The Syndrome (57 page)

“What? In the Olympics? Get out!”

“No—I’m serious. The ’72 Olympics. In Sapporo.”

“That’s fantastic!” she gushed. Paused. And asked: “What’s the biathlon?”

He laughed. “It’s the one where you cross-country ski for ten kilometers, and then you do some target shooting. What’s hard is: by the time you get to shoot, your body’s exhausted. So you have to be in tremendous shape, just to keep your pulse rate slow and steady. Then, when you stop to shoot, you take aim, wait—and squeeze the trigger between the beats of your heart.”

“You can do that?”

“No,” he told her. “That was my dad’s thing. But I can shoot. Or I could if I had a gun. Which, unfortunately, I don’t.” Heading up Beach Drive, he considered how he might buy one without having to suffer through the requisite waiting period. At a flea market, for instance, or at a gun show—or just on the street. There were lots of guns in the ’hood. But there weren’t any flea markets or gun shows in progress at the moment, or none that he knew of, and the idea of he and Adrienne cruising through a black ghetto in their rented Dodge Stratus, looking to get strapped, was … well, a hoot.

Then they were there. They found a parking space a block away and walked. The building was a ten-story, glass-and-brick box with a sign out front, advertising executive rentals. Seeing Adrienne and McBride, a uniformed doorman hopped up from his perch on a low wall to open the door. Inside, a weary-looking, middle-aged man sat behind a desk and halfheartedly asked if he could be of help.

“We’re looking for a tenant—Henrik de Groot,” McBride told him.

The man frowned for a moment, then looked up. “The blond guy—7-G!”

“Right!”

Then he shook his head. “I haven’t seen him in a couple of weeks. I don’t think he’s around. Travels a lot.” Reaching for the in-house phone, he dialed a number and listened to it ring. After a bit, he replaced the handset in its cradle, and shrugged.

Five minutes later, they were back in the car and on their way to McBride’s apartment. Going there was a risk, of course—there was a possibility it was still being watched. But there wasn’t any choice, really. Their only plan—and it wasn’t so much a plan as a notion—was to fly to Switzerland, confront Opdahl and find de Groot before it was too late. How any of that was going to be accomplished, he had no idea. But one thing was certain: he was going to need his passport (Adrienne already had hers)—and his passport was in the refrigerator.

All of his ID was.

That was de Groot’s idea. The Dutchman was in the fire suppression business, retrofitting halon systems with environmentally stable gases. At one of their first sessions, the Dutchman had clucked about the outmoded fire security system in place at the Capitol Towers. “Something gets started in here, I don’t think they’ll put it out. Maybe you should keep your backup discs and tapes in the freezer,” he suggested. “Also any papers you don’t want to lose. They’ll be safe there. It’s waterproof and fireproof.”

“Jeffrey Duran” hadn’t made any backup discs, and the only tapes were those he sent to the insurance company the same day. But he did have a passport and a couple of unused credit cards, so he’d made a show of putting them in a Ziploc bag and burying them under a tray of ice cubes in the freezer. As McBride had hoped, the effort pleased de Groot and helped him build a relationship of trust with his client.

All of McBride’s ID was in the name of Jeffrey Duran, and that was what he’d have to use in Europe. Reestablishing his real identity was going to be a bureaucratic nightmare.

Pulling into the circular drive in front of the Capitol Towers, he told Adrienne to wait in the car. She didn’t want
to, but he knew by now how to push at least a few of her buttons. “They’ll tow the car,” he warned, as he opened the door and got out.

The security guard at the reception desk was a young guy with Buddy Holly glasses, and he recognized McBride, which was good. “Hey, Mr. Duran—where have you been? We haven’t seen you for a while.”

“I went to Florida for a few days,” McBride told him.

“Sweet!”

“Yeah, it was—nice to be in shorts, you know?”

“Lucky you.”

“But now? It’s like I never left.” They laughed. “But, listen, you got a spare key I can use? I left mine in the apartment.”

“No problem,” the kid told him, then bent down, opened a locked cabinet, and removed a key from one of the hooks. “Just don’t forget to bring it back, okay?”

“Ten minutes,” McBride replied, taking the key and heading toward the elevator. While he waited for it to arrive, he looked back to see if the kid was busy on the phone, but no—he was just standing there at the desk, smiling.

A minute later, he stepped out of the elevator on the sixth floor, and walked slowly toward his apartment. He was worried about the man next door—Barbera, the guy in 6-G—but, as it turned out, there was no need to be concerned. The door to 6-G was half ajar, and a country and western tune—
“She’s gone country, look at them boots!”
—emanated from inside. The air was heavy with the smell of paint. Glancing through the doorway on the way to his own apartment, McBride saw a scrawny little guy with a ZZ Top beard, standing on a spattered drop cloth, rolling the ceiling with Shell White. Otherwise, the apartment was empty. The gray wire mesh was gone, and so were the table, the steamer trunks, the wall of electronics equipment, and the Aeron chair. Of Hector Barbera, there was nothing left—except, perhaps, the faint and sickly smell of rotting flesh, buried under the pungent odors of paint thinner and cleaning fluids.

Seeing the apartment’s emptiness, a feeling of relief swept over him, even as he felt a twinge of disappointment. Barbera could have told him things.…

His own apartment was just the way he’d left it, or so at first it seemed. On closer inspection, though, he saw that, with the exception of a few books, there wasn’t a scrap of paper anywhere. Every bill, note, grocery list, and take-out menu—anything on which something might have been written—was gone. So were the computer, and the pictures of his faux family. Anything, in other words, that might have linked him to the Program. It was all gone.

But not the passport and the credit cards, which remained in the freezer under the ice tray. He glanced around, sensing that whatever happened, this was a place he wasn’t coming back to. Then he threw some things in an overnight bag, and let himself out.

At a cyber café off Dupont Circle, Adrienne found a couple of B-sale fares on Swissair that didn’t require advance purchase. The tickets were $484 each, round-trip, including tax—a bargain, considering the cab fare out to Dulles was fifty-five dollars.

“What are you doing with a passport, anyway?” she asked, as the cab made its way north on the Beltway to the Dulles access road. “I thought you didn’t go anywhere—just watched TV all the time.”

“They had to get me back in the States—I mean, they had to get ‘Duran’ back in.”

“From where?” she asked.

“Switzerland.” He frowned. His memory of that time, when Lew McBride segued into Jeff Duran, was beginning to come back. There was an ambulance, he remembered, and whirling lights. He couldn’t move, but he was
moving
, rolling somewhere on a gurney. And he could hear people talking, people with Swiss-German accents—then Gunnar Opdahl whispering
Sh-sh-sh-sh
while Lew McBride lay there, eyes on the ceiling, suffocating. Sometimes, when he
thought of it … McBride’s body lurched in a my oclonic jerk, as if he were falling asleep.

“You okay?” Adrienne asked.

“I was just thinking about something.”

“What?”

He shook his head. She didn’t press it.

The Hotel Florida was a clean, if somewhat down-at-the-heels, nouveau deco
établissement
that looked as if it hadn’t been redecorated since the Seventies. Much of the furniture was composed of chipped black formica, and there was a free-form, salmon-colored ceramic lamp on the bedside table. A blond dresser stood a few feet away, perched on inverted, cone shaped legs. The traditional mammoth Swiss comforter lay like a cloud, on the mod bed.

“It grows on you,” McBride promised, seeing Adrienne’s hesitation.

“But … why is this place even here? Why is there a Hotel Florida in Zurich? Why not the Alpenhorn? Why not the Willem Tell?”

McBride shrugged and opened the door to the balcony, where a gaily painted window box held a tangle of dead vegetation. “Someone had a vision,” he explained.

Their room on the third floor looked out over Seefeldstrasse toward the Limmat River and the Zurichsee. Two blocks away, their rental car was parked around the corner from the tram stop. Every few minutes, a sleek new trolley car bombed down the street, passing beneath their balcony,
heading for busy Bellevueplatz. One squealed toward them even now, rocking around the angled corner, its single headlight fracturing in the mist. McBride closed the door to the balcony, reducing the noise.

Adrienne fell on the bed and yawned. “What time is it?”

“Just after nine.”

“Which is what?”

“Three in the morning, real time.”

She yawned again. “I’m wiped. I didn’t sleep at all on the plane.” This was actually an understatement. In terms of psychokinetic effort, Adrienne had expended a huge amount of energy getting the plane safely across the Atlantic. He knew, because his right arm had borne the brunt of her nervousness. “So, what’s the plan?” she asked, closing her eyes as she subsided into the cool comforter.

“‘The plan’? Well, the plan is: first, we get some sleep—then we go shopping.”

She rolled over on her stomach, and pulled the pillow under her cheek. “Mmmmmn,” she murmured. “That’s a good idea …”

She was sound asleep.

Undressing, he lay down beside her and closed his eyes. It wouldn’t be smart to go hunting for Opdahl, jet-lagged and ragged. He needed a couple of hours …

Opdahl … He remembered being in an ambulance, but he didn’t remember the injury—just the lights flashing across the ceiling. Then a gurney, and Opdahl saying, ‘You’re very brave.’ But he wasn’t brave—not really. And Opdahl wasn’t being encouraging. He was playing with him. Enjoying himself.

“Lew.
Lew!”
Adrienne was shaking him. “You’re dreaming. Wake up.”

His eyes snapped open. Relief surged through him. He’d been dreaming of a man with a tube in his throat—not a real man, but a man without a face. Or a man whose face had been torn away. The man was on television, in close-up, and the
image terrified him. Even now, he couldn’t get away from it: the empty visage stuck with him, shimmering in front of his eyes, pixilated and slightly blue. The man’s eyes, wide with horror, the venous pulp where his face should have been—

But no. That was a dream. And here he was in the Florida, looking at Adrienne looking at him with a worried look. Beyond the windows, a tram clattered and whined toward the train station.

“Let’s go out,” he suggested, “before the shops close for lunch.”

“They close for lunch?” Adrienne asked.

“Yeah—for a couple of hours, usually.”

“Think of that,” she muttered, having never been to Europe before.

Downstairs, the woman at the desk seemed charmed by McBride’s German. He was looking for a Jäger-store, he told her.
Kin Speicher fiir Jäger

“Of course,” the woman replied and, taking out a small brochure, marked the way in ballpoint pen from the hotel to the
Speicher
in question.

“What’s a spiker?” Adrienne asked, as they stepped out into the cold, and began walking in the direction of Zurich’s Old Town.

“It’s a store,” McBride told her, wishing he’d brought a pair of gloves.

“What kind of store?” she wanted to know.

“A store for hunters—a Jäger store.”

This confused her even more. “You mean, like—bows and arrows, fishing rods and—”

“Shotguns. Yeah, like that,” he said.

They continued walking for a while, until Adrienne stopped and turned to him. “Shotguns?” she asked. McBride nodded, and they resumed their stroll, crossing the Quail Bridge into the city’s historic quarter. Once again, and suddenly, Adrienne stopped. “The other day—when you said you were going to kill Opdahl so that everything could come
out in court—and I’d be your lawyer—that was crazy, right? That was a joke. I mean, it’s not the plan—not really!”

He leaned on the parapet overlooking the Zurichsee, where a flotilla of white swans glided on the glassine surface. His breath came and went in clouds. Finally, he said, “You’re trying to tell me you didn’t pass the Swiss bar?”

She shook her head. “Didn’t come close. Never took the test. Don’t speak the language. Don’t know where I am.”

He nodded thoughtfully, and shrugged. “Well, it wasn’t much of a plan, anyway.” Then he smiled. “Don’t worry,” he told her, “I’m not going to shoot anybody—unless they try to shoot me first.”

Two minutes later, they were standing in front of an old-fashioned store, looking in the window at a diorama of the hunt, replete with baying hounds, plunging horses, and men with post horns. Going inside, they were greeted by a stuffed bear, rearing on its hind legs. A wild boar’s head bristled from the wall behind the cash register, while a herd of dead stags stared forlornly from the wall.

Adrienne rolled her eyes. “You can’t just buy a gun,” she told him.

“You can in Switzerland,” he replied, studying the handguns that lay beneath the glass counter. “The country’s armed to the teeth. In fact, there’s a law: every male between twenty and forty, or something like that,
has
to own a gun.”

“Get out!”

“And not just a gun,” he added. “An assault rifle. It’s the law.” He paused. “Listen,” he said, “there’s a department store just up the block. Would you get me something?”

She nodded. “Sure. What?”

“Curtain rods.”

She didn’t think she’d heard right. Asked him to repeat it. He did. “What kind of curtain rods?”

“Any kind,” he told her. “As long as they are in a box and aren’t more than five feet long. And I’ll probably need some packing tape, too.”

Before she could ask if he wanted cafe curtains or doilies
as well, an elderly clerk came to the counter and inquired, in perfect English, if he could be of help.