A few local residents stood outside the tobacconist, watching Danny as he passed. He smiled and waved, and was surprised to see them wave back.
A mile and a half out of town, he turned to the right to head toward the facility. An abandoned house stood above the intersection, its siding long gone and its boards a weathered gray. A horse stood in a rolling pasture on the left, quietly eating unmowed grass as Danny passed.
The double fence that surrounded the place during its heyday was mostly intact, though weeds twined themselves through the links. The gates were pushed back, still held in place by large chains, now rusted beyond use.
Danny drove up the hill into the complex, feeling as if he was being watched.
He was: a large hawk sat serenely on the cornice of the main building at the head of the driveway, its head nestled close to its chest. Its unblinking eyes followed him as he got out of the car and walked across the small parking lot to the building. The Le Monde story fresh in his mind, he walked to the large gym building on the right. This was a steel structure, more warehouse than traditional gym. It had large barnlike doors on the two sides facing the rest of the complex. Both were locked, as was a smaller steel door at the side.
Danny walked back along the building, looking for the other gym, which according to the story, sat catty-corner behind the first.
It had been razed, replaced by an empty field. There were no traces of it.
A set of old dormitory buildings sat at the very rear of the site. Danny went to the closest one. The door gave way as he put his hand on the latch.
He stepped into a small vestibule. There were posters on the wall, faded but still hanging perfectly in place. The words were in Russian. He activated the video camera on the MY-PID control unit and had the machine translate them for him:
“Train well!
Your attitude is your ally!
Think, then perform!
Whatever you dream, you will live.”
The vestibule opened into a corridor on the left; an open staircase was on the right. Danny walked down the corridor slowly. Small rooms lined the hallway. Some had doors, some not; all were open. There were no furnishings in any of the rooms, nothing in them but dust, a few old shades, and in one, rolled rug liners. The place had a musty smell, the scent of abandonment.
Upstairs it was the same. He went into one of the rooms and looked out the windows. He couldn’t quite imagine what it would have been like — a hundred jocks and their trainers, always running, working out, practicing their various sports.
Getting injections and God knew what else.
How did that relate to Stoner?
The athletes were just a cover for an experiment to create supermen?
And Stoner… became one of their experiments?
It didn’t sound plausible. What Danny saw instead was more benign — people trying to help him back into shape after being broken. The downside of steroids and other drugs wasn’t understood at the time.
Or maybe he was being too naive. Maybe the doctors knew exactly what they were doing.
But steroids weren’t evil. He’d known guys who took them back in the nineties. Amateur bodybuilders trying to get ahead. An almost pro wrestler hoping to get the “look” so he could land a job with WCW, back in the day. Not evil guys.
Did they help? He couldn’t even say. But it didn’t seem to hurt. He didn’t buy the “ ’roid rage” hysteria.
Maybe he just didn’t have the right information. And maybe that was just the tip of the iceberg compared to what they were doing here, as Breanna had implied.
But could Stoner have survived the crash? Not from what he saw. No way.
Danny went back outside. Walking through the grounds, he could tell without even referring to the Le Monde story that several other buildings had been removed, bulldozed without a trace.
The remarkable thing, he thought, was the lack of vandalism. Granted, the population in the surrounding area was small, but there must be kids somewhere, and he’d have thought at least the windows would have been tempting targets on a boring Saturday afternoon. He was tempted to put a rock through one himself, right now, just for the hell of it.
Going to his car, he caught a glint of light, a reflection of the sun sinking toward the nearby hills. Once again he had the sensation of being followed. But it was distant, and even MY-PID couldn’t detect anything. He stared for nearly ten minutes; unable to detect any movement, he got into the Renault and headed back for the main road.
Danny followed the road south to a slightly larger village about two miles away, driving through a bucolic countryside of rolling hills and farm fields. Small corners of the fields were cultivated, here and there. The idle land was a sign of the country’s current economic woes, where farmers couldn’t afford the money for seeds and new tractors, but from the distance, driving by, they only made the place more beautiful.
This area had been used by the rebels during Romania’s troubles. A good portion of the people here were ethnic Romanians, and in the wake of the Soviet collapse, there had been active attempts toward unifying the country with its neighbor. The Romanian rebels, however, were aligned with the Russians, who were at odds with the Moldovan government as well as the Romanians.
The politics were complicated, tangled in family relationships and issues that stretched back hundreds if not thousands of years. An American had no hope of untangling them, not even with MY-PID’s help, and Danny treaded lightly when he stopped at the police station and asked if he could speak to the police chief.
The woman at the desk didn’t speak English, and his pronunciation of the words MY-PID had given him was off far enough that he had to repeat them several times before she realized what he was saying. Even then she didn’t completely understand — the chief came out of the back room in a rush, thinking he was reporting a stolen car.
“Auto?” said the chief, who spoke a smattering of English.
“I’m here to look for a grave,” said Danny. “A friend of mine died here fifteen years ago. I think he was buried here.”
“Your car stolen?”
“No, my car isn’t stolen.”
“A friend took your car?”
“He’s dead.”
“Dead?”
Danny took out the MY-PID, telling the chief it was a translating computer. He struggled with the words at first, but the more he spoke, the easier the pronunciation became.
When the chief finally understood what he was saying, he laughed. There hadn’t been a real crime in town in over a decade, he said, and he had worried not only for the town’s reputation, but his job.
That confusion cleared, the chief invited Danny to dinner with him. Danny wanted to see the cemetery before nightfall, and with the sun on the horizon, tried to pass.
“Not far,” said the chief, grabbing his hat.
“But—”
“We talk and we eat. Then, there is grave, we see.”
“I—”
“Come, come. Not far.”
The man’s hospitality was too generous to resist, and finally Danny agreed.
It wasn’t far at all. The chief, his wife, and their teenage son lived in a four-room cottage next door to the police station. The boy’s English was considerably better than his father’s, and he acted as translator through the meal. Danny explained why he had come — a friend of his had died in a helicopter crash some fifteen years before. He didn’t mention that he’d been working with the Romanian army, or even that he was an American, not knowing how those facts might be received.
“I remember the crash well,” said the chief, taking down a bottle of vodka from one of the kitchen cabinets. “That was during the guerrilla problems. Your friend was in the Romanian army?”