Brain Storm

by Warren Murphy

  The downward movement arrested. Bubbles of boiling water burst against Dominic's hair.

  "You want me to let you go?" The voice behind him sounded puzzled.

  "Yeah, yeah. Please."

  Behind Dominic, Remo shrugged. "Suit yourself."

  None of the members of the Scubisci Family had ever been very well supplied in the brain department, but it had been agreed by the rest of the clan that they could all safely look down on Dominic's limited mental capacity with superior disdain. But in that infinitesimally brief instant before his scalp touched the water, Dominic Scubisci realized that he had mis-spoken.

  Before he could speak, before he could shout, before he could take back his ill-chosen words, gravity plunged Dominic's wrinkled head below the boiling water.

  He immediately tried to pull himself free. Strong hands were again upon him, holding him in place.

  Though he thrashed in place like a large fish in a small boat, his head didn't move an inch from below the burning water. He tried briefly to fight the brilliant pain, but it wasn't long before it proved too great. All at once, he let himself succumb to the exquisite torture, and in that instant it was as though the bottom had dropped from the pot and Dominic felt himself slipping through the boiling water and into a greater, more eternal flame.

  The fire here burned brighter and more fiercely hot than anything Dominic had ever imagined, and long after his earthly shell returned to the dust from which it had come, the name of Guillermo Murietta and countless others tormented him in unending flaming anguish.

  Setting the timer on the back of the stove, Remo held Dominic in place for a good five minutes. The mobster had stopped wiggling in under a minute. Just like a lobster.

  Once he was satisfied the man was done, Remo pulled him out of the water and dropped him back atop the stainless-steel counter.

  The skin on Dominic Scubisci's head and neck was so bright it was nearly orange. Stringy bits of flesh hung off in reddish white tatters.

  "You look done to me," Remo commented happily.

  Milky white eyes stared ceilingward with unseeing horror. For good measure, he pounded a large meat thermometer between Dominic's open white eyes.

  "Ooh, mobster head's trickier than I thought."

  Remo frowned. "You could have stood another minute or two. I'll have to remember that when it's time to parboil your brother."

  Remo found his bag of rice on a table near the door. Scooping it up in his thick-wristed hand, he ducked out the emergency exit.

  The scent in the air gave promise of a beautiful day.

  3

  Harold W. Smith carefully scrutinized the information on PlattDeutsche America as it scrolled across his computer screen. The monitor was buried beneath the onyx surface of the desk and angled upward.

  Only the person seated behind the large high-tech desk could view the information as it passed silently across the screen and back into electronic limbo.

  Hardly an hour had passed since he had fled the Butler Bank, and Smith was already firmly en-sconced in his office at Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York. This unassuming office was the nerve center of the secret government organization CURE.

  It was here that Smith had spent the bulk of the past four decades of his life. He fully expected to die at his desk, alone and unheralded at the helm of the secret agency that identified, tracked and addressed crises both domestic and international. Created by a young president, himself the eventual victim of an assassin's bullet, CURE was always in demand to safeguard America, and was many times the last best hope of each man chosen to serve in the Oval Office.

  Smith had heard of PlattDeutsche, and knew it to be a company on the cutting edge of information technology. Because of this, the breakthroughs made by PlattDeutsche America at its New Jersey plant were sought-after by the Pentagon, particularly during the military buildup of the 1980s. Though quieter than Lockheed or Raytheon or any of the other military giants, PlattDeutsche America had carved out a comfortable niche for itself supplying technology and hardware to all branches of the United States armed services. This comfortable arrangement had lasted until the determined gutting of the American armed forces in the early 1990s.

  The company was hit hard by the drastic downsizing of the military. In spite of its quiet achieve-ments in computer-related research, for some reason, PlattDeutsche had never quite forced itself into the spotlight of popular culture. It was therefore not equipped to reroute its efforts into post-Cold War endeavors. Smith suspected that with the morning's flamboyant introduction of its new Dynamic Interface System, PlattDeutsche America was now poised to make the great public-relations leap necessary to survive in the fast-changing business climate.

  The information bubbling up from Smith's buried computer screen was vast and complex.

  There were several articles culled from the leading science magazines in the country extolling the breakthroughs PDA had made for the government's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. In particular the company was singled out for a

  DARPA-sponsored neural-network chip they had developed. The microchip was so advanced its function outstripped its closest competitor in the market by a factor of five. With a processing capacity roughly fifty thousand times faster than its biological counterpart, the chip used electrons to transmit information instead of the sodium and potassium ions required by the human brain.

  Again in a more esoteric scientific quarterly, the company was praised for its work—alongside the New York State Department of Health—training users to emit brain signals to command a computer to move a cursor around a screen.

  A seemingly small program that had apparently netted great results for the relatively obscure company, if the events at the Butler Bank were any indication.

  A few minor articles in some of the local Boston papers several years before mentioned that Dr. Curt Newton, a noted MUT researcher and lecturer in the fields of applied mathematics and cybernetics, had been lured away to PlattDeutsche. The scientist boasted in one article that the unlimited funding offered by the large corporation would, in less than a decade, allow him to become the world's first physical cryptologist.

  Smith wrinkled his nose at the phrase. At its most basic, cryptology was the science that dealt with en-ciphering and deciphering messages. He had known cryptographers since his OSS days during World War II. Indeed, it was a young Harold W. Smith who had worked alongside British and American cryptologists on the top secret Ultra project, which was one of the most successful counterespionage operations in modern history and broke the Nazi Enigma coding machine and contributed to the Allied victory in Europe. But Smith had never before heard of anyone referring to himself as a "physical cryptologist."

  He input the phrase into the computer and stuck the Search key. The computer responded almost instantaneously. There was only one article on the subject other than the one Smith had already read.

  It was in a European computer journal, and the phrase was highlighted seven times, all in reference to its cover interview subject, Dr. Curt Newton. He described physical cryptology as the science of deciphering the neural codes in a living subject and transferring them to an artificial host via an electronic uplink. Physical cryptology would break down the very codes that defined human thought.

  Preliminary research, he claimed, had reaped great results with servomechanisms and electrode attach-ments, but his ultimate goal was to make wire connection between human subjects and computers ob-solete.

  In the article—dated five years previous—Dr.

  Newton vowed that his process would eventually become simplified to the point that wires would be a thing of the past. Radio signals would take their place.

  Using the CURE mainframes' massive search ability, Smith sifted through all Pentagon information concerning PlattDeutsche. The search proved unen-lightening. There were files that concerned the company's dealings with the Air Force and Army, all inactive. Smith hit similar dead-ends with the NSC, NSA and CIA. All had had
accounts with the corporation in years past, but all had either completed the specifications of their various contracts or pulled the plug on whatever arrangements they had with the company when the national-security funds dried up.

  In all the government, only the FBI continued to divert a modest hundred thousand dollars to PlattDeutsche for research into a prototype crowd-control device using radio-enhanced ocular signals.

  Smith returned to his computer's main menu.

  There were other articles, but none offered any great insight. Smith scanned them all carefully before finally snapping the computer off. The screen within the desk winked out dutifully.

  He turned slowly in his cracked leather chair and stared through the one-way glass office window at the silent black waters of Long Island Sound.

  PlattDeutsche was a virtual island in the field of technology. It had apparently earned enough in government contracts to sustain itself during the long dry period. Indeed, it had used its earlier wealth to buy up a few other small companies—not related to the computer industry—making it a miniconglomerate. It had also started up the PlattDeutsche America Security Systems Corporation.

  All of this was cushion enough to allow it time to develop the technology Smith had witnessed at the bank that morning.

  But the technology was imperfect. It seemed that of all the people in the bank, Smith was the only one besides the robbers themselves who wasn't affected by the new device. He didn't know why this was so, but it remained a problem with the system that its designers would have to discover for themselves.

  Smith's work was far too sensitive for him to have given himself away.

  But that didn't mean the technology did not hold great promise.

  Smith, an old hand at computers since a time when the simplest calculators were measured in tons, was impressed by what he had seen. It was apparent that the intricate computer system necessary to immobilize the entire population of the bank was also able to differentiate between individuals. This would explain why the robbers themselves had remained un-affected. Any computer program that was able to scan and eliminate individual brain-wave patterns had been developed by an unquestionable genius.

  So the ultimate question was, did Smith need to worry?

  He doubted it.

  As a contributor to sensitive government agencies, PlattDeutsche had received many high-level security checks. They had passed all unfailingly. It was obvious that the strange event at the Butler Bank was a public-relations exercise by the company to announce its arrival in the commercial world.

  This Curt Newton had achieved what he had set out to do; he had become the world's first physical cryptologist. He had, in part, broken the code of the human mind—to what extent Smith didn't know. But it was remarkable that this man had, in such a small amount of time, identified and neutralized the structures in the brain involving conscious movement. In effect, he had learned how to rewrite at least part of the program of the human brain.

  But fully integrating a human being with a computer was still many years off, Smith was certain.

  He spun back around to his desk and clicked his computer back on.

  As his hands reached for the edge of the desk, a capacitor-style keyboard appeared beneath his fingertips, its orderly rows of letters and numbers lined like patient soldiers waiting to do his bidding.

  Smith paused before he began work. He pursed his lips, considering an idle thought.

  After a moment of hesitation, he typed a few brief commands into the computer that would track PlattDeutsche America activities, as well as the media's take on the events of that morning.

  As a participant in the event and a proponent of technology, Smith had more than just a passing interest in seeing how such a development panned out.

  That task accomplished, Harold W. Smith returned to the more mundane work of safeguarding America.

  4

  Remo took a shuttle flight from LaGuardia to Boston's Logan International Airport. He hired a taxi outside the airline terminal and settled into the back seat, arriving at his Quincy, Massachusetts, home late in the afternoon.

  If Remo had owned a suitcase, he would have spent the better part of his adult life living out of it as he shuffled back and forth across the country from hotel room to hotel room on his business as enforcement arm for the secret agency CURE. It was only within the past few years that he had finally gotten what most people took for granted. A home.

  Unfortunately home for Remo Williams was a gar-ish condominium complex that had been foisted on Remo and his aged Korean mentor, Chiun, by their employer, Harold W. Smith. The place was an eye-sore.

  A former church, converted to its current state in a fever of real-estate-boom-inspired optimism, it combined several of the most unpleasant styles of architecture under one roof.

  He sighed inwardly as the cab pulled up to the curb in front of the large building. It was true what they said. There was no place like home. But Remo doubted that most people thought of the phrase in quite the same way he did.

  This day, unlike most other times when his eyes alighted on the building Chiun insisted on referring to as "Castle Sinanju," Remo's spirits were light.

  He paid the taxi driver and, grabbing the bag of rice he had brought with him from New York, bounded up the front staircase into the building.

  His finely tuned senses told him that Chiun was in one of the rear rooms on the lower floor. Remo deliberately steered in the opposite direction. He'd let Chiun find him.

  In the kitchen, Remo dropped the brown canvas bag on a low taboret and scooped the phone up.

  Moving to a safe spot across the room, Remo sat up on the counter and stabbed out the 1 button repeat-edly, activating the simplified code system that automatically rerouted his call through various dummy repeater accounts along the East Coast before leading finally to a small office in Rye, New York.

  "Yes," the lemony voice of Harold W. Smith said crisply over the secure phone line.

  "You know, you never say hello or ask me how I'm doing, Smitty," Remo remarked.

  Nor did Smith now. "Dominic Scubisci?" he asked.

  Remo sighed. "His goose is cooked/' he said, proud of his private little joke. His acute, Sinanju-trained hearing detected nearly silent footsteps in the hallway. He held the phone closer to his ear and pretended not to be looking at the door.

  "May I take that to mean the assignment was carried out successfully?" Smith inquired dryly.

  "Didn't you see it on the news?" Remo asked, disappointed.

  Smith suddenly sounded vague. "No," he admitted, "I was...otherwise occupied."

  "Counting beans again, eh, Smitty?"

  Chiun chose that moment to enter the kitchen. He was a frail figure in a bright green kimono. His skin and bones were seemingly as delicate as those of a newly hatched bird. He regarded Remo with a look that one would generally reserve for a persistent sidewalk beggar.

  Wordlessly he padded across the kitchen floor. He was very old, his face tracked with wise wrinkles, his eyes like the seams of walnut shells and his wrinkle-webbed mouth thin with thought. No hair sat on his shiny head. Wispy cloud puffs hovered over the tops of his ears, and something like the remnant of a beard clung to his chin. Despite his advanced years, his hazel eyes looked as youthful and mischievous as a child's.

  "I was actually not far from you," Smith said. "I was in Manhattan on personal business."

  "That's a bit daring for you, isn't it?" Remo said, watching Chiun from the corner of his eye. "You usually don't want to get within a country mile of me when I'm working. And sneaking away from the office on a school day to boot. Naughty naughty."

  The Master of Sinanju was sniffing around the bag on the squat table like a dog on a scent and, like a canine, he seemed fearful of close contact with the alien item. He hovered a safe distance from the bag.

  "Your assignment was far enough away from my location," Smith explained.

  "Yeah, well, about that. Dominic seemed like small potatoe
s," Remo said. "Especially with his brother sitting right there next to him. I could have taken the two of them out, no questions asked."

  Smith didn't agree and had had a difficult time explaining this to Remo the previous day. "The gears of justice are working against Don Anselmo,"

  Smith said. "Better to let the American people know their justice system works by convicting him in a court of law."

  "He'll beat any rap they hang on him, Smitty,"

  Remo complained. "Scubisci'll just go on Horrendo and claim he was molested as a kid or something.

  Not only will America forgive him, he'll probably get his own sitcom out of the deal."

  "Unlikely."

  Remo watched Chiun's back as the old man circled the taboret once more. "Listen, Smitty, if Dominic Scubisci was the only thing on the front burner right now, I'm going to get a little R&R."

  Smith agreed. "I will contact you if anything else comes up."

  With that, Remo replaced the receiver in the cradle.

  4'What is this?" The Master of Sinanju demanded the instant the connection was severed. He pointed a long-nailed finger at the bag Remo had brought from New York.

  4'Dinner," Remo explained. 44It's my turn, remember?"

  With the sharpened nail of his index finger, Chiun harpooned the bag, splitting it from stem to stern with a delicate flip of his bony hand. The white foam container within the bag burst open beneath the razor-sharp fingernail. The gooey red contents poured out across the gleaming surface like the bloody in-nards of some eviscerated marsupial.

  "Aiyeee!" Chiun screeched. "What is this refuse?"

  Remo took up a haughty tone. "I'll have you know that is what passes for white rice at one of the most talked-about restaurants in New York City."

  The tip of his index finger quivered as Chiun extended it toward the mess on the table. "If this is what these talkers consume, then they are either dead or deranged."

  "Actually a little of both," Remo admitted, with a shrug. "I'll get the plates." He began rooting through the cupboards for their place settings.