MindWar (Nick Hall Book 3)

by Douglas E. Richards

  Based on Lucas’s now thoughtful expression, Victor guessed his arguments were making at least some sense to him. But if you were desperate to try heroin to become euphoric, the fact that it was addictive and could be bad for you in the long run probably wouldn’t change your mind.

  “If BrainWeb implants lead to dependency and scattered thinking,” said Lucas, “then why do you and Uncle Eduardo have them installed?”

  “Because we shaped our adult minds for many, many years without them. We learned how to think deeply, to analyze and solve problems, to harness our potential, without having this crutch.”

  Victor thought about taking a few steps closer to his son and putting a hand on his shoulder, but decided against it. “As accomplished as you are academically,” he continued, “you’re still young. Think of the next several years as formative. I need you to cement your ability to think deeply and well—unaided. There is no doubt that you can. Your recent idea to acquire experimental subjects in bulk is a demonstration of this. But show me a history of insights. And continue to demonstrate that you don’t have an addictive personality.”

  Lucas’s face remained impassive, unreadable.

  “Think of it this way: you’re a world-class distance runner already. I’m just sending you off to train in the mountains for a few years. When you’ve shown me deep thinking, deep focus, and have honed your mind into a weapon—without benefit of BrainWeb—that’s when you’ll be ready. And then when you do get implants, you’ll be in a league of your own. Runners who develop world-class times where the air is thin are unstoppable when they finally return to sea level.”

  Victor paused, waiting to see how his son would respond.

  “Anything to add, Eduardo?” he sent to his friend on what he thought of as their telepathy channel, with the words he thought at his implants being converted into a replica of his voice in Alvarez’s head.

  “Nothing,” came the reply. “You’ve done a good job making your case.”

  Lucas was silent for an extended period. “I have to admit,” he said finally, “you’ve raised some points I hadn’t considered. I’ll do some research and think about this more. Maybe I’ll come to agree with your decision. I doubt I’ll find a flaw in your reasoning big enough to change your mind, but if I think I have, are you willing to keep an open mind?”

  “Always,” said Victor. He paused. “I take it that this means you’re ready to move on, at least for now.”

  “At least for now,” said Lucas.

  “Good,” replied Victor. “As I said, the primary purpose of this meeting is to give you your next assignment, which I will now do.”

  He paused for effect. “For at least the next month, probably much longer, I want you to lock yourself in a room. I want you to come fully up to speed on every aspect of the organization. Every document, every project history, will be made available to you. Most importantly, I want you to think. About how our strategies can be improved, yes, but most of the time I want you to focus on worst-case scenarios, anything that could bite us in the ass. What are the weaknesses of our operations? What could be exploited to hurt us?”

  Lucas’s features darkened. This was clearly not what he had been expecting, and not at all welcome.

  Victor sighed. “I know being cloistered away from ongoing activities sounds unappealing. I know you wanted to be in the field with me, by my side as I go about my day. I want that too. But this is more important. Gives you an early chance to prove yourself. Think of it as an exercise in paranoia, the one thing you need to stay alive in this business. I’m extremely careful, as you well know. I don’t miss much. But I’m not perfect. I’m certain to have overlooked things that are important. Find them. I challenge you. Impress me. Come up with at least one dazzling insight about the business.”

  Lucas’s lip curled up into an almost feral snarl. “Challenge accepted,” he said with almost frightening intensity.

  27

  “Are you sure you’re up for this, Nick?” asked Megan as she and Hall entered conference room three inside THT’s headquarters, arriving ten minutes before the scheduled start of the bi-monthly meeting of the executive team of Hall’s ESP Taskforce.

  “I’m sure,” he replied with a tired smile. “I wouldn’t have called the meeting if I wasn’t.” When Megan’s concerned expression didn’t go away, he hastily added, “I’m fine. Really.”

  Megan knew this remained to be seen, and that he would respond the same way even if he had one foot in the grave.

  It had been six days since the attempted sarin attack, which would have been the bloodiest, most despicable atrocity to ever occur on American soil if Nick Hall hadn’t gone to herculean efforts to stop it. Without him they wouldn’t have known the attack was even coming, or where and when the drones might strike. Even so, he was far from the only hero. Stopping the attack had been a true team effort.

  But it had come at a very high cost.

  Two navy pilots were dead, as well as one of THT’s own, Lieutenant Chris Guest, for whom they had held a formal memorial service just the day before. Guest’s loss continued to be a great blow to the team. Floyd Briarwood was still recovering from multiple broken bones and lacerations.

  Nick Hall had pushed himself far beyond his limits, overcooking his mind almost to the point of no return, recklessly continuing to use his psionic power long after the check engine light had come on, nearly killing himself in the process.

  The moment his captors had been shot he had fallen into a coma for four full days, only returning to consciousness forty-eight hours earlier. It had been touch and go, and the doctors weren’t sure he’d pull out of it.

  These had been the worst four days of Megan’s life.

  “My coma was harder on you than on me,” said Hall, and if Megan didn’t know better, she would think he had read her mind. “I had the easy part, lying unconscious without a care in the world. But you maintained an around-the-clock bedside vigil, which is a lot more draining. So how are you doing?”

  “I see what you did there,” she replied with a twinkle in her eye. “You deflected this discussion away from yourself. You are, indeed, a man of many talents.”

  Hall was about to protest that he was sincerely concerned about her well-being, but several meeting participants filed in and he was drawn into greetings and friendly conversations until the meeting officially began.

  Everything was compartmentalized within THT. All eight members of Hall’s ESP taskforce knew about his telepathic connection to Megan, but those on other teams did not. And most members of the ESP taskforce knew nothing of the BrainWeb implants that Victor was busily installing in America’s enemies, or Altschuler’s work on quantum encryption.

  Hall sat at the head of a long table with a glossy lacquered surface, with Megan sitting just to his right, as usual. He looked out over the members of his taskforce with pride, including the newest addition, Dr. Catherine Ellen Guess, a neurosurgeon who had been working on a sister Black Ops team for many years, attending her first meeting. Next to her sat Gabriele Safani, an MD/PhD neurobiologist from Yale, whom Catherine had long admired. Gabriele had recently lost her husband in a tragic accident and had wanted to shake up her life, try something new. Working on ESP certainly fit that bill, and the team was lucky to have her.

  Drew Russell and Heather Zambrana came next. Like Megan, these two were in the minority of team members who had not earned an MD, a doctorate, or both. Not that anyone stood on formality, with first names almost always the order of the day.

  Drew Russell was a computer expert and brilliant software architect, second only in skill to Alex Altschuler himself, and was working on all three THT initiatives, essentially making him the seventh member of the core team. Girdler had come to him when he had needed to add software to the implants that would instruct them to surreptitiously beam all incoming thoughts and data streams back to US intelligence, and he had come through with flying colors.

  Like Altschuler and Heather, Russell was a com
ic book geek, but younger, in his early twenties. Russell was as cocky when it came to his field as he was awkward in social situations, although this cockiness vanished when he was in the presence of Altschuler, his programming idol, whom he followed around like a lost puppy dog.

  There was only one other scientist/coder who was in their league, a man named Troy Browning, but Browning was rumored to have been forced out of the NSA when he had developed a messiah complex. Russell’s ego was also inflated, but he was eminently likable and managed to stop just short of thinking himself a god.

  Heather was sitting next to her husband, who was wiping down his glasses absently with a pre-moistened towelette. She was on the plump side, and he was on the scrawny side, but this only seemed to make them even more perfect for each other somehow. She didn’t have a doctorate next to her name, but the entire team had come to appreciate her keen scientific mind and important contributions.

  An intense-looking man in this mid-thirties, Dr. Dennis Sargent, sat next to Altschuler, a bundle of anxious energy. He was one of the top scientists in the world in the area of man/machine interface research and part of a team that had been steadily mapping the human brain, with the ultimate goal of one day completing a computer simulation that would contain all hundred billion neurons.

  The scientist next to him, Dr. Hilton Subel, a short, affable man with an elegant South African accent, was a leading expert in both quantum physics and dark energy. Originally brought on board to help with Altschuler’s quantum encryption program, he had been added to the ESP team when it was conjectured that mind reading might well be a quantum effect.

  And finally, at the opposite end of the table from Hall sat Dr. Dottie Logerot, on loan from yet another Black laboratory. Dottie was an expert in electromagnetism, exotic signals, and sensors, and had made huge breakthroughs in detecting the signatures of inconceivably small levels of electromagnetic energies and other forces.

  Hall began the meeting promptly at ten a.m., as scheduled. He began giving the newcomer, Catherine Ellen Guess, a warm welcome, and then launched right into reviewing his state of health. He described his recent ordeal, not with respect to terrorism, but how overuse of his mind had felt, and its impact on his abilities. Given that the team had been assembled for the sole purpose of studying his abilities, his health was now a matter of great interest and great scrutiny.

  Gabriele Safani then gave a more extensive briefing, tackling the scientific side of Hall’s recent experiences. She compared his state of health before and after the ordeal, including MRI scans of his brain, sophisticated panels of brain electrolytes, ion channels, and neuronal firing patterns and recovery times. The differences were many and complex, including a severe depletion of glucose. No surprise there, as the brain was a glutton for this substance. The organ may have made up only two percent of a person’s total body weight, but it burned through twenty percent of the calories taken in. In Hall’s case, this was closer to fifty percent.

  The Yale neuroscientist kept her review relatively brief. “I’ll e-mail my full report to each of you after the meeting,” she said when she had finished. “I can’t be certain, but my confidence is high that Nick won’t suffer any permanent aftereffects, to his brain or abilities.” Gabriele turned to Hall and gave him a cross look. “But don’t ever push yourself that hard again,” she insisted, scolding him like a schoolmarm.

  “And risk getting on your bad side?” said Hall with a smile. “Never.”

  He paused for a moment and then turned to address the entire table. “With that out of the way, I wanted to use today to provide an extensive review session. I’ll begin by giving a thirty-thousand-foot overview of our efforts and findings to date, and then I’ll pass the baton to each team member in turn to give a more thorough report of their own activities and findings.”

  “Thanks, Nick,” said Catherine, “but please don’t put everyone through this kind of torture on my account. I don’t want everyone to resent the newcomer right away,” she added with a disarming smile. “I’m sure I can read all the reports and catch up on my own in no time.”

  “I have no doubt of that,” he replied. “But this is better. More comprehensive. And it will give you a chance to have back-and-forth discussions with the entire group, probe for deeper understanding.”

  Hall nodded at the accomplished neurosurgeon with a warm smile. “But make no mistake, Catherine, we’re doing this for our benefit every bit as much as for yours. Our group is pretty insular, and we don’t get the benefit of new ideas very often. We’re eager to review our work for someone who brings a new perspective. You’re sure to raise points that we’ve missed, question things we’ve come to take for granted.”

  “Okay, then,” she replied, his response having clearly satisfied her concerns. “I’ll do my best to come up with a novel idea or two.”

  Hall launched into a broad overview of their efforts. He described how he and the team had gone to Temple Square in Salt Lake City, a tourist attraction with plenty of open space outdoors, and one that received a high density of foot traffic.

  There, he had gone about identifying others whose minds he couldn’t read. After two days he had ended up finding nine people who were as naturally resistant to his abilities as Megan, a hit rate of about one out of every seven hundred.

  He next had tested for telepathic ability and confirmed that, like Megan, all nine of these subjects were able to receive the thoughts that he directed their way.

  “How did you do this without giving away your secret?” asked Catherine.

  “Turned out to be easier than we thought,” said Hall. “When I found a test subject, I just yelled, ‘Duck!’ telepathically. In every case the person ducked, looking around to see who had said it.”

  “Nick tried a few similar experiments,” said Megan, “but not many. Didn’t want these people to think they’d gone crazy.”

  “Or that they were hearing the voice of God,” added Heather in amusement. “Probably wasn’t a great idea for Nick to project thoughts into people’s heads while they were on the grounds of a temple.”

  Hall grinned. “One guy who was telepathically receptive did have a dog with him,” he said, arching his eyebrows suggestively.

  “You didn’t,” said Catherine in delight.

  “No, but think of all the funny things I could have had his pet say to him.”

  “Wasn’t there a serial killer years ago who said his dog told him to do it?” said Catherine.

  “That wasn’t me,” said Hall innocently. “Really. And I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the dog, either.”

  Catherine laughed, seeming to genuinely appreciate the group’s sense of humor.

  Hall liked to keep his meetings as lighthearted as he could, and he made sure new team members were vetted for their personality and compatibility with the team along with their technical expertise. Based on what he had seen so far, Catherine Ellen Guess would fit in nicely.

  He went on to describe how each of the nine subjects they had identified in Temple Square were later approached and told they had been randomly chosen to participate in a medical study. If they were willing to undergo a comprehensive physical at a medical center nearby, they would be paid five thousand dollars.

  Eight of the nine had jumped at the chance, although comprehensive didn’t come close to describing the tests they endured. In addition to blood and urine draws, and undergoing dozens of tests they hadn’t known existed, their brains were scanned and their DNA was sequenced.

  After these findings had been discussed, Hall went on to review the many ways he, himself, had been put through the wringer. DNA, MRIs, and every other brain scan known to mankind, of course, but reflexes, RNA analysis, chemical content of cells, neuronal physiology, the list went on and on.

  “About the only doctor who hasn’t taken a piece of me is a proctologist,” he explained to the newcomer.

  Megan grinned. “And that’s only because the team reluctantly decided that Nick’s rectum was proba
bly not the source of his mind-reading ability.”

  “Maybe we should rethink that decision,” said Altschuler. “Are we sure Nick has been probed enough? What if his anus does hold the key?” he continued. “Not literally, of course,” he hastened to add, breaking into laughter. “But it is possible we’ve been going about this analysis . . . ass-backwards?”

  “Wow, what are we, in seventh grade?” said Heather with a twinkle in her eye.

  “Yeah, Alex, thanks,” said Hall. “With you as a friend, who needs, you know . . . enemas.”

  “Please tell me you didn’t just say that,” said Megan.

  “Sorry,” he replied sheepishly, directing his apology more to Catherine Ellen Guess than to Megan. “We usually maintain at least a semblance of decorum,” he explained.

  “Sure we do,” said Heather, rolling her eyes.

  Hall went on to summarize all they had done to get a handle on the power and range of his abilities. They had tested his powers from inside a steam room, in arctic conditions, deep underwater, behind lead walls, inside a hyperbaric chamber, inside a Faraday cage, deep underground, surrounded by a vacuum chamber, and in any number of even more creative environments.

  None of the endless barriers and interfering waves they had tried blocked Hall’s mind-reading ability in the slightest. Only Megan Emerson could do that, and she had no idea how.

  They had also taken delicate measurements as Hall read minds, shouted telepathically, and strained to move tiny objects, but none of this had registered on any of the insanely sensitive sensors Dottie Logerot had brought to the party. Mind reading failed to register in any way on the environment. It didn’t create any residual heat or cold, and it had zero impact on any wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum.

  Since this was impossible, they had decided it might be a quantum effect, since most things in this realm seemed equally impossible. Or perhaps it was working through dark matter or dark energy, mysterious substances that, like Hall’s psionic powers, were also impossible to directly detect, baffling scientists for decades.