Relative silence.
Heinz quaking, hands in the air, eyes shut. Morgan weeping in a pool of blood beside the door, his knees blown out, going into shock. Gunsmoke, and the smell of gunsmoke. McBride exhaling for the first time in a long time, the air sweeping out of his lungs in a single burst. Then a soft plop as a chunk of Opdahl’s corpus callosum fell to the desk from the ceiling, landing like a load of birdshit on the financial pages of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.
McBride turned to the guard. “Stay.” Then he went to Opdahl’s desk and, picking up the phone, told the receptionist to connect him to the Belvedere Hotel. Which she did. A moment later, he had Adrienne on the line.
“What’s happening?” she demanded. “I heard—”
“Get the car out front,” he told her.
“But—”
“Do it now.” Then he hung up the phone, and turned to the guard. “Let’s go,” he told him, taking the man by the back of his collar, and placing the barrel against the side of his head.
Out to the corridor, where half a dozen birdlike patients fell back, gaping, as McBride and the security guard emerged from Opdahl’s office. Moving with slow deliberation, McBride escorted the guard past astounded nurses, aides, and doctors, to the front doors. Which opened with a whoosh on what was now a dank, gray afternoon—with no Adrienne in sight.
Standing on the front steps of the clinic with the shotgun jammed against the guard’s jaw, McBride considered his options—which were few. Either she’d come, or she wouldn’t. And if she didn’t, it was over. He was over. Because the police were on their way, or soon would be, and—
Suddenly, she was there, the BMW pulling into the courtyard, windshield wipers slapping back and forth, headlights blazing, the door flying open on the passenger’s side. And Adrienne leaning toward him across the seat, eyes like saucers.
“Hop in,” she told him.
Chapter 41
Davos was a zoo.
Not the cozy alpine village that Adrienne had imagined, but a long and noisy strip of glitzy discotheques and bars, restaurants and ski shops. Concrete condo blocks rose up against the ring of peaks around the town, while a sprawl of cute chalets lit up the hillsides. Seeing it for the first time made her think that someone—it could only have been Satan—had decided to re-create Route 1 in Paradise. And it went on and on, stretching down the valley to the sister towns of Davos Dorp and Davos Platz.
Despite the commercialism, there was nowhere for them to stay. Besides the usual tourists, and those in town to ski, there were hundreds of support people for the World Economic Summit, an equal number of journalists, and crowds of demonstrators protesting everything from “Frankenfood” to cloning. They tried half a dozen hotels, and everything was booked—even the luxe Hotel Fribourg, which served as the Summit’s headquarters.
High on a hill above the town, the Fribourg looked like a gigantic wedding cake, with each of its two hundred rooms boasting a balcony with white columns. Even before they got there, they could see that access was severely restricted. All the drives and walkways were cordoned off, and there were Swiss soldiers at checkpoints along the road. A crowd of protesters craned at the barricades lining the main drive, as an opening was made for a limousine. Polite shouts (it was a Swiss demonstration, after all) followed the limo in its crawl up the hill, the Mercedes’s smoked windows hiding its occupants. Midway between the protesters and the hotel was a clutch of trucks and vans, servicing CNN, the BBC, and a dozen others. Cables snaked across the snow, feeding batteries of lights and microphones, cameras, and satellite dishes. Here and there a lone figure stood, bathed in a cone of white light, narrating the scene to millions of invisible observers.
Where de Groot was, was anyone’s guess. If he’d taken a temporary apartment in the area—as he had in D.C.—he could be almost anywhere. In Davos or Klosters, or even in one of the smaller towns in the area: Wiesen or Langeise.
All Adrienne and McBride could do was look, going door to door from one hotel to another, poking their heads in the bars and restaurants, hoping to spy a tall and powerfully built Dutchman with a pelt of thick blond hair. It seemed hopeless—until McBride had a minor inspiration.
“Music… ,” he muttered.
“What?” Adrienne rubbed her eyes. It was almost 2 A.M.
“De Groot’s into trance music. He wanted me to go to a club with him. I had to tell him I didn’t get out that much.”
She looked puzzled. “What’s trance music?”
“Big pants—DJs and raves. ‘Special K’ and light sticks. Very big in Europe.”
“It is?”
He smiled. “I guess baby lawyers don’t have time to dance.”
“Oh? And how would you know anything about it?”
He looked embarrassed. “MTV.”
Somehow, the loud monotonous music and thrashing bodies of the discotheques only served to emphasize Adrienne’s fatigue. They wandered in and out of Club Soda, Trax, Rumplestiltskin, and the Kit Kat Klub. McBride’s German came in handy as the inquiry was put to bouncers, bartenders, DJs, and the occasional fatigued dancer stumbling to the sidelines. At successive clubs, he honed his rap about the person they were searching for and by the time they hit the Kit Kat, he was fast and efficient: they were looking for a Dutchman, a big guy from Rotterdam, yellow hair cut short, good-looking, chain-smoker—ever seen him?
No, no and maybe, with half of the people they asked too stoned to remember. But the DJ at Rumplestiltskin helped them out by writing down a list of discotheques where “trance” was played, or failing that, a close relative—“house music.” But no one at any of the places they visited knew Henrik de Groot by name or description.
“We could sleep in the train station,” Adrienne suggested. “Or in the car. I’m whacked.”
McBride nodded. “Okay, but just a couple more.”
By the time he’d drawn a line through three more clubs on the DJ’s list, the night was shading toward dawn and the discos were closing, disgorging rowdy clusters onto the streets, their laughter piercing the cold morning air. He was about ready to pack it in—and so was Adrienne who, game and uncomplaining, was nevertheless dazed by fatigue, so tired that occasionally she failed to pick up a foot and stumbled.
“One more,” McBride said, “and then we’ll get some coffee.”
And that’s when he saw it:
TRANCE KLUB and beneath those words, a circular sign displaying a dizzying pattern of silver and black concentric circles in the center of which a neon eye winked on and off. Chase lights zoomed around the circles like Pac-Men run amok. McBride stared so long and hard that when the eye blinked off, its afterimage floated on the inside of his eyelid.
“Hey,” he said, heading toward the sign at a trot, pulling Adrienne along with him.
“What?” Adrienne asked.
“He used to come here.”
“How do you know?”
“He had a matchbook. On top of his cigarettes. Menthol cigarettes. I remember seeing it—when I was Duran.”
She gave him a funny look.
Inside, the waitresses and bartenders were sitting at the bar, cashing out over cigarettes and coffee. “Geschloten,” one man said, a silver barbell bobbing on the end of his tongue. He gestured toward the dingy expanse behind him. A dark-skinned older man with a ponytail ran a huge vacuum cleaner over a grubby black floor stenciled with disintegrating silver stars.