The Syndrome

“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 pfe

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 co

“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 Adrie

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 Adrie

“Hop in,” she told him.

Chapter 41

Davos was a zoo.

Not the cozy alpine village that Adrie

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 Adrie

“Music… ,” he muttered.

“What?” Adrie

“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 Adrie

No, no and maybe, with half of the people they asked too stoned to remember. But the DJ at Rumplestiltskin helped them out by writing down a list of discotheques where “trance” was played, or failing that, a close relative—“house music.” But no one at any of the places they visited knew Henrik de Groot by name or description.

“We could sleep in the train station,” Adrie

McBride nodded. “Okay, but just a couple more.”

By the time he’d drawn a line through three more clubs on the DJ’s list, the night was shading toward dawn and the discos were closing, disgorging rowdy clusters onto the streets, their laughter piercing the cold morning air. He was about ready to pack it in—and so was Adrie

“One more,” McBride said, “and then we’ll get some coffee.”

And that’s when he saw it:

TRANCE KLUB and beneath those words, a circular sign displaying a dizzying pattern of silver and black concentric circles in the center of which a neon eye winked on and off. Chase lights zoomed around the circles like Pac-Men run amok. McBride stared so long and hard that when the eye blinked off, its afterimage floated on the inside of his eyelid.