Brains

  “So, what do you want?”

  “I want you to authorize me to go down there and look for him!”

  “Hansen is CIA. I'll have to call Langley first.”

  An hour later, she was called back into Crawley's office. “The DDO is sending two agents down in the morning. No one goes down alone, and we will be sending field agents. Not pathologists. No more amateur sleuthing is going to be tolerated. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir,” she agreed immediately. But what she said to herself was, In a pig's eye.

  ◆◆◆

  The Turtuga Marina had droned along steadily all afternoon and all night Thursday, and all day Friday, then stopped abruptly about sunset. Cameron looked out the porthole, and saw nothing but ocean. He wondered idly if they were waiting for another boat, but after a few hours the engines came back to life, and the boat powered up to what must have been near full speed. The night sky was inky black, and unlike the prior night, there was no reflection of running lights on the water. After about twenty minutes the boat slowed to a crawl, and he sensed more than saw the irregularity of land. Another half-hour's slow, nearly silent running, and the boat stopped. The thin man appeared at the door, and secured his hands behind his back, while another man kept a gun leveled on him. Next, two heavy weights were attached to his ankles. He gave a quizzical look.

  “These will discourage you from trying to escape by jumping overboard.” Cameron could see the logic in that.

  They loaded him into the Zodiac at the stern, and Cameron could see that they were in a small bay. A set of headlights shown from on shore, which otherwise was completely dark. The small boat powered across the quarter mile separating them from the beach. He definitely would have jumped had it not been for the leg weights, but as it was, he stayed put. As they approached the shore, he could see that the headlights belonged to a pickup truck or SUV. Two men, both large, were standing on the sand in front of him. They beached the Zodiac, and he walked slowly across the sand, the labor of an extra fifty pounds on each leg exhausting him quickly.

  The pickup truck had a Leer cap on the bed, and inside there was a wooden crate the size and shape of a coffin, padded on the bottom, with heavy leather straps for his ankles and wrists, and one across his chest. He was loaded in, leg weights and all, and the straps cinched tight. The leg weights were removed and the two men from the boat carried them away. He heard the Zodiac’s engine start up, then fade into the distance.

  “If you make noise, which would probably be useless anyway, we will stop and tape your mouth. We will also pull over and tape your mouth prior to stopping for gas. Enjoy your ride.” A straw was put between his lips, and he drank deeply. A lid was then placed on the crate. Not tight, breathing was not a problem, but he could barely move. All in all, he had preferred the Turtuga.

  He could hear the liftgate being secured, and the cab doors closed. They reversed up the beach, then spun quickly around and bumped along for several minutes before the road became smooth and the truck powered up to speed.

  The truck stank of sweat, urine, and gasoline. They rolled along steadily, stopping every few hours, first to tape his mouth, then at filling stations, then a few minutes later to remove the tape and give him more water. He asked to relieve himself, but the response was a laugh, “Why do you think it smells like piss? Feel free to wet yourself.” As dim daylight filtered into the crate, he did just that.

  It was getting dark when they stopped again, barely an hour after the last gas stop, and replaced the duct tape and checked all the straps. After just a few more minutes of travel, the steady highway noise was replaced with the stops and starts of city traffic. Cameron assumed they were approaching his destination. He struggled with the straps, as he had from time to time along the journey, but was completely incapable of getting any slack. Finally, the truck came to a stop, and he heard a large overhead door lowering. Both doors slammed, and he heard footsteps on concrete. Nothing was said to him, he was simply left in his crate. After the first fifteen or twenty minutes he started to lose it, and twisted and turned with all his might, but to no avail, accomplishing nothing but wearing bloody abrasions in his wrists and ankles. He screamed against the tape until his voice was reduced to a hoarse whisper, and his throat was as raw as if he had used a bottle brush to scrub his tonsils. He had nothing left, mentally or physically. He was sure he would die. And afraid that wouldn't happen anywhere near soon enough. Finally, exhausted, he fell asleep.

  Chapter 12

  Saturday, October 15

  New York

  Dr. Overbridge was at the door to his building at precisely eight a.m., as a black town car with tinted windows rolled smoothly to the curb. A man climbed out of the passenger seat and opened the rear door for Overbridge, who walked the seven steps to the car, and got in.

  “Wait,” he directed. He clicked the safety belt in place. Then removed it. Replaced it. Removed and replaced it once more. The driver watched him.

  “Okay to go now?”

  “Proceed,” he nodded. The car moved into traffic, then headed east. Overbridge stared out the window, counting the doors on the right side of the street. Once they merged onto FDR drive, he was able to close his eyes and think.

  His thoughts were not pleasant.

  Over thirty years ago, he had been a clinical fellow in advanced neurosurgery at the UniversitätsSpital Zűrich. Monique Lemieux was from Grenoble, a brilliant neurobiologist, beautiful, and passionate in a casual way that provided the perfect counterpoint to the intense study at the Center. When he left to return to America, the goodbye was simple, with neither of them expressing regret, nor any thought of continuing their association.

  Ten years later, at the Neurological Institute of New York, a small elderly man approached him. Monique was dying, ravaged by ovarian cancer, and had asked her father to bring him to her. Overbridge had heard nothing from her in the intervening years, but M. Lemieux had insisted, and he had flown to France.

  Monique had been almost beyond recognition, bald, emaciated, sallow. She introduced him to her son, Pierre. Their son. No, Pierre did not know.

  She asked him to take them for a picnic in an alpine meadow, where she proposed to tell Pierre of his parentage. She had wanted to take the téléphérique de la Bastille, to the top of the mountain near the ski jump built for the Olympics. Pierre loved the tram ride high over the city. Overbridge, however, had insisted on driving, excited to take the rented Aston Martin Volante convertible up the beautiful winding road. They never made it, Overbridge failing to negotiate an unmarked hairpin curve. Monique's face was crushed into the dash, and shards of the wine bottle in her lap had lacerated her chest and neck. Her left carotid was open, pumping. Overbridge tried to control the hemorrhage, pinching the vessel between his thumb and index finger. She was slippery with blood, and he would first succeed, then slip, then succeed again. At first she was conscious, calling to Pierre, telling him it was okay, but slowly she faded, and was gone. The rescuers arrived to find Monique dead, Overbridge still gripping her neck although barely conscious. Pierre was whimpering in the back, crying for his Maman.

  Overbridge was taken to surgery to remove his ruptured spleen and control the internal bleeding.

  When he awoke M. Lemieux was in his room.

  “I think,” he said, “that we should not meet again.”

  Overbridge struggled to comprehend.

  “Where is Monique? And Pierre?” he was finally able to croak out.

  “She is dead,” he answered evenly. “Pierre's spine was broken. He is paralyzed.”

  “When can I see him.”

  Lemieux' eyes were hard. “You are not understanding. You fathered him and deserted him. Then you killed his mother. Now you have paralyzed him. You will be returning to New York as soon as you are able, and you will not ever return here, you will not contact us or him. Ever.” He rose and left the room.

  Overbridge stared at the ceiling. His whole body had been full of grief and tension. His heart
pounded, and the bile rose in his throat. He began to feel that his heart would explode. Suddenly he saw the holes in the ceiling tiles. He had started to count them. The guilt somehow became less acute as he counted. He had been able to slow his racing heart, breathe normally. Numbers were pure, perfect, true. As he continued to count, he realized that order was the key to overcoming chaos.

  Order had become his friend, his talisman, his deity.

  Pierre Lemieux was now an internationally recognized poet and para-Olympian. Overbridge had seen numerous pictures of him, watched him roll his wheelchair up to receive the Grand Pris de Poésie from the Académie française. He had not tried to contact him.

  As they crossed the Triborough Bridge into Queens, Overbridge wondered whether repairing the aneurysm would exorcise the demon that had gripped him for the past twenty years.

  ◆◆◆

  The car pulled into a nondescript alley off a nondescript street several blocks from Elmhurst hospital. The overhead door in the back of a large brick building went up, and the driver rolled in and parked in a cavernous empty garage. The door rolled shut behind them. Neither Overbridge nor his escorts had said a word.

  Maxwell was waiting and opened his door, and Overbridge followed him to an elevator. Nine steps, then up three stairs, then six more steps to the waiting elevator. They went up to the third floor, where the elevator opened into a corridor lined with doors, looking very much like a small hospital wing, except that the floor was covered with a rich chocolate carpeting, and the walls were decorated with museum-quality impressionist paintings.

  Twenty-six steps down to the end of the hall, double glass doors opened onto a conference room, with a large walnut table, over-sized overstuffed chairs, and sixty-inch high definition screens on both side walls. Maxwell waved him to a chair.

  “I'll get right to it,” he said, pressing a button which lowered shutters and dimmed the lights. The screens lit up.

  First came a scene of a man in a complete lower body exoskeleton, laboriously moving along a walkway with side rails. His head was shaved, and the top was covered with wires inserted into the skin, coming together in a thick cable that led to a work station, with a similar cable going back to the exoskeleton. A narrator was explaining that this was the first generation, with needle EEG electrodes detecting brain activity, external signal processing, and simple robotic legs.

  The next scene showed the same man, this time with a tight-fitting cap, again with many wires, now going directly to a unit on the top of the exoskeleton. The voice explained that the interface had been miniaturized to allow for on-board processing, and that, instead of needle electrodes, a special cap with surface electrodes had been used. The walking was not as smooth as before, which was due to decreased signal clarity from the brain.

  The image next showed a different man, again with the needle electrodes on his shaved head, the same cable and workstation, but now the return cable went not to a lower body exoskeleton, but into a plate on the man's spine. He was able to walk, slowly, and with support. The narration explained that this man had been fitted with a spinal nerve stimulation interface, and that the impulses generated by the computer were used to stimulate the actual muscles of the legs and feet. The voice described the laborious process of determining by trial and error which nerves stimulated which muscles, and the immense initial processing required to program the movements.

  Overbridge sat passively through the presentation.

  “Well,” Maxwell asked, “what do you think?”

  “Interesting,” Overbridge replied, “but why am I here?”

  Maxwell stood up and escorted Overbridge back to the elevators. They went down to the second floor, the elevator opening into a single large room, with an operating setup in the center, and with dogs in cages down one wall. Maxwell guided Overbridge to the cages. In each was a dog, all Labrador retrievers. They all appeared healthy, and wagged their hind quarters enthusiastically as the men approached.

  Maxwell pointed to the plates on each cage, showing “Interface Implant,” and indicating dates of up to five months previously. He opened a cage. “Here,” he invited Overbridge, “examine the animal.”

  Overbridge looked at the dog. There was a connector on the back of the animal's head, which he touched, first lightly, then gripped it firmly and wriggled. It was apparently fixed to the skull. The connector was like an old computer cable plug, with perhaps thirty pins. The casing appeared to be titanium.

  Maxwell tossed the dog a kibble, and strode across the room. He opened a large cabinet, where there were plastic models of brains, which Overbridge noted to be about the size of a dog's. Maxwell took one and handed it to Overbridge.

  He looked closely and saw that there was something on the model. There was a plug similar to the one he saw on the dog attached on the back side. He looked carefully at the plug. It was indeed titanium, with a finish similar to the osteointegrated implants the dentists used. At Maxwell's urging, he grasped the connector and peeled a nearly invisible fine mesh off of the brain model. It was perfectly fit, following the contours of the brain into all of the folds. It had about the consistency of a spider web, and became nothing but a torn cobweb as he removed it.

  “This mesh,” Maxwell said proudly, “is my work. It is made from a new semi-conducting fiber, which we are now using in a wide range of applications in computers and communication, and can be spun into a web with several hundred individually addressable electrical gates per square centimeter, which can be used for either detection or stimulation of impulses. We go from a high resolution MRI, through 3-D printing of a precise replica of a dog brain, to spinning a perfectly fitting mesh in about two days. All of these dogs have had mesh applied to their brains, and the skull replaced, with the connectors you saw integrated to the back of their skulls.”

  Overbridge was interested. He thought about the difficulties in performing such an operation, which would involve removing the skull, opening the dura, placing the mesh, closing the dura, and getting a seal where the fibers connected to the plug. “It would be impossible to place something that fine,” he remarked. “How do you overcome that?”

  In response, Maxwell opened an envelope and dumped the contents on the lab bench. A mesh with enough stiffness to maintain shape was revealed, and sat on the bench like the ghost of a brain. “I have engineered a special sugar-based coating. Once in place, water, or saline, or blood will almost instantly melt the coating, and the mesh will settle into the folds and crevices nicely.”

  “What is your success rate?”

  “About sixty per cent of the dogs survive through recovery. Less than satisfying.” He sighed. “If we can get them out past a week, they do fine. It seems to be mostly a matter of getting adequate dural seals to prevent leaks and infection.”

  Overbridge was annoyed with the incompetence of the surgeons. It would certainly be a difficult procedure, he thought, but I am sure my success rate would be close to one hundred per cent. The right corner of his mouth twitched up slightly. He then turned to Maxwell with the obvious question.

  “If your goal is to re-animate legs, why do you need such a large implant? A smaller implant to go over the lower body motor cortex would be adequate. And again, why am I here?”

  Maxwell opened another cabinet and pulled out another model, this time a human brain. It was marked to show the motor cortex, that part of the brain that originates the impulses to cause movement, and specifically from the waist down. This was a strip about three centimeters wide, starting in the middle of the brain in the cleft between the right and left hemispheres, and arching just over the top of the brain on both sides. He then took another coated fiber mesh in the shape of a large “M,” which fit precisely into the hills and valleys of the model, covering the motor cortex completely on both sides.

  “You are quite correct, this is what we need for lower body re-animation. This model is a perfect replica of Pierre Lemieux' brain, 3-D printed from an MRI, and although the mesh I am holdi
ng is just for demonstration, we have spun a mesh precisely to fit his lower body motor cortex. Most conveniently, the approach to his aneurysm can be made through the center of the brain adjacent to that area, so the placement can be easily done at the time of his aneurysm repair. He had his spinal implant placed three months ago, and has been working every day on computer-assisted leg motion. He is ready for the direct cerebral interface, which will give us a hundred times more accurate detection of brain impulses than the external interfaces, and should allow return to near normal motor activity. You are here because we want – he wants – you to place the mesh.”

  Dr. Overbridge wondered exactly who “we” were.

  “What about his aneurysm? The approach is similar, but the chance of disaster when doing this at the same time is substantial.” Overbridge realized with a start that he had actually started to picture the procedure, and he pulled up short on the thought that he was actually being drawn in to consider doing such a thing.

  “There is no aneurysm. Those images were faked in order to provide a reasonable cover story as to why he was having surgery.”

  “So, what we have here is a new, clearly not-FDA-approved device, the product of clandestine research and development, which you would like me to surreptitiously implant in an internationally famous literary figure. Preposterous. Why would I ever consent to such a scheme?”

  “For one thing, you would be part of history. This has the possibility of solving one of the most vexing problems of modern medicine. But you and I know it would be more than that. This is about redemption, Dr. Overbridge. You paralyzed Pierre. You break it, you fix it. Gives a new meaning to child support.”

  Again, Overbridge wondered who “we” were. Although he assumed that his name would have been in the accident reports, only Pierre’s grandfather would have known he was the boy’s father. The fact that they had this information was unsettling.