Brain Storm Read online

  "I don't appreciate being shut out of my own research," he said accusingly.

  "Curt, this is not the time—"

  "Don't tell me that. Don't you dare tell me that.

  Not when you're bringing in this...this amateur. I did all the work. It's only fair I get the credit."

  "You will. Please, Curt." He was leaning and twisting, trying to interpose himself between Newton and the bodies on the floor. His gyrations weren't successful.

  "Oh, my..." When he at last saw the bodies, Newton's voice was small.

  "Who is this?" von Breslau demanded impatiently.

  Newton had stepped past both of them, inching closer to the two corpses. "That's...oh, my. That's Mervin, isn't it? And that's, that's Pembrake. He's a company lawyer or something. What happened?"

  He squatted on his haunches by the bodies, more curious than repelled.

  "It is an internal problem, Curt."

  "Not by the looks of it," Newton scoffed. He was looking at the hole in Mervin Fischer's chest through which some indistinguishable organs had slipped.

  "Did he impale himself on his keyboard?"

  "We are looking into the matter," Holz assured him. Still squatting, Newton turned. "I think it's safe to assume he's not a cop," he said, indicating von Breslau.

  "Who is this man?" von Breslau asked again.

  "Dr. Curt Newton. He pioneered the interface technology."

  "He is the inventor? Good, I have need of his expertise."

  "Wait a minute there, Grampa," Newton said, standing.

  Holz held up a staying hand. He seemed to consider something deeply. When he seemed to reach an internal decision, he beckoned Newton to him.

  "You remember that difficulty you had three years ago?" Holz whispered. "The traffic accident?"

  Newton felt as if he had just been punched in the stomach.

  He remembered a Christmas party that had gotten a little out of hand. He also vaguely remembered a body lying in some snow. It was an indistinct memory, almost like a dream. He didn't know what Holz had done that horrible night. All he knew was after the phone call he had left his car at the scene and been driven home. The vehicle was in his driveway when he awoke the following morning, washed and waxed and gleaming as if nothing had happened.

  Newton had forced the incident from his consciousness. For his part, Holz had never breathed a word of the incident. Until now.

  Newton gulped and nodded.

  "It is good to remember some things, good to forget others," Holz remarked, nodding toward the bodies. Again Newton silently indicated his understanding. "You have made some remarkable advances here, Curt," Holz said approvingly. "With the aid of Dr.

  von Breslau, you will make even more."

  Newton gulped. "Breslau? That wouldn't be Erich Von Breslau, would it?"

  The old man ignored the question. Holz leaned in closer to Newton. He said crisply, "You will not tell anyone. The doctor is involved in the management structure of PlattDeutsche International. If this is discovered, there are forces who would argue that all of our research is tainted. Including your own."

  Newton's mind was racing. His brain conjured up images, countless photographs he had seen over the years, depicting horrific scenes of a war that had ended three years before he was born. He saw London after the blitz; merchant vessels sinking, torpedo victims, orphans crying in the streets, wasted figures in tattered clothes lined up along barbed-wire fences, shallow mass graves stacked with rotting corpses.

  Putting all of that on one end of a scale, he placed his own career on the other. His career won out.

  He heard the voice of Lothar Holz, breaking through his thoughts.

  "Curt? Do you have a problem with this?"

  Newton blinked. He glanced at Holz, then at the small aged man standing impatiently next to him. He didn't look all that dangerous.

  Newton extended his hand. "I'm certain I will enjoy working with you, Doctor." And the smile Curt Newton flashed was sincere.

  16

  Remo and Chiun took the interstate from New York onto the Jersey turnpike. On either side of the high-way, industrialized New Jersey was a joyless, flat expanse of smoke-belching factories built in swamps.

  At night the ugly yellow glow of a million parking lot and chimney lights gave the flats the surreal tone of a depressing futuristic film. In the day, everything just looked squalid.

  Chiun sniffed at the air, thick with chemicals and other pollutants. His face became a pucker of displeased wrinkles. "Why do they call this province

  'new'?" he asked Remo.

  "Because it was at one time," Remo replied.

  "The newness has been eroded. It is time it was renamed Old Jersey."

  "I think that's over in Europe. It's an island or something in the English Channel."

  Chiun's eyes narrowed suspiciously. "Its history predates that of this malodorous place?"

  "By centuries."

  "Remind me never to visit there, Remo, for time has surely allowed the vile Old Jersians to amass an even greater volume of filth than their descendants."

  "Not very bloody likely, but I'll make a note of it," Remo promised.

  They got off the turnpike near Highland Park and threaded their way over to Edison.

  The PlattDeutsche America complex occupied a separate corner of an industrial park near the edge of town. It had its own fence to cordon it off from the other buildings on the site. Several tin patches decorated in red, white and blue adorned the fence at regular intervals. They sported the logo of a private security company.

  Remo parked his car in one of the nearer lots and he and Chiun walked the rest of the way over to the PlattDeutsche America compound.

  It was nearly nine and the place was open for business. People hustled from building to building. Cars were continually passing back and forth through the main gate.

  4 'I don't like this," Remo warned. "Maybe we should wait until tonight."

  "I do not wish to prolong my exposure to this foul air. When you were last here, to which building were you brought?"

  "That one," Remo said, pointing at one of two matching buildings at the front of the complex. It was a gleaming steel-and-glass structure. The early morning sun reflected brilliantly off hundreds of huge, glistening black panes.

  "Then that is where we begin."

  Chiun's hand chopped down. The links of the high fence popped, one after the other, beneath the side of his razor nails. When there was a large enough gap in the fence, he wrapped his fingers around the serrated edge and drew it back.

  Remo followed Chiun through the tear in the fence and the two of them made their way across a stretch of well-watered lawn for the main building.

  "I don't think we should barge in through the front door," Remo said when they were on the sidewalk encircling the building. A vast parking area stretched out to their left.

  "The Master of Sinanju does not use the servant's entrance," Chiun sniffed.

  Remo paused on the sidewalk. Grudgingly Chiun stopped, as well.

  "Look, Chiun. It doesn't make sense to announce we're here. You might not be worried about that gadget of theirs, but I am. If we go in the front door, their security is going to know something's up. We don't even have passes."

  Chiun glanced at the entrance. Several employees were passing into the building at that moment, their laminated security tags attached to a lapel or hanging from the neck. An older woman had one clipped to her pocketbook.

  "Wait here, O worrier," Chiun said with an annoyed sigh.

  Stranding Remo on the sidewalk, Chiun flounced off toward the parking lot, disappearing behind a tall row of neatly trimmed shrubs. He returned a moment later, two plastic tags in his frail hand. He handed one to Remo. "You may stop worrying now."

  Remo looked at his tag. It identified him as Louis Washington III. A charcoal black face was pasted in the corner of the pass.

  "This doesn't fill me with much confidence,"

  Remo said as he affixe
d the tag to the collar of his T-shirt.

  "These will not even be necessary," Chiun insisted. He clipped his tag to the front of his kimono.

  "I am merely indulging you. Come."

  As if he were master of the entire PlattDeutsche complex, Chiun marched boldly for the door. Reluctantly Remo trailed in his wake.

  Less than a minute later, they were roaming the corridors of the company's research-and-development wing. The passes had gotten them beyond the main security desk and onto the elevator. The guard at the R&D level hadn't even looked up when they disembarked from the elevator.

  A gold-embossed sign above the main corridor read Advanced Research Division, but it looked as though the research division had become fixated on a single item. Almost the entire floor had been turned over to the Dynamic Interface System. Down the hall were a few smaller signs announcing Computer Labs, DIS; Product Design, DIS; and Physical Cryptology.

  On the door of the last lab, a hand-written note was taped to the wall: 4'Dr. Curt Newton, resident genius."

  Chiun sniffed the air. "I do not sense the vibrations of the innerfaze device," he said.

  "They might not have the machine turned on,"

  Remo suggested.

  "Is this the correct floor?"

  Remo glanced around, considering. "I'm not sure.

  All these rooms look alike."

  Chiun nodded his understanding. "The banality of American architecture."

  "Maybe we should split up," Remo suggested, thinking it would improve the odds that one of them would destroy either the interface equipment or Holz.

  It would eliminate the chance that they would both be taken at once.

  "Agreed." Chiun spun on his heel and marched down the corridor.

  As he watched him go, Remo noted that the old Korean looked very small, very frail. He wished he could have impressed upon his teacher the frustration he had felt at being manipulated so easily. It was a feeling of helplessness he wished the Master of Sinanju would never have to experience.

  "Chiun?" Remo called.

  "Yes?"

  "Be careful."

  Chiun did not turn. "I am never not."

  Newton affixed the electrodes carefully. His test subject—a program accountant—appeared disinterested in the procedure. Newton talked while he worked.

  "I was surprised to find a lot of his abilities were stored in memory," he said over his shoulder.

  Von Breslau, from his spot near the electrocardi-ogram machines, looked up for a minute. "That is consistent with my knowledge of Sinanju."

  "Is it?" Newton sounded upset. "I wish Lothar had been more up front about everything earlier. I hate playing catch-up."

  "I see in your notes something about 4co autono.'

  What is this?" Von Breslau was near the electrocar-diogram. His thin lips pursed unhappily as he read some of the hasty notes Newton had scrawled to himself in the van the day before.

  "Controlled autonomous," Newton explained.

  "That was the only way I could think to describe it.

  He is able to physically control every autonomic response. It's like one big motor nervous system."

  And the nervous system is altered, you say?"

  Newton laughed. "It would have to be, wouldn't it? But I don't think it's been altered medically. It's more likely the result of an ongoing training. My people speculate the level our Subject A was at took at least a decade to achieve. Perhaps more." He finished with the electrodes and joined von Breslau near the monitoring equipment.

  "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. T
here 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.