The Syndrome (61 page)

“Ergreifen Sie ihn!”
Opdahl screamed, fumbling in the desk for the Sig Sauer that he knew was there.

The guards blitzed, rushing the American even as he backpedaled with the curtain rod box in his hands—the box exploding as Gunther moved to brush it aside, sending a spray of blood and bits at the opposite wall. The fat guard, Heinz, stopping on a pfennig, eyes ballooning, hands in the air, as McBride swung the shotgun in an arc and Opdahl began blasting with the Sig Sauer, hitting everything in the room but his target. And McBride working the slide with real composure now, his left hand sliding back and forth on the barrel as if it were the fingerboard of a Stratocaster, pumping and firing, pumping and firing, taking Morgan out at the knees even as the surgeon bolted for the door—then turning on Opdahl whose mouth made a little O of horror in the split second that he had to think about things, just before McBride plastered his forehead on the acoustical tiles overhead.

Relative silence.

Heinz quaking, hands in the air, eyes shut. Morgan weeping in a pool of blood beside the door, his knees blown out, going into shock. Gunsmoke, and the smell of gunsmoke. McBride exhaling for the first time in a long time, the air sweeping out of his lungs in a single burst. Then a soft plop as a chunk of Opdahl’s corpus callosum fell to the desk from the ceiling, landing like a load of birdshit on the financial pages of the
Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

McBride turned to the guard. “Stay.” Then he went to Opdahl’s desk and, picking up the phone, told the receptionist to connect him to the Belvedere Hotel. Which she did. A moment later, he had Adrienne on the line.

“What’s happening?” she demanded. “I heard—”

“Get the car out front,” he told her.

“But—”

“Do it
now
.” Then he hung up the phone, and turned to the
guard. “Let’s go,” he told him, taking the man by the back of his collar, and placing the barrel against the side of his head.

Out to the corridor, where half a dozen birdlike patients fell back, gaping, as McBride and the security guard emerged from Opdahl’s office. Moving with slow deliberation, McBride escorted the guard past astounded nurses, aides, and doctors, to the front doors. Which opened with a
whoosh
on what was now a dank, gray afternoon—with no Adrienne in sight.

Standing on the front steps of the clinic with the shotgun jammed against the guard’s jaw, McBride considered his options—which were few. Either she’d come, or she wouldn’t. And if she didn’t, it was over.
He
was over. Because the police were on their way, or soon would be, and—

Suddenly, she was there, the BMW pulling into the courtyard, windshield wipers slapping back and forth, headlights blazing, the door flying open on the passenger’s side. And Adrienne leaning toward him across the seat, eyes like saucers.

“Hop in,” she told him.

Davos was a zoo.

Not the cozy alpine village that Adrienne had imagined, but a long and noisy strip of glitzy discotheques and bars, restaurants and ski shops. Concrete condo blocks rose up against the ring of peaks around the town, while a sprawl of cute chalets lit up the hillsides. Seeing it for the first time made her think that someone—it could only have been Satan—had decided to re-create Route 1 in Paradise. And it
went on and on, stretching down the valley to the sister towns of Davos Dorp and Davos Platz.

Despite the commercialism, there was nowhere for them to stay. Besides the usual tourists, and those in town to ski, there were hundreds of support people for the World Economic Summit, an equal number of journalists, and crowds of demonstrators protesting everything from “Frankenfood” to cloning. They tried half a dozen hotels, and everything was booked—even the luxe Hotel Fribourg, which served as the Summit’s headquarters.

High on a hill above the town, the Fribourg looked like a gigantic wedding cake, with each of its two hundred rooms boasting a balcony with white columns. Even before they got there, they could see that access was severely restricted. All the drives and walkways were cordoned off, and there were Swiss soldiers at checkpoints along the road. A crowd of protesters craned at the barricades lining the main drive, as an opening was made for a limousine. Polite shouts (it was a Swiss demonstration, after all) followed the limo in its crawl up the hill, the Mercedes’s smoked windows hiding its occupants. Midway between the protesters and the hotel was a clutch of trucks and vans, servicing CNN, the BBC, and a dozen others. Cables snaked across the snow, feeding batteries of lights and microphones, cameras, and satellite dishes. Here and there a lone figure stood, bathed in a cone of white light, narrating the scene to millions of invisible observers.

Where de Groot was, was anyone’s guess. If he’d taken a temporary apartment in the area—as he had in D.C.—he could be almost anywhere. In Davos or Klosters, or even in one of the smaller towns in the area: Wiesen or Langeise.

All Adrienne and McBride could do was look, going door to door from one hotel to another, poking their heads in the bars and restaurants, hoping to spy a tall and powerfully built Dutchman with a pelt of thick blond hair. It seemed hopeless—until McBride had a minor inspiration.

“Music …,”
he muttered.

“What?” Adrienne rubbed her eyes. It was almost 2 a.m.

“De Groot’s into trance music. He wanted me to go to a club with him. I had to tell him I didn’t get out that much.”

She looked puzzled. “What’s trance music?”

“Big pants—DJs and raves. ‘Special K’ and light sticks. Very big in Europe.”

“It is?”

He smiled. “I guess baby lawyers don’t have time to dance.”

“Oh? And how would you know anything about it?”

He looked embarrassed. “MTV.”

Somehow, the loud monotonous music and thrashing bodies of the discotheques only served to emphasize Adrienne’s fatigue. They wandered in and out of Club Soda, Trax, Rum-plestiltskin, and the Kit Kat Klub. McBride’s German came in handy as the inquiry was put to bouncers, bartenders, DJs, and the occasional fatigued dancer stumbling to the sidelines. At successive clubs, he honed his rap about the person they were searching for and by the time they hit the Kit Kat, he was fast and efficient: they were looking for a Dutchman, a big guy from Rotterdam, yellow hair cut short, good-looking, chain-smoker—ever seen him?

No, no and maybe, with half of the people they asked too stoned to remember. But the DJ at Rumplestiltskin helped them out by writing down a list of discotheques where “trance” was played, or failing that, a close relative—“house music.” But no one at any of the places they visited knew Henrik de Groot by name or description.

“We could sleep in the train station,” Adrienne suggested. “Or in the car. I’m whacked.”

McBride nodded. “Okay, but just a couple more.”

By the time he’d drawn a line through three more clubs on the DJ’s list, the night was shading toward dawn and the discos were closing, disgorging rowdy clusters onto the streets, their laughter piercing the cold morning air. He was about ready to pack it in—and so was Adrienne who, game and uncomplaining,
was nevertheless dazed by fatigue, so tired that occasionally she failed to pick up a foot and stumbled.

“One more,” McBride said, “and then we’ll get some coffee.”

And that’s when he saw it:

and beneath those words, a circular sign displaying a dizzying pattern of silver and black concentric circles in the center of which a neon eye winked on and off. Chase lights zoomed around the circles like Pac-Men run amok. McBride stared so long and hard that when the eye blinked off, its afterimage floated on the inside of his eyelid.

“Hey,” he said, heading toward the sign at a trot, pulling Adrienne along with him.

“What?” Adrienne asked.

“He used to come here.”

“How do you know?”

“He had a matchbook. On top of his cigarettes. Menthol cigarettes. I remember seeing it—when I was Duran.”

She gave him a funny look.

Inside, the waitresses and bartenders were sitting at the bar, cashing out over cigarettes and coffee.
“Geschloten,”
one man said, a silver barbell bobbing on the end of his tongue. He gestured toward the dingy expanse behind him. A dark-skinned older man with a ponytail ran a huge vacuum cleaner over a grubby black floor stenciled with disintegrating silver stars.

“I’m looking for someone,” McBride said. A spiky-haired waitress with silver lipstick opened her mouth, and McBride cut her off. “No jokes. I’m looking for a Dutchman. Big guy. Blond hair. His name’s Henrik.”

“Sure,” the waitress said. “I know Henrik. He’s here a lot—unless he’s traveling.”

“Was he here tonight?”

“Yeah. He left an hour ago.” She frowned. “Is he a friend of yours?”

“I’m his therapist,” McBride told her.

She nodded, as if this made perfect sense. “Well, you got that right—Henrik is one sick fuck.”

“You know where he’s staying?” Adrienne asked.

The waitress gave them an evaluating look. “Maybe … is he in trouble?”

McBride made a sort of hapless gesture. “I wouldn’t be here at seven in the morning if—”

“He’s in the Alpenrösli flats—on the way to Klosters.”

The man with the barbell in his tongue looked surprised. “And how do you know that?”

“Fuck off,” she replied.

The Alpenrösli condominiums were in a half-timbered building on a hillside just outside of town. The structure housed four self-catering flats that were rented out by the week or the month, and a caretaker’s flat below.

“We are complete,” said the gray-haired woman who lived on the lower floor.

“We’re looking for Mr. de Groot,” McBride told her.

The woman shrugged. “Of course. Number 4—but he doesn’t come home yet. All night, he’s dancing, and then I think he goes to work.”

“And where is that?”

The woman shook her head. “I don’t ask.”

They sat in the car in the parking lot outside the Alpenrösli and waited, turning the heater on and cranking it up whenever they couldn’t stand the cold any longer or the windows steamed up. They took turns napping (there was nothing else they could do), and Adrienne went out for sandwiches at noon, walking halfway into town. By two p.m., the sky had darkened to the color of a deep bruise, and there was still no sign of de Groot. An hour later, the mountains were rumbling with thunder, and a soft snow had begun to fall.

“Maybe it’s time for Plan B,” McBride suggested.

“And what is that?” Adrienne asked.

McBride shook his head. “I dunno—I was hoping you did.” In fact, Plan B was the police. It was their only option. But after what had happened at the clinic, no one was going to listen to them. By now, they were almost certainly the objects of a massive manhunt. If taken into custody, there’d be a million questions about the slaughter at the clinic, before anybody was going to listen to their theory about Jericho. And by the time they did listen, it would be too late.

Lights began to flicker on across the valley at 4:15 in the afternoon. Cramped and cold, McBride felt as if his legs were about to fall off at the knees, even as a carbon monoxide headache gathered at the back of his head. And then, quite suddenly, he was there—
de Groot was there
, head down, trudging up the street, wearing jeans, boots and a shearling jacket. In each hand, a plastic supermarket bag. “There he is,” McBride said, suddenly sitting up behind the wheel.

They watched the Dutchman through a screen of falling snow, as he pushed open the gate to the Alpenrösli and tramped up the exterior stairs. Then he was out of sight, presumably inside Apartment 4—which was on the top floor in the back.

“Stay here,” McBride ordered, pushing the button that unlocked the trunk, and opening the driver’s door.

“Are you out of your mind?” Adrienne demanded. “I’m not going to stay here!”

He leaned toward her, and brushed her lips with his own. “Watch my back.”

Not waiting for an answer, he got out and grabbed the shotgun from the trunk. Then he followed de Groot’s footprints through the snow to the exterior stairs, and climbed to the top. There, he paused at the door to Number 4, took a deep breath, and rapped softly on the door. Then he stood back and waited with the shotgun in his hands, the barrel pointing at the floor. But nothing happened. He rapped again. Still no response. Frustrated, he pounded harder on the door, which swung open of its own accord.

Still carrying the shotgun, he stepped inside the doorway, casting his eyes left and right, listening hard. To nothing. If de Groot was in the flat, he must be standing stock-still, McBride thought, and holding his breath. And if he wasn’t in the flat …

Entering the living room, McBride noticed a table with half a dozen lightbulbs scattered across it. Little lightbulbs, and all of them broken. Nearby, an electric drill and a glue gun.
What the fuck?

A few steps took him into a truncated hallway—with one door on the left, and another on the right. Opening the door to the left, he found himself looking into de Groot’s bedroom. Which was not so much a place to sleep as it was a sort of quacked-out racist diorama, with crude collages plastered to the wall. Pornographic pictures of black men and young blond women. Desmond Tutu’s head on a chimpanzee’s body. Some UFO photos, and a poster of Nelson Mandela with a circle drawn around his head in Magic Marker, the whole bisected by a diagonal red bar. Nearby, a third collage, consisting of Thabo Mbeki’s head amid a bonfire of worms, with the nightcrawlers rising around the South African president’s cheeks and ears like flames. On the floor beside the bed, a pile of strange and unpleasant zines:
The Odinist, Contre le Boue, Der Broederbond Report.
And on the far wall, facing the collages, simpy and idolatrous portraits of Adolf Hitler and Swiss ufologist Billy Meier.

It’s a stageset
, McBride thought. Prima facie evidence that the occupant’s a “lone nut.” But there was nothing imaginative about it. Like de Groot’s screen memory, the scene in front of him was crude and trite, reminiscent of a cheap television show—a second-rate producer’s idea of a racist’s inner sanctum. If he looked around a bit, McBride was sure he’d find a diary filled with Freudian slips and parapolitical mumbo-jumbo. Maybe a picture or two, with de Groot holding a gun and a copy of
The Turner Diaries.