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 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.