The Syndrome (27 page)

“‘Jack be nimble,’” Adrienne whispered. Duran nodded his understanding.

Inserting the key, he turned the lock and pushed the door open, half expecting the Bear to fill the space with the fury of a sudden storm. But there was nothing—no movement, and no sound but the distant hum of a refrigerator. Stepping inside,
Duran was surprised to feel the tension within him dissolve. He remembered thinking, when he’d arrived back after the polygraph, how anonymous and generic the place was. But now he felt different.
There’s something about this place
, he thought.
I just like being here.
“C’mon in,” he said, speaking almost boisterously.

Adrienne shushed him, seeing at a single glance that someone had gone to considerable lengths to hide the violence that had taken place the day before. No bodies, no blood. Just a whiff of pine scented cleanser. Moving slowly through the room, looking for any sign of a disturbance, she’d almost given up when she found it: an indentation in the wall outside Duran’s consultation room. And a gouge in the wooden baseboard. You had to know where to look, though. “You see?” she said. “Those are from bullets.”

Duran nodded. “I’m a believer,” he told her. “I was there.” He looked at the damage. “They took the slugs, of course.”

She sighed. “I can see why the police didn’t buy it,” she said. “I mean if someone tells you that there’s a murder, that there are
bodies
, blood—and when they go to take a look, they don’t find anything …” Her voice trailed away. “I mean, who’s going to check for gouges in the woodwork. Who’s going to look any further? I wouldn’t.”

Going to the spot where Bonilla had fallen, Adrienne stared at the floor. Finally, she said, “I don’t get it.”

“What?” Duran asked.

“Any of it. I can see where they might have been able to clean things up in the time it took for the police to get here, but … what did they do with Eddie? And the other man? How did they get them out of the building?”

Duran shook his head, as baffled as she. “Through the garage?” Then he pointed to an end table next to the couch. “Look at that,” he said.

Adrienne frowned. “What?”

“The lamp,” Duran said. “It’s gone. I must have broken it when I hit the guy with it.”

Adrienne shivered. “Where’s your computer?”

“In here.” He led her into the consultation room.

“You drive,” Adrienne said, swiveling the desk chair in his direction.

“What are we looking for?” he asked, sitting down in front of the computer.

“Patient notes. Address books. Whatever we can find.”

He pushed the
Power
button on the CPU, and the computer began to whir and tick, going through its incomprehensible boot up routine. It took a minute for the wallpaper to shimmer into view, then the icons, and finally they heard a fanfare of trumpets. “So—where do you want to go today?” he asked, resting his fingertips on the keyboard.

“Patient notes. Do you have a folder for Nikki?”

Duran nodded. Typing rapidly, he clicked successively on
Start, Find (files and folders)
, and instructed the computer to list everything in the
Sullivan
folder. A moment later, the names of fifty-six files appeared in a little window. Most of them were denominated
Nico
, with a number after her name. Adrienne watched over his shoulder.

“What are the numbers?” she asked.

“First session, second session, third—like that.”

“Go to
Intake
,” she suggested.

Duran double-clicked on the file, then opened it in Word. The Microsoft splash screen appeared on the monitor and, soon afterward, a page consisting entirely of row upon row of numeral ones. Thousands of them. Disbelieving, Duran scrolled down the first page to the second in the file, and then to the third. They were all the same. Finally, he turned to Adrienne. “I don’t understand,” he said.

“Let me take a look.”

“You sure?”

She nodded as she took his seat, and began typing. “When I was in school, I had a part-time job at Dial-a-Geek,” she told him, fingers flying over the keys. “My junior year. I only got Tier One questions, but …” She stopped typing and looked up at him. “We’ve got a problem, Houston.”

“I can see that, but—what is it?”

She pointed at the screen in front of her. He saw that it was a list of the files in the
Sullivan
folder. Scrolling horizontally, she pointed to the last column on the right. It was headed with the word,
Modified
, and under it was a series of dates and times corresponding to each file. The dates were all the same, the times within a minute of one another.
November 14, 3:02
a.m.

“Son of a bitch,” Adrienne muttered.

“What?”

She shook him off. “What’s your other patient’s name?”

“De Groot.” He spelled it for her.

“Is there a de Groot folder?”

“Yeah.”

She typed for a moment, and then sat back as the monitor flickered, and Windows listed the files in the de Groot folder. At a glance, they could see that all of the files had been modified on November 14 at about three o’clock in the morning. Hoping against hope, Adrienne called up
deGroot 13
—only to see that, like the
intake
file in the
Sullivan
directory, it consisted entirely of the numeral 1, repeated thousands of times.

She sighed. “Someone wiped your text files last night,” she explained. “And only your text files.”

Duran couldn’t believe it. “How?”

Adrienne shrugged. “It’s not complicated. I bet if you went into
Programs
, you’d see a little file with a cute name like … ‘Wipeout’ or ‘Textburn.’”

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m not.”

“Someone wrote a program—”

She shook her head. “You can download it from hackers dot com.” She pushed her chair back from the computer, as Duran swore under his breath.

“But the information’s still there,” he insisted. “It doesn’t actually go away.”

“No?” she asked, arching an eyebrow.

“No,” he told her. “It’s like real memory. Even with amnesia, it’s just a question of retrieval. The data’s on ‘the disk,’
somewhere. All that’s changed is that someone’s erased the addresses.”

Adrienne shook her head. “They didn’t erase the addresses. They changed the ‘data’ in them to a lot of ones. That’s their content. That’s what they
say
.” She glanced at the screen. “Unless you made backups?” She gave him a hopeful look.

“In here,” Duran told her, pulling open the drawer on the left side of his desk. Only to find pens, pencils, scissors, and highlighters. A staple remover and paperclips. “I mean, they
were.”

Adrienne looked around, then reached into the wastepaper basket beside the desk. “Is this it?” she asked, showing him a zip disk that someone had crumpled like an empty beer can.

Duran looked at the label, and swore.

“You said you made tapes,” Adrienne reminded him.

Duran nodded.

“So where do you keep them?”

“I don’t,” he said. “I mail them to the—” Suddenly, he winced and groaned. “—ohhh, jeez …”

“What?” Adrienne asked.

Shaking his head, Duran reached into the pocket of his jacket, and produced a cassette tape labeled
De Groot-34.
“I was supposed to mail it, but … everything went haywire.”

“That’s the only one you have?”

Duran nodded.

“What about
that?”
Adrienne asked, with a glance at the answering machine.

He looked at it. “There’s only one message,” he said, tapping the
Rewind
button with his forefinger. Slowly, at first, and then faster, the tape began to rewind, emitting a high and empty whine that reminded Adrienne of Nikki’s robot impersonation:
Rrr-rrr-rrr.
Finally, it snapped to a stop with loud
cli-ick.

“Whoever it is, he’s got a lot to say,” Duran remarked, and hit the
Play
button.

There was a crackling silence, followed by a man’s voice, soft and confidential.
Hello, Jeff … I have a message for you—so it’s important to pay attention, okay? This is for you. Put everything down, and listen carefully …
There was a second silence, and then a low, reverberating sound rose up from the machine, as if a tuning fork had been struck. The signal rose and fell, weakened and pulsed, so that it seemed to come closer and closer, only to withdraw—only to return again.

Puzzled by the noise from the machine, Adrienne listened hard to it, trying to make sense of the sound. But it was impossible—a machine noise that made no sense and gave no hint about its origins. After a while, she gave up on it and turned to Duran in irritation.

Only to find him transfixed.

“Jeff?” She’d never called him that before, and it seemed strange to do so now. Not that he noticed. He remained where he was, entrained by the signal that poured from the answering machine. Taking him by the sleeve, Adrienne spoke again, and again there was no reaction. “It’s a fax, or something,” she explained, tugging gently at his jacket. “Let’s get out of here.”

And still no reaction from Duran—who, she saw, had begun to tremble. Looking closer, she noticed a thin line of foam curling between his lips.

“Hey!” she said, stepping back involuntarily, her voice an urgent whisper. Frightened now, she tried to pull him away from the desk, but it was useless. He was immobile, immovable, a six foot column of quavering stone. “C’mon,” she begged. “Let’s go!” But he couldn’t see or hear her—that much was obvious. His eyes were dilated, the irises gone and the pupils black, as if it were midnight in the darkest cellar, rather than midmorning in his own consultation room.

The tremors were stronger now, a real shaking. And then, to Adrienne’s shock, she saw that he was beginning to bleed, a steady drip that fell from his nostrils to the front of his shirt. She knew what to do—the answering machine was in easy
reach—but there was something wrong with her arms and legs. It was almost as if she were in a waking nightmare, paralyzed by the specter of something that, even then, was slouching toward her from the cellar.

And the blood was coming faster now, a steady drip that fell to the floor and spattered her shoes—so that, instinctively, she jumped back. And by that movement, broke whatever spell had been upon her. With a gasp, she slapped the buttons on the answering machine until the sound stopped.

“Jesus,” Duran said in a dazed voice. “Look at that.” He was swaying slightly, and staring at the blood on his shirt-front. “I got a nosebleed,” he told her.

Now it was Adrienne’s turn to shake as she took the telephone from him, and hung it up. Pulling a tissue from the Kleenex box on the desk, she gave it to Duran. “From now on,” she said, “if there are any phone calls or messages—let me handle them.”

Duran gave her a puzzled look, then turned his face to the ceiling. “Whatever …” he mumbled, keeping his head back. “Who was that, anyway?”

“You don’t remember?”

He shook his head, still facing the ceiling. “No.”

An idea occurred to her. “Well … let’s just see.” Lifting the handset on the telephone, she dialed *69. Then she grabbed a pen, and began to write on a Post-it, as an electronic voice revealed that: “The last number to call your telephone was 202-234-8484.” Hanging up, she showed the number to Duran, but it didn’t mean anything to him.

“We can still use your computer,” she told him, sitting down in front of the monitor.

“What for?” he asked, watching as she double-clicked on the AOL icon.

“There’s a reverse telephone lookup at any who dot com. You give them the number, they give you the address.” Duran watched over her shoulder as she filled in the appropriate windows, providing the telephone number and area code that
*69 had given her. Together, they watched and waited as the hourglass floated in the center of the monitor.

Waiting for reply Transferring document 1% 2% 3% 26% 49% Query result
The words Residential listing appeared, and under them the following information:

Adrienne frowned. “Who’s Hector Barbera?” she asked.

Duran stared at the information for a long moment, then held up a hand, and whispered, “We’re in 6-E.”

It only took a moment for Adrienne’s eyes to widen. Then Duran picked up the phone and, shaking off her silent objection, dialed the number listed for Barbera. Soon, they could hear it ringing next door—a long, slow trill that came and went. After the sixth ring, Duran replaced the handset in its cradle.

“No one’s home,” he told her.

She nodded, suddenly relieved.

“You know how to pick a lock?” he asked.

She grimaced in reply.

“Doesn’t matter,” Duran told her. “Wait here.”

“Where are you going?”

“Health Club.”

“What?” She was about to ask him if he was out of his mind, but then, it occurred to her that she already knew the answer to that question. Of course he was: that was the whole point.
“Why?”

But he was gone and, for the moment, she was alone in the apartment. Alone with the refrigerator’s hum, and with the changing light as clouds drifted across the sun. And not just that—there was another sound that she couldn’t quite place, and could barely hear, a low tone. Room noise, she decided. Or something.

Then Duran was back, carrying a twenty-five-pound dumbbell in his right hand. “Stay with me,” he said.

“But—”

He glanced down the hall to make certain it was empty, then strode to the doorway of Apartment 6-F. Standing about three feet from the door, he drew the dumbbell back, then came around like a discus thrower, slamming twenty-five pounds of chromed steel into the door just above the lock, splintering the jamb.

As the door flew open on its hinges, Duran stepped inside—and what he saw took his breath away. The wall between his apartment and Barbera’s was covered with a gray, wire mesh. In front of the mesh was a long table stacked with electronics equipment: there were oscillators, amplifiers, and receivers, and a cumbersome looking device that reminded Duran of a dental X ray. This last machine was pointed directly at the wall, and was warm to the touch, with a green diode that glowed brightly.