Brain Storm

by Warren Murphy

  Watching the entire procedure from a squatting position behind his desk and unable to move a muscle, Andy, in some lucid part of his mind, was struck by the surrealism of the entire procedure. It was an eerie tableau, as if everyone inside the bank were some sort of dusty museum exhibit demonstrating modern banking techniques.

  Andy caught a hint of movement before him and shifted his eyes—which seemed about all he could move—in that direction. He had forgotten about his customer. The old man was standing stock-still before his desk, frozen like everyone else.

  Not entirely, it seemed.

  Faintly, so much so that it was barely detectable, the old man was swaying from side to side. Also, as Andy watched, there seemed to be a slight trace of movement at the tips of the man's slender gray fingers.

  Andy's attention was distracted in the next minute when his legs suddenly buckled. He fell roughly back into his chair, dropping the old man's passbook to his desk blotter.

  All around the bank, patrons suddenly began to stir as if some huge unseen switch had been activated.

  Tellers backed away from their windows. Bank patrons stood nervously in place, eyeing the robbers, who seemed themselves at a loss for what to do next.

  The men looked suddenly panicked, as if the thought that anyone in the bank would be able to move had never occurred to them.

  For the first time, Andy noticed that none of them carried guns.

  Andy looked beyond the old man in front of him toward the street, where he fervently hoped that an NYPD SWAT team was positioned to take out the robbers. All he saw beyond the large white van was a pizza delivery truck stuck in late-morning traffic, a giant CB antenna bobbing impatiently from its roof.

  Suddenly a command cracked through the air.

  "Okay, hold it right where you are!"

  Bank security. There were three green-suited guards standing around the lobby, their guns drawn and trained toward the largest concentrations of thieves.

  The leader held his hands high above his head.

  "I'm certain that this is just a misunderstanding, sir," he said tightly. He tried to force the cheerful-ness of a moment before, but the words sounded terse. He glanced impatiently out toward the parked van. Andy noticed that he wore a hearing aid.

  "Shut up!" the head of the Butler Bank security force ordered. "Down on the floor, hands behind your heads! Now!"

  The man looked back from the door, eyeing the guard balefully. "Do you have any idea how much this suit cost?" he asked. He shot another glance toward the bank entrance. The traffic seemed to be picking up. The pizza truck had moved a car length down the street.

  "Down! Now!"

  The robbers were beginning to comply. They dropped to their knees, all the while watching their leader expectantly. The man refused to move an inch.

  The pizza truck drove away.

  Andy felt an odd tingling sensation at the back of his head.

  It was a sort of tickle, as if someone had brushed his neck with a feather. The sensation made his ears itch.

  The robber turned victoriously back toward the guard. With a boldness that was surely suicidally motivated, the man strode purposefully up to the guard and, wrapping his fingers around the barrel of the gun, tugged the weapon from the guard's out-stretched hand. The guard didn't react, didn't move an inch.

  With obvious relish, the robber tucked the gun back into the guard's holster. Frozen once more, the other two security men watched helplessly as the same procedure was repeated with them.

  Andy tried to move but realized that he, too, was immobile. All around the bank, patrons and employees alike were once again rooted to wherever they stood.

  Bags of money in hand, the robbers clustered around their leader in the center of the lobby. Some people were staring stonily off in other directions, but most were looking in the general direction of the thieves, their eyes darting helplessly from side to side. Drool leaked from one man's parted lips.

  The lead thief grinned triumphantly around the lobby of the bank.

  "And now, with your kind assistance, gentlemen..." With a nod from their leader, the thieves began to circulate through the frozen crowd.

  This was it. They were going to start killing people. Or worse.

  All thoughts of his dreaded commute were ban-ished from Andy's mind as one of the thieves—a sinister-looking man in his forties—approached his desk. He reached into the money bag he had taken from one of the teller windows and, stuffing his hand deep inside, proceeded to remove a handful of bills.

  As the young mortgage officer watched in disbelief, the thief stuffed the wad of bills into the pocket of the old man in front of Andy's desk. Moving on, he found a patron who was standing nearer the door and went through the same motions.

  Eyes straining to catch every movement at the limits of his peripheral vision, Andy saw the other thieves stuffing money into satchels and jacket pockets. While they seemed to carry out this task grudgingly, their leader performed it with unreserved joy.

  One bank patron was dressed in only jeans and a T-shirt, but the gang leader carefully wrapped up a tight roll of crisp new fifty-dollar bills and tucked it neatly into the pocket of the man's torn shirt.

  Oddly the Butler Bank employees seemed to be the only ones who were left out of this bizarre re-distribution of wealth.

  When all was done and the bags were once more empty, the thieves clustered back around their leader.

  There was something cultured, almost regal about him. He raised his hand in a casual gesture that would have made the Queen of England feel as if she'd just rolled off the back of a turnip truck.

  "Ladies and gentlemen," he called happily to the crowd. "My name is Lothar Holz, and you have just been privileged to witness the premier nonlaboratory test of PlattDeutsche, America's Dynamic Interface System."

  Andy felt the strange sensation at the back of his head return. He realized immediately that he could move. All around the bank, patrons and employees alike were coming to the same conclusion. The guards were in the process of unholstering their weapons once more, but Andy saw that the bank president, Clive Butler, trailed by a clutch of VPs, had entered the lobby from the rear elevator and was now circulating among the crowd, calming concerns and exhorting employees not to succumb to panic.

  A smattering of applause went up around the man who identified himself as Lothar Holz, led by the blond man at the door and the rest of the robbers.

  They were joined in their enthusiasm by Clive Butler and the other executives. With the urging of the suits from upstairs, it wasn't long before all of the junior employees were applauding the man who moments before had brought terror to an otherwise ordinary day. Amazingly most of the bank customers also joined in. It was a classic example of mob mentality, de-duced Andy, though he suspected that their enthusiasm for the would-be robber was mostly motivated by the cash in their pockets.

  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 walk
ed 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.