Zig Zag (54 page)

How
did this happen? How could she have gone through a 180-degree
transformation? Thinking about the night she met Valente had made her
reflect on all the changes her personality had gone through since
then: the student Elisa didn't care about her clothes or her
appearance at all; Professor Robledo acted like she was an aspiring
catwalk model or some cabaret hopeful. Even her mother, elegant Marta
Morande, had said she didn't seem like herself. Seemed like a
different person.

Her
heart pounded as she stared into the glass. Who was she getting all
dressed up for? Who had made her change so much? Then something very
strange occurred to her.
Valente
would have liked it.

Stunned,
she kept walking. Stunned and mystified, as if she didn't have
control of her own free will. But in the end, she accepted the fact
that wanting to feel desired was
her
fantasy,
too. It might be enigmatic or even repulsive, but there was no doubt
that the desire to feel wanted came from within her, and the Elisa of
years gone by had no right to protest.

The
heels of her white boots clicked on the sidewalk as she approached
the meeting point. She was scared, but she also really wanted this
meeting to turn out to be something
real.
Over
the last few months, Elisa's fear and desire always seemed rolled
into one.

It
was just a street corner. There was no one there. She glanced around
and was caught in the headlights of a car parking on a perpendicular
side street. Feeling her pulse race, she approached. Whoever was
behind the wheel opened the passenger door from inside. The car sped
off immediately, heading toward Paseo del Prado. Only then did the
driver speak.

"My
God, I would never have recognized you. You look so ... different..."

She
blushed and turned away.

"Please,
let me out. Pull over and let me out."

"Elisa,
they stopped watching us two weeks ago. Trust me. I know."

"I
don't care. Let me out. We shouldn't be speaking."

"Give
me a chance. We have to meet without their knowing. Just give me one
chance."

Elisa
looked at him. Blanes looked a lot better than he had at Eagle's
Aegean base. He wore jeans and a loose-fitting shirt and still had
his beard. All the hair once on the top of his head seemed to have
migrated there. But he definitely looked different. She looked
different, too. She felt ridiculous, dressed like that. Her whole
fragile existence came crashing down before her. She realized he was
right: they had to talk.

"I'm
happy to see you. Really," he added, smiling. "I wasn't
entirely convinced that my musical message would work. I know they've
stopped surveillance, but I still wanted to take precautions.
Besides, I had a feeling it might be the only way to get you here. We
had to bait Jacqueline, too."

She
picked up on the plural:
we
had
to. Who else was in on this? Still, Blanes's solid presence, his
proximity, was comforting. Staring out at the Madrid night, she asked
about the others.

"They're
fine. Reinhard took the train. One of his students bought the ticket
for him. And Jacqueline flew in. Sergio Marini couldn't make it."
Seeing Elisa's raised eyebrow, he added, "Don't worry, he's
fine. But he won't be coming."

The
rest of the trip—across illuminated highways and dark country
roads—was made in silence. The house was in the middle of
nowhere, near Soto del Real, and even in the dark it looked huge.
Blanes explained that it had belonged to his family: now it was his
sister's and her husband's. They thought about turning it into a
bed-and-breakfast. Rural tourism was all the rage. Eagle Group, he
added, had no idea it existed. Or so he thought.

The
sparsely furnished living room had just enough chairs so no one had
to sit on the floor. Silberg stood to greet her. Jacqueline didn't.
Jacqueline's appearance made her do a double take, but she forced
herself to turn away when she realized that the ex-professor's
reaction to her scrutiny was the same as her own when Blanes had
stared at her. And Jacqueline seemed to see in Elisa a mirror
reflecting her own appearance. What did all that mean? What the hell
was going on?

"I'm
glad you all came," Blanes said, pulling up a wroughtiron chair
for her. He took another one. "Let's get right down to it.
First, I should say that I'll understand your shock, even
incredulity, when you hear what we're going to tell you. It's only
natural. All I ask is that you try to have a little patience."
No one said a thing. Blanes, lacing his fingers together and resting
his elbows on his thighs, suddenly said, "Eagle Group is lying
to us. They've been lying for years. Reinhard and I have proof."
He pulled some papers from a side-table drawer. "I hope you'll
give us your vote of confidence. The memories will come, I assure
you. They came to us—"

"The
memories?" Jacqueline said.

"We've
all forgotten a lot of things, Jacqueline. They drugged us."

"When
we were on the base in the Aegean," Silberg interjected. "And
every single time the 'specialists' interview us. They drug us every
time..."

Elisa
leaned forward, incredulous.

"Why
would they do that?"

"Good
question," Blanes replied. "First, they're trying to hide
the fact that Craig and Nadja's deaths are related to Cheryl's,
Rosalyn's, and Ric's. They'll go to amazing lengths to cover it up.
They're spending millions on this smoke screen, and it's still
slipping from their grasp. There are more and more witnesses, people
they have to bring in for 'treatment,' journalists they have to throw
off track. In Madrid, when Nadja died, the authorities evacuated the
entire block claiming there was a bomb threat, and then leaked the
news that a young Russian woman had lost her mind and killed herself
after threatening to blow the whole building sky-high."

"They
had to come up with a credible story, David," Elisa said.

"True.
But look at this." He slid a sheet of paper over toward her.
"The owner of the apartment, Nadja's friend, was on vacation in
Egypt. She wanted to come straight back as soon as she heard. She
didn't make it in time. Two days later, a group of kids in another
apartment were playing with some sparklers they'd gotten for
Christmas and started a fire. They evacuated everyone again and no
one was hurt, but the whole building was burned to the ground."

"Yeah,
there was a lot of speculation about that." Elisa had read the
headlines. "But it was just a terrible coincidence..."

That's
out of the question. Let me tell you another coincidence.

She
glanced at Blanes apprehensively.

"There
were no witnesses in Colin Craig's case, either. Not even a crime
scene," he continued. "His wife killed herself at the
hospital, two days later, and their son died from exposure just hours
after being found. Neither Colin's family nor his wife's wanted to
keep the house, so they sold it through an agent. A young IT
executive at a company called Techtem bought it."

"It's
an Eagle front," Silberg explained.

"They
tore it down right away," Blanes finished. "Same situation
in both cases: no witnesses, no crime scene."

"How
did you get all this information?" Elisa asked, leafing through
the papers.

"Reinhard
and I have been making some inquiries."

"But
this still doesn't prove any relation between New Nelson and their
deaths, David."

"I
know. But look at it this way. If there is no relation between what
happened to Colin and Nadja and what happened on New Nelson, why go
through all this trouble to demolish the actual
scene
of
the crime? And why kidnap us
all,
and
drug us
all?"

Jacqueline
Clissot crossed her long legs, bare to the thigh in her amazing
three-piece "suit" (matching choker, tube top, and
miniskirt, slits in each one). Elisa thought she looked very sexy and
very made-up, her black hair up in a bun.

"What
proof do you have that they drugged us?" she asked, impatient.

Blanes
spoke calmly.

"Jacqueline,
you examined Rosalyn Reiter's body. And after the explosion, you went
down to the pantry because Carter called you in to look at something.
Do you remember all that?"

For
a second, Jacqueline seemed to become another person. Her face lost
all expression and she visibly stiffened in her seat. Her sensual
appearance contrasted so starkly with that windup doll reaction that
it scared Elisa to the core. She
saw
the
answer to the question in the ex-professor's fluster before she heard
her speak. "I... think ... a little..."

"Drugs,"
Silberg said. "They've erased our memories with drugs. You can
do that nowadays, you know. There are even lysergic acid derivatives
that can be used to create
false
memories."

Intuitively,
Elisa knew Silberg was right. She thought she could recall, in the
foggy haze of her mind, having received multiple injections while she
was confined on the Aegean base.

"But
why?" she insisted. "Let's say that Colin's and Nadja's
deaths
are
related
to Rosalyn's, Ric's, and Cheryl's. What does that have to do with us?
Why take us there, drug us, and then put us back? What information
could we possibly give them? What memories do they want to erase?"

"That's
the question," Silberg said. "They've drugged all of us,
not just Jacqueline. But she's the only one who examined a body, and
none of us has witnessed a crime..."

"And
we don't know anything," Elisa added.

Blanes
held up a hand.

"That
means we
do
know
something. We have something they need, and the first thing we have
to do is figure out what that is." He looked at each in turn.
"We have to figure out what it is we all have in common, what we
share without even realizing it."

"We
were on New Nelson and we saw the past," Jacqueline proclaimed.

"But
what information could they get from that? And what memories do they
want to erase? We all remember Project Zig Zag and the images of the
Lake of the Sun and the Jerusalem Woman..."

"I'll
never forget it," Silberg whispered, and for a second he looked
very old.

"So
what else do we have in common? What have we shared over all these
years since New Nelson that they want to find out about, and then get
rid of?"