“You’re bluffing,” said Kira. “Implanting an explosive device in my skull would be risking my death, leaving you no way to get the secret of longevity you so desperately want.”
Sam shook his head. “No risk at all. I have every intention of resetting it every twelve hours religiously—as long as I’m in good health. The only way you die is if I’m already dead, and at that point the fountain of youth won’t do me a lot of good.”
“No risk at all?” said Kira scornfully. “You’re more insane than I thought. What if the receiver fails? And what if your signal can’t make it down to this basement and through my skull? How many bars of reception do you think I get inside my head, anyway?” Her lip curled up in disgust. “Take it out.”
Sam’s eyes blazed, betraying a rage at having been spoken to in this manner, but only for a moment. His eyes quickly returned to normal and he smiled serenely. “Not to worry. The device has two receivers for redundancy. And while the explosive is a few centimeters deep in your skull, the receivers are affixed just a few millimeters below the surface of your skin. And they’re next generation. Won’t be available to the public for another year. Nothing but the best for you, my dear. You could be in a coal mine in West Virginia with your head in a freezer and my call would make it through.”
Kira glared at him but said nothing.
Sam pushed himself off his perch on the table to a standing position on the concrete floor. “So let’s review your options,” he said. “Option one: you tell me the secret, and no one’s reproductive abilities have to be destroyed. I remove the explosive device from your skull and you live a life of luxury—heavily supervised luxury, but luxury nonetheless—while you continue to work on immortality.”
Sam smiled insincerely. “Option two: you don’t tell me, our generation will be the end of the line for humanity, and you’ll end up telling me your secret and working on immortality eventually anyway.”
Kira’s eyes continued to burn with a seething hatred. “As I’ve said,” she hissed in barely contained, clipped tones. “I need to verify that you can do what you say before I make any decisions.”
Sam nodded. “I’ll make sure you get all the evidence you need.”
36
David Desh realized it was time to turn his attention toward escape. Even though his watch had been removed and he had been unconscious for an extended period since he had last looked at it, his mind had somehow kept perfect track of time. It was nearing 10 o’clock. Sam’s discussion had come to a somewhat logical conclusion, and he would need to leave and reset the booby trap in Kira’s head. He had no doubt planned to end the conversation just prior to having to reset his device for dramatic effect.
When Sam left, would he leave them alone, handcuffed, or would he have them actively guarded? Desh raced through probabilities and options, considering and discarding dozens of strategies. His mind seized on one he thought had a good chance of succeeding. But he would need to interact with the species Homo sapiens dullard, which meant he had to create an avatar personality of the old Desh so he could operate on their delayed level and not arouse suspicion.
Sam’s watch began emitting a series of high-pitched beeps, and he smiled in satisfaction. He pushed a button on his watch and the beeping stopped. “I’m afraid I have to go now, my dear,” he said to Kira. “I have a helicopter waiting for me. And it’s already 9:40. You were unconscious for quite some time. So before I leave, I need to reset the device in your skull. If I don’t—” He spread his hands helplessly. “Well, let’s just say that neither of us wants that.”
He barked an order and seconds later three plain-clothed men had joined him in the basement, each holding a tranquilizer gun. Under any other circumstances they would have been armed with automatic rifles, but Sam was taking no chances that something would go awry and result in Kira’s death.
Sam gestured at Smith’s corpse lying in a pool of blood ten feet away. “I’ll call in a clean-up crew when I’m in the air,” he informed the newcomers. He didn’t offer any other explanation for the body and the men didn’t ask for one.
Sam pointed to the tallest of the three men. “Jim here will be in charge when I’m gone,” he announced to his prisoners. “He’ll take good care of you.” He paused. “Mr. Desh, I’ll be back to interrogate you tomorrow morning. As much as I would enjoy slicing off digits and beating you to within an inch of your life, I’m afraid that truth drugs have become just too damn good to justify this sort of thing. Oh well,” he said in disappointment. “I’m sure the session will prove interesting, nonetheless.”
Sam turned to Kira. “As for you, my dear, you’ll have all the information you’ll need to confirm the activity of our sterility virus very soon.”
Sam paused in thought, and a look of mild amusement came over his face. “Jim, if the girl needs to relieve herself,” he continued, “I want one of you in the bathroom with her and one of you outside the door. And don’t turn away while she’s going either. As for Desh here, if he needs to go—” He shrugged. “Let him pee in his pants.”
With that Sam turned and walked to the wood staircase. When he reached it, he turned and faced Kira. “One last thing. Listen for three high-pitched beeps in a few minutes. This will tell you that your twelve-hour clock has been reset.” He smiled. “I thought it was considerate of me to provide an audible confirmation for you. I’m trying to minimize your stress until you’ve come to your senses.”
“Yeah, you’re a real prince,” said Kira bitterly. She paused. “Look, we’re handcuffed to a concrete wall. Do you really think you need three guards?”
Sam looked amused. “Just the fact that you asked the question tells me that I do.” With that he took a careful look at his watch and rushed up the stairs.
The three guards fanned out in the basement at equal distance from the prisoners.
Kira turned toward Desh with an alarmed look in her eye. There was no getting out of this situation. Moriarty, or Sam, or whoever he was, had won. He had an explosive charge planted in her head and a knife at the throat of the entire species. The situation was hopeless.
Desh winked. The gesture had been completed so quickly she had almost missed it, but it was unmistakable. She wrinkled her forehead in confusion. What did he know that she didn’t?
It was time. Desh instructed sweat to exit the pores in his face, and in less than a minute moisture started to bead on his forehead and cheeks. At the same time, at his command, the color drained from his face and lips. He moaned softly.
Hearing the prisoner moan, the guard nearest Desh studied him more closely. “Jesus,” he said to his companions. “This guy is sweating like a pig. He looks like death.”
“I need a doctor,” gasped Desh, the avatar personality he had set up ensuring he said the words in character and with mind-numbing slowness.
Kira struggled to make sense of what was happening. She would have been sure he had come down with the mother of all fevers if it had not been for its sudden onset and the wink he had given her. So this must have been planned. But the sweat sliding down his face was real. They were in a basement and the air was currently cool and dry. No one could cause themselves to sweat. This couldn’t be faked. Unless …
She glanced down at her chest and stifled a gasp. The locket was gone!
Her eyes widened.
The guard named Jim, stationed between his two colleagues, peered at Desh uncomfortably. “What’s wrong with you?” he demanded.
“Don’t know,” uttered Desh feebly. “Gonna vomit,” he whispered. “Bathroom. Please.”
“It’s a trick,” said the guard closest to Desh. “It has to be.”
“Brilliant conclusion,” said Kira mockingly, rolling her eyes. “Can’t you tell when someone’s feverish? How the hell could it be a trick?” She shook her head in disgust. “Look at him! You can’t fake that.”
Desh moved his head forward and swallowed hard several times, as if fighting a gag reflex.
“In another few mi
nutes he’ll be covered in vomit!” pressed Kira. “Are you prepared to live with that smell all night? You think your psychotic boss will be happy about this when he returns?”
Jim frowned miserably. “Ken,” he said, nodding at the guard closest to Desh, “cut him loose. And get him to a toilet.”
Ken hesitated.
“Hurry!” barked Jim.
Desh moaned as Ken approached, pulling a combat knife from his belt. The other two guards raised their guns and trained them steadily on Desh, as Ken reached behind him and cut through the tough plastic of his restraint, which fell to the ground, and returned the knife to his belt.
Desh grunted in pain as he rose unsteadily to his feet, hunched over and clutching at his stomach. He glanced at the other two guards. Ken began escorting him to the stairs. When Desh was halfway there, he bent over and made a loud, throaty, heaving sound, as though a week’s worth of stomach contents were erupting from his throat.
The guards all glanced away, just for a moment, in disgust.
Desh moved! He snatched Ken’s knife with a speed and precision that could never be equaled by a normal man and flicked it toward the guard farthest from him with a smooth, practiced motion. The knife buried itself deep in the guard’s chest. The instant Desh released the knife he spun Ken to his right and into the path of the tranquilizer dart that Jim had sent racing toward him. Desh threw his human shield forward and into Jim in front of him, who shoved the dead weight of his tranquilized colleague violently to the concrete floor. As he did so, Desh was on him immediately, landing a vicious kick to his arm and sending his gun flying. The guard attempted a knifehand strike to Desh’s throat in combination with a palmhand blow to his nose, but Desh blocked both attempts easily. He had read the guard’s body language so precisely he knew the man’s intentions before he had begun to move.
Desh now read Jim’s defensive posture, and spotting an opening, wheeled around and landed a roundhouse kick on the guard’s chest, exploding him back against the staircase. Even as the kick was landing Desh calculated the exact distance to the staircase and the exact speed and force he would need to exert to achieve his goal. As the man’s head cracked against the staircase, he crumpled to the ground, unconscious, and Desh knew his calculations had been perfect.
Desh snatched Jim’s tranquilizer gun from the floor, stepped over Ken’s body, and crouched low under the open staircase. As he had expected, the guard who had remained upstairs bolted through the door to the basement and down several stairs holding an automatic rifle out in front of him. So much for non-lethal force, thought Desh.
The man expertly covered the staircase and entire basement with his gun. He took in the sight of Kira, still bound, and four bodies sprawled on the floor, but could detect no other movement, which he immediately realized suggested his adversary was hidden under the staircase.
His realization came far too late.
Desh casually sent a dart at point blank range through the opening between two stairs and into the guard’s leg. He collapsed and slid down four stairs before finally coming to a stop.
Desh was expert in several forms of hand-to-hand combat, and long practice had made his movements precise and cobra-strike quick. And this was before his mind was enhanced. With his thoughts so vastly accelerated, the guards’ quickest movements had appeared almost deliberate to him. He had been outnumbered four to one and he knew it hadn’t been a fair fight—for the four guards.
Desh rushed over to Kira. As he was cutting her free three loud, piercing tones emanated from her skull, startling her but having no effect on him.
Perfect, he thought. His timing had been exact. He ordered the sweat to cease pouring from his face and his blood to flow normally, and the color quickly returned to his face. He considered if Kira could assimilate his speech if he sped it up to more closely match his thoughts, but ruled it out: as intelligent as she was, he would need to continue to relegate a portion of his mind to creating a simulacrum of his old self.
“Are you sure you want to go?” he asked. “You’ll need to be sure Sam resets his device by 10 o’clock tomorrow morning.”
Kira nodded defiantly. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” she said.
Desh took her hand and led her through the obstacle course of scattered bodies and up the stairs. Sam had said there were four guards, but Desh wasn’t about to trust this number. He cautiously peered around the door, counting on his enhanced reaction time to get him safely through any ambushes. There were none.
They found themselves in the kitchen. “Wait here,” said Desh.
Before Kira could respond, he rushed off and canvassed the entire house, confirming they were alone, and returned to her a few minutes later. “I want to check the men downstairs for identification. I doubt I’ll find any but it’s worth thirty seconds.”
Desh bounded off and down the stairs, closing the door quietly behind him. He pulled the knife from where he had implanted it in the guard’s chest and checked for the man’s pulse. He was dead. Desh knelt beside the unconscious men, two in the basement and one on the staircase, and slit each of their throats in turn, careful not to get any blood on himself.
He isolated the memory of these murders and created a temporary dead zone in his mind so they would be hidden when he returned to his vastly inferior normal state, ensuring he would not be improperly burdened by them. He knew that the emotional, un-enhanced version of himself would never sanction the murders of helpless men.
This other Desh was an idiot!
The enhanced version had just ensured that when Sam returned, he would get zero information as to how they had escaped. They needed to keep Sam as off-balanced as possible. The more confused he was, the more intimidated by their magical escape artistry, the better chance they would have.
The stakes were simply too high for squeamishness.
37
David Desh rejoined Kira on the first floor. “Did they have any ID?” she asked.
Desh shook his head. “None.”
“Doesn’t surprise me,” she said. “Good news, though. I found our personal items and cell phones in a kitchen drawer.”
She held out his watch and cell phone and he took them gratefully. “Good work,” he said as he slid his watch back around his wrist.
The fraction of Desh’s mind he had used to set up a simulacrum of his slow self waited patiently for the second-and-a-half he expected to pass before Kira’s next utterance. The rest of his mind continued to race at fantastic speed, following several trains of thought simultaneously. One train of thought involved their escape. He had learned how to hot-wire a car as part of his general “surviving with what was at hand” training, and he isolated these memories and amplified them in case he turned back into a pumpkin before locating a suitable car.
“Let’s get out of here,” suggested Kira. “We have to stop this sick bastard,” she added with determination. “And we don’t have much time.”
Desh computed a number of probabilities almost simultaneously. The probability that homing devices had been planted on them or their retrieved personal items. The probability there was detection equipment at hand. The odds that they would find this equipment if it was here, and the amount of time this could be expected to require. The increased risk they were taking with every second they remained where they were. He input all of these figures into a complex equation that he solved the instant it had been formulated: one course of action was optimal—but just slightly. He transmitted the result to his puppet personality.
Desh held up a hand. “Not just yet. Sam thought escape was impossible, so my gut tells me he didn’t plant homing devices on us. Odds are he put the device in your head just to be on the safe side and for intimidation purposes. But we need to be sure. We’re in a safe house, so there must be bug detection equipment here somewhere. Let’s find it.”
They separated and ransacked the house at breakneck speed, tearing through closets and dumping the contents of drawers onto nearby floors. Only
four minutes later, Desh found a case in a bedroom closet containing instruments for detecting both homing and listening devices.
He hurriedly scanned both Kira and himself, along with their phones and other personal items. Everything was clean. He checked carefully around Kira’s bandage for any signals but detected none.
They cautiously exited the house, wishing they had night vision equipment as they made their way through the darkness, punctuated by the lights from other houses in the neighborhood. Several streets over Desh found an old car that was susceptible to being hot-wired and quickly did so, performing the procedure by the dim light of his open cell phone. He was just pulling away from the curb when—like a hundred billion rubber bands snapping back into their original shape—his hyper-intelligence vanished.
Desh gasped out loud as if he had been hit in the stomach.
Kira glanced at him and nodded knowingly. “Welcome back to the world of the feeble-minded.”
He wore an expression of complete disconsolation. “I feel like I’ve just been blinded,” he whispered
She nodded. “Ten minutes from now it will all seem like a dream and you won’t miss it so much.”
Desh searched his memory. Had he retained anything? He was relieved to find that several of the ideas he had had while enhanced were still with him, although the underlying logic he had used to arrive at these concepts was either gone or far beyond his ability to comprehend. Desh forced himself to stop pining for lost brilliance. Time was short.
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