alert, that tells her quite firmly that they are not the kind of people who bomb churches. I wonder how long it took him to discover what somebody who’d run into these people before would have known all along. They may be irrational, but they’re not illogical. They may be some of the most logical people on earth.”
“Right,” Jackman said. “Yes. You’ve said this before. Lots of times. Over the years. I’ve always thought it was proof positive you were nuts.”
“I’m not nuts. I’m not nearly logical enough to be nuts. Get those pictures and let’s go see Andrechev.”
Gregor popped his door open and climbed out of the car. He hated bucket seats. Jackman got out on the driver’s side and carefully locked up. Jackman was always careful about cars. The only reason he didn’t park them across two spaces was because he knew how angry it got people and how prone angry people were to scraping the sharp edges of their car keys across the paint of offending cars. Jackman put his notebook back in the inside pocket of his coat. He got the pictures out and held them in his hand.
“Okay,” he said. “Here they are. If he doesn’t identify any of them, we’re screwed.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Gregor said.
He was right too. They went down to the far end of the next block where Krystof Andrechev had his newsstand and, less than three minutes later, came out again, with a positive identification. Andrechev made the identification so quickly, he didn’t even have time for his usual struggle with the language. Jackman laid the pictures down across the counter, one right after the other. As soon as Kathi Mittendorf’s picture went down, Andrechev picked it up.
“That one,” he said.
To Gregor, all the pictures looked more or less alike, except the one of Susan, which was there only in case he was wrong about which of the two women Harridan used to throw his smoke screens. Jackman put the rest of the pictures down on the counter and insisted on Krystof looking at them all. Krystof looked, but he didn’t change his mind. He pointed again and again at Kathi Mittendorf, as if he’d memorized her face.
“It is not a thing you forget,” he said, “when a woman comes and puts a gun down in front of you and is not for robbing you.”
Jackman picked the pictures up again. Gregor thanked Krystof Andrechev. Jackman and Gregor went outside.
“Now what?” Jackman asked. “You want to go out to see Kathi Mittendorf again?”
“Yes,” Gregor told him. “Absolutely. But I want to make one more stop along the way.”
“As long as it isn’t a stop at the zoo,” Jackman said. “If it is, I’m going to be very tempted to have you locked up.”
Gregor said nothing to that, and got back into Jackman’s car. It felt good to be doing something, anything, that was not brooding on the evils of human nature.
Gregor Demarkian had no sense of direction, and he never drove, so explaining to John Jackman how to find Henry Barden’s town house could have been a challenge. It wasn’t because Jackman had been a beat cop in Philadelphia before he’d been a detective there—and in other places—and before he’d risen to the exalted heights of commissioner of police. It also wasn’t difficult to find because it was not an obscure address.
“Australian Aborigines have heard of Rittenhouse Square,” Jackman said, as he pulled the car into an open non-spot only feet from Henry Barden’s front door. Gregor guessed they were more in the hydrant’s territory than outside of it. “Who is this guy, anyway?”
“Somebody I used to know at the Bureau. Do you realize you’re illegally parked?”
“I’m on official police business.” Jackman punched the side of his fist against the glove compartment to open it and got out his police parking card. He hung it over the back of his rearview mirror. “Knew in the Bureau, how? He was a special agent or somebody you picked up for bank fraud?”
“He was an analyst with a specialty in subversive groups.”
“Oh, marvelous. Subversive groups. You know how I feel about the FBI and their subversive groups. They thought Martin Luther King was the head of a subversive group.”
“Yes, I know, I agree with you. Henry Barden would agree with you. That’s why he ended up quitting. However, he does know a lot about how to analyze and investigate nut groups, real ones. And I see him on and off since we’ve both been retired. And he’s here and is willing to help and probably spent last night drowned in America on Alert paper, so would you like to talk to him or do you want to wait in the car while I do?”
Jackman got out. Gregor got out too, and as he did he saw the door of the small town house open and Henry Barden, short and round and cheery-faced, step out.
“How does a retired FBI agent afford a place like this in Rittenhouse Square?” Jackman asked.
“Family money,” Gregor said. Then he sprinted a little to get to Henry in the doorway.
“Gregor,” Henry said. “Good to see you. This must be your Mr. Jackman. I’d be dead under the paper, except that Cameron agreed to help me out. You’ve met Cameron, haven’t you, Gregor? He came to pick me up that time we went to lunch near Independence Hall.”
“I’ve met Cameron,” Gregor said.
A young man appeared behind Henry Barden in the doorway, tall and elegant and aristocratic in the extreme, like one of those pictures of the moles in MI-5 at the end of the Kim Philby affair. Henry Barden smiled. “Mr. Jackman, this is Cameron Reed, my partner. Mr. Jackman is commissioner of police for the city of Philadelphia.”
“How do you do,” Cameron said. He did not have a British accent.
“Come in, both of you,” Henry Barden said. “This really has been very interesting, Gregor. I’ve got to thank you for sending it my way. I don’t know if Gregor told you, Mr. Jackman, but since my retirement, I’ve made something of a hobby of collecting the really far-out conspiracy groups. I probably know more about most of them than the federal government does. It makes me nervous sometimes. Some of them are very paranoid.”
“Some of them are very violent,” Cameron said.
“Yes, yes. I know. Some of them are violent. But most of them aren’t. Most of them are just confused, I guess. And fearful. And addicted to magical thinking. Why do you think that is, that so many people are addicted to magical thinking?”
“Because so many people find life hard,” Cameron said, “and can’t see any way out of their difficulties.”
“He’s a novelist,” Henry said. “A published one.”
“That’s just to indicate that I’m not some pathetic case he picked up and decided to call his protégé,” Cameron said.
They had been proceeding into the town house all this time, down a long narrow hall next to a steep flight of steps, to the kitchen at the back. Gregor stepped into the kitchen and saw that the large table at its center was full of papers. Some of them were copies of The Harridan Report. Gregor was impressed that Henry had been able to get so many on such short notice. Some of them were printed pages of what looked like something Henry had done himself on the computer.
“Sit down, sit down,” Henry said. “I’ll make coffee. Let me make a little room here. You asked me when it started, and what it’s been doing, and I think I can give you a timetable.”
“Good,” Gregor said. He found a chair and sat down. There was no debris on the chairs. Jackman found a chair and sat down too.
Henry did something to the large coffeemaker. Then he came to the table and sat down himself. “Now,” he said. “The first you see of Michael Harridan was two and a half years ago, almost exactly. That’s when the Web site went up, and two weeks later, I found the first notice I could find of The Harridan Report going out in the mail. In case you want to know, there’s no mention of Harridan before that in any of the other groups. Which is very unusual. In fact, it’s nearly unheard of. Most of these guys belong to one or the other of the established groups before they set out on their own. It’s a classic case of progressive delusion, for some of them—”
“Only some?” Jackman said. “What about the rest?”
Henry Barden smiled faintly. “For a small segment of the population, it’s simple fraud. There’s a fair amount of money to be made at this stuff. Oh, you won’t get as rich as Bill Gates, or rich at all in any serious sense, but you can do fairly well in an upper-middle-class sort of way if you’re good at spinning the theories and good at organization and willing to work hard. I do want to emphasize, though, that the out-and-out frauds are few and far between. For one thing, it’s very difficult to commit to the time and energy you need to run an organization like this if you don’t really believe in what you’re doing. For another thing, it’s fairly difficult for most people to spin the theories in a convincing way if they don’t believe them. There are, of course, other people.”
“What about Michael Harridan?” Gregor asked. “Would you say he’s one of the other people?”
“Oh, definitely,” Henry Barden said. Something was happening with the coffee. Cameron went to get it. “And it’s not only that he hadn’t had any presence in any of the other organizations before starting his own. For one thing, his stuff is much too precisely targeted—”
“Excuse me,” Jackman said. “I’ve seen that stuff. It isn’t targeted.”
“I mean relative to the stuff these organizations put out. You see, the usual procedure is to produce a comprehensive overview of your version of the meaning of world events. Go look at the sites sometime. Quite a few of them start their explanations with the dawn of civilization. Most of them go back at least until nineteenth-century Bavaria, with the founding of the Illumi-nati. Did you know that? There really was an Illuminati, a group of Bavarian business and professional men who founded an offshoot of the Freemasons that lasted maybe two-dozen years. They were political radicals in the context of their time. They disappeared, but their name has proved nearly irresistible to the anti-Masonic conspiracists, and especially to the Catholic Church, which has been using them in anti-Mason propaganda for more than a century now. Although, of course, the anti-Masonic propaganda these days is much more sophisticated. You’d be surprised at how unsophisticated some of the stuff is from the late nineteenth century. Conspiracy nuts in high places. And, of course, in this country, conspiracy theories in response to rising numbers of Catholic immigrants and rising hysteria among anti-Catholic natives.”
“But Michael Harridan doesn’t go back that far,” Gregor said.
“No.” Henry Barden returned to the subject. Cameron began passing out cups of coffee. “He makes no attempt to produce a comprehensive explanation at all. He publishes The Harridan Report. He non-gives a few lectures—”
“What?” Jackman said.
“—and he maintains the Web site, that’s it. He hasn’t written a single book. He doesn’t have a single publication for sale. Most of these guys have several of each. Most of them sell all kinds of things. Audiotapes, videotapes, pamphlets, books, you name it. It’s like I told you. These are businesses. Their owners may be intellectually and emotionally committed, but at the end of the day they get paid for what they do and they have to get paid to keep on doing it. Michael Harridan doesn’t seem to have to get paid for what he does and he isn’t even trying to.”
“What did you mean about giving non-lectures or whatever it was you said?” Jackman asked.
“Well,” Henry said. “It’s very interesting. Not only are these businesses. They’re part of a circuit, a subculture with its own rules and members and events. Most of these guys give lectures to the same people in the same places. There are groups all over the country that sponsor speakers. Michael Harridan isn’t on the circuit, although I’d bet he’s been asked.”
“Why?” Gregor said.
“Because there’s a little notice up on his Web site explaining why he can’t accept speaking engagements in ‘outside’ venues,” Henry said, “which means, I’m sure, venues where he isn’t in control. With any other group of people, this might have been suspicious, but we’re dealing here with people who make paranoia a profession. At any rate, he doesn’t accept those, but for a while he did do talks and speeches, sort of. I say sort of, because he never actually appeared at any of them. People would come in, sit down, and listen to an au-diotape. That lasted for”—Henry checked his papers—“seven months. At the end of that seven-month period, what we find is that the talks are being set up by one Kathi Mittendorf, and all requests for lectures are being routed through her.”
“So, do you mean to say that Kathi Mittendorf is Michael Harridan?” Jack-man asked.
“No,” Henry Barden said. “I think that what happened was that Michael Harridan managed to recruit Kathi Mittendorf, to get her to do things for him so that he didn’t have to be physically present himself. Probably, when he first started, he would be in the audience himself when he non-gave his lectures. He’d set up and sit back and pretend to be one of the audience. Or maybe he’d stand up and say he was somebody else. But I’m also guessing that this wasn’t very safe for him. My best guess here is that he had reason to be concerned that somebody could recognize him, if not at the time he started then later. He didn’t want somebody seeing him as himself in the newspapers or on television and leaping up to say, ‘I know that man! That’s Michael Harridan!’ ”
“So he recruited Kathi Mittendorf and she did his scut work for him,” Gregor said. “Then what?”
“Well, then he put out his newsletter,” Henry said. “And that’s a very interesting artifact too. Most of these things take on everybody and everything. The World Bank. The United Nations. George W. Bush. And there’s some mention of that stuff in The Harridan Report, but not enough of it. Everything I could find, everything on the Web site, everything you gave me, ninety percent of it was targeted at Anthony Ross and his bank. Specifically, his bank. Not Morgan. Not Citigroup. Not Chase. Not banks in general.”
“What was the other ten percent targeted at?” Gregor asked.
Henry shrugged. “Everything and nothing. The usual mix, except that you were quite right. For at least a month before the murders, there are small but persistent mentions linking the Russian Orthodox Church and the other Orthodox Churches in the Soviet Union to the KGB and the ‘worldwide conspiracy for One World Government.’ Etc. Armenia and the Armenian Church are mentioned directly several times.”
“Wonderful,” Gregor said.
“Why the Armenian Church?” Jackman said, bewildered. “What did the Armenian Church have to do with Tony Ross? What does any of this have to do with Charlotte Ross?”
“There’s just one thing,” Henry Barden said. “If you’re right in your theories, and I’m right in mine, then he’s got to get rid of Kathi Mittendorf and he’s got to do it as quickly as possible. And he can’t do it himself. Not now. Not under the circumstances. So—”
“So what?” Jackman said.
“So we have to get to Kathi Mittendorf,” Gregor said. “But I told you that already.”