Brain Storm (20 page)

"Quite probably," von Breslau agreed.

Newton took a seat at the same monitor station Mervin Fischer had worked from the previous day.

He absently hooked his feet around its metal legs.

"Fischer eliminated temporal junk from the program. All limbic stuff. What we're working with is a distillation of his physical attributes alone."

"Have you raised the dopamine level?"

"There's a precursor to the main file that will trick his basal ganglia into elevating the level of dopamine."

"You should monitor ATP, as well."

"I'm not taking any chances." Newton tapped away at the keyboard. "I'm pushing everything else up, too. ATP, serotonin, acetylcholine. Everything.

Fischer didn't have sense enough there. Bright guy when it came to programming, but a bit of a neo-phyte with the rest of the interface system. His failure to chemically compensate might explain the reaction he got." He entered a final command. "I'm ready."

"Have you set your machines to deliver the information slowly?"

"I've increased the download time by a factor of four. If it becomes necessary to slow it any further, I can break in manually."

Von Breslau seemed satisfied. "Proceed," he said.

Newton glanced over to the spot where the bodies had been. They were gone. He had no idea where Holz's assistant had hidden them. The light brown patch on the floor where Fischer's blood had stained could have been caused by a spilled cup of coffee.

Newton took a deep breath and tapped out

"Copy" on his keyboard.

Erich von Breslau stared at their test subject, an expectant, avaricious expression on his features.

Exhaling loudly, Newton hit the Enter key.

In the hallway one floor above, the Master of Sinanju felt the electrical signal switch on.

It was different than it had been. Not as far-reaching. More concentrated. But though the signal was faint, it remained distinctive.

Chiun didn't hesitate. Black sandals slid in confident silence along the drab grey hallway carpeting.

Moving swiftly, he headed back down the corridor to the elevators.

A guard intercepted him before he reached the end. "Hold it, old-timer,'' the man said. A hand snaked cautiously to his hip holster.

"Out of my way, lout. I am on important innerfaze business."

"Are you?" the guard said skeptically. "Then you might be interested to know we've had a security breach. We found two of our people unconscious in the parking lot. Both of them were missing their security passes."

"That is not my concern," Chiun spit. "As you can see, I still possess my special identification."

"You're Stella Tresaloni?" the guard said. He indicated Chiun's laminated security tag. A woman's smiling face beamed out from the corner of the pass.

Chiun didn't have time to deal with niggling details. He left the unconscious guard behind an empty receptionist's desk and raced for the elevator.

"Cut the speed in half."

"Already?"

"Do as I say," von Breslau commanded. He watched their test subject carefully. "How do you feel?"

The man's shoulders lifted in a bored shrug. "I don't know. Kind of a little tingly, I guess. Is this going to take much longer?"

The two scientist ignored him.

"I've reduced the rate by half," Newton said.

"Chemical production has adjusted accordingly."

"His heart rate is elevated. Skin tone flushed."

"That isn't unusual."

"No." The German thoughtfully steepled his fingers, then ordered, "Increase by a quarter. Slowly."

Newton made the adjustments. Fischer's program informed him on the computer screen that there was a slight dip in the level of adenosine triphosphate. In the time it took to relate the message, the computer had compensated for the change.

The computer downloaded through the interface program for nearly another minute. Von Breslau stood beside the test subject throughout.

At last he held up a hand. "Let us stop here for a moment."

"Already?" Newton asked. He sounded disappointed.

"Shut down your machine."

Reluctantly Newton did so. He went over to the man and removed the electrodes from his forehead.

He had been so engrossed in his work he hadn't noticed the change in the EKG. The normal spikes that were present when he had begun monitoring had dropped. There were no more of the rough triangular shapes. There was now a serene waviness to the line.

Like a gently rolling sea. He pulled the electrodes from the man's chest

4'Pick that up, please," von Breslau said to Newton. There was a heavy steel crowbar lying on the floor near the gurney. Holz had borrowed it from the gar-deners earlier. It was a five-foot-long rod they used for prying up rocks or stumps on the grounds.

The tool was much heavier than it looked. Newton grunted as he hefted it from the floor.

Von Breslau looked down at the man on the gurney. "I want you to bend this, if you would be so kind."

"Are you out of your mind?" the man said. He glanced at Newton. The scientist's face showed intense strain from holding the bar.

In return, von Breslau smiled tightly. "Please humor an old man."

The man shrugged. "This is crazy," he said. He reached out and took the bar from Newton. And almost bowled the scientist over. He wrenched the bar out of Newton's hands, lifting it high in the air.

"What the—? This thing's light as a feather."

He lowered the heavy bar and took it in one hand, rolling it from palm to fingertips. The truth was, it felt lighter than a feather. It was as though the crowbar had substance, but no weight.

"Now, can you bend it?" von Breslau asked.

The man laughed. "Sure. No problem." He placed his hands approximately two feet apart on the bar and twisted. There was an angry cry of protesting metal, and when he was finished, the bar had a U-shaped bend.

There was a gasp from the room. But not from either von Breslau or Newton. An enraged voice cried out from near the door.

"Thieves!" it shrieked.

Newton turned. Von Breslau puckered his lips, his eyebrows rising in annoyance.

The Master of Sinanju stood in the doorway, his bony hands clenched in balls of white-hot rage. Tight hazel eyes shot charged streams of fury with laserlike intensity at the pair of men across the cold laboratory floor.

"Fiends! Barbarians! Plunderers of greatness! Prepare to pay for your venal pilfering in blood." And like the angry driving wind propelled at the fore of a furious tempest, the Master of Sinanju whirled der-vishlike into the laboratory.

Remo had decided his time might best be served trying to locate Lothar Holz.

Holz was a vice president, Remo knew, so it seemed logical he'd be wherever it was vice presidents hung out. Since the building didn't seem large enough to house an eighteen-hole golf course, Remo opted to check the executive office suite.

He abandoned the R&D level and took the stairwell at the end of the hallway up to the offices.

He found the place swarming with tanned, trim executives, just a hair or two on the younger side of middle age. Their expensive suits were tailored to perfection, and as they walked past Remo, he over-heard them discussing everything from actuarial tables to market placement to on-line strategy. It was worse than any image of hell the nuns at Saint The-resa's Orphanage had tried to instill in him.

Remo assumed that someone along the way would try to stop him. He wore his usual black T-shirt, black chinos and loafers. In this sea of suits, Remo thought he stuck out like a sore thumb. What he didn't realize was that in a company used to many computer-related projects, he wasn't dressed unusually when compared to any of the computer

programmers on staff. It was assumed by everyone that Remo was just another programming nerd.

Everyone, that was, except for Lothar Holz's secretary. "Hello, there," the girl purred when Remo entered the office at the end of the hall. She placed an emery board she had been drawing languidly across her index fingernail into the top drawer of her desk.

"This is Holz's office?" he asked.

"Uh-huh," she said. She leaned forward. "Can I do anything for you? Anything at all?"

"You can cool your jets. I'm here for Holz."

Remo headed for the door, but the girl was quick.

She leaped from behind her desk and plastered herself against the inner-office door.

Her body was pressed between Remo and the

door.

"Mr. Holz isn't in right now."

"I can hear his heart beating through the door."

"That's mine." She grabbed Remo's hand and placed it on her chest. "Let's go someplace and talk," she urged.

Remo didn't have time for this. He tapped the woman lightly on the inside of her wrist. She gasped once loudly, her eyes rolled back in her head and she collapsed sideways onto the office sofa. A broad smile stretched across her overly made-up features.

Remo popped the flimsy door lock and entered the inner office.

The pain from the Dynamic Interface System signal was immediate and intense. It was far more powerful than it had been the day before.

It felt as if someone were dragging his brain and spinal cord out of his body through a raw hole in the back of his neck.

Then all at once, the pain receded.

Lothar Holz was seated behind his desk. A row of tinted windows behind him overlooked a grassy courtyard. Beyond the courtyard was the matching PlattDeutsche building, reflecting its sister structure in its glassy facade.

Remo tried to lunge for Holz, but was rooted in place. He heard the door behind him close and saw Holz's male assistant step out from his peripheral vision and move across the office to stand behind his boss.

4'Don't bother to struggle. You know how pointless that is."

Remo gritted his teeth. "Not as pointless as you might think."

He was surprised to find that, unlike the previous day, the impulses weren't arrested when he tried to speak.

"We've eliminated certain aspects of the program.

Speech, most involuntary responses. The pickup time is greatly increased. You can thank Dr. Smith for that. His input—so to speak—has helped us a great deal. He delivered you over to us in every sense of the word."

Holz grinned triumphantly.

Remo felt foolish. He wanted to say something like You 7/ never get away with this, but the fact was he had already experienced the futility of trying to battle the powerful radio signal. He had tried for hours the last time and had failed. He screwed his mouth tightly shut and stared stonily ahead.

Holz tapped a pen on his desk. "When the interface van didn't check in, the entire building was wired yesterday for your eventual return. Sort of a Sinanju frequency. I don't suppose you'd want to tell me where the van is."

"Go goose a gorilla."

"Your cooperation is irrelevant—we will find out what we want to know easily enough."

Remo remained silent.

"Understand this, Remo, your consciousness may still be yours, but your body now works for me."

Holz turned to his assistant.

"The interface van is at the sanitarium in Rye. Get it." The man nodded and move toward the door.

Holz called after him. "If Smith attempts to stop you, kill him."

Remo heard the door close behind him.

"It became necessary to import assistance on your unique case," Holz said. "You might be curious to see how we're progressing." He called downstairs on his office phone and instructed the technical staff to move Remo down to the fourth floor. Holz then went over to the broken office door and pulled it open.

Remo felt his legs kick in automatically. Woodenly. Again he felt the sensation of some outside power forcing its will upon him.

Though he tried to stop it, he felt the interface signal coursing into his brain, seeping down into his limbs. In spite of his determination, he knew it was no use. He followed Holz out the door.

The expression on Holz's face was insufferably smug.

Remo wanted to rip the smile right off his smarmy face. And unbeknownst to Holz, he still had one chance. One thing the man hadn't bargained on.

Remo prayed the Master of Sinanju would be able to locate the source of the signal and stop it once and for all.

They had nearly been killed.

Von Breslau seemed to be taking the whole thing in stride, but maybe he didn't understand what a close call it had been. Only Dr. Curt Newton knew that they had made it by the skin of their teeth.

The old Asian had blown into the room like a man possessed.

His hands flailed; his legs pumped. Jaw clenching furiously, he had swooped toward them.

He was halfway to them when his actions began to slow.

The signal had kicked in automatically, as it had been programmed to do, but there was a time lag.

The Dynamic Interface System signal hadn't been able to cerebellum lock as quickly as usual. If the mainframes hadn't already been programmed with the information obtained from the younger one, they would never have stopped the Asian.

His speed continued to decrease as he came across the room. In the end, he was like a child's toy with worn-out batteries.

He froze a foot away from Newton.

"What is this sorcery!" the Master of Sinanju demanded. His hazel eyes were sparks of uncompre-hending fury.

Newton ignored Chiun. He tried to copy the old doctor's calm demeanor, though his heart pounded at the closeness of Chiun's attack.

He spoke directly to von Breslau.

"You'll be interested to know we've just refined the program to include speech. Before, we were forced to take hold of everything. It took up tons of computer space. Now we're able to be much more selective."

Chiun's eyes were wide in shock as he tried desperately to move his limbs. He couldn't budge them an inch.

The test subject seemed baffled by the strange ap-parition in the kimono. Newton tapped him on the leg. "Why don't you take off for now? We'll call you back when we need you."

The man nodded his understanding. He hopped down from the gurney and began buttoning his shirt.

He paused a moment, startled. "What—?"