The Syndrome

They must have been riding for an hour or more, and never once did the driver use the siren—just the lights. Every so often, McBride’s eyes fluttered open, and there they were, rotating over the ceiling: Red… yellow… red…

It was so strange. Wherever the ambulance was, wherever they’d been, there wasn’t any traffic. The ambulance cruised at a comfortable speed that seldom varied—as if they were on a highway, or driving through the country. Which didn’t make sense. There were lots of hospitals in Zurich—so why leave town? If it was an emergency—and it had to be an emergency, because… if it wasn’t…

The tranquilizer was begi

Then they were there—wherever “there” was. The ambulance crunched to a stop on what sounded like gravel, and the lights winked off on the ceiling. Then the car door slammed, and the walls trembled. People talking in Swiss-German, and the rear doors opening with a yank. A rush of fresh air, and then the gurney began to move underneath him.

“Where’m I?” A fu

“Not to talk.”

And then they were inside. Down a long hallway, and into a brightly lighted room. Where he was left for nearly half an hour, his mouth getting drier and drier as he stared at the clock, high up on a glazed, ceramic wall.

“You’re very brave.”

The voice came from the end of the gurney. It was Opdahl’s voice under Opdahl’s eyes, staring at him over the edge of a surgical mask.

The tranquilizer was history by now, and McBride found himself able to speak without much difficulty. “What’s happening?” he asked. And then, when no reply was forthcoming: “What are you doing?”

“Vec,” Opdahl said—but not to him.

A needle appeared—McBride saw it for the best part of a second, then felt the sting just below his elbow. Instantly, everything began to slow down. His heart seemed to start and stop, as if he’d been punched in the chest. And, suddenly, he couldn’t get his breath. He was suffocating, and the realization made him panic. And as the panic rose inside him, he lunged, lunged reflexively against the straps that bound him. He was determined to stand. If he could stand, he could breathe. But the straps wouldn’t budge, or—not that. It wasn’t the straps. It was him. He was paralyzed, as immobile as a butterfly under glass.

Opdahl leaned closer to him, so close that McBride could feel the older man’s breath on his face. Then the point of a scalpel touched his throat, just above the breastplate, and he felt the knife cut through the skin. “Sh-sh-sh-sh-sh,” Opdahl whispered, though McBride had not made a sound. “It’s going to be all right.”

But it wasn’t.

He was dying. He might as well have been underwater, encased in concrete, or buried alive. Airless and frantic, he felt something enter the wound in his throat. Whatever it was, it tore at the tissues in his neck as Opdahl worked it into him. Then a machine began to pump from somewhere behind him and, suddenly, he was breathing again—or the machine was breathing for him. He couldn’t tell.

The older man checked the pupils of McBride’s eyes, shining a penlight into the back of his head, oblivious to McBride himself. Then McBride felt himself being cranked into what was almost a sitting position. A moment later, a large machine was rolled to the side of the operating table, even as a second machine—itself about the size of a refrigerator—whirred into operation. McBride recognized the first device as an operating microscope, and guessed that the second was a fluoroscope, capable of generating live X rays throughout an operation.

Opdahl hove into view again, as someone wheeled a television monitor up to the operating table. It rested on a little stand, glowing brightly, and McBride’s eyes were drawn to it. With a sickening sensation, he realized that the man on the screen with a trache tube in his throat was himself.

“You’re going to be all right,” Opdahl promised. “Not to worry.” Then he reached for one of the surgical instruments that lay in a steel tray at his side. “We’ve given you eight milligrams of Vecuronium—that’s why you can’t move. It’s a paralytic.” He paused. “But not, I’m afraid, an anaesthetic.”

Then he nodded at the small monitor next to the table. “I’m sorry you have to watch this,” Opdahl told McBride, “but it’s a part of the procedure.” With that, he turned to the nurse, and nodded. Wordlessly, she stepped behind McBride and, reaching toward him, seized his upper lip between her thumbs and forefingers. Then she pulled it back, exposing his upper gum.

Opdahl leaned in, and drew his scalpel across the bit of tissue that held McBride’s lip to the gum beneath his nose. This done, and as the paralyzed McBride stared in terror at the monitor, Opdahl began the procedure known as “degloving,” delicately prying the younger man’s face away from the skull, peeling the skin back to reveal a direct passage into his brain.

Chapter 1

October 7, 2000

Florida

She was in a kind of road-trance, coasting south with her eyes on the horizon, not quite listening to the radio—that was, in any case, playing songs from her infancy. The car was a cherry-red BMW convertible, a Z-3 with new Michelins and a killer radio that seemed to be tuned to the past. Removing her sunglasses, Nico put the car on cruise-control—she didn’t want to speed—she knew better than to speed—and hit the seek button.

Easy listenin’. Country. Oldies. Salsa.

A riot of oleanders divided the highway, which unfurled across a sunbaked landscape that was flat as a pool table, seedy and glamorous, all at once. Dilapidated double-wides hunkered beside the road under canopies of live oaks strung with Spanish moss. Here and there: confederate flags and pink flamingos. Mortuaries and nursing homes. A roadside stand selling boiled peanuts, Cajun and plain.

Florida, she thought, then shook her head and rolled her eyes behind her Ray-Bans.

What glamour there was, was in the light, and in the Dodger-blue sky. It was in the pastel promise of the Gulf coast, a few miles west, and it was in Nico, too. Like the car she drove, Nico was a masterpiece, fast and expensive.

She’d come down by train from Washington to Orlando, where the BMW was waiting for her in a parking lot at the train station. (She’d have preferred to fly—she liked to fly—but, under the circumstances, what with her baggage and all, flying wasn’t practical, flying wasn’t even an option.) Taking the I-4 to the Tamiami Trail, she’d turned south just outside of Tampa. This was Florida, trashy side up, all strip malls and trailer camps, parking lots and gas stations.

But all that began to change when she left the Trail, heading west toward the causeway that co

Once Nico pulled away from the light, she left the craziness behind—or, at least, the crazy lady—and, with it, the down-at-the-heels world of the Inland.

Her destination was a rich man’s redoubt, a barrier island just a few miles north of Sarasota, a lush sandspit dappled with turquoise swimming pools and emerald-green golf courses. This was a place where million-dollar villas and high-rise condos stood their ground on a shimmering blond beach that, seen from the sky, made the island look as if it had been outlined with a yellow highlighting pen.