The Syndrome

by John Case

  Adrienne couldn’t help herself: she rolled her eyes.

  “They knew what men like Hitler could do. And it made them ruthless in the defense of freedom. I know it sounds corny—‘freedom’ always sounds corny—but it’s true.” The scientist paused, placed his left hand on the floor and sprang to his feet with surprising agility. Crossing the room to the woodstove, he opened it up, stirred the coals with a poker and put in a fresh log. Then he turned to his guests. “From the very beginning, the idea was to find ways to identify and eliminate men like Hitler and Stalin—before they came to power.”

  “So it was an assassination program,” McBride suggested.

  Shapiro shrugged. “In part. The idea was to develop behaviorally-controlled agents who would carry out an assignment, even if the outcome was counterinstinctive.”

  “And what’s that supposed to mean?” McBride asked.

  “It means they didn’t care if they lived or died,” Adrienne guessed.

  Shapiro inclined his head in reluctant agreement. “The agent’s survival wasn’t a critical issue—except in the sense that deniability was paramount. If the agent survived, and the agent was caught—well, that was a problem. And people will get caught. Not the first time. Not the second time. But, eventually.”

  They looked at him.

  “Guns misfire,” he explained. “Policemen become unexpectedly, even irrationally, interested in the most innocuous-seeming things. That’s how it starts. And the next thing you know, your man’s hanging by the balls from a hook in the cellar of somebody’s Ministry of Defense, entertaining questions from one and all. So quite a lot of research went into the issue of building an agent who was deniable from the get-go.”

  “Let me guess,” McBride suggested. “You drove them nuts.”

  Shapiro thought about it as he walked back to the table, and sat down. “No. If we’d done that, they wouldn’t have been able to function. We spent years—and quite a lot of money—studying differential amnesia and ways of engendering multiple personalities. In the end, we decided that screen memories were the optimal solution—though, even there, we had problems. They tended to destabilize the personality, so you needed a therapist figure to provide reinforcement.”

  Adrienne glanced at McBride, then turned a puzzled eye on Shapiro. “What’s a screen memory?” she asked.

  The scientist considered the question. Finally, he said, “It’s a memory that’s verifiably false and inherently ridiculous—so that anyone who claims that it’s real is discredited, simply on the face of that assertion.”

  “Give me an example,” McBride suggested.

  “‘I was kidnapped by aliens and flown to an underground base in the Antarctic,’“ the scientist replied.

  “‘Satanists tortured me as a child,’“ Adrienne suggested.

  “Exactly,” Shapiro said. “It pigeonholes the speaker—in this case, the assassin—as a ‘lone nut.’ Which, as you can imagine, is reassuring to everyone involved.”

  “‘Reassuring’?” Adrienne spat the word at him. “You’re talking about people’s lives. You’re talking about my sister’s life!”

  The old man was startled by her sudden intensity. “I’m talking hypothetically,” he told her. “And, anyway, it’s as I said: unless your sister was a lot older than you, this program had nothing to do with her.”

  “How can you say that?” Adrienne demanded. “You’ve seen the implant—”

  “We lost our funding thirty years ago—and, by then, most of the work had moved offshore. So, the handwriting was on the wall. I mean, it was the Sixties, for God’s sake! Every idiot in the country was conducting his own mind control experiments!”

  Despite himself, McBride smiled. “When you say the work moved offshore… ?”

  “Most of the studies were carried out at universities and research institutes. The funding was laundered through foundations and institutions we knew we could trust. As the years went by, and the Agency came under scrutiny from Congress and the press, some of the more sensitive studies had to be moved overseas. By the time the Rockefeller Commission began its investigation, the activity had been shut down. I retired soon afterward.”

  None of them said anything for a while, but sat where they were, watching the firelight play across the ceiling and the floor. Eventually, McBride cleared his throat. “So what about me?” he asked. “Where did the implant come from?”

  Shapiro shook his head.

  “And my sister!” Adrienne insisted. “What about her?”

  Shapiro turned his palms toward the ceiling. “You’re talking to the wrong person,” he told them. “You’re talking to a dinosaur.”

  “I think I’m talking to someone who won’t face facts—even when they’re staring him in the face,” Adrienne replied. “You saw his file. You saw the implant.”

  “I saw a photograph.”

  “Do you think we made it up?” McBride asked.

  “No,” the scientist conceded.

  “Then… what? Obviously, the program never ended,” Adrienne insisted. “The CIA—”

  “—had nothing to do with this.” Shapiro shook his head slowly. “Trust me: if the Agency was involved, I’d know.”

  McBride was trying to understand. “Then—”

  “It’s a Frankenstein,” Shapiro told them.

  Adrienne and McBride looked at each other, uncertain if they’d heard him right. “A what?” McBride asked.

  “A Frankenstein.” The old scientist finished his second glass of wine, and sat back with a strange little smile on his lips. “An agent or operation you can’t control. Something you create that takes on a life of its own.”

  “So… ?” Adrienne looked to Shapiro to finish the sentence.

  “I’m guessing,” Shapiro admitted. “But seeing that implant, I’d say the program was privatized.”

  “‘Privatized’?” McBride repeated.

  “I mean it’s been taken over by someone in the private sector—or someone who went into the private sector. In other words, it looks like someone’s continued the research on his own—outside the Agency.”

  “Who are we talking about?” Adrienne asked.

  Shapiro shrugged. “I haven’t a clue.”

  “It would take a lot of money to do something like that,” McBride mused.

  Shapiro nodded. “It would take millions. Then again, what doesn’t?”

  “But how could they keep it secret?” Adrienne wondered.

  Shapiro considered the question. Finally, he said, “Set it up offshore. Keep it small. Put it in a clinical setting where the patient’s privacy would be paramount.” The scientist pursed his lips, and thought for a moment. “You know,” he said, “if they’ve been working on this for thirty years—my God!”

  “You said they’d put it in ‘a clinical setting’?” Adrienne asked.

  “Yes.”

  She leaned forward. “Then, tell me something: have you ever heard of the Prudhomme Clinic?”

  The scientist furrowed his brows, thought for a moment, and shook his head. “Not that I recall.”

  Adrienne turned to McBride, who was looking at her with a question mark in his eyes, wondering where she was going. “What about you?” she asked.

  McBride was taken aback. “What-about-me-what? Have I heard of it?” The question was out of the blue—he hadn’t a clue as to what she was up to, but sensing her seriousness, he searched his memory. After a bit, he said, “No. There’s that chef in Louisiana, but… I don’t think that’s what you’re driving at.” He paused. “So what’s the Prudhomme Clinic?”

  She ignored the question, and turned back to Shapiro. “You keep referring to ‘the program’ and… “ She stopped for a moment, took a deep breath, and organized her thoughts. “A few days ago,” she said, “before Lew had the implant removed, I found him sitting in front of my sister’s laptop. He was logged onto this very weird Web site: theprogram dot org. (Theprogram is one word.)”

  “Yes?”

&n
bsp; “He was in a trance state—completely out of it. I mean, he was totally unresponsive—but not to the Web site. Which was interactive. He was typing in answers to questions that appeared on the screen. One of them was, ‘Where are you?’”

  “Well, that’s very interesting,” Shapiro remarked, “but… what’s the point?”

  “The point,” Adrienne replied, “is that someone tried to kill us the next night. They started a gas fire. No one knew where we were, so obviously, they got the address from Lew—when he was on that Web site.”

  “And this Web site was… ?”

  “I asked a friend who’s kind of a geek to check it out,” Adrienne told him.

  “And what did he find?” Shapiro asked.

  “He said the site’s on a computer in something called ‘the Prudhomme Clinic.’ It’s in a little town in Switzerland.”

  Shapiro nodded, shrugged. “Never heard of it.”

  Adrienne cleared her throat. “And there’s something else I haven’t told you.” She turned to McBride. “My sister killed someone.”

  “What?!”

  “She killed a man in Florida. She assassinated him.”

  Shapiro’s eyes swelled with skepticism and surprise. “Why do you use that word?” he asked.

  “Because the victim was an old man, sitting in a wheelchair, watching the sunset. She shot him with a sniper rifle—the kind with a silencer and telescopic sights. The newspapers said his spine was cut in half.”

  “And… how do you know this?” Shapiro asked.

  She explained about finding the rifle in her sister’s apartment.

  “And you’re just telling me about this now?” McBride exclaimed.

  “I didn’t know what the gun meant,” she told him, “until I went through her credit card charges, and saw that she’d gone to Florida. Then I looked up where she was staying, and read about this man who’d been killed while she was there. You were in the hospital—and, after that, we came here. I wanted to think about it.”

  McBride finished his glass of wine. “So who was he?” he asked. “The man who was killed.”

  “The papers said his name was Calvin Crane.”

  Shapiro’s hand jerked involuntarily, almost knocking over his wineglass. Adrienne saw that his black eyes were round with amazement. “Your sister killed Calvin Crane?” he asked.

  Adrienne nodded. “Yeah. No question.”

  “Wait a second,” McBride mumbled, talking as much to himself as to the others. “There was a Crane with the Institute.”

  “If we’re talking about the same person, he ran the Institute of Global Affairs,” Shapiro told them. “For decades.”

  “That’s right!” McBride exclaimed. “It was before my time, but… his name was still on the stationery. Director Emeritus, or something like that.” He paused. Finally, he said, “Jesus…”

  Adrienne nodded. “You. And Nikki… Crane and the Institute. You and Duran, Duran and my sister, my sister and Crane… it’s a loop!”

  No one spoke for a moment. Adrienne was hunched down in her chair, arms wrapped around her chest, a frown of concentration on her face. “But why?” she said in a plaintive voice. She looked back and forth between the men. “Jeff Duran, the implants, Calvin Crane… my sister… “ She shook her head. “What’s it all for?”

  Shapiro cleared his throat, and began to get up. To McBride, it seemed like the old man was shaken. “Well,” he told them, “I won’t ask you who ‘Duran’ is. I think we’ve probably taken this conversation about as far as—”

  “How do you know him?” Adrienne asked, her voice all business again.

  “Who?”

  “Calvin Crane.”

  The former CIA man was quiet for what seemed a long time. Adrienne was about to repeat the question, when he said, “Calvin Crane was a legend. One of the Knights Templar.”

  “The what?” McBride demanded.

  “That’s what they were called—the inner circle around Allen Dulles. Right after the war, when the CIA was created. Des Fitzgerald and Richard Helms, Cord Meyer and Calvin Crane.”

  “So… he was a CIA agent,” Adrienne said.

  Shapiro winced at the naive terminology, and shook his head. “No. He went to the opening, but left in the first act.” He paused. “Look,” he confided, “you’re nice people. But now you’re getting into something very dark. Maybe you should just walk away.”

  “‘Walk away’?” McBride said. “They’re trying to kill us. How the fuck—”

  “Who’s ‘trying to kill’ you?”

  McBride turned questioningly to Adrienne—who shrugged. “I’m not sure,” McBride replied.

  Shapiro sighed. “The Institute was one of our conduits,” he told them. “Crane was a good friend to the Agency—and completely trusted.”

  “So he was a part of the program,” Adrienne suggested.

  “He was an asset—one of the men we knew we could count on. This was a rich and well-connected patriot—no cartoon—a smart and sensible man.” Shapiro hesitated. Frowned. “That someone should kill him in the way you’ve described is tragic.” He paused, then added, “And ironic.”

  “‘Ironic’?” Adrienne asked.

  Shapiro nodded. “A case of the snake swallowing its tail. Crane wanted to establish an assassination utility deep inside the CIA. But the support wasn’t there.”

  Adrienne shook her head—a quick left-right-left that was meant to convey disbelief. “What did you call it?”

  “‘An assassination utility.’”

  She rolled her eyes. “You make it sound like the electric company.”

  Shapiro smiled. Weakly. “The idea was to identify—and eliminate—people who posed a threat to world peace. Or maybe it was liberal democracy—or the American Way. I don’t remember, and I’m not sure Crane was entirely certain himself. But he was lobbying to create an inner sanctum within the Agency, one that would have institutionalized murder as an instrument of state.”

  “So you’re telling us the CIA never killed anyone?” McBride asked. “What about all those ‘behaviorally-controlled assassins’ you were talking about?”

  Shapiro shook his head. “It’s two different things: when I was running it, the program was a research endeavor. A large and secret one that necessarily included operational activities—but it was not an assassination activity itself.”

  “What about Castro?” McBride demanded.

  “I understand what you’re saying,” Shapiro admitted. “But those were ad hoc exercises—and not at all what Crane had in mind. What’s more, they were failures—which is, also, not what Crane had in mind.”

  McBride cocked his head to the side. “Doesn’t it strike you as strange that so many ‘lone nuts’ have succeeded in killing political leaders, while the CIA—with all its resources—has failed—in every case we know of?”

  Shapiro glanced at his watch, and got to his feet, signaling that the conversation was at an end. He began to clear the dishes. “Well,” he sighed, “this has been interesting, but—it’s dark, and you have a long way to go.”

  McBride took the hint, stood, and helped Adrienne to her feet.

  “Actually,” she said, “we’re staying at Hilltop House. It’s not so far.”

  Shapiro shook his head. “That’s not what I meant,” he replied. “I meant it’s dark, and you have a long way to go.” Escorting them to the front door, he opened it and paused. “Put on your seat belts,” he told them, then closed the door, and was gone.

  Chapter 36

  The ride back to Hilltop House was beautiful, silent, and sad, with the Shenandoah River glittering in the moonlight and the two of them saying nothing, or next to nothing, while thinking the same thing: Everyone around me dies. Nikki. Bonilla. Shaw. It was a roll call of the dead.

  McBride drove with one hand on the wheel, and his arm thrown casually along the back of the seat. It made Adrienne tense, worrying that he was about to put his arm around her or, worse, that he would not. Not that his a
rm around her would be a good idea. On the contrary…

  The car rolled through the countryside, the mountains and forests black against the starry sky.

  Watery headlights loomed in the rearview mirror, sending a chill down McBride’s spine. But then the car swept past them, and they were alone again. “I’ve been thinking,” McBride said. “Maybe you should go someplace.”

  “Like where?”

  “The moon, if you can get tickets. Otherwise, anywhere you can lay low.”

  She thought about it. And the truth was: there was nowhere she could go. Her basement bunker on Lamont Street was out. She didn’t have a job anymore. And after Bonilla and Shaw, she wasn’t about to stay with friends. “I want to find out what happened to Nikki,” she insisted. “And, anyway: you need me.”

  “I do?” McBride glanced at her. The world inside the car was chiaroscuro, all black and white, noir. It was the moonlight. She looked good in it.

  “Yeah,” she said. “You need the car, and my name’s on the paperwork.”

  He shrugged. “Okay, you can stay.”

  “That was easy.”

  McBride chuckled, but what he was thinking was: it wouldn’t take much for my arm to slip around her shoulder. Then Hilltop House hove into view, and the moment was gone.

  But not forgotten.

  In their room, he asked her to tell him what she’d learned about Crane. She responded by pulling out a sheaf of papers from her suitcase, and handing them to him.

  They consisted, mostly, of printouts from Nexis, including a couple of obits from the Washington Post and the Sarasota Star-Tribune. He read them carefully, noting the organizations that Crane had belonged to and the name of a surviving sister in Sarasota. As he went through the printouts, one at a time, he did his best to ignore Adrienne, who was sitting on the bed, cross-legged. The room was small and stuffy, and he kept to the couch, an uncomfortable wicker object near the balcony.

  “We’re going to Florida, aren’t we?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I think we have to.” He was doing his best not to look at her, keeping his eyes on the landscape outside the window. In the distance, down by the river, he could see parallel strings of lights—one white, one red, pulsing along in opposite directions. They appeared and disappeared as the road wound in and out of sight in the folds of the mountains. “We can look up the sister, for starters,” he suggested, “see what she can tell us. Go to the courthouse—see if there was any litigation. Check out his will…”