“No — I drive.”
“I have a better idea,” said Danny, grabbing the dashboard as the driver turned off the highway, wheels screeching. “I’ll rent this car.”
“It’s my sister’s car,” said Joe.
“If she lends it to you, I’m sure she’ll rent it to me.”
“But then what will we have for a taxi?”
“Do you do that much taxi business?”
“We are the largest taxi service in all Balti.”
“Then missing one car isn’t going to be that big a deal.”
“We have only two,” said Joe. “One crashed, and two cannot get parts.”
“A hundred bucks for the day,” said Danny.
“One thousand. But we give you lunch, too. Biggest restaurant in Balti.”
Danny worked the price down to seven hundred dollars, with lunch and breakfast in the morning, assuming he was still in town. Joe also promised to give him a ride to the airport, no charge.
Whatever family member was cooking did a much better job at the stove than Joe did behind the wheel. Under other circumstances, Danny might even have stayed for dessert. But he had a lot to do before dark.
Besides the possible DNA match, there was circumstantial evidence of a link between the area where Stoner had crashed and Russian experiments with various physical “enhancements.”
The Soviet Union had run a sports clinic in a small town two miles away during the 1970s and early 1980s. The clinic had specialized in a number of techniques for athletic enhancement, including training in special aerobic chambers and rigorously supervised diets.
It hadn’t been secret — there were several stories about it in the Western media. It closed quietly sometime in the 1990s or early 2000s, never officially linked to the controversies then swirling about steroids and various stimulant use, but it wasn’t much of a stretch to make a connection. Anyone looking back would conclude that while those techniques were never mentioned in the press coverage, they were surely being practiced there as well.
It was rumored to be the site of other experiments as well. MY-PID located an article in
He’d recently retired from the French newspaper. When Danny, driving in the car, called the number MY-PID had discovered, the man answered on the second ring. Danny told him he was working on a book about old Olympic stars and had come across the article.
A white lie compounded by exaggeration, but harmless all around.
Flattered to be contacted, the former reporter told Danny what he could remember of the trip to the facility, describing what looked to him like a horse farm that had been “gussied up” with a pair of massive gyms in the old barns. He’d seen perhaps fifty athletes altogether, and interviewed a dozen. All spoke in glowing terms of the various methods that were used.
“A lot of emphasis on mental techniques,” said the man, whose English was heavily accented but fluent. “Positive thinking, we called it at the time. Of course, now we know they were probably just using many steroids. It was part of the culture of deception. So many athletes ended up doing this. My report was in the very beginning of the time.”
“Do you remember when it closed?”
“I wouldn’t know. We were invited — it was while the Eastern Europeans were winning all those medals, you understand. People thought the success was something to do with the mind. A fantasy.”
“So they did it with drugs?”
“Steroids, certainly. Now I realize what I should have looked for. They claimed they took a vitamin regime. Of course. And positive thinking. Well, you believe what you want to believe, as you Americans would say.”
MY-PID couldn’t locate any records showing whether the facility was operating when the helicopter went down in 1998, though the Frenchman’s account made it seem likely that it had. As of now, satellite reconnaissance appeared to show that it had been abandoned.
Danny decided to check for himself.
He followed the computer’s directions, taking a slight detour from the highway that led to the crash site. Dotted with small farms and houses built two or three centuries before, the countryside seemed almost idyllic, more a backdrop for a movie than an actual place.
A small village sat two miles from the complex. Dominated by a small church that hugged the road, it was home to less than two hundred people. Aside from the church, its central business section held only a pair of buildings; between them they had five shops: a bakery, tobacco shop, small grocery, clothing store, and a store that sold odds and ends.
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
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:
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.
