“It’s time sensitive.”
She gave him a puzzled look. “Why do you say that?” But even as the words emerged, the answer came to her: because they’d sent Nikki to kill a dying man.
Seeing her look, he knew she understood. “They couldn’t wait,” he told her.
She nodded.
“And we know something else,” he said.
“We do?”
“Yeah. We know who the hit man is—the guy who gets it started.”
Adrienne frowned, uncomprehending.
“De Groot,” he explained. “My client. You met him. The one who… “ His voice trailed off.
“What?”
“Son of a bitch,” McBride whispered. He was thinking of de Groot. The spiky blond hair, the athletic roll of his walk—a predator, always up on the balls of his feet. His ingratiating grin. The dancing light in his eyes. Even with the medication, the Dutchman had too much energy. He was constantly tapping his foot, or rapping his fingers against a leg, always humming a tune. Sometimes whistling. Always the same tune. They’d joked about it a few times, that it was a funny kind of tune for a hip-hop Dutchman to latch onto. It’s like an audio virus, de Groot had complained. You think it’s funny, but I can’t get rid of it! And I don’t even know the whole tune—just the hook: about Joshua.”
“What!?” Adrienne repeated, unable to read his mind.
“He was always humming that song—the one about Joshua… and Jericho.”
“What song?”
He looked at her: “The one where the walls come tumbling down.”
Neither of them said anything for a long while. Finally, Adrienne got up and crossed the room to the window. Looked out. “Did he have a screen memory?”
McBride nodded. “Yeah. An abduction scenario.” He paused, remembered. “And… you’re gonna love this… he thought he had a tapeworm in his heart. And that it gave him orders.”
“A worm?” Adrienne repeated.
“Yeah.”
She went to her legal pad, and began riffling through it. From somewhere down the hall, Adrienne could hear the motel’s cleaning women, rapping on doors: “Housekeeping! Housekeeping!” Finally, she found what she was looking for. “Look at this,” she said, and gave him the pad with her notes.
Henrik Verwoerd. South African P.M.—
architect of apartheid. Gunned down in ‘66 by Dimitrio Tsafendas. Tsafendas lone nut, cultist (“The Followers of Jesus”). Had five false passports when arrested. Blamed assassination on a tapeworm in his heart.
“Fuck.” The word fell softly from his lips—as if he’d whispered lavender or shadow play. Looking up from the pad, he said, “Jericho. It’s South Africa.” He let his head fall back on the pillow, and fixed his gaze on the acoustical tiles overhead. The tapeworm was an in-joke, of sorts, a sick reference to one of the Program’s earlier successes. An homage. McBride flashed back to his sessions with de Groot, and for the first time, he understood what the Dutchman had been muttering about. It had nothing to do with mandalas—the rigidly symmetrical patterns that haunted the visions of so many schizophrenics. It was Nelson Mandela he was talking about, Mandela he was after.
McBride pushed himself up in the bed, and swung his legs on to the floor. Reaching for his clothes, he began to get dressed. “He’s going to kill Mandela,” he told her. “He’s a racist, and he’s going to set South Africa on fire.”
They took turns at the wheel and drove straight through to Washington, smashing along the Interstate at eighty miles an hour, radio blaring. The sun went down in Georgia and, by the time it came up again, they were nearing the Virginia border. Even going eighty, semis rolled past them in the fast lane, rocking slightly from side to side.
It was 11 A.M. when they crossed the Potomac, heading north on Rock Creek Parkway. De Groot’s apartment was on a sidestreet near Chevy Chase Circle. McBride remembered the name: the Monroe. He and de Groot had joked about it, with the Dutchman insisting that its namesake was Marilyn rather than James.
McBride hoped against hope that de Groot was still there. He thought if he could find the Dutchman, he might be able to defuse the screen memory. And if that didn’t work, he’d find a way to put him out of circulation—whatever it took to derail Jericho.
“Penny for your thoughts,” Adrienne promised.
“It’s on the house,” he told her. “I wish I had a gun.”
She blanched, then peered at him as if to decide whether or not he’d gone insane. “What for?” she asked.
He returned the look. “What do you think? De Groot’s a big guy.” Entering the tunnel near the National Zoo, he added, “I don’t want a repeat of what happened in my apartment.”
“Eddie had a gun,” she reminded him. “It didn’t do him any good.”
McBride kept his peace. Kept driving.
When they came out of the tunnel, she asked, “Do you even know how to shoot?”
“Yeah,” he told her. “I’m good at it.”
“Right,” she replied, her voice a casserole of skepticism and sarcasm.
“I am!”
She looked at him again. Was he serious? “How come?” she asked.
“My dad taught me.” He said it without thinking, but as soon as the words were out of his mouth, he flashed on himself and his father. A crystal-clear, brick-cold winter morning in Maine. Breath pluming from their mouths. Fingerless gloves. His father adjusting the gun on his shoulder, teaching him how to sight it in. The paper target stapled to a tree at the foot of a low hill, maybe thirty yards away. “He won a medal in the biathlon—did I tell you that?”
“What? In the Olympics? Get out!”
“No—I’m serious. The ‘72 Olympics. In Sapporo.”
“That’s fantastic!” she gushed. Paused. And asked: “What’s the biathlon?”
He laughed. “It’s the one where you cross-country ski for ten kilometers, and then you do some target shooting. What’s hard is: by the time you get to shoot, your body’s exhausted. So you have to be in tremendous shape, just to keep your pulse rate slow and steady. Then, when you stop to shoot, you take aim, wait—and squeeze the trigger between the beats of your heart.”
“You can do that?”
“No,” he told her. “That was my dad’s thing. But I can shoot. Or I could if I had a gun. Which, unfortunately, I don’t.” Heading up Beach Drive, he considered how he might buy one without having to suffer through the requisite waiting period. At a flea market, for instance, or at a gun show—or just on the street. There were lots of guns in the ‘hood. But there weren’t any flea markets or gun shows in progress at the moment, or none that he knew of, and the idea of he and Adrienne cruising through a black ghetto in their rented Dodge Stratus, looking to get strapped, was… well, a hoot.
Then they were there. They found a parking space a block away and walked. The building was a ten-story, glass-and-brick box with a sign out front, advertising EXECUTIVE RENTALS. Seeing Adrienne and McBride, a uniformed doorman hopped up from his perch on a low wall to open the door. Inside, a weary-looking, middle-aged man sat behind a desk and halfheartedly asked if he could be of help.
“We’re looking for a tenant—Henrik de Groot,” McBride told him.
The man frowned for a moment, then looked up. “The blond guy—7-G!”
“Right!”
Then he shook his head. “I haven’t seen him in a couple of weeks. I don’t think he’s around. Travels a lot.” Reaching for the in-house phone, he dialed a number and listened to it ring. After a bit, he replaced the handset in its cradle, and shrugged.
Five minutes later, they were back in the car and on their way to McBride’s apartment. Going there was a risk, of course—there was a possibility it was still being watched. But there wasn’t any choice, really. Their only plan—and it wasn’t so much a plan as a notion—was to fly to Switzerland, confront Opdahl and find de Groot before it was too late. How any of that was going to be accomplished, he had no idea. But one thing was certain: he was going to need his passport (Adrienne already had hers)—and his passport was in the refrigerator.