The Illuminatus! Trilogy

"This," he said, "is the fundamental agreement proposed by the people I represent." He handed it to Drake. Maldonado, he noticed, was staring fixedly, expressionlessly, at him in the most u

"Do we sign this in blood?" said Drake, removing the cloth-of-gold ribbon from the parchment and unrolling it.

George laughed nervously. "Pen and ink will do fine."

Saul's angry, triumphant eyes stare into mine, and I look away guiltily. Let me explain, I say desperately. I really am trying to help you. Your mind is a bomb.

"What Weishaupt discovered that night of February second, seventeen seventy-six," Hagbard Celine explained to Joe Malik in 1973, on a clear autumn day in Miami, about the same time that Captain Tequilla y Mota was reading Luttwak on the coup d'etat and making his first moves toward recruiting the officer's cabal that later seized Fernando Poo, "was basically a simple mathematical relationship. It's so simple, in fact, that most administrators and bureaucrats never notice it. lust as the householder doesn't notice the humble termite, until it's too late… Here, take this paper and figure for yourself. How many permutations are there in a system of four elements?"

Joe, recalling his high school math, wrote 4x3x2x1, and read aloud his answer "Twenty-four."

"And if you're one of-the elements, the number of coalitions- or to be sinister, conspiracies- that you may have to confront would be twenty-three. Despite Simon Moon's obsessions, the twenty-three has no particularly mystic significance," Hagbard added quickly. "Just consider it pragmatically- it's a number of possible relationships which the brain can remember and handle. But now suppose the system has five elements…?."

Joe wrote 5x4x3x2x1 and read aloud, "One hundred and twenty."

"You see? One always encounters jumps of that size when dealing with permutations and combinations. But, as I say, administrators as a rule aren't aware of this. Korzybski pointed out, back in the early thirties, that nobody should ever directly supervise more than four subordinates, because the twenty-four possible coalitions ordinary office politics can create are enough to tax any brain. When it jumps up to one hundred and twenty, the administrator is lost. That, in essence, is the sociological aspect of the mysterious Law of Fives. The Illuminati always has five leaders in each nation, and five international Illuminati Primi supervising all of them, but each runs his own show more or less independent of the other four, united only by their common commitment to the Goal of Gruad." Hagbard paused to relight his long, black Italian cigar.

"Now," he said, "put yourself in the position of the head of any counterespionage organization. Imagine, for instance, that you're poor old McCone of the CIA at the time of the first of the New Wave of Illuminati assassinations, ten years ago, in sixty-three. Oswald was, of course, a double agent, as everybody always knew. The Russians wouldn't have let him out of Russia without getting a commitment from him to do 'small jobs,' as they're called in the business, although he'd be a 'sleeper.' That is, he'd go about his ordinary business most of the time, and only be called on occasionally when he was in the right place at the right time for a particular 'small job.' Now, of course, Washington knows this; they know that no expatriate comes back from Moscow without some such agreement And Moscow knows the other side: that the State Department wouldn't take him back unless he accepted a similar status with the CIA. Then, November twenty-second, Dealy Plaza-blam! the shit hits the fan. Moscow and Washington both want to know, the sooner the quicker, who was he working for when he did it, or was it his own idea? Two more possibilities loom at once: could a loner with confused politics like him have been recruited by the Cubans or the Chinese? And, then, the kicker: could he be i

"It always starts with nonsense," Simon is telling Joe in another time-track, between Los Angeles and San Francisco, in 1969. "Weishaupt discovered the Law of Fives while he was stoned and looking at one of those shoggoth pictures you saw in Arkham. He imagined the shoggoth was a rabbit and said, 'du hexen Hase,' which has been preserved as an in-joke by Illuminati agents in Hollywood. It runs through the Bugs Bu

"You mean the Mafia?" Joe asks.

"What? I didn't say anything about the Mafia. Are you in another time-track again?"

"No, not the Mafia alone," Hagbard says. "The Syndicate is much bigger than the Maf." The room returns to focus: it is a restaurant. A seafood restaurant. On Biscayne Avenue, facing the bay. In Miami. In 1973. The walls are decorated with undersea motifs, including a huge octopus. Hagbard, undoubtedly, had chosen this meeting place just because he liked the decor. Crazy bastard thinks he's Captain Nemo. Still: we've got to deal with him. As John says, the JAMs can't do it alone. Hagbard, gri