‚Yes.'
‚We don’t need to leave until midday tomorrow. You’ll have time for a visit to the Louvre, if you’d like that.'
Alex shook his head. ‚Actually, paintings bore me.'
‚Really? What a shame!'
Alex stood up. Somehow his hand knocked into his glass, spilling the rest of the Coke over the pristine white tablecloth. What was the matter with him? Suddenly he was exhausted.
‚Would you like me to come up with you, Alex?' the woman asked. She was looking carefully at him, a tiny glimmer of interest in her otherwise dead eyes.
‚No. I’ll be all right.' Alex stepped away. ‚Good night.'
Getting upstairs was an ordeal. He was tempted to take the elevator, but he didn’t want to lock himself into that small, windowless cubicle. He would have felt suffocated. He climbed the stairs, his shoulders resting heavily against the wall. Then he stumbled down the corridor and somehow got his key into the lock. When he finally got inside, the room was spinning. What was going on? Had he drunk more of the gin than he had intended, or was he …?
Alex swallowed. He had been drugged. There had been something in the Coke. It was still on his tongue, a sort of bitterness. There were only three steps between him and his bed, but it could have been a mile away. His legs wouldn’t obey him anymore. just lifting one foot took all his strength. He fell forward, reaching out with his arms. Somehow he managed to propel himself far enough. His chest and shoulders hit the bed, sinking into the mattress. The room was spinning around him, faster and faster. He tried to stand up, tried to speak—but nothing came. His eyes closed. Gratefully, he allowed the darkness to take him.
Thirty minutes later, there was a soft click and the room began to change.
If Alex had been able to open his eyes, he would have seen the desk, the minibar, and the framed pictures of Paris begin to rise up the wall. Or so it might have seemed to him. But in fact the walls weren’t moving. It was the floor that was sinking downward on hidden hydraulics, taking the bed—with Alex on it—into the depths of the hotel. The entire room was nothing more than a huge elevator that carried him, one inch at a time, into the basement and beyond.
Now the walls were metal sheets. He had left the wallpaper, the lights, and the pictures high above him. He was dropping through what might have been a ventilation shaft with four steel rods guiding him to the bottom. Brilliant lights suddenly flooded over him. There was a soft click. He had arrived.
The bed had come to rest in the center of a gleaming underground clinic. Scientific equipment crowded in on him from all sides. There were a number of cameras: digital, video, infrared, and X-ray. There were instruments of all shapes and sizes, most of them unrecognizable to anyone without a science degree. A tangle of wires spiraled out from each machine to a bank of computers that hummed and blinked on a long worktable against one of the walls. A glass window had been cut into the wall on the other side. The room was air-conditioned. Had Alex been awake, he might have shivered in the cold. His breath appeared as a faint white cloud, hovering around his mouth.
A plump man wearing a white coat had been waiting to receive him. The man, who was about forty, had yellow hair that he wore slicked back, and a face that was rapidly sinking into middle age, with puffy cheeks and a thick, fatty neck. The man had glasses and a small mustache. Two assistants were with him, also wearing white coats. Their faces were blank.
The three of them set to work at once. Handling Alex as if he were a sack of vegetables—or a corpse—they picked him up and stripped off all his clothes. Then they began to photograph him, beginning with a conventional camera. Starting at his toes, they moved upward, clicking off at least a hundred pictures, the flash igniting and the film automatically advancing. Not one inch of his body escaped their examination. A lock of his hair was snipped off and put into a plastic envelope. An opthalmoscope was used to produce a perfect image of the back of his eye.
They made a mold of his teeth, slipping a piece of putty into his mouth and manipulating his chin to make him bite down. They made a careful note of the birthmark on his left shoulder, the scar on his arm, and even the ends of his fingers. Alex bit his nails; that was recorded too.
Finally, they weighed him on a large, flat scale and then measured him—his height, chest size, waist, inside leg, hand size, and so on—making a note in their books of every measurement.
And all the time, Mrs. Stellenbosch watched from the other side of the window. She never moved. The only sign of life anywhere in her face was the cigar, clamped between her lips. It glowed red, and the smoke trickled up.
The three men had finished. The one with the yellow hair spoke into a microphone. ‚We’re all finished, he said.
‚Give me your opinion, Mr. Baxter.' The woman’s voice echoed out of a speaker concealed behind the wall.
‚It’s a cinch.' The man called Baxter was English. He spoke with an upper-class accent, and he was obviously pleased with himself. ‚He’s got a good bone structure. Very fit. Interesting face. You notice the pierced ear? He’s had that done recently. Nothing else to say, really.'
‚When will you operate?'
‚Whenever you say, old girl. Just let me know.'
Mrs. Stellenbosch turned to the other two men. ‚ Envoyez lui!' She snapped the two words.
The two assistants put Alex’s clothes back on him. This took longer than taking them off. As they worked, they made a careful note of all the brand names. The Quiksilver T-shirt. The Gap socks. By the time they had dressed him, they knew as much about him as a doctor knows about a newborn baby. It had all been noted down.
Mr. Baxter walked over to the worktable and pressed a button. At once, the carpet, bed, and hotel furniture began to rise up. They disappeared through the ceiling and kept going. Alex slept on as he was carried back through the shaft, finally arriving in the space that he knew as room 13.
There was nothing to show what had happened. The whole experience had evaporated, as quickly as a dream.
“MY NAME IS GRIEF”
« ^ »
THE ACADEMY AT POINT Blanc had been built by a lunatic. For a time it had been used as an asylum. Alex remembered what Alan Blunt had told him as the helicopter began its final descent, the red and white helipad looming up to receive it. The photograph in the brochure had been artfully taken. Now that he could see the building for himself, he could only describe it as … crazy.
It was a jumble of towers and battlements, green sloping roofs and windows of every shape and size. Nothing fitted together properly. The overall design should have been simple enough: a circular central area with two wings. But one wing was longer than the other. The two sides didn’t match. The academy was four floors high, but the windows were spaced in such a way that it was hard to tell where one floor ended and the next began. There was an internal courtyard that wasn’t quite square, with a fountain that had frozen solid. Even the helipad, jutting out of the roof, was ugly and awkward, as if someone had thrown a giant Frisbee that had smashed into the brickwork and lodged in place.
Mrs. Stellenbosch flicked off the controls. ‚I will take you down to meet the director,' she shouted over the noise of the blades. ‚Your luggage will be brought down later.'
It was cold on the roof. Although it was almost the end of April, the snow covering the mountain still hadn’t melted and everything was white for as far as the eye could see. The academy was built into the side of a steep slope. A little farther down, Alex saw a big iron tongue that started at ground level but then curved outward as the mountainside dropped away. It was a ski jump—the sort of thing he had seen at the winter Olympics. The end of the curve was at least fifty feet above the ground, and far below, Alex could make out a flat area, shaped like a horseshoe, where the jumpers were meant to land.