The Pinocchio Syndrome

by David Zeman

  “Specialists, yes,” Grimm said. “Working in teams, under strict security conditions. Under cover, of course. Some dressed as gas men or water company men. That sort of thing.”

  He yawned slightly. “That was part of the plan from the beginning. Ingestion had to be quick and easy. Also, the half-life of the chemical had to be extremely short, so it would leave no trace in the tissues of the subject. And, as you see, the symptoms are so bizarre that medical observers are inclined to view the disorder as internal, like a birth defect or a genetic anomaly. Diseases like acromegaly and Elephant Man’s Syndrome come immediately to mind.”

  Karen nodded. She had heard this theory expressed over and over again by the medical experts she had interviewed.

  “So you’re saying,” she concluded, “that the entire Pinocchio Syndrome epidemic is a terrorist attack on a grand scale?”

  “Vigilante act might be more precise,” Grimm said. “Through the Syndrome Goss out-terrorizes the terrorists. Annihilates them, in fact.”

  “Because the disease is always fatal,” Karen said.

  “Correct.”

  Karen thought for a moment. “Why didn’t Goss just murder the people he wanted to get rid of?”

  “Simple,” Grimm said. “Murder attracts attention. Genocide attracts even more attention. But no one questions a dread disease. They see it as an unfortunate fact of life. Like cancer, like AIDS.”

  “I see,” Karen said quietly.

  “With a disease you can kill as many people as you like,” Grimm said, “and no one will smell a rat.”

  ————

  “MICHAEL, HOW could you?” Ingrid was staring at Michael through eyes wide with horror.

  “How could I what?” Michael asked, playing for time. “What are you talking about?”

  “I heard,” she said. “That voice on the phone. You and Goss.” The tears stood out angrily, like glinting beads of rage, on her cheeks. “You’re going to let him murder your own wife. How could you?”

  Michael moved toward her, his hands held out as though to enfold her and entreat her. “Ingrid . . .”

  “You’re a monster,” she said. “You and that madman. What did you do, Michael? What girls was he talking about? What do they know about you?”

  “Ingrid, you’re misunderstanding the whole thing. If you’ll just calm down and let me explain . . .”

  She stood her ground. “What girls? What did you do? Oh, Michael, this is terrible. I used to have my doubts about you. About what happened to Mother . . . but I never believed it. I trusted you. I believed in you. How could you?”

  She was holding her ground, but her love made her vulnerable to his outstretched arms. She seemed to wilt as he came closer. When he embraced her at the doorway to his room, she trembled helplessly in his arms. She hated him now, but she wanted him to comfort her.

  “Ingrid, this is all a misunderstanding,” he said.

  “My God, you had us all fooled,” she said. “Michael, I diapered you. I watched you grow. I gave you everything. How could you?”

  “Ingrid, you don’t understand.” He petted her shoulder.

  “Wait till Daddy hears,” she said. “It will break his heart.”

  He gripped her shoulder as though to turn her toward his room. Then he curled his arm around her neck and grabbed his own wrist with his right hand, completing the stranglehold.

  “Michael . . . Michael!”

  She struggled, gasping for air and flinging her heavy limbs against him. But he held her tighter, dragging her into his room with the leverage of his tall body and superior strength.

  73

  —————

  KAREN’S MIND was fuzzy from the long trip, and she had not eaten in several hours. She was struggling to take in the enormity of what Grimm was saying.

  “I have a question,” she said.

  “Ask it.”

  “If you’re trying to paralyze a segment of the population that might carry out terrorist acts, how do you avoid affecting everyone else in the vicinity? How do you target your individuals?”

  A low laugh sounded in the backseat. “You still don’t understand, do you?”

  Karen’s hands froze around the wheel of the car.

  “You don’t target individuals,” she said. “You wipe out populations. Am I right?”

  “Good girl.”

  She had gotten off 395 and was slowing for a light.

  “Take Canal Street to Independence,” Grimm said.

  She did as she was told. There was little traffic. It was too late. She saw a D.C. traffic cop watching her as she took the left turn. She drove slowly.

  “I take it,” she said, “that the outbreaks last fall and winter were deliberately limited in scope.”

  “Correct,” Grimm said. “You were right on the money in your editorial. The lack of spread was a clear indicator that the disorder was toxic.”

  “How were the various pockets targeted?” Karen asked.

  “Random, mostly. There is a world map in Colin Goss’s office in Atlanta. The various areas are marked. He was experimenting with technique, with procedure.”

  “But since February the focus has been mainly on Africa and the Middle East and South Asia,” Karen observed.

  “That’s part of the larger plan.”

  Karen thought this over. The hub of the terrorist world was the Middle East, with South Asia and North Africa as spokes radiating from it.

  “What about Everhardt and Palleschi?” she asked.

  “They were given the Syndrome to get them out of Michael Campbell’s way. That was the first step in the plan.”

  “Why do it in such a public way?” Karen asked. “Why not get them out of the way quietly?”

  “Goss threw the health authorities Everhardt and Palleschi intentionally. He wanted them to see a case of the Syndrome up close. He knew they would do everything in their power to understand it and solve it, because the victims were high profile. He doubted they would succeed, but he wanted to be sure.”

  Karen thought for a moment. “And exposing the two of them?”

  “The simplest thing in the world,” Grimm said. “Security on the vice president is extremely lax. As for Palleschi, there was no security at all, really.” Grimm yawned. “Everhardt got it in his office. A glass of water he thought was from the water cooler. Palleschi ordered a glass of Valpolicella at a wine bar.”

  “So that’s why there were only two victims in Washington, while all the other outbreaks involved hundreds or thousands,” Karen said.

  Grimm smiled. “Correct. Goss wanted to embarrass the administration, wanted to keep them confused. It worked, as you saw.”

  Karen shook her head. In her wildest nightmares about political life, notions such as these had never occurred to her. Grimm was tossing them off as though he was reading a weather report.

  “Why did the epidemic disappear in America after January?” she asked.

  “Goss wanted to build support for Campbell and the president. His own candidacy was bolstered by the public’s fear of the Syndrome. Take away the fear and you take away Goss’s luster. As you can see, it worked.”

  The car was approaching the southeast prospect of the Washington Monument. The huge needle rose eloquently against the night sky.

  “Pull over just after the corner of 15th,” said Grimm. “There’s a free parking area there.”

  Karen did as she was told. She looked at Grimm in the rearview mirror.

  “You spoke of a larger plan,” she said.

  Grimm nodded. “Not even a man with Goss’s power could hope to bring off a thing like this alone. Sooner or later he would be found out. The technology to carry off the plan is one part. The ability to cover it up is the second part. Without that, it wouldn’t succeed.”

  “To cover it up?”

  “That, and also to get the public to accept it. The concept is well known. To get the public to accept the murder of Kennedy you have the Warren Commission. To get the pu
blic to accept Vietnam you have the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. To get the public to accept Iran-Contra you have the congressional hearings and Oliver North. Only the government can really pull the wool over people’s eyes and keep it there indefinitely.”

  Karen nodded. She had often had analogous ideas about the cover-ups that are never unmasked. For reasons only a philosopher or an expert in mass psychology could understand, government has a primordial connection to untruth. One might even speculate that human beings create governments in order to shield them from unpleasant truths. A government is like a parent whose responsibility is to provide presents on Christmas morning and to hide from its children the fact that there is no Santa Claus.

  “I understand,” she said. “But why did he take steps that hurt his own poll numbers?”

  “Can’t you guess?”

  “He wanted Campbell to be vice president,” Karen said.

  “Good for you. And why did he want that?”

  Karen shook her head. “I’m not sure.”

  “Goss himself is too controversial,” Grimm said. “He has many enemies. If he managed to force a special election, there was always the chance he would lose. It was safer to put a hero in the White House, a man whose integrity no one doubted. Campbell filled the bill.”

  Karen nodded.

  “Are you ready to hear the rest?” Grimm asked. “I’m counting on you. You’re going to be the only one.”

  “I’m ready,” Karen said.

  “The president will be eliminated not long after Campbell takes office as vice president. Michael Campbell will become president of the United States.”

  “Ah.” Karen was amazed by the enormity of the deception Goss planned to carry out, and by the cruelty of the plan.

  “Then what?” she asked.

  “Campbell will choose a lackluster Cabinet, the usual Washington hacks,” Grimm went on. “But in a surprise move he will name Goss to a non-Cabinet post that doesn’t need congressional approval. National security advisor or something. Like Nixon with Kissinger. He’ll use as an excuse the notion that he needs a strong antiterrorist in his administration for these perilous times.”

  Karen nodded. “I see.”

  “Then the Syndrome will spread throughout the Muslim world,” Grimm said. “It will wipe out every group from which terrorists have sprung since the creation of Israel. It will wipe out every terrorist nation. For all practical purposes the Arab world will cease to exist.”

  ————

  “INGRID, LISTEN. Just listen.”

  Michael squeezed hard. He heard a groan as Ingrid fought for breath.

  “Ingrid, you don’t know what you’re saying. You’ve got to listen to me.”

  Squeezing with all his might, twisting hard, he pulled her toward the floor like a cowpuncher with a calf. She kept struggling. Her hands scratched desperately at his arm.

  He fell alongside her. A part of his mind thought of Judd, of when he might return, of what he had to do. The rest of him thought,This is my sister. My only sister. He squeezed harder. He just wanted it to be over.

  On the walls were photos of the Campbell family. Michael as a child on his mother’s knee, and on Ingrid’s knee. Michael and Stewart in their little sailboat. Michael and his father standing on the shore with the Bay in the background. Mother and Ingrid, Mother and Stewart. And then, after Mother’s death, Susan.

  Susan with Michael in the hospital. Susan on her bicycle, riding alongside Michael as he trained for the Olympics. Susan and Ingrid laughing in the kitchen with their matching aprons that said “Oh How I Suffer.” Susan with Judd on the porch glider, looking like father and daughter.

  Please, God. Michael felt the shudder of his sister’s convulsions.Please .

  He knew he was at the boundary of the unbearable. Except for Susan, Ingrid was the woman he loved most in the world.

  To give himself strength he let his mind wander back to those early years. He thought of Ingrid’s excited, laughing face the day she taught him to ride his two-wheeled bike. Dad was at work that day, and Stewart was away at school. Ingrid took Michael down the street to the flat walkway near the beach and perched him on the bike’s seat. She ran alongside the bike, puffing from the effort and urging him, “Faster, Mikey. Faster!” And he had at last reached that mysterious borderline where the speed of the bike joined his body’s natural sense of balance to make the ride possible.

  Faster, Mikey! Faster! You’re almost there!

  The forgotten thrill came back to him, the breeze on his cheeks as the bike went faster and faster, and finally Ingrid’s face receding as he looked back over his shoulder, Ingrid waving and clapping her hands.Good boy! You’ve got it, Mikey! Good boy!

  The fresh pure wind blew over his face, eclipsing the sudden odors of defecation and death. He flew into that breeze gratefully, the tears drying on his cheeks.

  And so the old memory came to comfort Michael as his sister died in his arms.

  “Ingrid . . . Ingrid . . .”

  He lay beside her for a long time, listening as his own scalded breath began to abate. He clung to her as he had long ago, when as a child he sometimes slept in her bed.

  Then he realized he had to act quickly. Judd would be back in forty-five minutes, perhaps less. He couldn’t leave Ingrid like this.

  Suicide,he thought.Asphyxiation. Hanging. Suicide.

  He picked her up and moved toward the other bedrooms.Mother committed suicide by hanging. Ingrid did the same . . .

  He staggered under her weight, weakened by the struggle he had just been through.

  Depressed over Susan’s abduction,he thought.A mental collapse. She was never strong . . .

  Thinking desperately, he carried Ingrid toward her own bedroom.

  What did she use? A belt. Mother used a belt . . .

  He was at the door of Ingrid’s room. He was remembering his mother’s suicide. She had hanged herself from the beam in the ceiling of her bedroom. There was a similar beam in Ingrid’s room.

  She took Mother as her example,he thought, grunting as he carried Ingrid to the window under the beam.

  Placing the body on the floor, he turned toward the closet and stood thinking. He needed a belt. Ingrid’s own clothes would not be much help. Ingrid was too fat to wear dresses with belts. Perhaps her coats . . .

  Michael suddenly got an inspiration. Ingrid had devoted her life to Judd. Like so many spinsters she was fixated emotionally on her father. If she went over the deep end and killed herself, she might use one of her father’s belts.

  Michael dashed down the hall to Judd’s room and flung open the closet door. Judd’s collection of leather belts hung on a rack alongside his ties. Michael made a quick survey of the belts before choosing a thick one with a sturdy buckle.

  She used her father’s belt,he thought.She had lost her grip, she was acting out of instinct . . .

  He hurried back to Ingrid’s bedroom and knelt beside her. He whipped the belt around her neck and started to lift her up. She was very heavy. His strength almost failed him. But years of conditioning of his upper body came to his rescue.

  Tears were coming out of his eyes. He wondered if he could really go through with this.

  But he heard Goss’s voice,Son, think of her as a soldier who’s given her life in a great war, a soldier who has died for a great cause .

  He lifted Ingrid with a groan.

  A great cause,he thought.

  74

  —————

  “ONCE THE Arabs are neutralized, oil resources will be administered by the Western powers,” Grimm said. “The profits will be divided up in an equitable manner. It will be a windfall for the economy of all the nations involved, especially the Western Europeans. The price of oil has been strangling Europe for three generations. As you may imagine, the Europeans won’t be inclined to protest too much over the deaths of a few hundred million Arabs.”

  “Won’t people be suspicious when the outbreak doesn’t go further?”


  “Were they suspicious when the AIDS epidemic was centered in Africa?” Grimm asked.

  Karen nodded. “I see what you mean.”

  “Of course, some will be suspicious,” Grimm allowed. “But they won’t find out the truth. For one thing, the science behind the Syndrome is too subtle. Goss was light-years ahead of his colleagues when he discovered the principle behind it. But even if someone does get an inkling of what happened, the government will put a lid on it.”

  “It will?”

  “They didn’t find out the truth about Kennedy, did they?”

  Karen shook her head thoughtfully. “No. They didn’t.”

  There was a silence. In the rearview mirror Karen could see that Grimm was wearing a Baltimore Orioles jacket. His disguised head, with the ball cap and the wraparound glasses, looked particularly sinister.

  A nagging question that had been at the back of Karen’s mind for two years now came to her lips.

  “The current political climate has been largely shaped by the World Trade Center attack and theCrescent Queen, ” Karen said. “And, of course, the oil crisis, and the recession. Is Colin Goss powerful enough to have caused the oil crisis?”

  “Certainly.” Grimm spoke with glib assurance.

  “And theCrescent Queen, ” Karen said. “They never did find out who was behind that. Could Goss have had something to do with it?”

  “Notcould he . Instead askDid he.”

  Karen felt her hands go cold. “Did he?”

  Grimm was silent.

  Karen spent a long moment in thought. The things she was hearing were too monstrous to be believed. Yet they fit in with the facts. TheCrescent Queen had created a climate of insecurity that prepared the ground for the greater terror of the Pinocchio Syndrome. The two disasters fit together like pieces of a puzzle.

  Another question now occurred to her.

  “This master plan with the disease,” she said. “Is that where it ends? Destruction of the terrorist world?”

  Again Grimm’s low laugh sounded. “What do you think?”

  Karen’s thoughts were straying to the great experiments in genocide of the past. Hitler, Stalin, Idi Amin, the Kurds in Iraq, Milosevic in Kosovo. Genocide was a habit that was hard to break. Rarely was the damage limited to one group.