Brain Storm

by Warren Murphy

  Pendrake had taunted Mervin in the cafeteria for the past eight months to the point where the timid young man had taken to eating in the diagnostics lab.

  Holz had moved Mervin into the large fourth-floor laboratory where the PET team and others connected with the early stages of the interface study had worked. The room was spacious and filled with equipment that had outlived its usefulness but had been stored here on the off chance that it might be needed once more. Nearly everything was covered with sheets of thick, translucent plastic.

  Holz, accompanied by his young male assistant, led Zach Pendrake into the sterile room.

  Mervin's stomach knotted when he saw whom

  Holz had tapped as a volunteer. Pendrake, on the other hand, seemed absolutely delighted.

  "Mervin! Buddy! How ya doing, pal?" He slapped the nervous programmer on the shoulder.

  Mervin winced. He bruised easily.

  "Zach," he said with a timid nod.

  "Mr. Holz didn't tell me you'd be testing me."

  Pendrake glanced at Holz. "Mervin and me are old buddies." He turned back to Mervin. "Why haven't I seen you at lunch, Merv? Got a little chippie stashed away somewhere?"

  Mervin looked horrified at the idea. He glanced nervously to Lothar Holz and his silent assistant, stammering. "Mr. Holz, I... That is, I..." His eyes were watering.

  Holz held up a hand. "Pendrake, calm down."

  The marketing man smiled but grew silent.

  He allowed Mervin to steer him to a wheeled table to one side of the lab, beneath the large bar-covered window. It was like a regular doctor's examining table. Right down to the sheet of disposable paper over the plastic-coated foam pad.

  Mervin smeared a set of electrodes with a noxious-smelling gel and affixed them to Pendrake's temples.

  These led to the back of a small computer console that was hooked into the mainframe in the corner.

  Mervin had already transferred the information Holz was most interested in—the data on physical feats—

  into this larger computer.

  He had Pendrake unbutton his shirt and proceeded to attach a second set of electrodes to his chest.

  These ran to a portable EKG monitor that had been shipped in from a subsidiary pharmaceutical company in New York. Mervin snapped on the machine, and instantly a steady green vertical line appeared across a small monitor in the face of the device. At regular intervals, a reassuring open-ended triangle spiked up from the solid line, accompanied by a familiar electronic beep.

  Holz watched, anxiously wetting his lips, as Mervin slipped onto the rolling stool before his computer and began typing swiftly at the keyboard. He talked as he worked.

  "I culled the stuff you told me to, Mr. Holz," he said. He avoided Pendrake's bemused look. "You wouldn't want anyone developing the psychoses your prisoner had. It's all about killing and stuff."

  He shuddered as he thought about the man with the deep-set eyes who was, at the moment, in the interface van somewhere on the Cross Bronx Expressway.

  "Anyway, what I concentrated on was the physical aspects of his nature. I tried to keep it pretty basic."

  He was no longer glancing at Pendrake but was becoming more engrossed in the data stream on the monitor before him.

  The marketing man looked bored. He had volunteered for this latest experiment for the same reason he had volunteered for some of the earlier ones. To suck up to the boss. Plain and simple. And, as he had been with the earlier PET experiments, Pendrake was bored out of his skull in less than a minute. He exhaled deeply as the first bits of data began to download into his cerebellum.

  All at once, he sucked in a sudden, unexpected lungful of air.

  The EKG pinged once. It almost sounded questioning. As if the device were uncertain of the data it was collecting.

  Mervin glanced up curiously. Lothar Holz

  watched, his face growing more expectant with each electronic spike of the EKG.

  Pendrake felt the air pull down to the bottom of his lungs. It flowed into his heart and forced itself, fresher and fuller than ever before, into his blood-stream. The cleansing air coursed through his body, opening floodgates that someone who had dedicated his life to bar charts and smoke-filled rooms never knew were closed.

  He felt suddenly invigorated. And light-headed.

  For some reason, he found himself rotating his wrists absently. Holz was standing close, practically salivating.

  "Is it working?" he asked Mervin. His eyes never strayed from Pendrake.

  Mervin nodded. "He's absorbing it. Slowly, but it's working."

  Pendrake knew what the little nerd meant. As he felt the power within him grow, he gripped the cold metal lip of the examining table in both hands. Still in a seated position, he twisted his hands. A simple action. He felt the strength of the metal beneath the pads of his greasy fingers. The strength of the metal was as nothing compared with what now flowed within him.

  There was a loud wrenching noise, and when the others in the room looked they saw that Zach Pendrake had ripped a pair of foot-long sections of lead-enforced metal piping from the edge of the table.

  He held the twin silver pipes in the air, a baffled expression on his face. It was as if he was wondering how they had gotten there.

  Mervin looked on in wonder, Holz in slavering awe. Only Holz's assistant showed no sign of interest in the proceedings.

  Pendrake no longer seemed to be aware of the others. In a crystalline moment of pure realization, he understood. Understood everything. The point of existence. The perfection that could be derived from the simple act of breathing. He knew that the limitations on the human body were placed there by men afraid to achieve. Terrified of true success.

  The epiphany was short-lived.

  Pendrake suddenly sat bolt upright on the examining table, as if jolted by a massive surge of electricity. The calm, soothing spikes of the EKG monitor stabbed sharply and held at a constant, dangerous peak.

  Mervin frantically wheeled on his computer.

  Holz took a few cautious steps back.

  Pendrake was jolted again. His head snapped back and smashed against the painted cinder-block wall of the lab. They all heard the solid crack of bone. Pendrake snapped forward once more. A smear of hair-mottled blood stained the whitewashed wall.

  "I think he's going into shock!" Mervin said desperately.

  "Are you getting everything down?" Holz asked, his voice growing excited. He ignored Mervin, concentrating on the man on the table.

  "I can't break the connection!" The information was being drawn into Pendrake too quickly. He was absorbing the new data like a sponge. The speed was frightening. As Mervin watched in horror, he understood what was happening. Pendrake's brain was overloading.

  "Mr. Holz, we have to call someone!" But even as he pounded uselessly on his keyboard, Mervin knew there was no one he could call who could possibly help.

  "Leave that alone," Holz ordered, pointing at the keyboard.

  "Mr. Holz!"

  "Leave it!" Holz yelled, wheeling on Mervin. He had a wild look in his eyes. He spun back to Zach Pendrake.

  The marketing man was twitching spastically, as if someone had dumped a carton of red ants down the back of his shirt. His gaze was distant. When his neck twisted from side to side, a maroon patch of thick, coagulating blood on the back of his head was revealed. But no matter how hard he jerked in every direction, the electrodes didn't come loose. The EKG

  monitor continued to shriek a warning to those in the room, as if the pain Pendrake was feeling had somehow been transferred to the machine.

  The steady high-pitched whine grew more intense inside Mervin's head. It rattled against his eardrums until he could nearly feel the power pouring through the electrodes himself. And when he couldn't bear the noise or the angry thrashing of the man on the gurney any longer, he did something totally uncharacteristic. He disobeyed a direct order.

  Mervin stepped over to the examining table.

  "Stop!" Holz bar
ked.

  But Mervin didn't listen.

  Woodenly he reached for the pair of temple electrodes. His pudgy hand never got closer than a foot away.

  Pendrake's hand shot out, faster than a cobra, faster than the pairs of binary numbers could be downloaded, faster than the human eye could perceive. It struck the young programmer squarely in the chest.

  The fingers snapped like dried twigs against the solid sternum. No matter. The chest bone groaned in protest and collapsed inward.

  A spray of blood erupted from the open chest cavity as shards of shattered bone pierced the heart. Several of Pendrake's own wrist bones shattered as the hand continued. Through the spine. Out the back, clutching air. Return.

  Mervin looked down at his now open chest cavity as the arm withdrew. His mouth gulped, but no words came out. Only a small trickle of blood gur-gled from between his parted lips.

  With nearly no sound, he fell to the floor. He didn't move again.

  Pendrake didn't feel the pain of his shattered forearm. It was as nothing compared with the symphony of exquisite torture in his own mind. Though science had determined that the brain had no true pain sensors, Zachary H. Pendrake would have disputed that theory with anyone. Except for the fact that the syn-apses in his own brain were popping like flashbulbs at an old-fashioned Washington news conference.

  His thoughts were roiling into a supernova. His spine was acid dipped and on fire.

  And all at once, his mind exploded in a flash of pure, searing energy.

  Pendrake sat bolt upright one last time and then dropped like a sack of wet cement to the floor of the lab. He landed atop Mervin's prone body. The two electrodes on his forehead and one from his chest were wrenched free in the fall. The EKG monitor spiked one last time and then leveled out in a single, steady line. The keen of the electronic device buzzed quietly in the otherwise silent room.

  After a moment, Lothar Holz stepped gingerly over to the bodies. The marketing man continued to twitch occasionally. In one such move, the watch on his shattered wrist chipped a silver-dollar-sized chunk out of the concrete floor.

  Holz glanced at his silent assistant, then at the EKG. Pendrake was still flatline. He was dead.

  Holz placed his toe beneath the man's shoulders and flipped him over. Pendrake rolled off of Mervin and against the legs of the examining table. The last electrode popped loose.

  His eyes were opened wide. Wider than they could have been if someone had grabbed onto both lids and pulled. The red-streaked white orbs bugged unnaturally from their sockets. What was also visible by its lack was that he had bitten his own tongue off in the excitement, his lips a red-ringed O of dismay and surprise.

  "It's remarkable, wouldn't you agree?" Holz asked, grinning. He looked up at his assistant expectantly. His silent companion said not a word.

  Holz sighed. "We are close. Closer than we have been in many years," he said quietly to himself. He straightened himself up.

  "Von Breslau will be here soon. In the meantime, clean this mess up." He waved a manicured hand at the bodies on the floor. Picking his way carefully through the carnage, Lothar Holz left the room.

  12

  The world was sound and fury, narrowed down, tele-scoped to a sense that the world might end—in that very spot, unless something was done...

  The bomb had blown out the rear wall of the office.

  Ernst, the torturer, had been struck by a piece of flying rock. He crawled, dazed, across the rubble-strewed floor of the interrogation cell.

  Smith had remained alert in spite of days of in-humane treatment. Though weakened, his mind raced.

  The cross beams and plaster ceiling of the room had been new additions. Smith spied glimpses of the stone ceiling through the newly formed holes. The heavy beam from which Smith dangled had been jarred loose in the explpsion. It was much lower than it had been, its end near the newly opened wall shattered by the blast. His toes now touched the floor.

  Smith moved on tiptoe toward the open wall, slid-ing the rope along the beam as he moved. Every joint ached, every muscle protested.

  From the floor, Ernst moaned.

  The end of the beam was chewed, pulpy wood.

  Smith lifted the looped end of the rope from around the beam's end.

  His arms ached. Fortunately they had taken him down not half an hour before to eat. It was the only time during the day he was freed from his bonds. If it had been another six hours later, it would have taken much more time to restore the circulation to his arms. As it was, they felt leaden and unresponsive.

  Ernst grunted from behind. Smith turned.

  The big man was pushing himself up, using the wall for support.

  There wasn't much time.

  Smith scrambled over the debris to the interior of the cell. His heart racing in his chest, he found the torturer's bag, which had overturned in the explo-sion. A heavy steel pipe had spilled out and rested beside the battered case.

  Ernst grunted again. Smith glanced up.

  The torturer was more alert. He realized what was happening. Groggily he pushed himself away from the wall, lumbering over toward the escaping prisoner.

  Smith curled his fingers around the pipe. It was cold in his grip. Ernst was nearly upon him.

  Smith stood, wheeling. He swung the pipe like a batter trying to put one out of the park.

  The pipe struck Ernst in the temple. The big man stopped in his tracks, dazed.

  Smith swung again. Another crack. Ernst blinked once, hard, and fell to his knees.

  Smith lashed out once more. Ernst was too far gone by now to feel the blow register. Shattered skull fragments were already lodged in his brain. The final blow forced them in farther.

  Like some great primal beast that knows when its time has come, Ernst's eyes rolled back in his head.

  The huge man fell forward onto his bag of torturer's tools. He didn't move again.

  Smith quickly unholstered the man's side arm, tucking it in his belt. Captain Menk had left his greatcoat on a hook in the corner of the room. Smith snatched it up, pulling it on over his grimy clothes as he ducked out through the opening.

  From all around came the sound of shouting, panicked voices and frantic milling around.

  Smith ducked into the shadows behind the building, hiding away.

  Plotting his next move. He knew that Captain Menk wouldn't rest until he was dead.

  Smith had become the madman's prey once more.

  Harold Smith awoke behind the wheel of the rented car.

  For one frightening instant, he thought he was back on Usedom, but the thought soon fled. He was here, in the present. And the stakes were as high now as they had been then.

  He checked his watch. He had slept for precisely eleven minutes.

  Harold Smith removed his glasses and massaged his eyes with his fingertips. The same troubling thought that had passed through his mind for the past five hours resurfaced.

  He should have shot Holz when he had the chance.

  His gun had been in the desk drawer the entire time.

  He could have ended this nightmare before it had even started.

  It was a foolish recrimination, he knew. He had hoped that Remo would be able to take out Holz and his interface van quietly. That hope had vanished, along with Remo.

  His organization was an open book to Lothar Holz, but Holz didn't seem interested in CURE. Only Sinanju. That had been the only piece of true luck in this entire ordeal.

  Smith's only hope was to use the organization against Holz. But for that, he needed access to his office.

  The passenger's door of the car suddenly opened.

  The Master of Sinanju slid in beside Smith. There was no rustling of leaves or clothing, not a single audible footfall to warn of his approach. These were the skills that had served the Korean Masters for centuries and that had finally been rendered useless by technology.

  "The vehicle is not there." The old Korean's voice was thin.

  "You are certain of that?"<
br />
  Chiun fixed Smith with an icy glare. "I am certain, Smith."

  Smith nodded curtly. He turned the ignition key.

  "I'm sure Remo will be fine." He was embarrassed the second the words passed his lips. Chiun didn't respond. The wizened Asian stared stonily out the windshield.

  Without another word, they drove the last quarter mile to the darkened gates of Folcroft.

  There was a note on Smith's desk.

  Your appointment informed me that you were feeling ill. Hope you are better today. E. Mikulka Smith's secretary.

  The note was neatly typed and perfectly centered on the onyx slab. She must have suspected Smith would return the next morning. In his entire time as director of Folcroft, only dire circumstances had kept him from his post for more than two days in a row.

  He settled in behind his desk and booted up his computer.

  Chiun stood before the desk, tucking his bony hands into the voluminous folds of his brocaded kimono.

  Smith ran a security check for any signs of tampering in the CURE system but found none.

  It was a relief,, though not entirely a surprise. He had been checking in at various intervals from pay phones around Rye. If someone other than himself had attempted to access any information, the entire memory core of the Folcroft mainframes would have self-destructed. However, it was still a relief to see with his own eyes that everything remained intact.

  "You will use that device to locate Remo?" Chiun asked flatly.

  He hadn't spoken much to Smith in the past few hours.

  "It is my hope," Smith said. He stabbed out a few rapid commands, eyeing the results expectantly. He was surprised to find no listing of a Lothar Holz in any of the PlattDeutsche company records that were open to public scrutiny. "Odd," Smith said aloud.

  He tried a different tack. Reasoning that they would have to bring Remo somewhere convenient to their research, he began checking real-estate holdings. He found that the PlattDeutsche Corporation and its subsidiary, PlattDeutsche America, had several smaller business concerns in the immediate vi-cinity. It was a well-diversified company, and as Smith ran through the various real-estate holdings, he eliminated most of them as possible destinations.