Brain Storm (3 page)

Lothar Holz stood in the center of the crowd, soaking up the admiration as if such a display was his birthright

Clive Butler moved to Holz's side, quieting the crowd with a raised hand. When he spoke, his words had the clipped intonation of an old-money New Englander. It was as if the sounds were produced in his sinuses and every word had a gasping, affected qual-ity that suggested each syllable would be his last. As he spoke to his customers, his teeth never parted.

"I want to thank Mr. Holz on behalf of the entire Butler/Lippincott family of banks for the privilege of witnessing his remarkable new technology firsthand.

And I am certain that we are all thankful that it is PlattDeutsche who has developed our new security system. I know my money sleeps better at night knowing PlattDeutsche is on the job."

Andy was about to call the paramedics until he realized the painful series of groans emanating from Clive Butler's throat was the man's version of laughter.

A brief round of fresh applause ensued.

"Thank you, thank you," Holz said to the now genuinely enthusiastic crowd. "You will all be relieved to know that the technology used to temporarily immobilize you is a harmless neural linkup that connects the human brain to a computer. And thanks to the kind cooperation of my good friends at the Butler Bank of New York, we are now ready to offer our invention to the government of the United States.

All of you will surely agree that the scientific potential for such a device is limitless. As it happened, this test was necessary to prove to our government that this is a viable technology.

"And a very personal thanks to my good friend Mr. Clive Butler for the generous use of these facilities to introduce our product to the world. And to further thank each of you for your cooperation in this most successful enterprise, my company is going to deposit five thousand dollars in each of your accounts. I thank you for your invaluable assistance."

The ensuing applause was deafening. Whistles pierced the staid lobby. A call for the amount to be doubled was pointedly ignored.

Like a prince after a tour of a peasant village, Lothar Holz exited the building, surrounded on all sides by his coterie of thieves. The blond man pushed the door open and fell in respectfully behind him.

Outside, a gaggle of press descended, as if they, too, had been frozen off at some distant point and only now released. They circled around Holz like a swarm of buzzing flies.

Andy Frost watched all of this with a mixture of confusion and relief. The bosses were making the rounds now, gathering information for the PlattDeutsche deposits and instructing employees to put the best possible face on this bizarre event.

Not wanting to appear either flustered or lax in his work habits, Andy turned back to his desk. Remembering the old man, Andy reached for the bankbook he had dropped in the confusion. It was gone. He glanced around and found that the old man was gone, as well.

On Andy's desk was a handful of crumpled

twenty-dollar bills.

HOLZ CLIMBED UP into the back of the van half an hour later. His delicate fingers were wrapped around the neck of a chilled bottle of champagne, which he had retrieved from the trunk of his car once the crowd of expectant reporters had departed. His young assistant wordlessly passed out crystal stemware to the elated collection of scientists.

"It all worked flawlessly, Mr. Holz," a nervous man said.

"Let's not delude ourselves, Mervin, hmm? It worked out very well. That's why we celebrate now." Holz downed his glassful of champagne in one gulp. With giddy looks, like schoolchildren proud to have come in first in a spelling contest, the gathered scientists followed suit.

His assistant offered the bottle to him once more, but Holz declined. While the others still reveled in their success, he waved his empty glass around the cramped interior of the van, indicating the complicated machinery with the offhand gesture. "That moment when we lost contact—what went wrong?" he asked.

"A radio signal, Holz. There was a truck out here with a powerful CB transmitter. It garbled our signal."

Holz tipped his head boyishly. "Mervin, your garbled signal almost got me shot," he admonished the programmer.

Mervin Fischer looked nervously at the others. "It wasn't a fault in the program. It's a design flaw. I warned you this could happen, Mr. Holz. We should have done more lab testing."

"How long would you suggest we take, my friend? Ten years? Twenty? The Japanese will easily outstrip us by then."

"Germany is the only country we have to worry about right now. No one's deeper into interface technology than they are."

Holz gave the man a paternal slap on the back.

"No one is ahead of us," he announced. A nod of his head, and his assistant returned with a fresh bottle of champagne, filling the programmer's glass.

One scientist sat far back in the van, still staring intently at a monitor screen. His hands were flying across a compact keyboard as he sifted through all of the raw data they had collected in the previous hours.

Holz left the others and stepped over to the man.

"I had hoped you would revel in your success, Curt. Aren't you going to join us for a drink?"

Dr. Curt Newton didn't tear his eyes away from the screen. "This is amazing," he said, shaking his head.

"What is?"

Newton pointed at the screen. "As you know, the Dynamic Interface System not only manipulates the human mind, but we are able to download information as if it was stored on a computer. Which, in effect, is what the human brain is."

"So?"

"There was one individual in the bank who wasn't affected by our immobilization program."

"That is impossible. No one moved but us."

"Yes, yes," Newton said impatiently. "But look." His hands moved in a flurry over the keyboard. In a matter of seconds, he had pulled up the CD recorder files from the bank's stationary cameras.

Displayed on the small screen was an unremarkable man in gray standing before one of the bank lobby desks.

"He's not moving," Holz said.

"Look more closely."

Setting his champagne glass on a console, Holz leaned closer to the monitor. The old man was as frozen as everyone else, staring blankly in the direction of the would-be robbers. Holz was about to tell the scientist that he saw nothing that wasn't expected from the man when all at once he noticed movement at the end of the man's hand.

As he watched more carefully, he saw that the old man was swaying from side to side. It was obvious from the footage that this man was somehow immune to the immobilizing effects of the interface system.

He was only mimicking the rest of the bank patrons.

"Explain this," Lothar Holz demanded, indicating the monitor.

On the small screen, the drama continued to play out. The robbers were circulating among the crowd, passing out money.

"I don't understand it."

Holz's features were grim. "Did the rest of the interface work?"

"We downloaded his thought patterns into our system along with the others in the bank. And that's another remarkable thing. If I didn't see him with my own eyes, I would swear the patterns were a computer construct. This man interfaces with the computer better than any human I've ever seen. He's remarkable."

Lothar Holz stood. "Use him as a test subject."

Newton seemed delighted at the prospect.

"Gladly," he said. He couldn't wait to download the hard-drive information into the mainframes back at PlattDeutsche America's headquarters in Edison, New Jersey. The man's thoughts were so precise, so logical, that they would be easier to read than those of any of the laboratory test subjects he had used up until now. He couldn't wait to use the revolutionary new interface program to tinker around in the old man's head and see what secrets were hidden up there.

He watched the small monitor screen excitedly. On it, Harold W. Smith, the man on whom the "revolutionary new interface program" had no immobilizing effect, hurriedly dropped the robbery money onto the desk of Andy Frost. Without so much as a glance in the direction of Lothar Holz, he tucked his bankbook into the torn plastic cover he had received when he opened his original account at the Butler Bank of New York thirty years before and ducked out the bank's side entrance.

2

His name was Remo, and the last thing he wanted was the first thing he got.

The waiter dropped the glass of water to the red-and-white-checkered tablecloth. He did this from at least one foot above the table's surface. Warm water spilled over the rim of the glass and spread in a widening stain across the ragged and faded check-erboard tablecloth. Remo inspected the translucent glass carefully. A brown-crusted residue clung to the lip of the glass. He doubted it was food.

"What is this?" he asked, pointing to the glass.

"What's this?" the waiter mocked in a thick Bronx accent. "What are you, a comedian? What's this? It's water."

"I wanted the rice first," Remo explained.

"You wanted the water, then rice," the waiter replied flatly.

Remo closed his eyes patiently. Though he had kept his breathing shallow since he had first walked through the door to the tiny Manhattan bistro, the fumes from the kitchen were already getting to him.

"Look, I don't care what you think you heard,"

Remo said. "I want my rice,
then
my water." He pushed the glass away. "And would it be too much trouble to put a little soap in the dishwasher next time?"

The waiter's eyes were angry, but the man didn't say a word.

Instead, he left the glass where it sat, spun on his heel and returned to the kitchen through a battered steel swinging door. A menacing red-printed sign beneath the filthy Plexiglas window warned that this entry was for employees only.

Occasionally a head would pop into view behind the grease-striped glass, and a pair of blurry eyes would peer nervously in his direction.

Remo had been aware of the stares from the back room ever since he had entered the restaurant. Although he was used to hard looks from potential targets when he was on assignment, this time the agitation among the kitchen staff had nothing to do with him. They were staring beyond Remo, at a tiny table set at the very back of the small room.

It looked as if it had been a booth in a previous lifetime, for there was a high-backed parson's bench with accompanying torn and faded vinyl seat cover pressed firmly up against the rear wall. The table seemed to match the restaurant's original decor, but on the nearer side the bench had been replaced with three uncomfortable-looking hard-back chairs. The absence of the bench allowed the occupant on the far side of the table an unobstructed view of the entire interior.

Though the restaurant wasn't large, a generous amount of space had been cleared around this lone table.

Three burly men in ill-fitting suits packed the bench awkwardly, their amply padded elbows jos-tling their neighbors' hands with every forkful of spaghetti that traveled up from their overflowing plates.

As they slurped up generous quantities of sauce-freighted pasta, the men crowding around the table used their vantage point to keep their watchful eyes trained suspiciously on the other bistro patrons as they came and went.

Only one of the three chairs was occupied. One man sat across the table from the others, his back to the rest of the room. His shoulders were broad, though not as muscled as those of the watchers, and they were clad in sea blue fabric that shimmered like silk. The suit jacket was cut perfectly, the matching trousers seeming to have been tailored to his legs where he sat. The shoes were the finest cordovan leather and polished with a shine so fierce that it reflected and amplified the dull glow of the spotty overhead fluorescent lights so that it looked as if the dingy room were illuminated all around with halos of golden fire.

Remo knew the man from various television news programs and newspaper articles. His legal exploits in New York City were grist for all of the late-night comedians.

Don Anselmo Scubisci.

With his back to the room, he exuded a cool confidence that almost dared someone to try to take him on. Of course, it didn't hurt that he had a trio of gorillas in suits staring down every man, woman or child who got within fifty yards of their boss.

Remo had heard that since the death of old Don Pietro Scubisci a few years back, a vacuum had developed in the upper echelon of the Manhattan Mafia.

This was not so unusual. Organized-crime families were reeling nationwide, due to the combined efforts of various law-enforcement agencies. Things had gotten so bad for the Mob of late that no one was moving up in any family for fear that a long-trusted ally could turn out to be a high-level government plant. The dons became fewer and older, the money became scarcer and the power from the old days had just about disappeared.

After the death of the elder Scubisci, there had been a few bloody years when sparring families, intent on getting a piece of the Scubisci Family action, had participated in a violent turf war.

The killing had spread as far in the U.S. as Miami, San Francisco and Spokane. Outside of America, the silent war raged on into Mexico, Colombia and the Cayman Islands. A few bodies even turned up in London and Moscow. But when the smoke cleared, it was the late Don Pietro Scubisci's eldest son, Anselmo, who finally stepped in to fill the void, aided by his ruthless younger brother Dominic.

Remo had identified young Dominic Scubisci as the middle spaghetti-slurping thug, and though he would have loved to finish off the new don right then and there, he was only sanctioned to take out Dominic. Those were direct orders from Upstairs.

Remo's table was closest in the room to the rear booth, and he had pitched an ear to the hushed conversation since he had entered the small restaurant.

"We gotta get the nigga's outta here/' Dominic Scubisci was pleading with his older brother. Flecks of expelled tomato sauce speckled the tablecloth as he spoke, blending with the red squares and marking the already well-stained white.

"Your attitude is not progressive," Don Scubisci said. He spoke precisely, in barely accented English.