by John Case
An hour later, she was standing in the kitchen, washing up, when she heard him make a call. Turning off the water, she set the plate in the drainer, and listened.
“Yeah, Doc,” he said, “It’s Jeff Duran… right. Fine, thanks. Listen, I just wanted to say—I’ve thought it over, and… I’m in.”
Chapter 27
Shaw telephoned at eight in the morning, waking Adrienne even as Duran pulled a pillow over his head.
“We can do it on Tuesday,” he told her. “I’ve got Nick Allalin on board—he’s the neurosurgeon—and I’m lining up the O/R. I may have to do a bit of camel-trading, but… we’re there.”
Adrienne swung her legs out of the bed, and sat up. “Tuesday?”
Shaw could hear the disappointment in her voice. “Best I could do,” he said. “Even that—”
“Tuesday’s fine,” she decided. “It’s just that… I was wondering what we’d do in the meantime. New York’s so expensive, and—another three days…”
“Why not go home? Tell Jeff to put his feet up for a while, and—I’m sure you’re missed at Slough, Hawley.”
“Mmmnnn…”
They rolled into Bethany at dusk, and stopped at the supermarket, first thing.
“I wish I could cook something fabulous,” Adrienne said, as she requested a rotisserie chicken from the clerk—who expertly plucked it free of its metal prongs and slipped it into a bag lined in aluminum foil. They continued down the aisle, stopping to get a prepackaged salad. “But the truth is,” she continued, “the kind of things we ate at home, well, I’m not sure you’d be too happy.”
“What,” Duran said. “You mean, like meatloaf? I happen to like meatloaf.”
“Meatloaf—that would be haute cuisine. My personal specialty was tater-tot casserole,” Adrienne said. “And Hamburger Helper was pretty big. Tuna wiggle. Chicken à la king. And you know that thing with marshmallows and coconut that someone always brings to potluck dinners? I used to love that.”
“What’s a tuna-wiggle?” Duran wondered. “Sounds like—”
“Don’t ask. You need noodles, and cream of mushroom soup. And lots of Ritz crackers.”
Returning to the cottage, parking behind it, hearing and feeling the familiar crunch of the pea gravel under their tires—all this gave Adrienne a brief flush of pleasure, a spurious (she reminded herself) sense of coming home.
When they’d eaten, she changed into jeans and a sweater and, accompanied by Duran, went for a walk on the beach, braving the cold. She loved the smell of the sea, the thump of the surf, and the clatter of pebbles dragged by the undertow. But the air was freezing. She could see her breath, and it made her shiver. Noticing this, Duran put his arm around her shoulders, even as he lowered his head against the onshore wind. For a moment, Adrienne stiffened—then, warming, relaxed, sagging into him ever so slightly.
After a while, she asked, “Are you worried about the surgery?”
Duran shrugged.
“You’d be crazy not to be.”
He chuckled. “Well, that’s the point, isn’t it?”
After a couple of hundred yards, they returned to the house, invigorated. “I want to take another look at this,” Adrienne said, sitting down at the dining room table with Nikki’s computer. “I’m sure there’s something on it that I missed.” She waited for the machine to boot up. “You any good with these things?”
Duran shrugged. “I could take a look.” He leaned over her shoulder.
“I’ve been through everything I could think of: calendar, address book, e-mail, accounting programs. I’ve called up every file I can find, and there’s nothing.”
“You look at the temporary Internet files?”
She rolled her eyes. “No.”
Duran sat down beside her. “Go to Start,” he said. “Then Settings. Then Control Panel.” She moved the pointer as he directed. “Now hit the Internet icon and… you see where it says, ‘Temporary Internet Files’… click on the Settings button, and—”
“‘View Files’?”
He nodded. She clicked, and a window appeared with scores of Internet addresses, listed by Name, Address, and Last Access.
The two of them scanned the addresses together, scrolling down the page. Besides the usual assortment of cookies, banner and GIF files, there were lots of URLs, though most of them had been accessed only once or twice:
cookie:[email protected]
cookie:[email protected]
http://www.travelocity.com
http://www.mothernature.com
http://www.theprogram.org
http://www.jcrew.com
http://www.victoriassecret.com
http://www.theprogram.org
“What’s that one?” Duran asked, stabbing his finger at an entry that came up, time and again: cookie:[email protected]
Adrienne shook her head. “It’s like she went there every day.”
Duran nodded. “And who’s Jacko?” he asked.
“Her dog,” Adrienne explained. “I guess she named her computer after her dog.” She continued scrolling.
cookie:[email protected]
cookie: [email protected]
http://www.theprogram.org
http://www.theprogram.org
http://www.theprogram.org
http://www.mothernature.com
http://www.jcrew.com
http://www.theprogram.org
“It’s every day,” Adrienne said. “Sometimes, a couple of times a day.” She looked at Duran. “Shall we?”
He nodded.
She closed the Control Panel windows, clicked on the AOL icon, and waited as it went through its routine. Finally, there was a rush of white noise, some honks and beeps—and she was on.
“You want a beer?” Duran asked, getting to his feet.
“Sure,” she replied. Moving the cursor to the window at the top of the screen, she typed theprogram.org, and hit Return. A moment later, Duran was back with a couple of bottles of Hop Pocket Ale, which he set on the table beside her as he took a seat. Her foot was tapping impatiently on the floor. “I hate how long this takes,” she muttered.
Transferring document: 1% 5% 33%
And then:
Unknown Host
Description:
Could not resolve the host:
“www.theprogram.org” in the URL
“http://www.theprogram.org/”.
Traffic Server 1.1.7
With a groan, she cleared the screen and tried again, typing the address exactly as it was in the Temporary Internet file. Hit Search. Once again, the site started loading. Sipping her beer, she watched the little blue bar filling up at the bottom of the screen: 24% 25% 32%. Finally, the screen flipped, and the same message popped into view:
Unknown Host
Description:
Could not resolve the host…
She swore to herself, and sighed. Took a long sip of beer. “Why don’t you try?” she asked. “I’ll be right back.” Then she got to her feet, stretched, yawned, and wandered off.
Returning to the dining room, Adrienne sat down beside Duran, and asked, “Did I leave out a hyphen, or…”
He was tapping away at the keyboard, and didn’t answer. Annoyed, she peered over his shoulder at the laptop’s screen—and what she saw made her feel as if she’d been given an injection of ice water at the base of her spine. There was a cascade of images and text, scrolling and flipping so fast that she could not focus. No one could. It was moving at warp speed to a strange, electronic beat—a kind of nonmusic.
“What the… what is that?” she asked, but Duran still didn’t answer.
Then the screen shimmied, steadied, stopped. Against an emerald green background, a message began to blink:
Hello, Jeffrey.
Duran typed something, and hit Return.
Where are you?
Once again, Duran typed a brief message, and tapped the Return key. “What is this?” Adrienne asked. “What are you doing?”
“‘Thank you, Jeffrey’? Who are you talking to?” Adrienne demanded. Duran maneuvered the cursor to the AOL logo and double-clicked. The computer emitted its usual Good-bye.
“Is this the Web site?”
But Duran still didn’t answer. Instead he shut the computer off, and picked up something from the counter—something she hadn’t noticed before. This was a transparent plastic sheet imprinted with little squares.
“What’s that?” she asked, reaching for the sheet, which Duran held on to in the dogged and determined way of a toddler. Silent and unsmiling, he tried to pull it away from her.
“What is it? Give it to me!” she insisted, tugging at the sheet to no avail. After a few seconds of wordless struggle, Duran put an end to the contest by closing his free hand around her wrist with such force that she gasped.
“Hey!”
He ignored her complaint, squeezing harder and harder until her knees began to buckle. As she sank toward the floor, he pried open her fingers one by one. Then extracted the piece of plastic from her grasp, and placed it carefully inside the instruction book for Nikki’s computer, making sure that its edges did not protrude. This done, he replaced the instruction book in one of the side compartments of the computer’s carrying case, and zipped the case shut.
Setting it down on the floor he looked at her with a smile that made her take a step back. It was a jack-o’-lantern smile with nothing behind it, a smile as big and empty as the desert.
Jesus, she thought. What’s the matter with him? His grip had been ferocious. What if he’d wanted more than a piece of plastic? What if… For the first time, she was afraid of him, and the fear arrived like a sucker punch, unexpected and sickening. She felt a weakness in her legs, as if she were melting from the ankles up. One minute, he’s so caring and kind… She thought of the arm he had put around her shoulders on the beach. And the next… It’s so easy to forget: he’s insane. A psychopath.
A sharp little sound fell from her mouth and, hearing it, Duran turned to her on his way to the living room. “You okay?” he asked.
He still had a lights-out look in his eyes, and there was something funny about the way that he moved, as if he were gliding on well-oiled tracks. And his voice—his voice was perfectly normal, which was chilling, because his smile was so airless and cold, his eyes so distant and unfocused that it seemed to her that he was gazing toward the horizon.
Adrienne nodded. “Yeah, fine,” she managed, leaning back against the dining room table.
With a shrug, Duran continued into the living room. Sat down on the couch. Turned on the TV.
Call Shaw. Now. She took a sip of beer, and searched through her purse for the scrap of paper on which she’d written the psychiatrist’s home and office numbers. Finding it crumpled in the bottom of the bag, she flattened it out and began dialing. Then she leaned to her left to see if Duran had noticed what she was doing, but no, he was sitting on the couch in the living room, encapsulated in the soft glow and relentless good humor of the television.
Shaw answered on the fourth ring and, as soon as the psychiatrist said hello, she said, “We’ve got a problem.”
“What’s up?”
“Duran,” she told him. “He scared me.” She related what had happened, feeling a little silly because it didn’t sound like much when you said it out loud. But Shaw was understanding.
“Have you ever seen this… lack of affect before?”
“No,” she replied.
“And what’s he doing now? You’re whispering, so I assume he doesn’t know that you’re talking to me. Is he alert? Is he cognizant?”
“Sort of. He’s watching television. But he’s really blitzed, Doc. I mean, I could be a lamp, for all he cares. It’s like I’m not even here.” Shaw was quiet for what seemed a long time—long enough, at least, for her to prompt him. “So… what do you think it is?”
“I don’t know,” Shaw replied. “Sounds like a trance state. And you say he was sitting in front of the computer when—”
“Right.”
“Well, I suppose… it could be some kind of entrainment—”
“‘Entrainment’?”
“—caused by flicker.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m talking about the rhythm of a flashing light—flicker—synchronized to the electrical rhythms of the brain. That’s ‘entrainment.’”
“Okay, but—we’re not in a disco, Doc!”
“I understand that. But you said he was using the computer.”
“Right.”
“Well… most monitors are in a constant state of flicker—because they’re ‘refreshing’ the video signal.” He paused, and asked, “Was there any sound on this Web site, or was it just—”
“There was some kind of sound,” she told him. “Electronic music, or… maybe it was just noise—whatever, it was something.”
Shaw grunted.
“What!?” Adrienne asked.
“Well, it could be a problem with the monitor, but… it could be the Web site. I mean, it’s a classic recipe…”
“What is?”
“What we’re talking about—combining rhythmic pulses of light with certain frequencies of sound.”
“To do what?”
“Induce a trance state. Shamans have been doing it for thousands of years, playing drums around a bonfire. Though I’d hate to think there’s a Web site—”
“But—”
“Let me talk to him,” Shaw suggested.
“Really?”
“Ummm. Can’t hurt to try.”
Adrienne took a deep breath, turned, and called out to Duran in as “natural” a voice as she could manage: “Jeff—Dr. Shaw wants to talk to you for a second.”
When he didn’t reply, she went into the living room, where he was sitting on the couch, watching television. Seeing her, he pressed the Mute button, and looked up. His face had an expressionless and somehow out-of-focus look, as if he were wearing a mask of himself.
“Phone call,” she told him.
They were on the phone for a long time, maybe twenty minutes, with Shaw doing almost all the talking. Duran sat with his eyes closed and every once in a while, said, “Ummmhmmm,” or “Yessss,” his voice low and indistinct. Finally, he put the phone down, and heaved a huge yawn.
“Adrienne? I think Dr. Shaw would like to talk to you now.” His voice sounded normal, if sleepy. “I’m really tapped out,” he explained, handing her the phone. “I think I’m gonna crash.” With a yawn, he turned, and made his way to the bedroom.
Adrienne was astounded, watching him as he disappeared down the hall. “What did you do?” she asked, her voice in an urgent whisper.
“I hypnotized him,” Shaw replied.
“Over the phone?”
“Yes. It wasn’t that hard. He was already in a trance.”
“And—”
“I gave him a couple of posthypnotic suggestions—did he go to bed?”
“Yes.”
“Well, he’ll be fine in the morning. Refreshed, and feeling pretty good about himself.”
“Thanks, Doc.”
“If he gives you any more trouble—and I don’t think he will, but if—the best thing to do is just: walk out. Play it safe. Give me a call, and I’ll take it from there.”
When they’d said good-bye, Adrienne went into the kitchen for a glass of water, then wandered back to the dining room to take another look at the plastic sheet that she and Duran had been struggling over.
Removing the sheet from the computer handbook, she saw that it was embossed with a grid, almost like graph paper, although the spaces were rectangles rather than squares. There were two- or three-hundred of them, she guessed, and judging by its size, it was obviously meant to fit over the screen of Nikki’s computer.
Which it did. Perfectly. Indeed, there were small holes in each corner of the sheet that corresponded to markings on the monitor’s frame.
Placing the sheet over the markings, she saw that it created a precise, transparent overlay.
With the sheet in place, she turned on the computer, signed onto AOL and went to the Web site.
Unknown Host
Just like before. But the grid revealed nothing at all, it spidery lines crisscrossing the error message. She sighed. Duran must have gone to another Web site, while she’d been in the bathroom, brushing her hair. Then she remembered the trick Duran had shown her earlier and, with a little experimenting, she found the icon for the “Temporary Internet Files.” What she wanted, of course, was to identify the site Duran had visited—the interactive one with the Hello, Jeffrey message. It should have been the second site on the list, but, no: the first and second sites were the same.
http://theprogram.org
http://theprogram.org
Which was frustrating because that was the nonsense site, the one Nikki had gone to, the one with the error message. She stared for a while at the letters, wondering what they meant, thinking, Maybe Duran erased the address… But no, he hadn’t. She’d watched him sign off AOL, and close the computer. Then they’d argued. So…
She needed a nerd. And she knew where to find one.
Carl Dobkin was famous for sleeping four hours a night, so if she could get him on the phone, he might be able to talk her down. It was unlikely that he’d be at work, but you never knew with Carl. So she tried Slough, Hawley, punching his name into the voice mail system—which then patched her through to his extension. He wasn’t there and she didn’t leave a message. She knew Carl lived in Potomac with Caroline Stanton, a partner in the firm. Bette had been there once for a cookout and (cattily) described the place as “E-nor-mous! Faux Tudor. No landscaping.” Adrienne got the number from Information, and called it.