Ten minutes later she was pouring steaming coffee into Nathan’s cup. “And who is Etienne Hebert?”

“I don’t think the present tense applies to Etienne.” Nathan took a drink of coffee, and gave a deep sigh of satisfaction. “I think Jules killed him.” He held up his hand at Eve’s exclamation. “Okay, okay. Let me do this in my own way. I’ll start in the beginning. About a month ago I received a phone call at my office from a man named Etienne Hebert. He said he knew what had happened to Harold Bently, and that Bently was the smallest part of the story. He asked me to meet him outside New Orleans, at a little crab shack on the Mississippi.”

“Why you?”

“How the hell do I know? Maybe because I covered the Bently disappearance for the newspaper.” He took another sip of coffee. “Anyway. I met him. He was a big guy, not over twenty-one or -two, and seemed a little simple at first glance.” He shook his head. “But he wasn’t that dumb. After I talked to him for a while, I realized he was smarter than I first thought. He was just troubled, and feeling guilty about talking to me. He had a big brother, Jules, and there was no way he wanted to get him in trouble. It was obvious he had a king-size case of hero worship. Etienne was only a fisherman, but Jules was the smart one in the family. He was the only one who made it to college.” He grimaced. “Maybe it would have been better for him if he hadn’t. He was a junior at Tulane when the Cabal recruited him.”

“What’s the Cabal?”

“It’s a secret society that’s been in existence since the early 1900s.”

“Secret society?” Galen said. “Be for real.”

“I couldn’t be more serious.”

“And the society is named the Cabal? For God’s sake, that means secret society.

They must be seriously lacking in imagination.”

“They’re called that because their members are drawn from the top echelon of other organizations.” Nathan grimaced. “And they think of themselves as the ultimate secret society.”

Galen snorted.

“That was my reaction until I did my homework,” Nathan said. “There are hundreds of secret societies around the world, and the U.S. has taken them to its heart. The Freemasons, the Odd Fellows, Skull and Bones.” He studied Eve’s expression. “I know. They all sound a little ludicrous—unless you study the membership lists. Did you know both George Bush and George W. Bush belong to Skull and Bones, and George W.‘s only comment about his membership was that he couldn’t talk about it?”

“So what? I assume there’s no proof that Skull and Bones is involved in any nefarious activities?”

“No proof. But there are also members in positions of power in the CIA and on Wall Street and practically every level of the business world. It’s not only Skull and Bones. The Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations have always been influential. The Bilderberg Group is supposed to be so powerful it can influence worldwide politics itself. Margaret Thatcher’s career took off like a rocket after she attended a Bilderberg meeting. The same thing happened to Tony Blair after he was invited to a meeting in Vouliagmeni, Greece. In 1991, David Rockefeller invited Arkansas governor Bill Clinton to a meeting in Baden-Baden, Germany.”

“Now wait a minute. I respect Bill Clinton and Tony Blair.”

“So do I. I’m not accusing them. I’m just trying to show you the influence a secret society could wield. Probably the great majority of the members of these societies are totally in the dark about the activities, unaware of the elite groups in their organizations. I don’t even know which groups are part of the Cabal. Maybe none of the ones I mentioned. Maybe all of them.” He shrugged. “Etienne didn’t know how many secret societies were involved. He only knew what Jules had told him, and that was that the Cabal comprised the highest echelon from several organizations, and that these elite members used their societies to influence the world economy.”

“How?”

Nathan shrugged. “How the hell do I know? But didn’t you find it weird that the gas prices went up so high recently when there was no lack of oil?” Eve had been as angry as everyone else at that increase at the gas pumps. “And how could they do that?”

“Use your imagination. There are supposed to be members of OPEC, Wall Street shakers, and Japanese computer executives in the Cabal.”

“Supposed? That’s not good enough. Give me names.”

“If I knew who, do you think I’d be here? I’d be back home in New Orleans writing my story.” Nathan’s gaze searched their faces. “Dammit, it’s true. What else can I tell you? I watched the stock market before and after the Greenspan announcements. There was always a flurry of activity from the same banking quarters, and fortunes were made as soon as the announcement came through. They know what’s going to happen before it happens. Secret societies pervade our past and our present. They have power in every quarter. Almost every U.S. president of the twentieth century was a Freemason. Hell, George Washington’s inauguration ceremony was Masonic. Lyndon Johnson’s advisors were in the Council on Foreign Relations when he escalated the Vietnam war. The first peace negotiator for Bosnia was Lord Carrington, chairman of the Bilderberg Group.“ Nathan drew a deep breath. ”Okay, don’t accept what I’m telling you as gospel, just look at the possibility.

When men of power get together, it’s natural for them to try to combine and push to increase that power. They work in the dark and behind the scenes, because if the public knew they were being manipulated they’d be yelling to the high heavens. It’s been that way since the first secret societies in Egypt and Samaria in the B.C.‘S. The Cabal’s worked for decades to form a spider-web of tremendous power, and they’re not going to let that power be jeopardized.“

Galen shrugged. “I don’t see how any organization composed of such powerful, renowned figures could even meet without attracting attention.”

“They usually don’t meet. They communicate by messenger and, more recently, on the Internet. The only exception is when something really big is going down and they have to get together to form a clear-cut majority. When they do meet, they schedule it at a place and time where it seems natural that they would all be present.

Like a royal wedding. According to Etienne, the last meeting was at the Summer Olympics. No one suspected that they were there for anything else but to cheer on their national teams.”

“And was Etienne recruited by the Cabal?”

“No, his brother tried to persuade the Cabal to accept him, but they didn’t believe he was good material. However, they had a gem in Jules. Etienne said Jules was brainwashed until he believed that everything the Cabal said and did was right, that a strong guiding hand was necessary to preserve peace and the status quo. He became their dirty-tricks expert.”

“Assassin?”

Nathan nodded. “He was trained in a terrorist school in Libya, but he developed his own techniques. He became an expert, and worked for the Cabal for ten years before the Bendy murder.”

“Murder? You’re sure he was murdered?”

“Etienne said he was there when it happened, and I have no reason to think he lied to me.”

“I thought you said he was refused by the Cabal.”

“But Jules trusted him and took him along on a number of jobs. Etienne was no problem to Jules until it came to Bently. Something bothered him about the Bently killing.”

“What?”

“He wouldn’t tell me. He just said it was wrong, and that why the Cabal was doing it was wrong, too. He didn’t like the murder, and he didn’t like bringing the skeleton back two years later. It must have worried him seriously to cause him to break with a brother he’d previously always followed blindly.”

“But not enough to go into detail.”

“He still hoped to change his brother’s mind about the Cabal, and he only wanted to use me as a safety net in case he couldn’t do it. He said someone had to know about the Cabal and stop them. He said we had to hurry.” He paused. “He was worried about something that Jules had been ordered to do in Boca Raton. He kept saying that we had to stop them before October twenty-ninth.”