“We lost our funding thirty years ago—and, by then, most of the work had moved offshore. So, the handwriting was on the wall. I mean, it was the Sixties, for God’s sake! Every idiot in the country was conducting his own mind control experiments!”
Despite himself, McBride smiled. “When you say the work moved offshore… ?”
“Most of the studies were carried out at universities and research institutes. The funding was laundered through foundations and institutions we knew we could trust. As the years went by, and the Agency came under scrutiny from Congress and the press, some of the more sensitive studies had to be moved overseas. By the time the Rockefeller Commission began its investigation, the activity had been shut down. I retired soon afterward.”
None of them said anything for a while, but sat where they were, watching the firelight play across the ceiling and the floor. Eventually, McBride cleared his throat. “So what about me?” he asked. “Where did the implant come from?”
Shapiro shook his head.
“And my sister!” Adrienne insisted. “What about her?”
Shapiro turned his palms toward the ceiling. “You’re talking to the wrong person,” he told them. “You’re talking to a dinosaur.”
“I think I’m talking to someone who won’t face facts—even when they’re staring him in the face,” Adrienne replied. “You saw his file. You saw the implant.”
“I saw a photograph.”
“Do you think we made it up?” McBride asked.
“No,” the scientist conceded.
“Then… what? Obviously, the program never ended,” Adrienne insisted. “The CIA—”
“—had nothing to do with this.” Shapiro shook his head slowly. “Trust me: if the Agency was involved, I’d know.”
McBride was trying to understand. “Then—”
“It’s a Frankenstein,” Shapiro told them.
Adrienne and McBride looked at each other, uncertain if they’d heard him right. “A what?” McBride asked.
“A Frankenstein.” The old scientist finished his second glass of wine, and sat back with a strange little smile on his lips. “An agent or operation you can’t control. Something you create that takes on a life of its own.”
“So… ?” Adrienne looked to Shapiro to finish the sentence.
“I’m guessing,” Shapiro admitted. “But seeing that implant, I’d say the program was privatized.”
“‘Privatized’?” McBride repeated.
“I mean it’s been taken over by someone in the private sector—or someone who went into the private sector. In other words, it looks like someone’s continued the research on his own—outside the Agency.”
“Who are we talking about?” Adrienne asked.
Shapiro shrugged. “I haven’t a clue.”
“It would take a lot of money to do something like that,” McBride mused.
Shapiro nodded. “It would take millions. Then again, what doesn’t?”
“But how could they keep it secret?” Adrienne wondered.
Shapiro considered the question. Finally, he said, “Set it up offshore. Keep it small. Put it in a clinical setting where the patient’s privacy would be paramount.” The scientist pursed his lips, and thought for a moment. “You know,” he said, “if they’ve been working on this for thirty years—my God!”
“You said they’d put it in ‘a clinical setting’?” Adrienne asked.
“Yes.”
She leaned forward. “Then, tell me something: have you ever heard of the Prudhomme Clinic?”
The scientist furrowed his brows, thought for a moment, and shook his head. “Not that I recall.”
Adrienne turned to McBride, who was looking at her with a question mark in his eyes, wondering where she was going. “What about you?” she asked.
McBride was taken aback. “What-about-me-what? Have I heard of it?” The question was out of the blue—he hadn’t a clue as to what she was up to, but sensing her seriousness, he searched his memory. After a bit, he said, “No. There’s that chef in Louisiana, but… I don’t think that’s what you’re driving at.” He paused. “So what’s the Prudhomme Clinic?”
She ignored the question, and turned back to Shapiro. “You keep referring to ‘the program’ and… “ She stopped for a moment, took a deep breath, and organized her thoughts. “A few days ago,” she said, “before Lew had the implant removed, I found him sitting in front of my sister’s laptop. He was logged onto this very weird Web site: theprogram dot org. (Theprogram is one word.)”
“Yes?”
“He was in a trance state—completely out of it. I mean, he was totally unresponsive—but not to the Web site. Which was interactive. He was typing in answers to questions that appeared on the screen. One of them was, ‘Where are you?’”
“Well, that’s very interesting,” Shapiro remarked, “but… what’s the point?”
“The point,” Adrienne replied, “is that someone tried to kill us the next night. They started a gas fire. No one knew where we were, so obviously, they got the address from Lew—when he was on that Web site.”
“And this Web site was… ?”
“I asked a friend who’s kind of a geek to check it out,” Adrienne told him.
“And what did he find?” Shapiro asked.
“He said the site’s on a computer in something called ‘the Prudhomme Clinic.’ It’s in a little town in Switzerland.”
Shapiro nodded, shrugged. “Never heard of it.”
Adrienne cleared her throat. “And there’s something else I haven’t told you.” She turned to McBride. “My sister killed someone.”
“What?!”
“She killed a man in Florida. She assassinated him.”
Shapiro’s eyes swelled with skepticism and surprise. “Why do you use that word?” he asked.
“Because the victim was an old man, sitting in a wheelchair, watching the sunset. She shot him with a sniper rifle—the kind with a silencer and telescopic sights. The newspapers said his spine was cut in half.”
“And… how do you know this?” Shapiro asked.
She explained about finding the rifle in her sister’s apartment.
“And you’re just telling me about this now?” McBride exclaimed.
“I didn’t know what the gun meant,” she told him, “until I went through her credit card charges, and saw that she’d gone to Florida. Then I looked up where she was staying, and read about this man who’d been killed while she was there. You were in the hospital—and, after that, we came here. I wanted to think about it.”
McBride finished his glass of wine. “So who was he?” he asked. “The man who was killed.”
“The papers said his name was Calvin Crane.”
Shapiro’s hand jerked involuntarily, almost knocking over his wineglass. Adrienne saw that his black eyes were round with amazement. “Your sister killed Calvin Crane?” he asked.
Adrienne nodded. “Yeah. No question.”
“Wait a second,” McBride mumbled, talking as much to himself as to the others. “There was a Crane with the Institute.”
“If we’re talking about the same person, he ran the Institute of Global Affairs,” Shapiro told them. “For decades.”
“That’s right!” McBride exclaimed. “It was before my time, but… his name was still on the stationery. Director Emeritus, or something like that.” He paused. Finally, he said, “Jesus…”
Adrienne nodded. “You. And Nikki… Crane and the Institute. You and Duran, Duran and my sister, my sister and Crane… it’s a loop!”
No one spoke for a moment. Adrienne was hunched down in her chair, arms wrapped around her chest, a frown of concentration on her face. “But why?” she said in a plaintive voice. She looked back and forth between the men. “Jeff Duran, the implants, Calvin Crane… my sister… “ She shook her head. “What’s it all for?”
Shapiro cleared his throat, and began to get up. To McBride, it seemed like the old man was shaken. “Well,” he told them, “I won’t ask you who ‘Duran’ is. I think we’ve probably taken this conversation about as far as—”