The Syndrome

by John Case

  Adrienne was tempted. It would be nice to crawl back into bed—and dissolve in sensation. But she stayed where she was, clutching her yellow legal pad.

  He propped himself up on an elbow, suddenly serious, concerned. “What’s-a-matter? Second thoughts?”

  “No.”

  “Whew! Because—I might be in love. I think—I think I am in love. You sure you won’t come here?” His voice slowed, became theatrically sleazy. “Show you a good time.”

  “Lew.”

  The somber note in her voice got through. “Okay,” he said, sitting up. “What’s going on? Where have you been?”

  “The library.”

  “Oh. So what did you find out?” He rubbed the sleep from his eyes, and looked straight at her in a parody of alertness.

  “Luciano Albino,” she told him.

  “Albino,” he repeated, then frowned, trying to remember. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “The list. So who was he?”

  She turned her notepad toward him, so he could see what she’d written. He squinted.

  John Paul I.

  “Oh, Jesus,” he muttered. “That’s who Crane was talking about. That’s ‘Papa.’ There were stories about him being poisoned after Vatican II.”

  “They’re going to kill us,” she announced.

  He was silent for a long moment. Finally, he said, “I know.”

  “What do you mean you know?” There was a little quaver in her voice, and she worked to control it.

  “I mean, I know they’re going to try. They’ve already tried. But they won’t get away with it—I mean, they won’t succeed.”

  “Why not?” she demanded, sitting down on the bed.

  “Because we’re going after them.”

  “What?!”

  “We’re going after them! I’m gonna kill the son of a bitch,” McBride swore.

  “Who?”

  “Opdahl.”

  “What are you—crazy?”

  “It’s the last thing he’ll expect,” McBride told her.

  “Of course it is—because it’s the stupidest thing you could do!”

  “No, it’s not. The stupidest thing I could do is keep running from him. Because, eventually, you run out of room.”

  “And how is killing him going to help?” she asked. “I mean, assuming you could—which you can’t!”

  “I’ll plead self-defense. You can be my lawyer. We’ll have a big trial, and everything will come out.” He paused. “What do you think?”

  She looked at him wordlessly for ten or twenty seconds. Finally, she said, “You’re insane.”

  His head fell back on the pillow. “I know,” he admitted. “But, unless you have a better plan, I’m going after him—because I don’t know of any other way to stop Jericho.”

  “‘Jericho’? You don’t even know what Jericho is.”

  “Yes, I do—a little bit.”

  “Like what?”

  “It’s a bloodbath,” he told her.

  She nodded in agreement. “Right. What else?”

  “It’s time sensitive.”

  She gave him a puzzled look. “Why do you say that?” But even as the words emerged, the answer came to her: because they’d sent Nikki to kill a dying man.

  Seeing her look, he knew she understood. “They couldn’t wait,” he told her.

  She nodded.

  “And we know something else,” he said.

  “We do?”

  “Yeah. We know who the hit man is—the guy who gets it started.”

  Adrienne frowned, uncomprehending.

  “De Groot,” he explained. “My client. You met him. The one who… “ His voice trailed off.

  “What?”

  “Son of a bitch,” McBride whispered. He was thinking of de Groot. The spiky blond hair, the athletic roll of his walk—a predator, always up on the balls of his feet. His ingratiating grin. The dancing light in his eyes. Even with the medication, the Dutchman had too much energy. He was constantly tapping his foot, or rapping his fingers against a leg, always humming a tune. Sometimes whistling. Always the same tune. They’d joked about it a few times, that it was a funny kind of tune for a hip-hop Dutchman to latch onto. It’s like an audio virus, de Groot had complained. You think it’s funny, but I can’t get rid of it! And I don’t even know the whole tune—just the hook: about Joshua.”

  “What!?” Adrienne repeated, unable to read his mind.

  “He was always humming that song—the one about Joshua… and Jericho.”

  “What song?”

  He looked at her: “The one where the walls come tumbling down.”

  Neither of them said anything for a long while. Finally, Adrienne got up and crossed the room to the window. Looked out. “Did he have a screen memory?”

  McBride nodded. “Yeah. An abduction scenario.” He paused, remembered. “And… you’re gonna love this… he thought he had a tapeworm in his heart. And that it gave him orders.”

  “A worm?” Adrienne repeated.

  “Yeah.”

  She went to her legal pad, and began riffling through it. From somewhere down the hall, Adrienne could hear the motel’s cleaning women, rapping on doors: “Housekeeping! Housekeeping!” Finally, she found what she was looking for. “Look at this,” she said, and gave him the pad with her notes.

  Henrik Verwoerd. South African P.M.—

  architect of apartheid. Gunned down in ‘66 by Dimitrio Tsafendas. Tsafendas lone nut, cultist (“The Followers of Jesus”). Had five false passports when arrested. Blamed assassination on a tapeworm in his heart.

  “Fuck.” The word fell softly from his lips—as if he’d whispered lavender or shadow play. Looking up from the pad, he said, “Jericho. It’s South Africa.” He let his head fall back on the pillow, and fixed his gaze on the acoustical tiles overhead. The tapeworm was an in-joke, of sorts, a sick reference to one of the Program’s earlier successes. An homage. McBride flashed back to his sessions with de Groot, and for the first time, he understood what the Dutchman had been muttering about. It had nothing to do with mandalas—the rigidly symmetrical patterns that haunted the visions of so many schizophrenics. It was Nelson Mandela he was talking about, Mandela he was after.

  McBride pushed himself up in the bed, and swung his legs on to the floor. Reaching for his clothes, he began to get dressed. “He’s going to kill Mandela,” he told her. “He’s a racist, and he’s going to set South Africa on fire.”

  They took turns at the wheel and drove straight through to Washington, smashing along the Interstate at eighty miles an hour, radio blaring. The sun went down in Georgia and, by the time it came up again, they were nearing the Virginia border. Even going eighty, semis rolled past them in the fast lane, rocking slightly from side to side.

  It was 11 A.M. when they crossed the Potomac, heading north on Rock Creek Parkway. De Groot’s apartment was on a sidestreet near Chevy Chase Circle. McBride remembered the name: the Monroe. He and de Groot had joked about it, with the Dutchman insisting that its namesake was Marilyn rather than James.

  McBride hoped against hope that de Groot was still there. He thought if he could find the Dutchman, he might be able to defuse the screen memory. And if that didn’t work, he’d find a way to put him out of circulation—whatever it took to derail Jericho.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” Adrienne promised.

  “It’s on the house,” he told her. “I wish I had a gun.”

  She blanched, then peered at him as if to decide whether or not he’d gone insane. “What for?” she asked.

  He returned the look. “What do you think? De Groot’s a big guy.” Entering the tunnel near the National Zoo, he added, “I don’t want a repeat of what happened in my apartment.”

  “Eddie had a gun,” she reminded him. “It didn’t do him any good.”

  McBride kept his peace. Kept driving.

  When they came out of the tunnel, she asked, “Do you even know how to shoot?”

  “Yeah,” he told her. “I’m good at i
t.”

  “Right,” she replied, her voice a casserole of skepticism and sarcasm.

  “I am!”

  She looked at him again. Was he serious? “How come?” she asked.

  “My dad taught me.” He said it without thinking, but as soon as the words were out of his mouth, he flashed on himself and his father. A crystal-clear, brick-cold winter morning in Maine. Breath pluming from their mouths. Fingerless gloves. His father adjusting the gun on his shoulder, teaching him how to sight it in. The paper target stapled to a tree at the foot of a low hill, maybe thirty yards away. “He won a medal in the biathlon—did I tell you that?”

  “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 ther
e, eyes on the ceiling, suffocating. Sometimes, when he thought of it… McBride’s body lurched in a myoclonic 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.

  Chapter 39

  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.