Conspiracy Theory Read online

  CONSPIRACY

  THEORY

  The Gregor Demarkian Books by Jane Haddam

  Not a Creature Was Stirring

  Precious Blood

  Quoth the Raven

  Act of Darkness

  A Great Day for the Deadly

  Feast of Murder

  A Stillness in Bethlehem

  Murder Superior

  Dead Old Dead

  Festival of Deaths

  Bleeding Hearts

  Fountain of Death

  And One to Die On

  Baptism in Blood

  Deadly Beloved

  Skeleton Key

  True Believers

  Somebody Else’s Music

  Conspiracy Theory

  CONSPIRACY

  THEORY

  Jane Haddam

  ST. MARTIN’S MINOTAUR

  NEW YORK

  CONSPIRACY THEORY. Copyright © 2003 by Orania Papazoglou. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.minotaurbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Haddam, Jane, 1951-

  Conspiracy theory / Jane Haddam.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-312-27188-3

  1. Demarkian, Gregor (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Private investigators—

  Pennsylvania—Philadelphia—Fiction. 3. Philadelphia (Pa.)—Fiction. 4.

  Armenian Americans—Fiction. 5. Conspiracies—Fiction. 6. Bombings—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3566.A613C66 2003

  813'.54—dc21

  2003040637

  First Edition: July 2003

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This book is for

  RAM

  rec. arts. mystery

  and everybody on it—especially the

  Australians, who send TimTams.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  First, I need to thank Norma Frank, her husband, Bob, and all the people from Mystery Books on Lancaster Avenue in Bryn Mawr. It was a great mystery bookstore—it’s closed now, but it should have been declared a historic treasure. Norma and company have been of invaluable help in setting me straight about all things Bryn Mawr. If I’ve taken their excellent information and made a hash of it, it’s my fault.

  Second, I’d like to thank Vicki Ball, who spent several weeks gamely attempting to write messages from RAM to the Federal Bureau of Investigation protesting their investigation of Father Tibor Kasparian—then I changed the plot and couldn’t use the stuff and left her hanging out to dry. I apologize, and note that she runs an excellent on-line source for mystery books: Books ’n’ Bytes at www.booksnbytes.com. If you’re looking for mysteries, or for information about your favorite mystery writers, start there.

  Third—I’d like to thank all the people I work with, who make it possible for me to write books that don’t sound as if I’ve just sat down at the computer to spout gibberish before I’ve had my serious caffeine: Don Maass, my agent; Keith Kahla, my editor; and Teresa Theophano, the world’s greatest editorial assistant, who’s now left to go off and get another degree and do real work in the real world that will actually help people and, and—no! no! I’m not hyperventilating. I’m not. I’m fine. It’s not like she deserted me. It’s—no, really, it’s … nah. Good luck, Teresa. I miss you.

  Finally—a note about the Web sites. By now, I’ve had dozens of people read this manuscript, and all but one of them have said the same thing: You made those Web sites up, didn’t you? No, as a matter of fact, I didn’t. If a Web site is mentioned in this novel, it existed on the Web at the time I wrote this manuscript, and maybe still does. Go try them out. For people who know nothing about conspiracy theories, or about the people who are committed to conspiracy theories, they’re quite a revelation.

  Of necessity, the conspiracy theories and the conspiracy theorists used here are mostly American, British, Canadian, or Australian—but there are a lot more of them worldwide, and a lot more variations on them than I could cover here. There are secular, Protestant, Catholic, and Muslim varieties, to start with. There are wholesale conspiracy theories, where everything is a plot, and partial conspiracy theories, where it’s just the Republicans trying to get the Democrats or the Democrats trying to get the Republicans, or … well, you see what I mean.

  I don’t like conspiracy theories, much, and I don’t respect them, and it worries me that there are so many of them alive in the world right now. But— check them out if you dare.

  —Litchfield County, Connecticut

  September 2001 to January 2003

  CONSPIRACY

  THEORY

  THE HARRIDAN REPORT

  November 7

  This week, Philadelphia will be host to one of the most important, and most sinister, gatherings of the Illuminati on the planet—and most of you won’t know it. Like all the best secrets, this is a secret hidden in plain sight. Open your copy of the mind-controlled mainstream press on the morning of November 9 and take a look at the pictures spread out across the “society” section. You’ve probably seen pictures like these before: young girls in ball gowns; distinguished-looking men in tuxedos; stately dowagers in beaded dresses and four strands of pearls. Philadelphia’s social season has begun, and the shadowy leaders of the Illuminati have done their work so well, most Americans see nothing odd—or dangerous—about the process. After all, what is so awful about giving a few formal parties to raise money for charity?

  If you’re tempted to fall for this line, I suggest you try a little experiment. Try to get tickets to the Around the World Harvest Ball, that supposedly “open” event that anybody can buy a ticket to, if they have the price of admission. The price of admission is not cheap: 25,000 dollars a table, meaning 2,500 dollars a seat. Even if you could come up with the money, or more, you couldn’t crack your way into that exclusive enclave. Most of the tickets were already taken long before they were advertised for sale. The few left were handed out only to carefully vetted supplicants, who had to pass muster with an invitations committee made up of women from the most important Illuminati families. Chairwoman of the event is Charlotte Deacon Ross, a Rockefeller on her mother’s side and married to a collateral member of the House of Morgan, who also happens to be Anthony van Wyck Ross, head of Lessard Cole, one of the world’s biggest and most important investment banks. Vice chairwoman is Bennis Hannaford, a member of the notorious Duke family. The Dukes founded Duke University in North Carolina, the only university in the United States that funds academic “research”into the occult. Their most famous member, Doris Duke, once known as the richest woman in the world, was ritually murdered in 1993 to keep her from exposing the family’s involvement with Satanism and the New World Order.

  If all that isn’t enough for you, consider the event’s purpose: to raise money for UNICEF, the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund. You remember UNICEF. If you were like me, you probably carried little orange-papered milk cartons around on Halloween, collecting money to “help” children in the poor nations of the world. But UNICEF doesn’t help children anywhere, and the fact that it collects its money on the Illuminati’s only sacred holiday is no accident.

  The purpose of UNICEF is now, and has always been, to separate children from their parents so that they can be raised by the state as mind-controlled slaves for the New World Order. That’s why UNICEF supports such radical political measures as “children’s rights,” including the “right” of children to be “vaccinated” against “diseases�
�� that will supposedly kill them otherwise. You and I know that those “vaccina-tions”are really implants, the means by which the Illuminati and their forces get the necessary microequipment into the bodies of children, the better to control their behavior for the benefit of the corporations—and the banks—who really run this world.

  The important thing to remember is that the Illuminati never get together in public unless they have to. Something is up. Philadelphia is the heart of the vortex of the New World Order this weekend. Something will be decided here. Something will be launched. Something will come to fruition. We may not know what until it’s far too late.

  Check back next week for the Harridan Report’s firsthand account from the belly of the beast.

  PROLOGUE

  The American Constitution has been called “the finest document ever written by the mind of men!” The American people have been taught that it was written to restrict the power of government, and to protect their God-given inalienable rights to life, liberty and property.

  But Ralph Epperson has discovered the evidence that the men who founded this nation were not God fearing patriots as we have been told, but occultic practitioners of a secret worship on this earth. In fact, he will discuss the evidence that our founding fathers created two separate governments in the Constitution at the same time, and ONE OF THOSE GOVERNMENTS WAS GIVEN ABSOLUTE TYRANNICAL POWER! And that this is the government ruling America today!

  —PROMOTIONAL COPY FOR AMERICA’S SECRET

  DESTINY BY RALPH EPPERSON (TUCSON,

  ARIZONA: PUBLIUS PRESS, 1977) AT

  HTTP://SYNINFO.COM/EPPERSON/#B17

  1

  It was on the eighth of November, one year and some weeks after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, that Father Tibor Kasparian received the letter—and realized, without much shock, that he had spent a decade living in a fantasy. Maybe, he thought, sometime in the middle of the afternoon, when his head was pounding so badly that he would have willingly cracked it open on a brick wall, maybe all of America was a fantasy, a kind of Brigadoon, outside space and time, outside reality. Father Ti-bor’s own reality had begun fifty-five years before on the flat dirt floor of a back room in a midwife’s house in Yekevan, Armenia. There were hospitals in Yekevan, and doctors, but his mother hadn’t trusted them. Those were the days before—just before—the Soviet occupation, but she hadn’t trusted them anyway. She hadn’t liked the condescension of the medical staff, who seemed to think women knew nothing about giving birth. She hadn’t liked the soldiers in the street, who belonged to one side or the other, but never hers. Most of all, she had wanted a priest, a real Armenian priest, from an Armenian church, willing to give baptism on the spot just in case the worst decided to happen. All these years later, that was the one thing about his mother that Father Tibor Kasparian had not been able to accept. He could not fully love anyone who thought so little of God as to think that He would send an infant into eternal hellfire simply because it had happened to die before someone had been able to baptize it.

  I have become Americanized, he thought—but it didn’t bother him, because he was a little proud of it. Some people grew up wanting to be doctors or lawyers or astronauts or spies. He had grown up wanting to be an American. The first time he had ever risked his life, he had done it to see a movie. It was 1962, and he was fifteen years old. The movie was The Parent Trap, starring Hayley Mills. He had no idea how the two young men who ran the floating American movie concession had gotten hold of their copy. They were students at the university, and people said they were traitors. At least, that’s what they said publicly, but by then everyone knew the doublespeak that went on where the authorities could hear. Patriots were traitors. To be Armenian was to be a traitor. To be anti-Soviet was to be a traitor. To be caught in a cellar watching contraband American movies was to risk jail, or worse. For the two young men whose names he had never known, the result had been worse, in the long run—two years after the night on which he had seen The Parent Trap, Tibor had watched one of them gunned down in the street and the other captured when the police had raided a showing of an Elvis Presley movie called Fun in Acapulco. Hayley Mills, Elvis Presley—it seemed incredible to him now that they could have taken it all so seriously, studying the films as if they were ancient sacred texts, the secret of the universe, the meaning of life. When he’d first come to America for real, many years later, he had made a point of seeing all those movies again. He’d been shocked at how awful most of them were, something that had been masked at his first viewing by the fact that they had been shown in English without subtitles—where were two university students going to find American movies subtitled in Armenian? Or even Russian?—and by the further fact that they had been completely incomprehensible. People talked about culture shock, but they didn’t understand what it meant. He could still see himself in the dark of that small room, sitting next to Anna Bagdanian without the courage to take hold of her hand, wondering in bewilderment why, if the girls were attending the obligatory patriotic training camp, nobody ever sang patriotic songs or marched with flags.

  Stupid, he thought now, but not about himself, or even about Hayley Mills and Elvis Presley. He was feeling a little light-headed, and had been, ever since the mail had come at 10:35 this morning. It was now almost six o’clock, and cold for this early in November. Outside the door of the small apartment he lived in behind Holy Trinity Armenian Apostolic Christian Church, in the little bricked courtyard, wind was blowing leaves and stones into gutters. On any other day, he would have been headed down Cavanaugh Street to the Ararat Restaurant, to meet Bennis Hannaford and Krekor Demarkian for dinner. Tonight, they were on their way to some party a friend of Bennis’s was giving to benefit UNICEF, and he was on his way to do a little business for the church. If the letter hadn’t come, it wouldn’t have mattered. It was only because he knew that he needed advice, and needed it desperately, that he felt so completely at sea. Or maybe not, he thought, irritated at himself, and at everything about himself. He looked around his living room at the stacks of books that lined all the walls and cluttered most of the furniture, at the carpet that he should have replaced a year ago, at the big framed poster of the World Trade Center Twin Towers lit up at night. He did the same things over and over again these days. He saw the same people. He read the same books. He had this small church in his charge, to be pastor of, to celebrate the liturgy in, out in the open, without fear. He had more food in his refrigerator than he would be able to eat in a year. He published his articles about theology in good journals and was asked to conferences to sit on panels with people whose names he had once known only as the authors of banned books. He knew that if he sat down and tried to write out all the things he had wanted when he was still in Yekevan and Anna was still alive and his wife, he would have achieved every single one of them with the exception of a life with Anna herself—but he was sure he had come to terms with that years ago. He didn’t know what was wrong with him. He didn’t know what it was he wanted that he hadn’t wanted a week ago. He only knew that he was suddenly ill at ease, and unhappy in his own skin. The world inside himself felt flat. The world outside himself felt dangerous and deliberate. Maybe reality was something that slept, and now it had woken up.

  Don’t dramatize, he told himself. Then he went into his vestibule and got his long good coat out of the closet. There was a time and a place for wearing hair shirts, and Philadelphia on a cold winter night was neither. He started to button the coat from the bottom and then stopped. He put his hand in under the coat and felt around for the inside pocket of his jacket, where the letter was, wadded up so many times that it felt like a stone. He ought to leave it here, where it would be safe. If he got mugged while he was out in the city, the muggers might take it, thinking it was cash. When they found out it wasn’t, they might rip it up. He left it where it was and buttoned his coat the rest of the way to his chin. He got his gloves out of his coat pockets and put them on. He got the Stewart plaid
muffler he had been given for Christmas last year and wound it around his neck. The muffler was cashmere. The gloves were leather and lined with cashmere. He wasn’t a rich man, or even close, but he had rich things. Maybe that was part of what was wrong too—but that was worse than stupid, because he was as nearly oblivious to what he ate and what he wore as it was possible to be without going naked and starving. He was just mixed up, tonight, that was all; mixed up and frightened to the bone, and there was nothing he could do about it.

  He checked his pockets for change for the bus and then stepped out his door into the courtyard behind the church. He pulled the door shut and looked at the brass knocker, shined so flawlessly it glowed gold in the light from the streetlamp. When he and Anna were first married and he had just been ordained, he had celebrated a liturgy in a cramped little apartment on a side street in Toldevan, a godforsaken mining town in the middle of nowhere, full of people whose names no one else on earth would ever have been able to recognize. It had been a cold night then too, and November, but he hadn’t had a coat that would protect him from much of anything. The apartment had heat only between midnight and six in the morning. It was eight in the evening. The only warmth came from a paper-fueled fire the grandmother of the family had lit in a large can that had once held lard. You had to be careful with the cans. Some of them melted more quickly than you’d expect. Fires broke out that way all the time, and whole apartment blocks went down in flames. At this liturgy there was himself, Anna, the family, and three other families from the same building, carefully chosen, part of the elect. Still, that had made nearly forty people, and the room they were in was very small. There were no lights in the room. Electricity was expensive, and he was expected to know the liturgy by heart. It was dangerous to carry liturgical books, or books of any kind that had not been published by government publishing houses. His hands were cold. His fingers were stiff with the beginning of premature arthritis, brought on by too many nights consorting with the cold. He had given communion to everyone in the room and felt relieved. He had promised to return to perform a wedding on the third of June. The room smelled of urine, and worse. The only facility was down the hall and not working very well. The people in the apartments used tins, like the one with the fire in it, so that they wouldn’t have to go down the hall in the middle of the night.