The Syndrome

by John Case

  It wasn’t a conversation, really. McBride knew that better than anyone. Opdahl was having fun, playing with him—and that was fine. The longer the older man talked, the sooner Adrienne would come into play—though, in reality, McBride wasn’t counting on a call to the police being much help. What he was counting on was getting out of the straitjacket.

  “Obviously, we can’t just let you go,” Opdahl told him, “though I suppose I’ll seem ungrateful when I don’t.” For a moment, the older man turned serious. “You did a terrific job with de Groot. I’m sure it wasn’t easy. He’s not like the others.”

  “How so?” McBride asked.

  Opdahl made a dismissive gesture. “The clinic here—well, it’s a cachement pond. On any given day, we have ten or fifteen young men and women with serious eating disorders—and/or a crippling dependency on drugs. Thanks to the charitable work that we do, quite a few of them come to us from foster care or state agencies. As you might suppose, this lack of family connectedness is convenient for the Program—as is the propensity of these poor creatures for generating distorted self-images of themselves.”

  “And de Groot?” McBride asked.

  “De Groot was different. We needed someone with Henrik’s expertise, so we made… “ Here, the surgeon waggled his forefingers in the air. “…an ‘involuntary recruitment.’“ He smiled. “So Henrik doesn’t fit the profile as well as we’d like.”

  “Expertise?” McBride wondered. The guy ran a company that installed fire alarms and stuff.

  “It actually requires rather a lot of medication to make him the charming lad you know,” Opdahl added. “So we’re grateful to you. We really are.” The surgeon hesitated for a moment, then furrowed his brows and leaned forward, moving his head from side to side, making a show of studying McBride. “My God, man,” he said, “you’re sweating bullets!”

  It was true. McBride was sweating bullets, though not so much from fear as from his efforts to conceal the muscular adjustments he was making in an effort to get free. There was a trick to it, of course. Houdini had gotten out of straitjackets routinely and, as a kid, McBride had wanted to emulate him. He’d even toyed with the idea of asking his parents for a straitjacket on his twelfth birthday but, in the end, opted for a skateboard instead. Still, there was a trick—and it was one that he knew. In principle, at least—which he’d be the first to admit was a long way from actually doing it. Then again, he was highly motivated.

  “I’m not going to kill you, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Opdahl promised, flicking another ash onto the floor. “Though we’ll have to do something.” He paused, frowned, and thought about it. Then he looked up with a big smile. “I know! We’ll replicate ‘H.M.’ You remember H.M., don’t you?”

  He did. And the thought of it made him look away, sickened at what Opdahl was suggesting.

  The surgeon was suddenly incredulous. “Are you trembling?” He peered closely at McBride for the second time in as many minutes. “You are! Look at you!” And he laughed, a sort of burst transmission giggle, à la Dennis Miller.

  And, in fact, McBride was trembling. He was losing motor control from the effort it was taking to free himself from the canvas jacket that pinioned his arms to his chest. The trick, which he’d read about in a children’s biography of the magician, was actually pretty simple. At least, in theory. As the straitjacket was being put on, the wearer was to make himself as big as possible (which McBride had done), expanding his chest, flexing his muscles, and keeping his elbows as far from his sides as his handlers would permit. Then, when the jacket was in place and the wearer relaxed, he’d have the wiggle room he needed to get out. (Or so he hoped.) Houdini had done it dangling from a rope, ten stories above the street. Of course, that was Houdini.

  “Industrial accident,” Opdahl reminded him. “Textbook case! Old H.M. wound up with a pole through his head—like one of those arrow jokes, but real. And, as I think you know, he survived the pole, though he wasn’t what you’d call intact. Remember? He’d lost the ability to form long-term memories. So, every day, his wife would introduce herself to him and, every day, it would be like meeting her all over again. Same with his parents, same with his friends.” Another chuckle. “We could tell you the same joke every day, and every day you would laugh.” He looked delighted. “And you wouldn’t be depressed about it. Not at all! You’d be a lamb. Because every day would be—” his face lit up “—brand-new!”

  McBride’s right arm was almost free. “What’s ‘Jericho’?” he asked.

  Opdahl looked impressed. “My, you have been doing your homework, haven’t you?”

  “What is it?”

  The surgeon took a long drag on his cigarette, and blew a stream of smoke into the air. Then he cocked his head at McBride. “Are you trying to get out of that thing?” When McBride didn’t reply, he made a little moue, and said, “Well, good luck to you.” Shoving away from the desk, he went around to the window, and looked out at the snow. Musing over his shoulder, he muttered, “Jericho,” then turned around to McBride. “You’ll just forget it in the morning, anyway,” he said, and began pacing, moving in a wide, counterclockwise circle around the room.

  “You don’t know—you have no idea—what any of this is all about,” Opdahl told him. “The Institute, the clinic—they’re a lot more than they seem.” He paused to consider. “Think of this place as… the crossroads of Realpolitik and Realmedizin. It’s where they come together.”

  McBride’s elbow was caught on the edge of a sleeve. Just a little bit more and…

  “As a surgeon, it’s my responsibility to cut out diseased tissue. The Institute has the same responsibility, except that its patients are states instead of individuals.”

  “In other words, you kill people.”

  “We remove cancers.”

  “Like Nelson Mandela?” McBride asked, sagging with relief as his right arm came free inside the straitjacket.

  Opdahl paused in his circuit, and looked at his prisoner. Finally, he said, “Not just Mandela. Mbeki, too. And Tutu—too.” He smiled at his own pun. “They’ll all be at Davos—hobnobbing. Me, too. I like to watch.”

  Jericho’s scope was suddenly apparent: the operation represented a clean sweep of South Africa’s black leadership, eliminating at a single stroke the country’s founding father, serving president, and moral conscience. “You’re out of your mind,” McBride told him.

  “That’s funny,” Opdahl replied, “coming from a man in a straitjacket.” Only for a little while longer, McBride thought, using his right hand to begin freeing his left arm. “Why would you even think of something like this?”

  Opdahl shrugged. “A patient has a boil—we lance it. That’s all we’re doing here.” Seeing McBride’s frown, and misinterpreting it, Opdahl elaborated: “Think of it as a ‘preemptive bloodletting.’ The country needs to be bled. De Groot will set it in motion.” He paused again, and added, “What happens in Davos, explodes in Capetown.”

  “And Calvin Crane?”

  Opdahl couldn’t hide his surprise. “You are dangerous,” he told him, returning to the chair behind his desk. “Mr. Crane became an obstacle. He had certain… liberal objections to Jericho’s targets, and ethical concerns about some related investments. So he got in the way… for a while.”

  “What ‘investments’?”

  Opdahl shrugged, and looked away. “The Institute costs a lot of money—the clinic, too. Neither of them are self-supporting.”

  “So?”

  “So we bought platinum futures—quite a lot of them.”

  McBride frowned.

  “Just between you and me, South Africa’s about to enter a period of profound instability” Opdahl explained. “I think we can count on the fact that platinum’s going to go through the roof. The Institute will benefit from that in a substantial way. And with those new resources, its influence will expand—so will mine, for that matter.”

  McBride shook his head. “Have you always been like this?” />
  Opdahl nodded. “I was a wicked child.”

  McBride withdrew his left arm from the sleeve of the straitjacket, and heaved a sigh of relief. Both arms were free inside the jacket, now, though still concealed.

  Reaching for the intercom on his desk, Opdahl punched in a couple of numbers, and waited for the call to be picked up. “Frank? Gunnar here. I wonder if you’d come to my office for a moment. There’s someone I’d like you to see.” Hanging up, he sat back in his swivel chair, and began a series of slow turns, his head thrown back and eyes turned toward the ceiling. “Doctor Morgan assisted on your earlier operation. He’ll be doing the surgery. I’d do it myself, but… Davos.” He paused. “Which reminds me: how did you find out about Jericho?”

  McBride shook his head slowly. If he wanted to, he could come across the desk before Opdahl knew what hit him—break his neck. Better, though, to find out as much as he could. “How’s de Groot going to do it?”

  Opdahl smiled. “Me first. I asked you a question.”

  For a moment, it occurred to McBride to tell the truth about Crane’s papers—but no. If something went wrong in the next five minutes, Mamie Winkelman would pay for it. So he lied. “It came out in a session with Henrik—bits and pieces.”

  Opdahl frowned. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. “The client isn’t supposed to be aware—”

  “He was way under.”

  “I’ll bet… “ A soft knock came at the door. “Come in.”

  McBride turned in his seat to see a powerfully built, handsome young man enter the room, wearing a set of blue hospital scrubs.

  “Frank,” Opdahl said, “you remember Jeff Duran, don’t you?”

  “Of course,” Morgan replied.

  “No need to shake hands,” Opdahl joked. “I was just telling Jeff that you’ll be operating on him this evening.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. You’ve been itching to replicate H.M.’s condition—and now’s your chance. Jeff’s become a disposal case, haven’t you, Jeff?”

  Morgan winced in mock sympathy.

  “So? What do you think?” Opdahl asked, as if he’d just given the young surgeon a new puppy. “You like the idea?”

  “‘Like’ it!?” Morgan exclaimed. “‘Like it’!?” Coming to McBride’s side, he touched a spot just below his hairline. “I’ll go in here,” he began.

  McBride came out of the chair like a boulder from a volcano, driving his head into the surgeon’s chin, then tearing off the straitjacket to lunge at the shocked Gunnar Opdahl. Who slapped a button on the edge of his desk, triggering a silent alarm, even as he shoved backward in his swivel chair, retreating toward the window.

  McBride was on him in a second, scrambling across the desk to seize him by the throat. Lifting the older man from the chair, he drove the surgeon’s face into the wall, yanked him back, and drove his head into and through the window, hoping it would cut his throat. And it might have, if Morgan hadn’t taken out McBride’s legs from behind, sweeping them with a karate kick that sent the younger man sprawling.

  Opdahl staggered in a little circle, trying to breathe and shout at the same time, choking as McBride crabbed backward across the floor, driven by Morgan’s kicks.

  He could hear people running down the hall, now, shouting in English and German, even as Morgan tried to kick a field goal with his head. Catching the surgeon by the heel, McBride twisted, hard, and torqued him to the floor with a crash of glass from a toppling lamp. Lurching to his knees, McBride drove his fist into the back of the surgeon’s skull, sending him sprawling, then dove for the box on the sofa. Tearing at the cardboard to get at the trigger, he succeeded at the very moment the door burst open and Rutger and Heinz came charging in, eyes wild.

  “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.

  Chapter 41

  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, Rumplestiltskin, 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?