The Syndrome Read Online Free PDF Page A

and got out her laptop. Connecting it to the phone, she waited for the CPU to boot up, then got out the plastic overlay, and went to the hidden URL she’d accessed the day before (and the day before that). She moved the cursor to today’s rectangle, and then to the one that represented her birthdate:
    Hello, Nico
    The cursor blinked silently.
    Resting her fingertips on the keyboard, she typed
    Picture, please
    Instantly, an hourglass appeared in the center of the screen, and hung there, like a bug in the air at the end of an invisible thread. After a while, an image began to form, one line after another until, in the end, there was a snapshot of an old man,the same old man who was sitting in the wheelchair eight floors below.
    Certain now that she had the right man, Nico went to the folding luggage rack that held her baggage. These were a battered leather pullman in which she kept her clothes, and a waterproofed case made of lime-green, high-impact plastic with a customized, foam interior. Turning the numbered wheels of the combination lock on the second bag, she sprung the catch, opened the case and checked her tools.
    These were nestled in a complex of foam compartments and, once assembled, constituted the finest sniping system money could buy. There was a bolt-action, M-24 barrel that coupled with a reassuring
cliick
to a Kevlar-reinforced, fiberglass stock with a matte-black finish. A Leupold scope was mounted to the barrel on steel rings and bases, in tandem with a B-Square Laser. Support came from a Harris bipod, and silence from a Belgian-made helical suppressor that threaded onto the maw of the rifle’s twenty-inch barrel.
    Nico assembled the weapon system with practiced ease, taking about thirty seconds, and tested the trigger’s three-pound pull. Then she inserted a single round of Teflon-coated, .308 ammunition, and rammed it home. With the silencer, scope, and laser, the rifle weighed almost eleven pounds—which made the bipod essential for accuracy.
    Walking out onto the balcony, she saw that the sun was almost underwater, the horizon hemorrhaging as the sky darkened to a blue-black bruise. Backlighted from below, a dozen palm trees trembled in the evening breeze.
    But the old man was right where he was supposed to be, sitting in the twilight, enjoying the day’s last gasp.
    Lying on her stomach, Nico slid the muzzle between the pink balustrades at the edge of the balcony, its barrel resting on the bipod, taking the weight off her arms. Then she looked through the scope, and flicked on the laser, which cast a wafer of bloodred light between the old man’s fourth and sixth vertebrae. From the end of the barrel to the edge of his skin was less than two hundred yards, an easy shot for her, even in thegloaming. Still, she could see the light tremble on her target’s back as her finger curled on the trigger, drawing it toward her for what seemed like forever. Then the rifle spasmed, and she heard a sound like a champagne cork going off in another room. The old man jerked upright and stiffened, as if an electric shock was moving through him. Then his body slumped, sinking into itself in such a way that she knew she’d cut his spine in two.
    There was no smoke, really, and no flash that anyone was likely to have seen. The cartridge she’d fired was subsonic, so the only sound that could have given things away was the noise of the slug as it slapped into the old man’s back.
    Not that it mattered. No one was paying attention—certainly not the Jamaican, who was lost to Bob Marley, and certainly not the children in the pool, whose laughter hung in the air like music.
    Nico sat up, and broke down the gun.
No muss, no fuss.
    Then she got to her feet, and returned the rifle’s components to the Underwater Kinetics case in which they belonged. Finally, she spun the custom-fitted, little brass wheels that locked the suitcase, and topped off her champagne. Then she walked out onto the balcony with her glass, sat