Mind's Eye (37 page)

“Well?” said Girdler. “What do you say? Do we have a deal?”

44

Nick Hall reached out and searched with his mind. Sure enough, the men from the Homestead Inn had carried Megan to their U-Haul and were now less than a mile away from him, closing fast. They had received new orders. To pick him up and bring him to a safe house in Merced, forty-five minutes away. They had been told in no uncertain terms that if he cooperated he was to be treated as gingerly as if he were a crystal vase. The boss only wanted to do a catch-and-release on this fish.

Hall could detect the faint outlines of Megan’s mind, but conscious or unconscious, it remained unreadable to him. It didn’t matter. It was enough to know she was alive, and the men in the truck provided confirmation that she was in mint condition.

“Your men have been approaching while we’ve been talking, haven’t they?” said Hall into his phone.

“Good guess,” replied the colonel. “They’re almost there. Should I tell them you’ll be cooperating? So they can revive Megan Emerson and drop her back at the hotel?”

Hall sighed deeply. “I’ll cooperate,” he said.

“Good choice, Nick. I’ll let them know. They’ll be there shortly.”

In less than a minute, a fourteen-foot U-haul truck, painted a familiar orange and white, arrived on the scene, and pulled off the road near Nick’s rental car. The back of the truck rolled up to reveal two men, each carrying both tranquilizer guns and real guns. Megan had been carefully strapped in against one wall, her head against a pillow.

Hall couldn’t believe his reaction to seeing her. It was like a crushing weight had been lifted from his chest. He felt intense relief and elation, and the raw power of these emotions took him by surprise. He stepped into the truck and went straight for Megan, kneeling down next to her and making sure she was in perfect health.

One of the men rolled the back of the truck back down and the vehicle began moving. A light was on inside, providing plenty of illumination. Another of the men nodded at Hall. “We appreciate your cooperation,” he said.

A receiver in the man’s ear came to life as a call came in. Hall couldn’t hear what was being transmitted through the tiny device, but he could read the words as they registered in the soldier’s mind. “Lieutenant,” said the voice. “This is Colonel Girdler. New orders. I want you to shoot our new guest with a tranquilizer dart.
Immediately!
No hesitation!”

Hall read that the lieutenant was just as astonished by this order as he was, but the soldier reacted with admirable speed, drawing his tranquilizer gun like he was a gunfighter in the old west. Hall didn’t have enough time to even think about diving away as the soldier depressed the trigger.

As Hall felt the sting of the dart, he knew that Girdler hadn’t played it straight with him.

So what else had he lied about?

Hall’s grip on consciousness slipped away quickly. But the fear that enveloped him just ahead of the darkness was not a fear for himself, but a fear of what might happen to Megan Emerson, a woman who was rapidly becoming his entire world.

45

As consciousness gradually returned, Hall found his right hand had been handcuffed to a heavy steel chair in a large bedroom. And his Internet connection was down!

He had become so dependent on instant access to cyberspace that its absence was jarring. He had integrated this new ability so quickly and so thoroughly into his senses that its loss was as distressing as the loss of an arm, or maybe even an eye, would have been.

Had his implants been removed?

Across from him, a man with salt-and-pepper hair, in his fifties, was watching him intently. He entered the man’s mind and answers to this question, and many others, gushed in as quickly as he could assimilate the information.

The man was Colonel Justin Girdler, the head of PsyOps, and they were in the safe house in Merced he had spoken of on the phone. Girdler had been forced to use the safe house because he was going against the direct orders of his boss, a general named Sobol, so nearby Edwards Air Force Base was out.

Girdler was using an electronic device to actively suppress the WiFi in the area. The 6G system was never down. Its coverage was absolute across the fifty states: penetrating and overlapping. But Girdler didn’t want Hall to be able to send e-mails and texts, or otherwise make use of the most impressive system to communicate information the world had ever known.

Hall opened his mouth to protest he had nothing to do with the destruction of the
Explorer
, and that the killings at WeOfficeU were in self-defense, but before the first word came out he read that it wouldn’t matter.

Girdler knew very well this was the case.

He also knew about Hall’s ESP. That was why Hall was here.

Hall continued probing. Girdler’s thoughts revealed that no one else was in the house, other than an unconscious Megan Emerson two rooms over and a single man to guard her, whose presence Hall had already discovered for himself. This man had strict instructions not to leave the room under any circumstances. Girdler had made sure he wouldn’t be interrupted. Sure there would be no witnesses to what was to take place here.

The colonel not only knew about his ESP, he even had a rough sense of its range. “But how?” muttered Hall out loud.

He paused for several seconds and then his eyes widened in shock as he fished out the answer to his own question. “I sent you an e-mail?” he whispered, as if he was still having trouble believing it. “I alerted you
myself?
” he finished in horror.

“If you read your entire message from my mind,” said Girdler, “you’ll know not to be too hard on yourself. It was a desperation move. We thought you might have lost your memory again after it was sent, so didn’t realize that you had. Your reaction now confirms it.”

“And you’re also thinking that I’ve just confirmed my ESP, as well, which was critical to you.”

“You’re right, of course. Your ability is
amazing
. Just incredible. Intellectually, I had convinced myself you had this ability. But to be faced by the reality is just . . . extraordinary.”

Hall remained silent. He glanced at a digital clock on an end table. It was two a.m. He had not been out long. Even now, Altschuler was having his head drilled and technology implanted in the soft tissue of his brain.

“Although you can read my mind,” said Girdler, “I’d prefer an actual conversation. This way, instead of going to the effort of randomly picking out what you will, I can direct and organize the presentation of my thoughts. You’ve no doubt read I plan to kill you here this morning. And why.”

“What do you plan to do with Megan Emerson?” demanded Hall.

He already read the gist of the answer, but Girdler was correct. He could get a clearer, more nuanced answer if someone organized their own mind around a subject. He could pick apart memories and specific information, but opinions, future plans, and answers to subjective questions were harder to get a handle on through mind reading alone.

The answer to the question, “Did you like the horror movie you just saw?”
could be read instantly. The answer to the question, “Do you
think
you’ll like the new horror movie coming out next week?” was far more challenging to read. This answer was an amalgam of preferences for genre, the actors involved, the director, the screenwriter, opinions of friends, reviews one might have read, and so on. And only the person being asked the question knew their own minds well enough to instantly weigh and combine the variables to provide an answer. A trespassing mind reader could not.

“Your friend will be awake fairly soon,” answered Girdler. “My associate will give her a second dose and then return her to where he found her, good as new.”

Hall read in Girdler’s mind that different people responded differently to the knock-out drug, and she was very petite, so giving her a second dose before she regained consciousness from the first would put her at unnecessary risk. The fact that Girdler was unwilling to take this risk was encouraging.

“I’m fairly sure she knows about your ability,” continued Girdler. “But without you to demonstrate, no one would ever believe her. Like you, she’s innocent. You have my word she won’t be harmed.”

Hall laughed. “Your
word?
” he said in contempt. “We both know that’s not worth a fucking thing.”

Girdler reeled, and Hall knew he was drilling into a sore spot.

“Why did you let me wake up?” asked Hall. “I can read how distressing this is to you.” Hall wasn’t sure it was comforting to know the man who would kill him regretted it to the very core of his being and was sure he would pay a terrible price, psychically, the rest of his life. “So why let me see it coming?” he continued. “Much harder this way for both of us.”

“I had to be absolutely certain you could read minds,” replied the colonel. “I had to be absolutely certain I wasn’t making a mistake.” He frowned deeply. “And I owe it to you to not to kill you from afar, like a coward, without you knowing the reasons why.”

“You
owe
it to me?” spat Hall. “Are you serious? Did you ever consider I might prefer
not
to see it coming? That this would be the more humane option?”

“I had to be sure about your ESP,” mumbled Girdler miserably. “Killing an innocent man is bad enough. Killing an innocent man on the basis of a mistaken assumption is . . . unthinkable.”

“Okay. So having to kill me makes you feel like shit. I get it. So here’s an idea.
Don’t!
I agree with your position about mind reading being too dangerous to risk unleashing. I really do. I wish you could read my mind just for a second to see this for yourself. I’m working hard to cure myself of this curse and see to it that the recipe is deleted from history forever. Even if I can’t rid myself of this unwanted ability, I promise to never admit to having it. To never demonstrate it again. How can I convince you?”

If anything, the colonel’s expression became even more morose. He lowered his eyes. “You can’t,” he said softly. “I believe you. Everything I’ve learned about you tells me you’re a decent man, with high ethical standards.”

“
So let me go!
” insisted Hall. “Do the right thing.”

Girdler looked as though he had been hit in the stomach. “I
am
doing the right thing,” he said, disgusted with himself. Disgusted with an impossible situation with only ice-cold solutions. “I trust your good intentions, Nick.
Now
. But what about tomorrow? Given what was done to your brain, it’s a miracle you’re still alive. Your mind and memory have been screwed with mercilessly. Since you wrote the e-mail, you’ve already had a memory-loss relapse. Your mind has undergone multiple, severe traumas, and is potentially unstable. Who knows what will happen going forward? What if you become psychotic? A paranoid schizophrenic who can read minds?”

Hall blanched, now looking as though
he
had been sucker punched in the gut. This was a chilling scenario he had never considered.

“Or what if the power changes you?” continued Girdler. “Power has corrupted good people before. So you’re a potentially mentally unstable nuclear bomb who assures me you won’t self-detonate. I trust your sincerity when you tell me you won’t do anything to let this genie out of the bottle.” He shook his head despondently. “But the stakes are too high to leave it at that. It’s the Nick Hall that you’ll be a year from now I can’t be certain of.” He nodded toward his prisoner. “And neither can you.”

Girdler was
right,
Hall realized. He
was
too potentially dangerous to let live. His mental stability going forward was by no means a given, not with what had been done to him. So was his death for the good of society? He couldn’t argue that it wasn’t.

But his survival instinct was too strong. He couldn’t lay down his life because of what he
might
become,
might
represent. Maybe it was the ethically right thing to do, but it was something of which he was incapable. So he would fight to his last breath to survive, even though he understood intellectually why he should do nothing to resist.

He was once again living the lesson Megan Emerson had taken from a Broadway play. Her
wicked
effect. Seen from one angle, Colonel Justin Girdler was a hero, not shirking his duty—no matter how detestable—of eliminating a credible threat to the safety of civilization. Seen from another angle, Hall was an innocent man, being executed without a trial by a merciless autocrat. And it occurred to Hall that Girdler was the hero from many more angles than he was.

Unlike Altschuler, the colonel had skeletons in his metaphorical closest that were not pretty. On the whole, he was a good man, forced all too often into making impossible decisions no one should have to make, but he was far from a prince in his personal life. Altschuler’s decency was fairly white, while Girdler had a lot of gray in his background.