How can that work? How can I remember something without remembering how I learned it in the first place?
He shrugged to himself. It didn’t matter. He felt as though he had walked into a quiz show on elementary arithmetic. He knew he’d be able to answer all the questions, even if he would never be able to recall the moment when he had actually learned how to multiply 7 and 5 to get 35.
In any case, he seemed to be retaining the information quite well.
“I learned a bunch of other stuff, too,” he said, returning his attention to Andrew. “Lots of other stuff. But it’s all pretty technical.”
“I’m sure.”
“The breakfast is great,” Kevin said, trying to change the subject. He felt he was somehow making Andrew uncomfortable.
“Thank you,” Andrew said. And he turned once again, with evident relief, to escape to the kitchen.
Kevin watched him go, and then he went back to eating. Now there was near-silence in the dining room, and he realized that those pestering, anxious voices inside his head hadn’t made a peep yet this morning.
Ready, Kevin thought. Right? He nodded to himself. There was something deeply satisfying about the idea. It made him feel so calm. Ready enough, I guess.
He certainly felt ready.
But he wasn’t. Not by a long shot.
Face Down On The Ground
Jacob Savian was in the chair at his desk, waiting for the door buzzer to ring. He was expecting a visitor that morning. In the meantime, he was watching George work on his latest painting, a process Jacob found mesmerizing. George’s easel and paints were set up near Jacob’s work station, because he knew his brother liked to watch him at work. The gigantic canvas he had been building two days before was complete and resting on the easel’s support brace; the beginnings of a winter scene were taking shape on the canvas surface. The slim brush George was using looked like a toothpick in his hand. His movements were small and careful. Delicate.
Jacob was transfixed, as always. Creativity of this kind was especially wondrous to him, not only for the aesthetic sense and fine motor skills required – neither of which Jacob had ever possessed – but because his brother’s paintings seemed to represent creation in the purest sense. George had no goal. He was not solving a puzzle, or addressing a need. And the scenes he painted were not even necessarily based on real places. They simply occurred to him, and something about this notion, this transformation of a non-existent, imagined thing into an actual form, an actual physical representation, was endlessly fascinating. Jacob was a genius at coding – an actual, strict-definition genius who could solve problems on a computer that most people couldn’t even understand – but his work was invariably responsive. Reactive. People came to him with problems, and he solved them. He had never created a program that existed for its own sake, a program that stood on its own. He was, at his core, a trouble-shooter. Without an error to fix or a challenge to meet, Jacob knew he would have been left to sit looking at his computer screen for hours on end, doing nothing but sucking away time. George, on the other hand, possessed a creative spark of his own, a prime mover ability that Jacob found miraculous.
“This is what I’m trying to protect,” Jacob said suddenly.
George turned, brush still in hand. He waited for his brother to explain himself.
“I am not going to let Pascal Billaud turn us all into watchers. Turing and von Neumann, they were visionaries, not watchers. They knew how to solve and create.” George squinted at the unfamiliar names, but Jacob wasn’t paying attention. He was on a roll. “And you are not a watcher. You are a visionary. You make things. From scratch, out of nothing. Out of the air. It’s incredible, it’s…”
He held up one hand, searching for the proper superlative. Then he put the hand down with a little shake of his head. Words would not suffice. “It’s incredible,” Jacob said again. “And I’m not going to let him take it away. It’s for us, and it’s for God. Not for him.” His face grew dark, and he glared at his computer screen as though he were picturing an image of Pascal Billaud there.
George turned back to his painting. The hillside was giving him problems. The sleds and the children would be easy, but getting a snowy slope to look right was turning out to be far more difficult than he had anticipated. The shadows were killing him.
There was a buzzing noise at Jacob’s desk, and he picked up an old-fashioned looking phone that was connected to the side wall by an extra-long cable.
“Yes. Send him up.”
He turned again to his brother. “George, would you mind grabbing me a large bottle of Ice Tea?”
George put down his paintbrush. “Hold on,” he said, and headed for the corner of the loft that served as their kitchen. There was a stove and a refrigerator there, neither of them showing signs of any real use. The Savian brothers preferred to order most of their food from restaurants and delivery places.
“No, we don’t have any left,” Jacob called. “I mean from the deli.”
“You need it right now?”
Jacob nodded apologetically. “Sorry. Would you mind?”
George shook his head placidly, and he veered toward the exit. He decided he could use the ten minutes to figure out a strategy for those hill shadows. There was a knock at the front door just before he got there, and he opened it to reveal a short, stocky man wearing black army fatigues. His nose was heavily taped, and there were dark circles under his eyes that might have been the result of a recent injury. A sharp blow to the face, for example. George glanced questioningly over his shoulder.
“It’s okay,” Jacob called, with a little wave. “Send him over.”
George stood aside to let the man pass, and then he continued out to do his errand. He let the door close behind him.
Jacob waved the man over. “You’re the one called Gun Two?”
The man nodded.
“Yes, okay. You know what’s funny?” Jacob asked casually, as if the two of them were old friends. As if he were picking up a conversation they had been having in fits and starts over a period of several years. “A computer can’t get a feeling. Can’t get a hunch. Not yet, anyway. The technology’s not there. A system can be programmed to watch out for low-probability events, but each event has to be entered ahead of time.”
Gun Two remained silent. This information did not seem funny.
“But a man,” Jacob said quickly, “now, he can get a hunch. A man has so many millions of loosely associated ideas and images floating around in his head, it’s a wonder he doesn’t go crazy making sense of it all. Still, it’s those associations that let us figure things out. We can sort of jumble things together until they seem to make a pattern, and that process helps us make new connections that might not seem obvious at first. That’s a hunch, you see?”
Gun Two nodded slightly. He supposed he did see, but it still wasn’t funny.
“Right,” Jacob said. “So here’s the problem. We’ve got this very carefully laid-out plan in progress, and part of that plan involves a bunch of white vans. We need those vans to arouse no suspicion, no nervousness of any kind, which is why we’ve got them circling that area like bees around an apple tree. Right?”
Gun Two nodded again. He wasn’t sure where this was headed, but he was starting to feel nervous. The Organizer hadn’t told him why the Client wanted to see him, but face-to-face contact was usually forbidden for someone at his operating level. The only sensible explanation was that he was going to receive some sort of formal congratulation for having eliminated the cop.
Except that the Client didn’t seem to be leading that way.
“And that would be fine,” Jacob was saying now, “except that for some reason you felt the need to kill a cop whose beat patrol included the block where the vans have been parking.”
“He was asking questions,” Gun Two explained. “He was writing things down.”
“Of course he was writing things down,” Jacob said, sounding tired. “And the information he recorded wo
uld have gone down with the hundreds of other useless bits of crap he collected this week. No one would have cared.”
“But he – ”
“Shut the fuck up,” Jacob said, still in that tired tone of voice. “Now there’s going to be all kinds of attention on that cop. Now every little thing he wrote down will be like the damn Rosetta Stone, and they’ll go over every note in his pad like it was written in his fucking blood.”
“It was a hit and run, no one would ever – ”
“You don’t understand,” Jacob cut in. “You weren’t listening to me when I explained about hunches. Nobody needs a direct connection, not for something like this. Let me try to explain it another way. See that machine?” Jacob pointed at a medium-sized device made of metal and plastic resting at the base of the near wall. Compared to the other machines lining the shelves in the room, this one seemed almost simple. “Bring it over here.”
The Gun did as he was told, retrieving the device and setting it on Jacob’s desk.
“It’s an auto-defibrillator, you know what that is?”
Gun Two shrugged. “Re-start your heart?”
Jacob smiled, and Gun Two was put momentarily at ease. “Exactly. Now open up the plastic housing and take hold of the paddles, and I’ll show you something.”
Gun two opened the little door that gave access to the computer-controlled charging paddles. Then he picked one of them up in each hand.
After a delay of exactly three seconds, a 120-Amp surge of DC power froze Gun Two in place, locking his muscles and snapping his jaws together with enough force to chip two of his molars. The paddles’ handles, which had been carefully stripped of their insulating rubber and wrapped – unaccountably – with a thick layer of superbly conductive copper, vibrated in Gun Two’s hands. A popping sound came from Gun Two’s right forearm; this may have been his palmaris tendon rupturing under the uncommon strain of an electrically induced spasm.
The few lights that were switched on that morning in the Savian apartment went dim.
“It’s normally programmed to activate only when it detects cardiac arrest,” Jacob explained, studying the Gun with an expression of rapt attention. He had never seen anyone in the actual process of dying, and he thought the experience was almost as good as watching George paint. Not quite, but pretty close. Murder without intent to consume was, in Jacob’s opinion, another one of those rare things that only humans and God could lay claim to. Worth appreciating, therefore. “And of course it’s only supposed to deliver a quick jolt, not this extended business here. But the literature says it takes a good minute and a half to properly fry a man, so I’ve got it wired to the building’s power – see those extra leads coming out of the bottom? No, of course you don’t. That’s okay. Anyway, it was easy to modify. I created the original software, you know. So I didn’t have too much difficulty with the failsafe protocols.”
Gun Two was not listening. Or looking. His eyes popped out in quick succession – not the entire eyeballs, only the contents – and a pink-tinted smoke began wafting up from the bloody sockets. His whole body was shaking now, vibrating so rapidly that parts of him were a blur.
Jacob looked at his watch. He tapped his foot.
Precisely ninety seconds after the modified machine had detected a closed circuit, an automatic relay was faithfully tripped by the programming logic embedded in the rudimentary CPU, and the power supply was interrupted. The remaining charge, which was significant, was then redirected to the main circuit board itself, instantly destroying all of the code responsible for the machine’s operation.
Gun Two’s body dropped to the floor in a heap, his muscles now awaiting commands from a brain and nervous system that would never again issue commands of any kind. Jacob leaned forward and peered over the desk, wondering if he should put forth the effort to get up and check for the Gun’s pulse. He couldn’t imagine why he would need to, despite the accounts of electric chair procedures he had read. He could smell the man’s charred skin easily enough from where he was sitting. So what if his heart were still beating? Surely it wouldn’t be beating for long.
“Just stay there,” Jacob said to the Gun, whose heart had in fact stopped just twenty-five seconds after the first shock. Jacob leaned back and began turning slowly, idly in his chair. “I had a hunch you were the dumb one,” he called to the Gun after a minute. “See, that’s using it in a sentence. My hunch is that you would have fucked something else up later on. I have a hunch the whole operation has a better chance of success now, without you around.”
Jacob kept spinning slowly in his chair. Kept calling out examples of the word “hunch” to his dead, uncaring pupil.
A minute later, George returned from his errand. He came through the front door and held up two large bottles of Raspberry Lipton Ice Tea, his brother’s favorite. He held them up like prizes he had won at a fair. But then he frowned. He lowered the bottles, sniffed the air, and grimaced. Then he peered across the huge room, trying to make out the scene at Jacob’s desk more clearly. It looked to George as though the man who had come in a few minutes ago was lying face down on the ground there.
“What is that?”
“I told him not to touch it,” Jacob said, still turning around slowly. He looked like a child – an extremely large, extremely cold-blooded child – who had only now discovered the delightful time that could be had by sitting in a rotating chair. “I told him it was dangerous, that I hadn’t finished with the programming. But he wanted to pick it up.”
Jacob said all this to the ceiling. Then he looked at George. “We’re going to have to clean him up, I’m afraid.”
George walked over quickly. When he reached the desk he looked down and studied the man lying there. He put the bottles of Ice Tea carefully next to Jacob’s second keyboard, where his brother could easily reach them. Then he put his hands on his hips and gave Jacob an exasperated look. “You mean I’m going to have to,” he said. “Fuck, Jay,” he added.
Jacob looked shamefaced. “Thanks for the tea.”
“You can’t do this,” George said, his hands still on his hips. He looked like a disappointed parent. More fed up than mad. Because of a C- on a report card, say. “I’m really busy. I don’t have time for this kind of thing. Is he clean?”
“Of course he’s clean. Anyway, I’ll make it up to you.”
“Oh, please. This is going to take me hours. The rest of the day.”
“Don’t be like that. You know I’m busy, too. I explained all of this. It’s for you, too. This was necessary.”
George rolled his eyes.
“And speaking of that, I have to make a call.”
George shook his head in disgust. “You owe me.”
“I know, but give me a minute here.” Jacob was moving on, already pulling up the contact information on his screen. George sighed and walked away. He went past his beloved canvas and headed for the kitchen.
Jacob established the connection, and a moment later the Organizer’s face appeared. He looked confused to be receiving the call. “What’s the problem? Is he there?”
Jacob nodded. “Listen, you’re going to need to modify your plans.”
“Why? What happened?”
“This man is not part of your team anymore. He’s quit the business.”
The Organizer was silent for a moment, trying to process. Trying to understand. Then his face changed, and he nodded.
“So you’ll figure it out?” Jacob asked. “You’ll shuffle your people around to make it work?”
The Organizer waited another minute, then said, “We will.”
“Wonderful. Also, I need you to draw up an alternate plan.”
Real surprise registered on the Organizer’s face this time. Killing an operative was one thing, but messing with the plan, especially this close to the deadline, was almost unheard of.
“Give me something we can do three days earlier,” Jacob said.
“That could be very difficult. What use would it be? There’s no
reason to think the target will be out in the open on Tuesday; it wouldn’t make any sense. He’s not even – ”
“Draw it up,” Jacob said. “Three days earlier. Got it?”
“Yes.”
“Excellent. Talk to you tomorrow.”
He severed the connection.
George emerged from the kitchen area wearing an enormous blue apron. The material ran all the way down to his ankles. He was carrying a small axe in one hand, and there was a thick roll of plastic under the other arm. His face was dark. “I need to get started,” he announced.
“You’re the expert,” Jacob replied happily.
George made a grumpy noise, and then he reached down and began unrolling the plastic sheet.
Undetectable (Great Minds Thriller) Page 19