The Syndrome

Epilogue

The only person to visit McBride during the week he spent in the Davos jail was a gentleman from the American embassy in Bern, and he was very straightforward.

There would be no publicity about the incident at the Hotel Fribourg. Henrik de Groot would be treated for his condition at a private sanitorium in an undisclosed country. Whether the Dutchman was ever to be released would depend upon how much—or how little—he chose to remember.

Meanwhile, arrangements had been made for McBride to pay a small fine for disturbing the peace at the banquet. He and his “girlfriend” would then be driven to the Zurich airport, where they would be placed on the first American carrier home. As far as the events in Spiez were concerned, cantonal authorities agreed that there was nothing to be gained by a public trial—which could only embarrass both countries.

“That’s it?” McBride asked.

His visitor shrugged. “I’m just a messenger,” he told him. “This isn’t my brief. I don’t know the details. But I can tell you this: based on the cables I saw—and the people who signed off on them—there’s only two ways this thing can end.”

“And what are those?”

“Well, my personal favorite is ‘happily ever after’—that’s the one we’re shooting for.”

“Great,” McBride replied. “And what’s the other?”

“The other? Well, the other is… unhappily ever after. That’s the one where you decide to tell everyone your story. That’s the one where you wind up in a Thorazine coma on the high-risk ward at St. Elizabeth’s.” He paused. “Don’t go there.”

He didn’t.

When they finally got back to D.C., Adrie

But first, she’d have to clean out Nikki’s apartment, go through her belongings. She’d promised the Watermill that she’d have everything out by the end of the month—

And then, beyond this minor stuff, there was Nikki herself. Nikki’s ashes still reposed in the “classic urn” and Adrie

McBride had his own list and most of it had to do with picking up the severed strands of an interrupted life. There were friends and colleagues—in San Francisco and elsewhere—he needed to get in touch with. He had a career to resume as a research psychologist. And there were dormant bank accounts and a small brokerage account with Merrill Lynch to reclaim. Maybe because he’d lived so close to Silicon Valley, his modest investments had been targeted toward the Internet. He remembered what he’d bought and at what prices; a preliminary look produced the happy news that during his walkabout as Jeff Duran, the value of his shares of Cisco Systems, Intel, and EMC had skyrocketed. He wasn’t rich, but his fifteen grand had multiplied many times.

Lew couldn’t take the idea of living in the apartment where he’d been “that robot.” So until they figured out what they were going to do and where, they lived in the Bomb Shelter, enduring the disapproval of Mrs. Spears until Lew won her over by cleaning out the gutters, pruning the overgrown pyracantha and repairing her dishwasher.

“I didn’t know you were so handy,” Adrie

“We were hard up,” he explained, “when I was a kid. We couldn’t afford to hire people to do things.”

“Well, ditto. But I never learned how to fix anything.”

“In Maine we pride ourselves on that Yankee can-do attitude.”

“Can do, huh?” He was sitting on the edge of the bed, unlacing his shoes. She pushed him over onto his back and sprawled on top of him. She lifted herself up and looked down at him. She ran her thumb along his lower lip. “Does that extend to all areas of endeavor?”

“Absolutely.”

She kissed him.

“We’re famous for it,” he said, coming up for air. “We also have Yankee ingenuity.”

“Do you always talk so much?”

It finally came to her about two weeks after their return from Switzerland—how to send Nikki off in a style appropriate to her sister’s lively and glamorous spirit.

She explained the idea to Lew and he helped her find the perfect vessel on the Web, a Challenger model yacht owned by a gentleman named Taz Brown. They communicated first by e-mail, then by telephone. “I hate to give her up,” Brown said, “but my wife says I’ve got to trim the fleet and this one’s named after the first wife.”

Once a tentative deal had been struck, they coaxed Adrie

Brown was a dapper fifty-year-old wearing a blue blazer, khakis with a knife crease and tassel loafers. Once they’d introduced each other and Brown had cast a worried look at the scabby Subaru, he led them to the garage to show them the Patricia. The craft—and its siblings—shared space with a pair of Bimmers.

“It’s big,” McBride said. In fact, the mast was taller than he was.

“Fifty-seven inches in length, twelve inch beam, mast eighty-five inches from the deck. Comes in two pieces, with a carrying case that ought to fit right on top of your car. Good you’ve got a roof rack.”

“It’s beautiful,” Adrie

Brown grunted his concurrence. “Carbon fiber, composite hull—just like the America’s Cup. And it comes with a suit of high-wind sails if you have a taste for ocean racing.”

Adrie

“You’re getting quite a bargain,” he told her, as she wrote out a check for $1,250. “A new one would cost you five grand.”

“I know it’s a lot,” Adrie

The Mount Vernon Parkway is a beautiful twelve-mile stretch of road that follows the shoreline of the Potomac River south of Old Town Alexandria to the bend in the river chosen by George Washington as the site for Mount Vernon. The whole length of the parkway is paralleled by a heavily used bike and footpath and interspersed with parks, marinas, and roadside picnic areas. In nice weather, the riverfront is a lively place, with windsurfers and inexpert groups in canoes sharing the water with pleasure craft. On dry land, picnickers and fishermen share the terrain with joggers and cyclists, and families out for a stroll.

But it wasn’t nice weather, and it wasn’t daytime, so they had the shoreline entirely to themselves. The moon, fuzzy and indistinct behind the cloud cover, provided some light, but they had also brought powerful flashlights. It only took a few minutes to remove the Patricia from its carrying case and rig it, snapping on the mast, the keel and the rudder. Once it was floating in a protected little cove, Adrie