The Syndrome

He was smiling at her.

It’s the Stockholm Syndrome, she thought. Please God—let it be the Stockholm Syndrome.

In the morning, McBride did the driving.

On the way, Adrie

She’d gone out after di

None of the books had that much to say about Shapiro, who’d presided over a program so “sensitive”—Adrie

Moving from index to index in each of the books, Adrie

“Then what?” McBride asked.

“I’m not done. This Human Ecology thing was supposed to be private, but all its money came from the CIA. So he was an NOC.”

“A what?”

“An NOC! It means Nonofficial Cover.”

McBride glanced at her. “Where did you get this stuff?”

“At the library—when you were sleeping.”

“Hunh!”

“So, anyway, this fund was a CIA front. And what it did was, it funded behavioral studies—secret studies—in mind control. They called it Mk Ultra. Artichoke. Bluebird. Things like that.”

“And Shapiro was part of this?”

“He ran it for about ten years. Then they closed it down, and he took over as head of the Science & Technology Directorate at the CIA. But it was interesting what they did. They studied psychotropic drugs, hypnotism, telepathy, brainwashing, psychic driving—”

“I saw a documentary about it,” McBride told her. “On A&E. About a year ago. They were experimenting, testing hallucinogenic drugs on people they considered ‘fair game’—people in prisons and mental institutions, suspected communists, people who were breaking the law.”

“So, what happened? They got stoned, right?”

“Right. Only they didn’t know they were stoned. These weren’t exactly clinical trials. So most of them—what they thought was that they were sick or crazy.”

“Of course. That is what you’d think.”

“People lost their minds. And at least one guy lost his life.”

“Who?”

“A scientist named Olsen. His ‘colleagues’ slipped him a dose of LSD—and he lost it. Completely. Or so we’re told. A few days later, he threw himself out the window of his hotel.”

“Migod…”

“Or that’s what they said. According to the documentary, he probably had some help.”

“‘Help’?”

“There’s reason to think he was pushed.”

“Oh.”

They were crossing the Delaware Memorial Bridge. Below, the water looked metallic and sullen. Ahead of them, brake lights flared ruby-red as the traffic congealed before a phalanx of tollbooths.

“So it looks like you were right,” Adrie

“About what?”

“Showing up on his doorstep. I don’t think a phone call would work.”

At the tollbooth, McBride pressed a bill into a woman’s outstretched hand. The air outside was cold, the woman’s hand warm, the moment they touched oddly precise, carved out of time. It struck him as a perfect microcosm of commerce, passage over a river in exchange for currency, a transaction that had taken place all over the world for centuries. The river below seemed huge, sinuous, alive and he could sense its moist, dank presence in the air despite the heavy aroma of diesel. Sounds welled up around him, the roar and rush of vehicles unfurling into the air as they accelerated away from the booth. McBride couldn’t get over how he felt, co

They checked into the Hilltop House, an old hotel perched on the mountainside in Harpers Ferry, overlooking the famous mountain gap where the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers meet. The hotel was nearly empty—too late for fall color tours, too early for the holidays, and they had their pick of rooms. Once again, and for reasons of frugality, they took only one. Adrie

An aging bellboy showed them to the room, and waited at the door until McBride pressed a bill into his papery hand. Once the old man was gone, the two of them stepped onto the balcony and looked out. From here, the rivers were visible only as occasional flashes of silver threaded between the dark mounded shapes of the wooded slopes.

The address they had for Shapiro was a P.O. box in the tiny, unincorporated town of Bakerton. They drove there—it was only a few miles from Harpers Ferry—figuring they’d ask around. How hard could it be to find someone who lived in a place whose population was sixty-three?

As it turned out, not hard at all.

Bakerton amounted to twenty or thirty houses scattered over a hundred acres of rolling woodland. Besides the houses, and a couple of trailers, there was a church, and a country store with a single gas pump in front of it.

They went inside, where a man with a bushy beard, a mustache, and a corona of red hair, was standing at the register. All around him were bowls of pe

The P.O. box was not, as they’d expected, a bid for privacy. The town didn’t offer home delivery of mail, so every resident had a box at the post office.

“Right through there,” the clerk said after he explained this, gesturing through a doorway where McBride could see ranks of cubicles, each with a tiny door and combination lock. Against the doorway leading into the post office, a trio of men stood drinking coffee from Styrofoam cups. What they shared, beyond coffee, was a lot of hair, a lot of wrinkles, and a taste for camouflage.

From the look of them, McBride would have guessed that they’d be talking about NASCAR or deer hunting, but what he overheard as he approached them was: “You’re telling me the NASDAQ isn’t overheated?”

It almost made him laugh. But he kept a straight face, asked, “You know where I can find a guy named Shapiro?”

“You mean, ‘James Bond’?”

McBride chuckled. “Yeah.”

“He lives up Quarry Road,” said a wizened little man in green fatigues and a baseball cap with the name of a feed company on the front: Rimbaud.

“Which is where?”

“Go out t’front door, across the street you’ll see a little road runs crosswise to the one you drove in on. That’s Quarry Road. You head on up there about a mile, look for a red mailbox on the left. That’s Sid.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“‘Course, you might find him praying,” said the tiny man. “And if you do, you’ll have to wait him out.”

“Not ‘praying,’“ one of the other men said. “Meditating. It’s different. But Carson’s right. You come up on him when he’s meditating, he won’t even look at you. Seems rude, but that’s Sid for you.”

“Is he… religious?” Adrie