Brain Storm (11 page)

Smith sat behind his desk. The other man, a stranger Remo somehow found familiar, sat in a chair across from Smith. The stranger turned to Smith as Remo staggered in pain near the still-open doorway.

"This man is white."

"That is true, obviously." Smith's eyes darted over to Remo.

There was a hint of concern etched in the deep recesses of his flinty gray eyes.

"The Masters of Sinanju have always been Orientals. Koreans, specifically."

"Remo was able to absorb the training when no Asians could."

The man's tone became threatening. "It would be regrettable if I discovered you have been lying to me, Dr. Smith."

By the door, Remo was attempting to regain his equilibrium.

It felt as if someone had jammed two rusty ice picks in his ears.

The itching had moved inward. It now felt as though a starving rat were trying to claw its way out of his skull.

With a colossal effort, Remo forced his jaw and larynx to work.

"What is going on, Smitty?" Though he was able to speak, the words were labored, sounding as though they were spoken by a stroke victim.

Dimly Remo recognized the man as the one he had seen on the news the previous evening. A look of mild surprise spread across the man's regal features.

"Unusual," he said. He nodded approvingly, as if Remo had just passed some private test.

Remo decided he didn't like him. The way he looked at Remo was maddeningly condescending. He wasn't going to wait for the order. He'd settle this guy's hash and then ask Smith what the hell was going on.

The look of surprise on the face of Lothar Holz became one of shock as Remo took a hesitant step toward him.

"Curt," the man said to no one in particular.

"You don't have a lock yet." There seemed to be a nervous crack in his usually calm demeanor.

Remo took a second step. Though he moved like a marionette with hopelessly tangled wires, he was closer to Lothar Holz.

Holz stood. His face grew more concerned and he spoke urgently.

"Curt, he is moving."

For the first time, Remo noticed a small device pressed into the man's ear. It was no larger than a hearing aid. Apparently he was giving and receiving signals from some outside source.

A second later, Remo had forgotten about the transmitter-receiver. With no warning, Remo's left hand moved in a deadly arc.

It whipped up and around, slashing down solidly onto the back of an old oak office chair. The chair protested, but only for an instant.

All at once the legs buckled, the back and seat shattered apart and the entire chair collapsed into an unrecognizable pile of splinters.

The hand continued its vicious arc and slapped audibly against Remo's thigh. It rested there as Holz looked on, wide-eyed.

Holz wasn't the only one who was shocked. Remo looked at the pile of debris, a dumbfounded expression on his twitching face.

Something was profoundly wrong. He had been focused in on Smith's visitor. He hadn't told his body to shatter the chair. It had acted independently, exerting some foreign will over him.

The tingling at the base of his skull grew more intense.

"Mr. Holz, I have acceded to your demands.

There is no need for random acts of violence," Smith said.

Holz. The man from the bank. The stunt with the interface system. And all at once, Remo knew. It was some sort of mind-control device. Smith had sold him out. To Holz. Remo fixed the man with a deadly glare.

"He is not under control," Holz snapped at Smith.

He tapped the receiver in his ear. "Newton! Newton!" Frightened and cornered, he backed up against Smith's desk.

And though he moved with an uncertain, jerky motion, Remo still had his body partially under his control. With a look that would have inspired terror in hell's most stone-hearted demon, Remo took another step toward the cowering intruder.

"What on earth was that?"

"Autonomic response."

"From the peripheral system?"

"That's just it. This guy has no peripheral nervous system. It's all autonomic."

"That's impossible." In the back of the van, surrounded on all sides by various scientists, technicians and programmers, Dr. Curt Newton was having an impossible time figuring all this out.

He had been overjoyed to learn that Harold W.

Smith had been contacted and even more delighted when he learned that Holz had set up a meeting with the doctor at Smith's place of business. But he didn't know why Holz wanted him to bring the interface van from the New Jersey complex.

"We have someone special I want you to download," Holz had said.

This was troublesome in and of itself.

There was a problem with the ethics of duplicating the contents of a person's mind when that person hadn't given prior consent. Indeed, Newton had learned earlier in the morning that some of the people at the bank were threatening PlattDeutsche with lawsuits—so Newton had assumed that they were going to put a hold on this aspect of the project. Curt Newton didn't have much of a problem with that. They had already demonstrated to the world that the process worked. Surely the government contracts would start rolling in now.

But Holz had been insistent, and so Dr. Curt Newton had loaded everything into the van and driven up to Rye to await the "someone special" he'd been promised.

The man had arrived at the building mere moments before. He had been a problem right from the start.

Not only did his synaptic and neural patterns not match anything the computers had on file, but something as simple as a cerebellum lock was proving to be near impossible. The man was going into some sort of nervous-system overload. Where they should have gotten control of him the moment the heat sensors picked him up in the rear office—which was where Holz had arranged for his meeting—the man was proving virtually impossible to detain. His acetylcholine levels were off the charts. Some rogue spark had just caused him to destroy a piece of furniture. Who knew what he'd go after next?

"Why haven't you gotten a lock yet?" Newton demanded of his panicking staff.

"He's resisting."

Newton shook his head. "Impossible." Newton, who had been acting in a supervisory capacity, pushed one of the technicians away from his terminal and dropped into the vacant seat. And immediately saw a problem. "Your readings are wrong," he said, indicating the neural monitors. "Your nervous-system model is shot," he said, waving toward the monitor. "These axons and dendrites aren't even from a human."

"Yes, they are," one of the scientists insisted. "I triple-checked. They've been reconfigured somehow.

The interface program is having a hell of a time trying to adjust to the new system pattern."

"Afferent indicators are negative," a technician piped up.

"Shh! Shh!" one of the men hissed. He cocked an ear toward the speaker that connected the back of the van via a special radio signal to the headset of Lothar Holz. "He's still speaking!" the man said, incredulous.

Newton's face was severe. "He shouldn't have hypoglossal control at this point."

The scientists collectively shrugged or shook their heads in confusion. They redoubled their efforts.

An instant later, there was another crash from the office speaker.

In the back of the van, Dr. Curt Newton froze. He prayed that nothing had happened to his mentor. For without Holz, the money flow for the Dynamic Interface System would trickle to a stop. With wary eyes, he turned toward the heat-sensing apparatus.

The chair holz had been sitting in shuddered as if from some unseen inner force, then collapsed into a shattered lump on the threadbare carpeting. There was nothing left to indicate that the pile of splinters had been, until a few seconds before, a rather worn and uninviting office chair.

In a lightning-fast flash, Remo's hand returned to his side.

"Control your man, Smith!"

Holz looked clearly terrified. His unflappable facade had given way to a look of sheer horror as Remo, struggling to fight the interface signal, slowly advanced.

Smith kept his expression bland. He dared not allow Remo's unexpected resistance to raise any visible signs of hope. If Remo was able to battle the signal and take care of Lothar Holz, then perhaps this situation could be rectified quickly. But there was still the matter of the white van out in the parking lot. "Master of Sinanju, I meant you no harm," Holz cried out as Remo closed in.

Remo managed a puzzled frown. Master of Sinanju? What was he talking about?

Remo wanted to ask, wanted to put the question to Smith.

But it had become too much of an effort to speak.

He would take care of Holz first.

Remo's deep-set eyes were focused on his target, but he still moved in an awkward, stilted manner. He was battling a nervous system that had for years obeyed his every move and now felt sluggish and unresponsive. The itchiness inside his skull was a constant irritant.

His ears rang dully.

But he had Holz. The man cowered like a frightened, craven dog before him. He would finish him with a simple blow. Nothing fancy. Then he'd find out from Smith what the hell was going on.

But the blow he planned had a mind of its own.

To Remo's surprise, his hand slashed out automatically, his spear-sharp fingertips aimed directly at the sternum of the man who cringed before Smith's desk.

Sweating profusely, Holz cowered, petrified and utterly defenseless against the killer attack.

Out in the van, Curt Newton was frantic.

"Boost the signal!"

"I can't."

"There's got to be interference coming from somewhere!"

"There's no interference. The signal's fine."

Newton shook his head. "This is impossible," he said again, desperately.

Information raced across the screen at a rate Newton had never before seen. The lightning-fast binary scroll was reflected in his owlish glasses.

"Master of Sinanju, I meant you no harm," the pleading voice of Lothar Holz hissed over the tinny speaker. Newton glanced at the speaker with a worried expression.

"Can you get the cerebellum lock yet?" Newton pleaded with one of his white-coated associates.

The man was bathed in sweat, red faced and pale in turns. He nodded sharply. "I could get it now, but we don't have the capacity."

"What do you mean?"

"His neural system is incredibly complex. There's not enough room for the file. That's why we've had a problem so far." The man wiped the sheen of perspiration from his forehead as he spoke.

"There's no way one man could fill the entire system." "I don't think this guy is human," the technician explained, shaking his head in awe. "It's almost like his neural codes have been entirely rewritten."

"But you're saying we don't have the capacity to duplicate the file?"

"Only if we destroy the other files in the system."

Newton's jaw was firmly set. "Copy over them."

"Are you sure?"

Newton nodded sharply. "Copy over everything we have. Get the cerebellum lock on him first."

"Yes, sir." The man immediately went to work, setting up the interface system to automatically delete old files as it copied the synaptic information from the individual in the rear office. The portable computers in the van whirred anxiously to life as the information flowed back over the radio signal from the rear office.

The massive databases rapidly began to fill with a wealth of new information.

"I've got cerebellum control," a tech announced after only a few seconds. He hunched over his screen excitedly.

Newton watched in fascination as new sets of binary codes—translated automatically by the preprogrammed interface system—began scrolling across the screen. The speed was far greater than before.

Where they had first moved by in a flash, they were now a blur. When he blinked, the bands of white numbers seemed to congeal into single, static lines of washed-out white.

"Wow, this is great," said the technician who had informed the others of the cerebellum lock. He had isolated the information from that section of the brain and was now playing around at his keyboard.

"This guy's got some killer programming." He punched out a simple command on the cerebellum board.

"What did you do?" Newton asked. He was still nervous, still thinking about the funding that a major screwup could cost him. Still thinking about his place in future scientific textbooks.

The man shrugged. "I just ran a program this guy's brain had started. It was something that was already along the neural net. Pretty basic compared to the rest of this guy's programming."

"What was it?"

"It was a move."

Newton pressed. "What kind of move?"

Again the young man shrugged. "It was like a karate chop, sort of." He scrunched up his face at the inadequacy of the description.

Newton felt his heart turn to water and slide down into his stomach. This foolish little hacker in the van had no idea what he might have done. The man in the office was like no one he had ever downloaded before. He was something more than a man. And he had already been advancing on Lothar Holz.

Newton prayed that the blow had missed its mark.

Fortunately for Lothar Holz, it had.

And fortunately for Remo, as well, it had been a simple stroke.

Any maneuver more complex might have ripped his arm from his shoulder.

His arm shot out, but the aim wasn't true. Holz had moved to one side. And while Remo's brain would have ordinarily compensated for the movement, he found to his supreme surprise that his brain was no longer his own. His hand breezed past Holz's shoulder. The powerful blow dissipated in the empty air above Smith's desk. His hand returned to his side, seemingly of its own volition.

Now, though Remo struggled against the mind control, he couldn't budge even a fraction of an inch.

Holz caught his breath. With grateful eyes, he watched Remo's hand slap back against his leg. It didn't move again.

Holz stood erect, straightening his tie. He tugged the cuffs of his suit jacket primly and, with a half turn of his neck, adjusted his Adam's apple against the collar of his white dress shirt.