He turned off the E-25 to the A7, took the Montreux exit, and followed the signs to Clinique La Prairie, a spa, and hotel. The complex sprawled over seven acres of green hillside that sloped to the eastern end of Lake Geneva. It was one of Europe’s most prestigious centers for anything related to health and well-being, and included a five-star hotel where guests could rest after a hard day in hydrotherapy, mud baths, seaweed treatment, and deep muscle massage. What La Prairie offered most of all, however, was privacy and discretion.
Steve had decided the only way to carry out his mission – to survive in the post-Orwellian world where U.S. intelligence agencies vacuumed up every digital communication on the planet, and satellites and drones and millions of street cameras could identify individual faces hundreds of miles distant – was to disappear and recreate himself with a new face that even his former wife wouldn’t have recognized. Which is why he’d come to La Prairie.
He dropped his car with the hotel valet, walked past a couple of elderly Germans in fluffy white Frette bathrobes on the way to the spa, and checked in at the registration desk. The bellboy escorted him to his room on the fourth floor overlooking the lake. He unpacked, showered, and dressed in a pink shirt with a blue cashmere sweater, light gray flannels, and loafers. At 10:55 a.m., he walked along a serpentine flowerbed exploding with yellow and red tulips to the three-story gray concrete building that housed the Centre for Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery. The office of the director, Doctor Neil Bilstrade, was on the third floor, with a stunning view of the Matterhorn and Jungfrau. The doctor greeted him with a dry, confident grip.
“Delighted to meet you finally, Mr. Penn,” he said, clipping his vowels with a slight Scottish accent. He had curly brown hair, light blue eyes, and a ruddy complexion, thanks to regular weekends on the nearby ski slopes.
It was Sarah Levin who’d told Steve about Bilstrade. He’d been twice hired by the agency to deal with difficult cases that had to remain confidentiaclass="underline" one agent who’d had his jaw half shot off in the Ukraine, the other a former head of the Romanian secret police who needed to be furnished not just with new papers but a new face as well.
Born in Glasgow, Bilstrade studied medicine at Cambridge, specialized in plastic and reconstructive surgery. After his residency, he spent seven years in Rio perfecting his skills under Dr. Ivo Pitanguy. He came to La Prairie first as deputy director, and then was promoted to director, a post he’d held for the past fifteen years. His discretion was as valued as his surgical skill, which was legendary and the subject of countless magazine articles and documentaries.
Behind him on the wall was a rogues’ gallery of before and after pictures of patients he’d treated over the years. He was, of course, unable to reveal anything about his more illustrious cases. The leading European and British tabloids, the American movie magazines, and gossip columnists would have paid a fortune for such information. But no such leaks ever occurred, which was the main reason Steve was there. Just the same, he would be known by everyone at La Prairie, including Doctor Bilstrade, as George Hardy. There would be nothing in the file to connect Hardy to Steve Penn.
“I hope you had a good flight, Mr. Hardy,” said the doctor. “Can I offer you a tea or coffee?”
“Coffee, thanks, and please call me George.” The doctor passed the order to his receptionist and then looked brightly at his visitor. “It’s nice to finally meet you in person,” he said. Via an untraceable server, Steve had already sent the doctor pictures of his face taken from all angles, plus X-rays, scans with 3D reconstruction, and the results of a series of lab tests.
“So you want a total redo?” The doctor pursed his lips. “Despite the fact that you have no evident physical defects.”
“What I’m after,” said Steve, “is a radical change of appearance that will still leave me physically presentable, shall we say, but unrecognizable to my own mother, if she were still alive.”
“And as I understand it, you want me to accomplish this miracle in a maximum of four weeks?”
Steve paused to accept a cup of coffee from the receptionist and waited until she’d left before he answered. “Unfortunately, that’s all the time I can spare. I’m a man in a hurry, a lot of urgent things to attend to.”
The doctor shrugged. He was used to not asking searching questions of clients who obviously didn’t want to be probed. “If I may be very frank, Mr. Hardy, I am not a man to be pushed around. And I certainly don’t need more patients. On the other hand, I find your case interesting. I enjoy a challenge.” He turned to the wide screen on his desk and brought up two high-definition color images; on the left, a front and side view of Steve as he currently appeared, and on the right, a front and side view of another high-cheeked man, with a fleshier face, beard, large nose, and prominent chin.
“That’s your before and you after – the you I am planning to create,” said the doctor. He smiled and raised his eyebrows. “So what do you think?”
“That’s me?”
“In four weeks.”
“Impressive. Never mind my mother; I don’t think I’d recognize myself. How are you going to do it?”
“It will involve a number of procedures. We will use rhinoplasty to change the shape of your nose – make it bigger – perhaps somewhat Roman.”
“How?”
“We make all the incisions on the inside of the nose, little cuts, lifting the soft tissues away from the skeleton,” he pointed to the image on the left of Steve as was. “That allows us to open the nose like you would open the bonnet of a car, and then build up the bone and cartilage.
“As for your cheeks and jaw and chin, we will make them more prominent. We’ll use custom-made synthetic implants designed from the CT scan data you sent me, here and here, along onto the cheekbone area, and there, at the point of the chin. We can also take fatty tissue from other parts of your body and flesh things out a bit here and there. We’ll also change the angle of the jaw to make a wider mandible.”
“Mandible?” asked Steve.
“Jaw bone. We can do all that with incisions in the mouth, so we don’t leave any scars on the outside.”
“No telltale scars?”
The doctor shrugged, “There’ll be some swelling and bruising of course, but that will only last a couple of weeks. The injured tissue will slowly go through the color of the rainbow. Like this.” He digitally manipulated the image of Steve on the right-hand screen. “Dark purple then red and blue and yellow-green. Then the discoloration descends with gravity, like this, down through the tissue down into the neck, until it disappears.
“As for changing your hair style and color, obviously no problem there. I’ll make an appointment with one of our beauticians. The optometrist in the clinic can deal with the color of the eyes with contact lenses. And the shape of your body? If you were grossly overweight, we could of course do something surgical about that, but you’re not. So it depends on how much exercising and dieting you’re willing to put up with. The spa is fully equipped and we’ve got two professional dieticians on staff.
“Of course,” said the doctor, “we could do more.”
“What do you mean?” said Steve.
“I don’t want to get into matters that don’t concern me, but if your worry is to totally insulate yourself from modern facial recognition technology – well, that would be a much more radical procedure, and could never be done in just a month.”
“What kind of procedure?”
“I’ll show you,” said the doctor, pointing again to the image on Steve’s face on the screen and moving the cursor between Steve’s eyes. “You see the distance between your eyes is – uh – 60 millimeters. That’s a key measurement for sophisticated facial recognition technology. That’s something we could only change by moving your orbits, or eye sockets. We call that a ‘box osteotomy.’ Unfortunately, that could put your vision and other nerves at great risk.”