The Syndrome (52 page)

“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.

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 arm 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 …”

“Ummmm,” she said, stretching her arms over her head. “So, basically, we’ll go down there and beat the bushes.”

“Unless you have a better idea,” he agreed, pulling open the door to the balcony so that a rush of cold air entered the room—which had suddenly become quite warm.

She caught his eyes, held them for just a little too long and then executed another languorous stretch, extending her legs and flexing her feet, while raising her interlaced hands overhead. She arched her back, displaying her body, opening it toward him.

McBride groaned inwardly. Getting to his feet, he stepped out onto the balcony.

The truth was that all day, he’d been constantly aware of her, in the moony obsessed manner of an adolescent. It was like high school. No—worse—junior high. At various points during the day—even in the austerity of Shapiro’s cabin, even in the darkness cast by his terrifying anecdotes, even in the face of the horrible news about Ray Shaw—he had suffered the painful tumescence that had made seventh grade an agony.

Standing out on the balcony, he looked down at the lights of the cars and thought about it: how long had it been since he’d taken a woman to bed? He couldn’t be sure—his memory was still coming back in bits and pieces, flashes. But it was before Jeffrey Duran—that much was certain.

It was a line from Meatloaf’s
Bat Out of Hell
album, and it reminded him of all the good music he’d missed, as well, Jeff Duran having been, not merely celibate, but entrained by a different drummer. Or not even a drummer: Oprah.

Adrienne was a fox, and that was a fact. But it was also a fact that Lew McBride was the last thing she needed. She’d already lost her sister, her job, and very nearly her life—and he was responsible for all of it. It wouldn’t be right to take advantage of her simply because they’d been thrown together in what were, after all, desperate circumstances. Still …

It was unnatural, sleeping in the same room like this and keeping your distance.
It’s human nature
, he told himself, arguing with his conscience. They’d been through a lot together, and it wasn’t just a question of sex—he really liked her. She was smart and attractive, funny and vulnerable. It was like what happened during wars and natural disasters.
People reached out. So why fight it? Why not just …
make your move!

But it was too late—or, if not too late, an interregnum. The cold had had its effect, and he reentered the room, diminished. Adrienne remained where she was, sitting on the bed, reading the hotel’s potted guide to Harpers Ferry and environs. She looked up at him from under thick, dark lashes—a killer look, her eyes full of allure and invitation. She shifted position, a series of fluid adjustments that made it impossible not to think of other adjustments her body might make. Without the clothing.

“Looking at the stars?”

His eyes went to the ceiling. “No,” he replied. “I was thinking …” He laughed. “You don’t want to know what I was thinking.”

She made a little sound in the back of her throat, and it took all his willpower not to launch himself at the bed. A flying dive into the depths of her.

Instead, he said, “I guess we’d better get some sleep.”

She nodded. Pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. All closed off now. The radiator ticked in the hot room. After what seemed like a long time, she heaved a sigh, and flashed a bright little smile. “Great,” she said.

It was a long way, and they took turns at the wheel, driving all the next day, arriving late at night. They checked into a Super 8, requesting a room with twin beds. She was actually embarrassed by the way she felt. She would not have thought her body capable of this swoony teenage lust.

In the morning, they went to the sales office at La Resort on Longboat Key, where a tanned blonde told them that the contents of Calvin Crane’s condo had been cleaned out weeks before. The unit itself—three bedrooms, oceanside, with every amenity—was for sale. Were they interested?

No.

They drove back by way of Armand’s Circle, stopping for
lunch at Tommy Bahama’s, where they ate salads and conch chowder, discussing their next move. Which was the courthouse in Bradenton, where they all but struck out. Crane wasn’t engaged in litigation with anyone, or not, at least, in Manatee County. And his will wasn’t as interesting as they’d hoped. Half of his estate was bequeathed, in equal proportions, to Harvard University and the American Cancer Society. The remainder was earmarked for his “beloved sister, Theadora Wilkins,” and his “lifelong friend, Marijke Winkelman.”