Conspiracy Theory (44 page)

“Armed standoffs are armed standoffs, Gregor, you know that. We don't kill anybody if we don't have to, but sometimes we have to.”

“It's what he wants,” Gregor said. Somewhere down there there was a point. Gregor even knew what it was. He could see it resting at the bottom, the way a cask of treasure rested at the bottom of a murky ocean pool. He just needed to bring it up. “He has to kill her,” he said, “and he can't do it on his own. Don't you see that? This isn't his territory. This isn't someplace he's comfortable with and besides, he knows people are watching him. He knows. So he's got to find a way to kill her, and he wants to get the police to do it for him.”

“That's quite a speech. When you die from loss of blood, will your ghost come back and protect me from Bennis?”

“Die from loss of blood,” Gregor said. Then he looked down at his body— the body that didn't feel like his anymore; the body that seemed to be nothing and belong to nobody—and there was blood coming out of his shoulder. He tried to think about that. There might be an artery there somewhere. He couldn't remember. He didn't think the bullet had hit it if it was there, because his suit jacket was covered with blood but it wasn't pumping out of him like a spring. He could not keep himself thinking along any particular path to any particular point. His mind would not do it.

“I don't really think you're going to die from loss of blood,” Jackman said.

In the distance, there were sirens—but not very far in the distance. They got louder and louder, and the worse they got, the worse they were for his headache.

“Listen,” he said again, trying to shout. It didn't work. His voice came out in a croak. “Don't let them kill her. She's all you've got. If she dies, you'll never be able to tie him to America on Alert, or to Steve Bridge. Got that?”

“We'll discuss it later.”

“It's the only direct evidence you've got,” Gregor insisted, and by now he felt like he was swimming through a sea of noise. “Everything else is circumstantial. Don't let them kill her.”

The sirens were right there now, right on top of them. Gregor felt the heat of the first vehicle before he saw it, which wasn't odd, since he was still lying flat on his back. He tried to sit up. Jackman pushed him down. He tried to sit up again. Nobody stopped him, because there was nobody to stop him. Jackman was off talking to somebody else. He got himself more or less upright and looked around at what was now a sea of cop cars. There were uniformed officers everywhere. There were detectives too. Maybe he only thought they were detectives. His head had reattached to his body just long enough to give him a splitting headache. He wanted to stand up. He tried, and felt somebody push him down.

“What's wrong with you?” Jackman said. “You're going to kill yourself. And she's still in there, and she still has a gun.”

“Do you have any liquor?”

“Of course I don't have any liquor. In my car? What do you take me for?”

“I need a shot of something serious,” Gregor said.

There was a sound like a gong ringing, and Jackman ducked. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “There she goes again.”

Somebody else crouched down next to them, somebody Gregor didn't know, or didn't recognize, at least at the moment. “How many are there?” the somebody else said.

“I don't know,” Jackman said. “I've only seen one. She may be alone.”

“Susan,” Gregor said.

“What?” Jackman said.

“Susan,” Gregor said again.

“Oh, yeah,” Jackman said. “There's two of them involved in the organization. The one we think is shooting is called Kathi Mittendorf. There's another one, though, named Susan something. You'll have to get the details later.”

“No men?” the somebody said.

“No,” Gregor said. “Don't kill her.”

“What is this guy, her husband?”

“No,” Jackman said. “She's a witness in a murder case. In three murder cases. It would be a good idea if we didn't kill her.”

“Yeah, well,” the somebody said.

There was another ping, and another, and another. Gregor felt the ground shake—everybody was hitting the dirt, getting down behind the cars.

“Jesus Christ,” somebody said. “That's a machine gun.”

“Grenades,” Gregor said.

“What?” Jackman said.

“Grenades,” Gregor said again.

Then, suddenly, the people right next to him were wearing white and not talking much. Somebody was tearing the cloth away from his wound. It was one of his best suits and they were ripping it to shreds … but maybe it didn't matter anyway, because maybe the blood would never come out. They were ripping into his shirt. Somebody put a hard metal edge next to his skin and he screamed.

“For God's sake,” Jackman said. “Give him something for the goddamned pain before you go digging into him.”

“Don't let them
kill
her,” Gregor said.

“Listen,” Jackman said. “If she starts lobbing grenades, we're going to kill her. This is a residential neighborhood. What's wrong with you?”

“You can see what's wrong with him,” one of the ambulance men said. “He's got a bullet in his shoulder.”

“Nah,” the other ambulance man said. “It went right through. I'd bet anything.”

“Jesus Christ,” Jackman said.

“Listen,” Gregor said.

There was another burst of gunfire, steady and staccato. How much ammunition could she have in there? They wouldn't be able to take him out to the ambulance as long as she was shooting. They wouldn't—

They weren't paying attention to him anymore. Gregor could tell. A new set of vehicles was pulling in. The whole scene was beginning to seem like something out of a Bruce Willis movie, and Gregor hated Bruce Willis movies. Still, it gave him his chance.

He held on to the door handle of Jackman's car and began to pull himself very carefully to his feet, inch by inch, molecule by molecule. He was in such pain he thought he was going to pass out, and the blood was coming out of the wound much faster now than it had been. He kept inching his way up, and then he was standing.

He made it upright just in time to see that Kathi Mittendorf had dropped the machine gun and put her hands on a body instead, and the body was coming through the door and down the steps at them.

It was Anne Ross Wyler, and she looked dead.

Later, when the shooting finally stopped, Gregor Demarkian would wonder exactly what had happened to him, and why. The sirens, the police strobes, the shouting—surely he remembered himself standing upright as Kathi Mittendorf staggered out the front door of her house, a gun in one hand and Annie Ross in the other, and bullets sprayed in an arc over her head, breaking windows, chipping brick. When you were dying, everything was supposed to happen in slow motion. Since everything had speeded up, Gregor concluded he was not dying, although he didn't really conclude anything, because that assumed reasoned analysis. This was more like stream of consciousness, or stream of
un
consciousness. Once he was standing up, he didn't seem to be able to sit down. Everything hurt. He was dizzy. His eyes were watering. Kathi Mittendorf took Annie Ross's body and dumped it on the ground. Then she backed into her house again and slammed the door shut. Gregor felt himself swaying in the wind. The wind was strong and cold and everything was getting darker. The door opened and Kathi Mittendorf came out again. She was carrying another body, and for a moment, all the police shooting stopped dead while everybody tried to get a look to determine if this body might still be alive. Gregor knew at once that it wasn't. She wasn't. It was the body of a woman. It had a hole the size of a McIntosh apple in its forehead.

“Get
down
,” John Jackman screamed into his ear, grabbing him by the lapel of his coat and pulling him.

Gregor had no idea why the pulling didn't work. He was upright, and he seemed destined to remain upright. He could see the ambulance men, all three sets of them, crouched down behind their vehicles. They didn't dare move from where they were. There were bullets everywhere. The sound of shooting was so constant, it had begun to feel like background noise. He wondered what Kathi Mittendorf was doing. She ought to be retreating into the house again. She wasn't. She ought to be surrendering. She wasn't. She had a gun in her hands, but she had stopped shooting it. Suddenly, everybody stopped shooting. The silence was so abrupt, it was like death. Kathi Mittendorf stayed were she was. The gun in her hand was a rifle, really. Gregor finally realized what it was she reminded him of: Sylvester Stallone in the Rambo movies, holding a machine gun in one hand and firing it. Did he do that? Gregor couldn't remember. He hadn't seen the movies. He'd only seen the commercials.

Jackman stood up himself, cautious. “Maybe,” he said.

Somewhere in the crowd of police, ambulance, civilians, SWAT teams, whatever was out there, somebody stood up and pointed a bullhorn at the door where Kathi Mittendorf was standing. Gregor had no idea why. They were close enough for a shout alone to have worked as well as it needed to.

“Put the gun down,” the man said through the bullhorn.

Gregor really wanted to sit down. He tried to bend his knees. They wouldn't bend. He tried to bend his waist. It wouldn't bend either. The pain in his shoulder was beyond belief. He didn't even feel it as pain anymore.

Up at the door, Kathi Mittendorf dropped her rifle to the ground. She stuck her hands in the pockets of her jacket. She looked out at the crowd. Gregor couldn't remember ever having seen anybody so calm. People in death were not this calm. Nobody was ever this calm. He searched her face for something in the way of emotion, but all he got was … amusement. Why would she be amused?

He thought of her sitting in her own living room only a day or so ago, telling him about the reptilian aliens who had taken over control of the planet, of the One World Government that was already more than half in place, ruling the world, destroying the lives and hopes and dreams of Good Americans. The words had rolled out of her like mercury rolling out of a broken thermometer, practiced and perfect. He remembered it like music. It made no logical sense and it made no practical sense but on some very basic level it made emotional sense. It was the truth of her. He stood there staring at her as the wind blew across his face and across hers, and finally it hit him. She was smiling.

If he'd been feeling better, his reaction time might have been better. On the other hand, it might not have been. She was smiling. The wind was blowing. She had something in her hand.
Fruit
, he thought, and then:
oh, Jesus
.

He still couldn't bend his legs. He stood where he was and watched her pull the pin out of the grenade and lob it in a high, wide arc over their heads into the street.

The first explosion came from behind him.

The second came from Kathi Mittendorf's head.

Current Working Hypothesis: “The Overt and Covert Organs of the Vatican and British Empires are Locked in Mortal Combat for the Control of the World.”

—ANNOUNCED AT A-ALBIONIC OVERVIEW ON
MARCH 18, 2001
HTTP://A-ALBIONIC.COM/A-ALBIONIC.HTML

 

Anne Ross Wyler decided to give 500,000 dollars to the Freedom from Religion Foundation. It was in the
Inquirer
on the first day Gregor Demarkian felt capable of sitting up in his hospital bed—and it was on the front page too, along with a picture of Annie and Lucinda, with Annie in her usual frumpy Price Heaven baggy clothes, jeans this time, and a big sweater that had not come from Price Heaven at all. The thing was, Gregor thought, moving his shoulder slightly to see if it still hurt, Annie couldn't disguise her face. The high cheekbones, the wide eyes, the chin-up back-tilt of self-confidence did not belong to the sort of person who usually looked, otherwise, as Annie looked. The headline didn't help either.
Billionairess Gives Gift To Atheists
, it said. Gregor had had no idea that Annie Ross was a billionaire. He wondered if she really was.

Outside in the hall, there was the clear sound of Bennis arriving, the Main Line accent drifting down the corridor, the shuffle and smack of clogs. His shoulder
did
hurt. In fact, it hurt a lot. He got the little electric gizmo from the utility table next to the bed and tried to get the bed to put him in a more upright position. He was apparently as upright as it was going to let him get.

Bennis came in, carrying two large canvas tote bags, but otherwise alone. This was something of a relief. At least once since he'd landed in the hospital as a result of Kathi Mittendorf's last stand, they'd all arrived at once, and he thought he was going to die.

“Oh, good,” Bennis said, putting the tote bags down on the floor next to the bed. “You're awake. And conscious. You have no idea how that makes me feel.
Are
you feeling better?”

“I must be,” Gregor said. “I've been reading the paper.”

He waved the paper at her. She shrugged. “Oh, that. Apparently, a whole bunch of people wrote her letters after she was hurt saying that they just knew that she'd accepted God now, because there are no atheists in foxholes. Anyway, this organization she gave the money to has a project called Atheists in Foxholes, where they collect stories of people who didn't get religion when they were in danger of death. Or something. I don't know, Gregor, it's just Annie Ross. Yesterday the paper was full of the foundation she's setting up for Adelphos House. She's giving it forty-five million dollars outright and a building closer to the strip where the girls are. A big building, too.”

“The last time I saw her, I thought she was dead.”

“She was barely even scratched,” Bennis said. “I think she spent something like six hours in the hospital before she bullied them into letting her out. She got hit over the head, and that was about it. Although you'd think she'd be in danger of concussion. Well, no matter. She probably made the nurses nuts. She used to make the teacher at dancing class nuts too. She nearly got kicked out of Madeira twice. Why don't I have that kind of strength of character?”

“Is strength of character what it is?”

“It must be,” Bennis said. “It's not like she's marrying ski instructors. She's helping the sort of people most of her parents' neighbors probably secretly wished could be wiped off the face of the earth.”

“Tell me about David Alden,” Gregor said.

Bennis bent down and got something out of one of the tote bags. “You're not going to like it,” she said, coming up with a cookie tin and popping the top off it.

“What aren't I going to like?”

“He's disappeared,” Bennis said, holding out a cookie tin full of honey cakes.

“Disappeared how?” Gregor asked.

“Disappeared,” Bennis said. “While Kathi Mittendorf was shoving a grenade down her throat and blowing herself to pieces, he was getting on a plane to Switzerland. By the time the police started looking for him, he'd gotten to Switzerland and gotten out, nobody is quite sure where. He doesn't seem to be there anymore.”

“How can nobody be sure where?” Gregor asked. “There are controls, there are passports—”

“There are cars, there are roads, there are fake identities,” Bennis said. “I don't know. That man from Lower Merion, Frank Margiotti—”

“Yes?”

“He's coming in to see you as soon as they tell him it's safe. We've all been worried about you. But he can tell you more about this than I can. David seems to have done a lot of planning beforehand. And I mean a lot. The money was gone at least three days before, as far as anybody has been able to determine. It went to the Caymans, but that doesn't mean it's there now, and they're not cooperating. Oh, Gregor, I don't know. I should have saved you the papers. They were full of it. But that was nearly a week ago.”

“I've been out of it for a week?”

“Just about. Oh, you were never in danger. At least that's what they said. But you were woozy and not well, and your shoulder is a mess. They're going to have to do surgery on it. And I haven't the faintest idea what's going on. I mean, I still don't understand this thing with America on Alert, except that David apparently started it, or something—”

“As a smoke screen for the murder of Tony Ross,” Gregor said. “That took me a while to figure out. I thought that the murder was a last-minute thing. It seemed logical to me that an embezzler wouldn't want to kill anybody, and wouldn't get started embezzling if he thought he was going to get found out and have to kill anybody.”

“But David knew he was going to have to kill Tony all along? That just seems so odd. Tony was like a father to him. They'd been close for years.”

“I rather think David Alden is one of those people who are never really close to anybody.”

“All right. But America on Alert?”

“We should have seen it coming,” Gregor said. “Not the murder of Tony Ross in particular, but that people like David Alden would use the new hysteria about terrorism to try to cover perfectly ordinary crimes. And that's what he tried to do. He set up a situation where it looked as if Tony Ross was being targeted by domestic terrorists. He put up a Web site, half-plagiarized a bunch of stuff from the conspiracist sites, and then set up some local meetings to see what would happen. And he sent that newsletter to the Ross house for months, so that the police would find them everywhere, so that America on Alert would look like the likely culprit. And we know what happened. Kathi Mittendorf happened. Do you think we could get the nurse or somebody to get me some coffee to go with all this food you keep unloading?”

“No coffee, only tea,” Bennis said. “Ring the little bell thingee next to the bed. So Kathi Mittendorf came to one of the lectures.”

Gregor tried the “little bell thingee” and hoped it worked. He had no idea how to tell. “We think that what he'd do was announce a lecture and then set it up so that his speech would be heard through a public address system. We think he told his listeners that he was being hunted by the agents of the One World Government and couldn't afford to allow his face to be seen. In the meantime, he'd be sitting in the audience as a supposed listener, keeping track of what was going on. Kathi Mittendorf probably came to a few of these lectures. Eventually, he decided to trust her.”

“To tell her who he was,” Bennis said. “I mean, not that he was David. That he was Michael.”

“Yes?” the intercom squawked. “Can I do something for you?”

Bennis went to the wall. “This is Gregor Demarkian's room. Do you think he could have some tea? The doctor said yesterday—”

“He should start taking sustenance as soon as possible. I know. We'll be right down.”

“There,” Bennis said.

“She sounds like a Morlock,” Gregor said.

“He decided to trust Kathi Mittendorf,” Bennis said. “Then what?”

“Then,” Gregor said, “he started to build an organization. He started very slowly, and he built small. My guess is that, by the time he murdered Tony Ross, America on Alert had maybe half-a-dozen members, if that. That other woman at the house the day of the standoff was probably one of them—”

“Susan Hester,” Bennis said. “She was. They searched her apartment after it was over and it was full of America on Alert stuff. Oh, and guns, and ammunition, and hand grenades, and I don't know what else. She was armed to the teeth.”

“So was Kathi Mittendorf.”

“We noticed,” Bennis said.

The door opened and a woman in a green dress with a white collar came in, pushing a trolley. On the trolley there was a small metal pot of steaming water, a tea bag, a spoon, a pile of sugar packets, and a cup and saucer. Maybe, Gregor thought, there was a way Bennis could sneak coffee into his hospital room as well as honey cakes.

Bennis took the things off the trolley and thanked the woman. The woman went out, looking completely bored. Bennis put the tea bag in the cup and poured water over it. “I don't understand why they can never make tea properly in this country. I mean, what does it take to remember to pour boiling water over the bag?”

“What does it take to understand that I got my shoulder hurt, not my stomach, and there's no reason for me not to have coffee?”

“Back to America on Alert,” Bennis said.

“Yes,” Gregor said. “Well. It was simple, really. He had this organization set up, and he was producing those newsletters, lots and lots of them, really harping on Tony Ross and the bank, so that when the time came the first place the police would look would be at America on Alert. And that would be okay, because nobody would really know him, nobody would be able to finger him. If he'd been reasonably careful about the computers, which I can't imagine he wouldn't be, nobody would be able to trace him, really. And he could leave copies for Charlotte at the Ross house without being suspected. The only bottom-line problem he had was that Kathi Mittendorf had actually seen him, and that was something he could worry about later, if he had to worry about it at all.”

“Okay. So then, what? This Steve Bridge person—”

“Yeah. Well, Kathi Mittendorf was amassing weapons, and she was an amateur. So, eventually, she came to the attention of the two most inept agents in the history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation—”

“Oh, I think that's harsh,” Bennis said.

“Don't get me started on the deficiencies of Walker Canfield. At any rate, Canfield and Bridge were sent in to check out America on Alert, and when Bridge started to get too close, David Alden killed him and dumped his body in that vacant lot. Which was all right too, if you want to know the truth, because neither Canfield nor Bridge had ever laid eyes on him, and the vacant lot was in one of the worst neighborhoods in the city, the kind of place where you wouldn't be surprised to find the body of some white guy with all the money and jewelry stripped off it. It also, by the way, happens to be only six blocks from Adelphos House, which means that David Alden had a perfect excuse if anybody saw him in the vicinity, since he's been doing work for Annie Ross Wyler's foundation and he did visit her at Adelphos House on and off.”

“Tea's ready,” Bennis said. She took the tea bag out and laid it in the saucer. “It all sounds so complicated,” she said.

Gregor tried the tea. It was Lipton. He didn't like tea. “It wasn't really,” he said. “It was just a diversion. What got complicated was the endgame, when he finally hit the point where he knew he would have to kill Tony Ross. In the first place, he had to use a venue where he wouldn't automatically be the prime suspect, which, as Ross's second in command and general right-hand man, he was likely to be. In the second place, he had to create a diversion, specifically to get me out of the picture.”

“You? Really? Are you flattered? It must be very gratifying to know that master criminal manqués now think you're a formidable master detective yourself so they—”

“Hardly,” Gregor said. He tried putting three packets of sugar into the tea. Now it tasted bad, but sweet. “It was more in the way of supplementary insurance. Since I tend to get called in on major cases, it would be better if I was out of the way. So, he did a very sensible thing, given what he was thinking. He came down to Cavanaugh Street before he came to the party and left a bomb on a timer in the vestibule at Holy Trinity Church. He thought that if I was investigating the bombing, I wouldn't have time to investigate the death of Tony Ross.”

“You'd think somebody would have seen him,” Bennis said. “The Very Old Ladies see me every time I so much as sneeze in front of Ohanian's.”

“They're looking for you. Cavanaugh Street is still part of the city of Philadelphia. It's a city street in the middle of a busy city. Strangers come walking through all the time. It wasn't much of a risk, either. And if somebody did see him, what would it matter? What would they have seen? A tall young Caucasian man in a dark coat. All he had to do was pull up his collar and hunch into it for his face to be completely obscured, and it wouldn't have looked suspicious, either. The wind had been awful all week. It was awful that night.”

“Could you prove all this?” Bennis asked. “If they bring him back, would you have enough for the city to bring charges against him for the bombing.”

“No,” Gregor admitted. “The only way I know is that there's nearly an hour's discrepancy in the times—when he says he was in New York, when he says he was in Philadelphia, when he got to the party. Agatha Christie notwithstanding, it's a hotbed of reasonable doubt. And, besides, he covered his ass on this one too, by sending Kathi Mittendorf to Cavanaugh Street to give that gun to Krystof Andrechev.”