(Tobias Knight, the FBI agent monitoring the bugging equipment in Dr. Mocenigo's home, heard the pistol shot the same time Carmel did. "What the hell?" he said out loud, sitting up straight. He had heard the door open and footsteps walking about and had been waiting for a conversation… and then, without warning, he had heard the shot. Now a voice spoke, "Sorry, Dr. Mocenigo. You were a great patriot, and this is a dog's death. But I will share it with you." Then there were more footsteps and something else. .. Knight recognized the sound: it was liquid being poured. The steps and the pouring liquid continued, and Knight abruptly tore himself out of his state of shock and pressed the intercom. "Knight?" asked a voice which he recognized as Esperando Despond, the Special Agent in Charge for Las Vegas. "Mocenigo's house," Knight said crisply. "Get a whole crew out there double-quick. Something is happening, one killing at least." He released the intercom and listened, paralyzed, to the footsteps and the liquid sounds, which were now mixed with subdued humming. A man doing an unpleasant job, but trying to keep his cool. Knight recognized the tune, finally: "Camp-town Races." The humming and walking and slurping continued. "Do-da-Do-da…" Then the voice spoke again: "This is General Lawrence Stewart Talbot, speaking to the CIA, the FBI and whoever else has this house bugged. I discovered at two this morning that several people in our Anthrax Leprosy Pi project have accidentally been subjected to live cultures. All of them are living at the installation, and can easily be isolated while the antidote works. I have already given orders to that effect. Dr. Mocenigo himself unknowingly received the worst dose, and was in advanced morbidity, a few minutes from death, when I arrived. His whole house, obviously, will have to be burned down, and I am also, due to my proximity while examining him, too far gone to be saved. I will therefore shoot myself after setting fire to the house. There is one remaining problem. I found evidence that a woman had been in Dr. Mocenigo's bed earlier- that's what comes of allowing important people to live off base- and she must be found and given the antidote and each of her contacts must be traced. Needless to say, this must be done quietly, or there will be a nationwide panic. Tell the President to see that my wife gets the medal for this. Tell my wife that with my last breath I still insist she was wrong about that girl in Red Lion, Pennsylvania. In closing, I firmly believe that this is the greatest country in the history of the world, and can still be saved if Congress will lock up those damned college kids for once and for all. God bless America!" There was a scratching sound- my God! Knight thought, the match- and the sound of flames, in the midst of which General Talbot tried to add a postscript but couldn't get the words out because he was screaming. Finally, the second shot came, and the screaming stopped. Knight raised his head, jaw clenched, repressed tears in his steely eyes. "That was a great American," he said aloud.)
Over cigars and brandy, after George had been sent off to bed to be distracted by Tarantella, Richard Jung asked pointedly, "Just how sure are you that this Discordian bunch is a match for the Illuminati? It's kind of late in the game to change sides."
Drake started to speak, then turned to Maldonado. "Tell him about Italy in the 19th century," he said.
"The Illuminati are just men and women," Maldonado replied obligingly. "More women than men, in fact. It was Eve Weishaupt who started the whole show; Adam just acted as her front because people are used to taking orders from men. This Atlantis stuff is mostly bullshit. Everybody who knows about Atlantis at all traces his family, or his clan, or his club, back there. Some of the old dons in the Maf even try to trace la Cosa Nostra back there. All bullshit. Just like all the WASPs tracing themselves back to the Mayflower. For everyone who can prove it, like Mr. Drake, there's a hundred who are just bluffing.
"You see," Maldonado went on more intensely, chewing his cigar ferociously, "originally the Illuminati was just a- how do you call it- a kind of 18th-century women's liberation front. Behind Adam Weishaupt was Eve; behind Godwin, who started all this socialism and anarchism with his Political Justice book, was his mistress Mary Wollstonecraft, who started the woman revolution with a book called, uh…"
"Vindication of the Rights of Women," Drake contributed.
"And they got Tom Paine to write on women's lib, too, and to defend their French Revolution and try to import it here. But that all fell through and they didn't get a real controlling interest in the U.S. until they hoodwinked Woody Wilson into creating the Federal Reserve in 1914. And that's the way it usually goes. In Italy they had a front called the Haute Vente, that was so damn secret Mazzini was a member all his life and never knew the control came from Bavaria. My grandpa told me all about those days. We had a three-way dogfight. The Monarchists on one side, the Haute Vente and the Liberteri, the anarchists, on the other, and the Maf in the middle trying to roll with the punches and figure out which way the bread was buttered, you know? Then the Liberteri got wise to the Haute Vente and split from it, and it was a four-way fight. You look it up in the history books, they tell it like it was except they don't mention who ran the Haute Vente. And then the good old Law of Fives came into it, and we had the Fascisti and it was a five-way dogfight. Who won? Not the Illuminati. It wasn't until 1937, manipulating the English government to discourage Mussolini's peace plans and using Hitler to get Benito into the Berlin-Tokyo axis, that the Illuminati had some kind of control in Italy. And even then it was indirect. When we made our deal with the CIA- it was called the OSS back in those days- Luciano got out of the joint and we turned over Italy and delivered Mussolini dead."
"And the point of all this?" Jung asked coldly.
"The point is," Maldonado said, "the Maf has been against the Illuminati more of the time than we've been with them, and we're still doing business and we're stronger than ever. Believe me, their bark is much worse than their bite. Because they know some magic, they scare everybody. We've had magicians and belladonnas- witches, to you- in Sicily since before Paris got hot pants for Helen, and believe me a bullet kills them as dead as it kills anybody else."
"The Illuminati do have a bite," Drake interjected, "but it is my judgment that they are going out with the Age of Pisces. The Discordians, I think, represent an Aquarian swing."
"Oh, I don't go for that mystic stuff," Jung said. "Next thing you'll be quoting I Ching at me, like my old man."
"You're an anal type, like most accountants," Drake replied coolly. "And a Capricorn as well. Down-to-earth and conservative. I won't attempt to persuade you about this aspect of the matter. Just take my word, I didn't get where I am by ignoring significant facts just because they won't fit on a profit-and-loss statement. On the profit-and-loss level, however, I have had reasons to believe that the Discordians can currently outbid the Illuminati. These reasons date back many months before the appearance of those marvelous statues today."
Later, in bed, Drake turned the matter around in his head and looked at it from several sides. Lovecraft's words came back to him: "I beg you to remember their attitude toward their servants." That was it, basically. He was an old man, and he was tired of being their servant, or satrap, or satellite. When he was thirty-three, he was ready to take them over, as Cecil Rhodes had once done. Somehow, he had been maneuvered into taking over just one section of their empire. If he could think, truthfully, that he owned the United States more thoroughly than any President in four decades, the fact remained that he did not own himself. Not until he signed his Declaration of Independence tonight by joining the Discordians. The other Jung, the alter Zauber in Zurich, had tried to tell him something about power once, but he had dismissed it as sentimental slop. Now he tried to remember it… and, suddenly, all the old days came back, Klee and his numinous paintings, the Journey to the East, old Crowley saying, "Of course, mixing the left-hand and right-hand paths is dangerous. If you fear such risks, go back to Hesse and Jung and those old ladies. Their way is safe and mine isn't. All that can be said for me is that I have real power and they have dreams." But the Illuminati had crushed Crowley, just as they smashed Willie Seabrook, when those men revealed too much. "I beg you to remember their attitude toward their servants." Damn it, what was it Jung had said about power?