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 penny candy, boxes of shotgun shells, and jars filled with pickled pigs’ feet and hard-boiled eggs.
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?” Adrienne asked. She frowned at the thought. It didn’t seem likely.
“Buddhist,” the tiny man piped in his country twang. “One of them Jewish Buddhists. Says he’s got a heavy karmic burden.” He paused. “You watch A&E?”
Adrienne smiled, nodded.
“Then you know what I’m talking about. That boy’s got some shit to come to terms with.” The other men laughed.
“Pardon my French,” the man continued, “but I guess he’s trying to square it—” He tapped himself on the temple. “—up here.”
Quarry Road was gravel, puddled from a recent rain. It passed through terrain that was heavily wooded, the trunks of the slender, immature trees black with moisture. They jounced up an incline, the sharp winter sun flickering on and off through the thin tree trunks. McBride turned the Dodge into the drive and a moment later, drew the car to a halt next to a battered white pickup. In the clearing stood a simple log house. Beyond it at a distance of a hundred yards or so was a large structure that looked like a greenhouse. To the right, a fenced-in pasture held half a dozen llamas. They trotted toward Adrienne and McBride as the two of them walked from the car toward the house. And then beyond them, toward the center of the pasture, they saw Sidney Shapiro—engaged in the slow, graceful movements McBride recognized as Tai Chi.
Despite the cold, Shapiro was bare chested, wearing only a pair of grey sweat pants. He appeared to be barefoot. He moved with great concentration and composure. Adrienne looked at McBride and raised her eyebrows, but neither of them spoke. After a minute or two, the llamas lost interest in them and resumed grazing—some of them venturing quite close to Shapiro, who seemed oblivious. The old man was thin, but with a stringy muscularity, and a full, thick shock of black hair. He looked agile and strong for a man in his seventies, extending one leg out with excruciating slowness until it was straight and parallel to the ground, then gracefully lowering the limb while turning in a painstaking and unhurried spiral. It was like watching a ballet dancer in extreme slow motion and McBride felt hypnotized by the fluidity of Shapiro’s movements. For a moment, the sun poked out from behind the clouds and lit up the pasture like a stage, and McBride saw with something of a shock that if the man’s body belied his age, his face did not. It was all bone, skeletal beneath the thin, stretched skin.
Shapiro finished his exercise with head tilted back, legs astride, both hands outstretched and upraised to the sky. He held this position for about thirty seconds, then gracefully brought his arms down and began to walk toward them, picking his way carefully through the field, stopping to stroke the neck of each llama. He let himself out through the metal gate, refastened it, and only then looked at them.
“Hello.”
“Hi… Doctor Shapiro?”
“Yes.”
“My name is Lew McBride. This is Adrienne Cope.”
“What can I do for you?” he asked, swinging his focus from McBride to Adrienne and then back again. He seemed very composed, McBride thought, for a man with a “heavy karmic burden.”
“Well, uhhh… I was hoping we could talk to you.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. I was hoping we could talk about… “ Duran wasn’t sure how to put it.
“Your work,” Adrienne said.
“My work?” Shapiro turned to her. His eyes were coal-black, and glittering. “I’m retired.”
“The work you used to do. MkUltra.”
Shapiro frowned, and his eyes took on an irritated glint. “Are you reporters?”
They shook their heads.
“Because I told the young man on the telephone that I’m not interested in appearing in any other documentaries. I didn’t find the first experience all that rewarding.” He looked up at the sky, then back to McBride. “Although as a form of penance, few things could be more… fulfilling… than seeing one’s life reduced to sound bites interspersed with ads for a liposuction clinic.” He shook his head. “It’s not an act of contrition I intend to repeat.”
“That isn’t why we’re here,” Adrienne said.
“Oh?” Shapiro looked from one to the other. “Then why are you here?”
“My sister and… Mr. McBride… were victims.”
Shapiro gave her a skeptical look. “I don’t think so,” he told her. “That was a very long time ago.” He gave an apologetic chuckle. “If you think you’re a victim of mind control—”
“Not me,” Adrienne said. “My sister—”
“Then I’d suggest that you tell her to turn off her television set—and the ‘mind control’ will go away. That’s my advice.”
“I can’t tell her anything,” Adrienne replied. “She’s dead.”
Shapiro blanched. “I’m sorry.” He paused. “Look,” he told her, “this is a wholly discredited field. The territory was abandoned decades ago.”
“Was it really?” McBride asked.
Shapiro ignored the skepticism. “It was supposed to be the next frontier. And maybe it was. We thought the benefits of going into outer space, putting men on the moon, would be trivial compared to what we might find… “ He tapped his head. “… in here.” Then he looked at Adrienne, and shook his head ruefully. “We called it ‘inner space.’“ He sighed. “But that was a very long time ago and, while I don’t know how old your sister was, this young man would have been a toddler.” He smiled a smile that never quite rose to his eyes. “And contrary to what you may have heard, we didn’t experiment on children. So… “ He turned to leave.