"Well," Jackson began in a Harvard accent, "this is probably not important. It may be just a coincidence."
"Most of what we hear is just unimportant coincidence," Saul said gently. "But it's our job to listen."
"Everybody but the lunatic fringe has given up on this by now," Jackson said. "It really surprised me when Joe told me what he was getting the magazine into." He paused and studied the two impassive faces of the detectives; finding little there, he went on reluctantly. "It was last Friday. Joe told me he had a lead that interested him, and he was putting a staff writer on it. He wanted to reopen the investigation of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and the Kennedy brothers."
Saul carefully didn't look at Muldoon, and just as carefully moved his hat to cover the memos on the table. "Excuse me a moment," he said politely and left the cafeteria.
He found a phone booth in the lobby and dialed his home. Rebecca answered after the third ring; she obviously had not gotten back to sleep after he left. "Saul?" she asked, guessing who would be calling at this hour. "It's going to be a long night," Saul said. "Oh, hell."
"I know, baby. But this case is a son-of-a-bitch!" Rebecca sighed. "I'm glad we had a little ball earlier this evening. Otherwise, I'd be furious."
Saul thought, suddenly, of how this conversation would sound to an outsider. A sixty-year-old man and a twenty-five-year-old wife. And if they knew she was a whore and a heroin addict when I first met her…
"Do you know what I'm going to do?" Rebecca lowered her voice. "I'm going to take off my nightgown, and throw the covers to the foot of the bed, and lie here naked, thinking about you and waiting."
Saul grinned. "A man my age shouldn't be able to respond to that, after doing what I did earlier."
"But you did respond, didn't you?" Her voice was confident and sensual.
"I sure did. I won't be able to leave the phone booth for a couple of minutes."
She chuckled softly and said, "I'll be waiting…"
"I love you," he said, surprised (as always) at the simple truth of it in a man his age. I won't be able to leave the phone booth at all if this keeps up, he thought. "Listen," he added hurriedly, "let's change the subject before I start resorting to the vices of a high school boy. What do you know about the Illuminati?" Rebecca had been an anthropology major, with a minor in psychology, before the drug scene had captured her and she fell into the abyss from which he had rescued her; her erudition often astonished him.
"It's a hoax," she said.
"A what?"
"A hoax. A bunch of students at Berkeley started it back around sixty-six or sixty-seven."
"No, that's not what I'm asking. The original Illuminati in Italy and Spain and Germany in the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries? You know?"
"Oh, that's the basis of the hoax. Some right-wing historians think the Illuminati still exist, you see, so these students opened an Illuminati chapter on the campus at Berkeley and started sending out press releases on all sorts of weird subjects, so people who want to believe in conspiracies would have some evidence to point to. That's all there is to it. Sophomore humor."
I hope so, Saul thought. "How about the Ishmaelian sect of Islam?"
"It has twenty-three divisions, but the Aga Khan is the leader of all of them. It was founded around-oh-1090 A.D., I think, and was originally persecuted, but now it's part of the orthodox Moslem religion. It has some pretty weird doctrines. The founder, Hassan i Sabbah, taught that nothing is true and everything is permissible. He lived up to that idea-the word 'assassin' is a corruption of his name."
"Anything else?"
"Yes, now that I think of it. Sabbah introduced marijuana to the Western world, from India. The word 'hashish' also comes from his name."
"This is a heavy case," Saul said, "and now that I can walk out of the phone booth without shocking the patrol-
man in the hall, I'll get back to work on it. Don't say anything that'll get me aroused again. Please."
"I won't. I'll just lie here naked and…"
"Good-bye."
"Good-bye," she said, laughing.
Saul hung up frowning. Goodman's intuition, the other detectives call it. It's not intuition; it's a way of thinking beyond and between the facts, a way of sensing wholes, of seeing that there must be a relationship between fact number one and fact number two even if no such relationship is visible yet. And I know. There is an Illuminati, whether or not those kids at Berkeley are kidding.
He came out of his concentration and realized where he was. For the first time, he noticed a sticker on the door:
THIS PHONE BOOTH RESERVED FOR CLARK KENT
He grinned: an intellectual's kind of joke. Probably somebody on the magazine.
He walked back to the cafeteria, reflecting. "Nothing is true. Everything is permissible." With a doctrine like that, people were capable of… He shuddered. Images of Buchenwald and Belsen, of Jews who might have been him…
Peter Jackson looked up as he reentered the cafeteria. An intelligent, curious black face. Muldoon was as impassive as the faces on Mount Rushmore. "Mad Dog, Texas, was the town where Malik thought these… assassins… had their headquarters," Muldoon said. "That's where the staff writer was sent"
"What was the staff writer's name?" Saul asked.
"George Dorn," Muldoon said. "He's a young kid who used to be in SDS. And he was once rather close to the Weatherman faction."
Hagbard Celine's gigantic computer, FUCKUP-First Universal Cybernetic-Kinetic-Ultramicro-Programmer- was basically a rather sophisticated form of the standard self-programming algorithmic logic machine of the time; the name was one of his whimsies. FUCKUP's real claim to uniqueness was a programmed stochastic process whereby it could "throw" an I Ching hexagram, reading' a random open circuit as a broken (yin) line and a random closed circuit as a full (yang) line until six such "lines" were round. Consulting its memory banks, where the whole tradition of 1 Ching interpretation was stored, and then cross-checking its current scannings of that day's political, economic, meteorological, astrological, astronomical, and technological eccentricities, it would provide a reading of the hexagram which, to Hagbard's mind, combined the best of the scientific and occult methods for spotting oncoming trends. On March 13, the stochastic pattern spontaneously generated Hexagram 23, "Breaking Apart." FUCKUP then interpreted:
This traditionally unlucky sign was cast by Atlantean scientist-priests shortly before the destruction of their continent and is generally connected with death by water. Other vibrations link it to earthquakes, tornadoes and similar disasters, and to sickness, decay, and morbidity as well.
The first correlation is with the unbalance between technological acceleration and political retrogression, which has proceeded earth-wide at ever widening danger levels since 1914 and especially since 1964. The breaking apart is fundamentally the schizoid and schismatic mental fugue of lawyer-politicians attempting to administrate a worldwide technology whose mechanisms they lack the education to comprehend and whose gestalt trend they frustrate by breaking apart into obsolete Renaissance nation-states.
World War III is probably imminent and, considering the advances in chemical biological warfare in conjunction with the sickness vibrations of Hexagram 23, the unleashing of plague or nerve gas or both is as probable as thermonuclear overkill.
General prognosis: many megadeaths.
There is some hope for avoidance of the emerging pattern with prompt action of correct nature. Probability of such avoidance is 0.17 ± 0.05.
No blame.
"My ass, no blame," Hagbard raged; and rapidly reprogrammed FUCKUP to read off to him its condensed psychobiographies of the key figures in world politics and the key scientists in chemobiological warfare.