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Chapter Nineteen

Not one to toot my own horn, but I love this line: “I dreamed about way back on my mission in Nebraska, when it was nothing but spirituality and corn on the cob all summer long.”

In one of the in-between drafts (after Tangled Web but before the final version of The Counterfeit) Isabella originally showed up here and told them most of the details of the Illuminati conspiracy. It was changed to give Eric and Rebekah more of a chance to figure things out on their own.

Here’s a scene from that draft: that morning, Isabella takes them from the hotel and they stop somewhere to eat breakfast. She lays out a lot of details.

In pop culture, the Illuminati appears in many varied shapes. Most notably, Dan Brown’s version (in Angels and Demons) is very ideological; specifically, anti-catholic. Mine is certainly not, partly because I was trying to distance my book from Dan Brown, but also because the stuff I read on the Illuminati simply didn’t support that.

In truth, the Illuminati, as created by Adam Weishaupt in 1776, did actually exist. It’s (as Dan Brown would say) a matter of historical record. However, historians generally agree that the group flourished only briefly, and was quickly quashed by law enforcement. I can’t remember the exact dates (and I’m too lazy to look them up again) but the Illuminati’s heyday was much shorter than even twenty-five years. It was begun, grew rapidly (due largely to piggybacking on the Freemasons) and was shut down in a major government raid.

Now, conspiracy theorists claim that the group just went underground. That’s where the good stories come from. But historians claim the group is long dead.

My version of the Illuminati (which, like all good conspiracy theories, follows closely to some evidence and varies widely from other) is a much more practical Illuminati. I really have a hard time believing in long-standing collective hatred of the Catholic church, being passed down from father to son over hundreds of years. But I have no trouble at all believing in the possibility of a good-old-boys club, where the super-rich scratch each other’s backs. So, that’s the route I took.

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