The illuminatus! trilogy (67 page)

O’Banion was imagining finding a white girl in the arms of a black boy and finishing them off with one burst from his machine gun. His cock swelled in his pants.

Waterhouse fired.

In the next instant he threw his weight against the door and smashed it open. He was in a hallway next to the kitchen. He walked into the apartment. His shoes rang on a bare tile floor. Tears ran down his cheeks.

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” he sobbed.

“Who’s that?” a voice called. Waterhouse, whose eyes had adjusted to the darkness, looked across the empty living room into the foyer, where Milo A. Flanagan stood silhouetted in the light from the exterior hall.

Waterhouse raised the heavy automatic in his hand to arm’s length, sighted carefully, took a deep breath and held it and squeezed the trigger. The pistol blasted and kicked his hand and the black figure went toppling
backwards into the startled arms of the men behind him.

A bat which had been sitting on a windowsill flew out the open window toward the lake. Only Water-house saw it.

O’Banion came clumping into the room. He took a bent-kneed stance and fired a burst of six rounds in the direction of the front door.

“Hold it!” Waterhouse snapped. “Hold your fire. Something’s wrong.” Something would really be wrong if the guys at the front door came through again, shooting. “Turn on the lights, O’Banion,” Waterhouse said.

“There’s somebody in here shooting.”

“We’re standing here talking, O’Banion. No one is shooting at us. Find a light switch.”

“They’re gonna set off the bombs!” O’Banion’s voice was shrill with fear.

“With the lights on, O’Banion, we’ll see them doing it. Maybe we’ll even be able to stop them.”

O’Banion ran to the wall and began slapping it with the palm of one hand while he kept his machine gun cradled in the free arm. One of the other men who had followed O’Banion through the service entrance found the light switch.

The apartment was bare. There was no furniture. There were no rugs on the floor, no curtains on the windows. Whoever had been living here had vanished.

The front door opened a crack. Before they could start shooting Waterhouse yelled, “It’s all right. It’s Waterhouse in here. There’s nobody here.” He wasn’t crying anymore. It was done. He had killed his first white man.

The door swung all the way open. “Nobody
there?”
said the helmeted policeman. “Who the hell shot Flanagan?”

“Flanagan?” said Waterhouse.

“Flanagan’s dead. They got him.”

“There isn’t anybody here,” said O’Banion, who had been looking through side rooms. “What the hell went wrong? Flanagan set this up personally.”

Now that the light was on, Waterhouse could see that someone had drawn a pentagram in chalk on the floor. In the center of the pentagram was a gray envelope. Otto picked it up. There was a circular green seal on the back with the word ERIS embossed on it. Otto opened it and read:

Folding the note and shoving it into his pocket as he holstered his pistol with his other hand, Otto Water-house strode across the living room. He barely glanced down at the body of Milo A. Flanagan, the bullet hole in the center of his forehead like a third eye. Hagbard had been right. Despite all the advance terror and sorrow, once he’d done it, he didn’t feel a thing. I have met the enemy and he is mine, he thought.

Otto pushed past the men crowded around Flanagan’s body. Everyone assumed he was going somewhere to make some sort of report. No one had figured out who shot Flanagan.

By the time O’Banion had puzzled it out, Otto was already in his car. Six hours later, when they had set up blockades at the airports and railway terminals, Otto was in Minneapolis International Airport buying a ticket to Montreal. He had to fly back to Chicago, but he sat out the brief stopover at O’Hare International Airport aboard the plane, while his brother officers searched the terminals for him. Twelve hours later, carrying a passport supplied by Montreal Discordians, Otto Waterhouse was on his way to Ingolstadt.

“Ingolstadt,” said FUCKUP. Hagbard had programmed the machine to converse in reasonably good English this week. “The largest rock festival in the history of mankind, the largest temporary gathering of human beings ever assembled, will take place near Ingolstadt
on the shore of Lake Totenkopf. Two million young people from all over the world are expected. The American Medical Association will play.”

“Did you know or suspect before this that the American Medical Association, Wolfgang, Werner, Wilhelm and Winifred Saure, are four of the Illuminati Primi?” asked Hagbard.

“They were on a list, but fourteenth in order of probability,” said FUCKUP. “Perhaps some of the other groups I suspected are Illuminati Veri.”

“Can you now state the nature of the crisis that we will face this week?”

There was a pause. “There were three crises for this month. Plus several subcrises designed to bring the three major crises to a peak. The first was Fernando Poo. The world nearly went to war over the Fernando Poo coup, but the Illuminati had a countercoup in reserve and that resolved the problem satisfactorily. Heads of state are human and this feint has helped to make them jumpier and more irrational. They are in no shape to react wisely to the next two jolts. Unless you wish me to continue discussing the character structures of the present heads of state—which are important elements in the crises through which the world is passing—I will proceed to the next crisis. This is Las Vegas. I still do not know exactly what is going on there, but the sickness vibrations are still coming through strongly. There is, I have deduced from recently acquired information, a bacteriological warfare research center located in the desert somewhere near Las Vegas. One of my more mystical probes came up with the sentence, The ace in the hole is poisoned candy.’ But that’s one of those things that we probably won’t understand until we find out what’s going on in Las Vegas by more conventional means.”

“I’ve already dispatched Muldoon and Goodman there,” said Hagbard. “All right, FUCKUP, obviously the third crisis is Ingolstadt. What’s going to happen at that rock festival?”

“They intend to use the Illuminati science of strategic
biomysticism. Lake Totenkopf is one of Europe’s famed ‘bottomless lakes/ which means it has an outlet into the underground Sea of Valusia. At the end of World War II Hitler had an entire S.S. division in reserve in Bavaria. He was planning to withdraw to Obersalzburg and, with this fanatically loyal division, make a glorious last stand in the Bavarian Alps. Instead the Illuminati convinced him that he still had a chance to win the war, if he followed their instructions. Hitler, Himmler and Bormann fed cyanide to all the troops, killing several thousand of them. Then their bodies, dressed in full field equipment, were placed by divers on a huge underground plateau near where the Sea of Valusia surfaces as Lake Totenkopf. Their boots were weighted at the bottom so that they would stand at attention. The airplanes, tanks and artillery assigned to the division were also weighted and sunk along with the troops. Many of them, by the way, knew that there was cyanide in their last supper, but they ate it anyway. If the Fuehrer thought it best to kill them, that was good enough for them.”

“I can’t imagine there would be much left of them after over thirty years,” said Hagbard.

“You are wrong as usual, Hagbard,” said FUCKUP. “The S.S. men were placed under a biomystical protective field. The entire division is as good as it was the day it was placed there. Of course, the Illuminati had tricked Hitler and Himmler. The real purpose of the mass sacrifice was to provide enough explosively released consciousness energy to make it possible to translate Bormann to the immortal energy plane. Bormann, one of the Illuminati Primi of his day, was to be rewarded for his part in organizing World War II. The fifty million violent deaths of that war helped many Illuminati to achieve transcendental illumination and were most pleasing to their elder brothers and allies, the lloigor.”

“And what will happen at Ingolstadt during the festival?”

“The American Medical Association’s fifth number
at Woodstock Europa will send out biomystical waves that will activate the Nazi legions in the lake, and send them marching up the shore. They will be, in their resurrection, endowed with supernormal strength and energy, making them almost impossible to kill. And they will achieve even greater powers as a result of the burst of consciousness energy that will be released when they massacre the millions of young people on the shore. Then, led by the Saures, they will turn against Eastern Europe. The Russians, already made extremely nervous by the Fernando Poo incident, will think an army is attacking them from the West. Their old fear that Germany will once again, with the help of the capitalist powers, rise up and attack Russia and slaughter Russians for the third time in this century will become a reality. They will find that conventional weapons will not stop the resurrected Nazis. They will believe they are up against some new kind of American super-weapon, that the Americans have decided to launch a sneak attack. The Russians will then start bringing superweapons of their own into play. Then the Illuminati will play their ace in the hole in Las Vegas, whatever that is.” The voice of the computer, coming from Hagbard’s Polynesian teakwood desk, was suddenly silent.

“What happens after that?” said Hagbard, leaning forward tensely. George saw perspiration on his forehead.

“It doesn’t matter what happens after that,” said FUCKUP. “If the situation develops as I project, the Eschaton will have been immanentized. For the Illuminati, that will mean the fulfillment of the project that has been their goal since the days of Gruad. A total victory. They will all simultaneously achieve transcendental illumination. For the human race, on the other hand, that will be extinction. The end.”

Well, Hoover performed. He would have fought. That was the point. He would have defied a few people. He would have scared them to death. He has a file on everybody.

—Richard Milhous Nixon

The Starry Wisdom Church was not 00005’s idea of a proper ecclesiastical shop by any means. The architecture was a shade too Gothic, the designs on the stained-glass windows a bit unpleasantly suggestive for a holy atmosphere (“My God, they must be bloody wogs,” he thought), and when he opened the door, the altar was lacking a proper crucifix. In fact, where the crucifix should have been he found instead a design that was more than suggestive. It was, in his opinion, downright tasteless.

Not High Church at all, Chips decided.

He advanced cautiously, although the building appeared deserted. The pews seemed designed for bloody reptiles, he observed—a church, of course, should be uncomfortable, that was good for the soul, but this was, well, gross. They probably advertise in the kink newspapers, he reflected with distaste. The first stained-glass window was worse from inside than outside; he didn’t know who Saint Toad was, but if that mosaic with his name on it gave any idea of Saint Toad’s appearance and predelictions, then, by God, no self-respecting Christian congregation would ever think of sanctifying him. The next feller, a shoggoth, was even less appetizing; at least they had the common decency not to canonize
him
.

A rat scurried out from between two pews and ran across the center aisle, right before Chip’s feet.

Fair got on one’s nerves, this place did.

Chips approached the pulpit and glanced up at the Bible. That was, at least, one civilized touch. Curious as to what text might have been preached last in this den of wogs, he scrambled up into the pulpit and scanned the open pages. To his consternation, it wasn’t the Bible at all. A lot of bragging and bombast about some Yog Sothoth, probably a wog god, who was both the Gate and the Guardian of the Gate. Absolute rubbish. Chips hefted the enormous volume and turned it so he could read the spine.
Necronomicon
, eh? If his University Latin could be trusted, that was something like “the book of the names of the dead.” Morbid, like the whole building.