by Eric Bernt
“Does he hear more than we do, or does he simply process the same things we hear better?”
“We’re honestly not sure.”
The answer surprised her. “Why not?” It was quickly becoming clear why she’d been required to sign a seventeen-page confidentiality agreement as part of her employment contract.
“He once had such a severe panic attack in an MRI that he broke the machine. He can’t handle electrodes or anything else being attached to his body that would allow us to gather any meaningful data.”
“I think I can help with that.”
“I believe you can, too. I want your initial focus to be on Eddie. He’s very close to a breakthrough.”
“What kind of breakthrough?” She assumed he meant developmental.
“After you’ve heard his lecture, you’ll understand.”
Skylar’s footsteps echoed as she and Fenton neared the end of the hall. “He can’t possibly hear us now, can he?” she asked quietly.
From nearly one hundred feet behind them, Eddie poked his head out of his door. “After you’ve heard his lecture, you’ll understand.” Eddie’s delivery sounded more like a male version of Siri, but it was still striking. Then he closed his door.
Skylar shook her head as she and Fenton turned a corner. “Amazing.”
“You have no idea.”
CHAPTER 12
Hay-Adams Hotel, Washington, DC, May 22, 8:30 a.m.
The Lafayette was a statement kind of DC restaurant. How often someone dined there, and at which table, told the world exactly where that individual ranked in the political scheme of things. It was a never-ending game of musical chairs. Those who could afford the private dining room, however, bought a speed pass. Everyone got to see them enter the establishment, but was then denied the pleasure of watching them eat. Which meant, of course, that any real business conducted in the Lafayette was done back there.
The maître d’ greeted the Honorable Senator Corbin Davis from Indiana as he entered the restaurant. “Welcome back, Senator.”
“Thank you, Antonio.”
The maître d’ corrected him. “Alfonso.”
“Alfonso, right.”
“Your host is expecting you. Please follow me.” He led the senator through the restaurant to the private room. Davis exchanged pleasantries with several other politicians and influence peddlers as they made their way back.
Davis’s breakfast companion stood up from the table as he entered the private room. “Senator, it’s a pleasure to meet you. Bob Stenson.”
Davis gave Stenson a firm handshake. “Bob, the pleasure is all mine.” He glanced at Alfonso, who excused himself.
Davis was attired exactly the way Stenson’s research had told him he would be: navy-blue pinstripe suit, handmade; off-white dress shirt, lightly starched; Brooks Brothers tie, yellow; Tiffany cuff links, brushed platinum; Patek Philippe watch, vintage. Stenson intended to tell him the watch was a poor choice even if it had been a wedding gift from his father-in-law, but only in due time. “Please, have a seat.” The two men sat at the table. “I ordered you a double cappuccino with nonfat milk. That is how you like your coffee, isn’t it?”
“It is.” Davis took a sip. “I gather you’ve done your homework on me.”
Stenson stifled a smile. “You could say that.” Only for the last fifteen years.
“Fifty thousand dollars is a hell of a contribution, Stenson. It’s rather unusual to see that kind of money come in without any fanfare.”
“We don’t care for fanfare, or publicity of any kind.”
The senator nodded as he studied the man across the table. “From what I could gather, while people have heard of the American Heritage Foundation, nobody knows much about you.” Stenson stared back impassively across the table. “Except that every candidate you’ve backed in the last twenty years has won.”
Stenson remained without expression. “We’re rather selective.”
“I suppose I should be flattered.”
“That depends.” Stenson took a sip of water.
“On what?”
“On whether you would like to be the next president of the United States.” He looked directly at the perfectly tanned man across from him.
Davis knew this was not a joke. His next few words might very well be the most important he’d ever speak in his entire political career. “Very much.”
Stenson took another sip of water. “We can make it happen.”
Coming from anyone else, the statement would be ludicrous. But from these people, it was to be taken at face value. “Based on your track record, I don’t doubt you.”
“Would you like our support?” Stenson did not blink. He kept his gaze locked on his target.
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“We’re what people today refer to as old-school. We require complete trust. And absolute confidentiality.”
“I’ve never betrayed a friend in my life.”
“We would not be having breakfast if you had.” He slid a manila folder across the table.
“What’s this?”
“We need to know if we’ve missed anything.”
Davis opened the folder to find a handful of items. Among them, records of a $175,000 payoff from a union representative in 2005; Davis’s ongoing affair with a twenty-three-year-old staffer; and his 2013 drunk-driving arrest, which he’d managed to have expunged at considerable expense. Each offense was well documented with photographs, paperwork, and other damaging evidence.
They knew everything.
The senator’s blood went cold. He was shaken. The documents he was looking at were not supposed to exist. “Where the hell did you get all this?”
“That’s not important. What is important is that we know everything. We cannot protect you without full disclosure.” Stenson sipped his water. “Is there anything we don’t know?”
“I . . . I don’t think so.” Davis couldn’t think at all. His mind was spinning. How could they possibly know? How did they get any of this?
My God, who are these people?
Stenson’s expression remained completely unthreatening. “If something comes to you later, don’t hesitate to contact us.” He placed an encrypted phone on the table. It was the same model Henry Townsend had used to call Stenson the night he was murdered, only this one was brand new. “Keep this with you at all times. To reach us, all you have to do is press ‘1.’ You are never to use this phone to contact anyone else under any circumstances.”
Davis couldn’t stop staring at the documents. “And you can make sure none of this can come back to bite me in the ass?”
“Yes.”
“May I ask how?”
Stenson sipped his water. Clearly, the answer was no. “The phone will be our primary means of communicating with you. If we call you, we expect you to answer it.”
“Doesn’t seem too much to ask.” He studied the phone, and then pocketed it as a waiter arrived to take their orders. Stenson ordered the oatmeal. Senator Davis ordered the eighteen-dollar eggs Florentine with a side of apple wood–smoked bacon, just like the American Heritage Foundation research said he would.
Stenson waited for the server to leave the room. “Senator, there is a small favor we’d like to ask.”
Senator Davis had been waiting, since the moment he sat down, to find out just how much this little breakfast was going to cost him. “What can I do for you?”
“Tomorrow, at the annual budget meeting of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, one agenda item is of great importance to us.”
CHAPTER 13
Recreation Room, Harmony House, May 22, 9:15 a.m.
Fifteen minutes had passed by the time Eddie finished writing his equations. Turning away from the whiteboard, he glanced around the room to the other patients. “Good morning.” They all stared at him expectantly. Even the guy who was drooling. Eddie cleared his throat, took a deep breath, and then started. “Matter can be neither created nor destroyed, though it can be
converted from one form into another.”
His delivery was slow, methodical, and surprisingly dramatic. He seemed almost to physically transform himself, Skylar thought. Something inside him had turned on. He wasn’t merely imitating. He was expressing himself. Which meant that he was capable of it. On her mental list of priorities, understanding the trigger mechanism had just risen to the top.
Eddie moved to a phonograph, which was as old as he was. He glanced confidently at his audience, then picked up the stylus and turned on the device. The vinyl record on the platter began to spin, gradually moving faster until finally reaching a constant speed of thirty-three and one-third revolutions per minute.
Eddie carefully placed the needle into the outermost groove of the record, which happened to be Wilhelm Kempff performing the Schubert Impromptu D. 923, one of the finest Schubertians playing one of the finest pieces of music ever written for piano.
Eddie closed his eyes to relish the sensation as it washed over him. Everyone else looked on in envy, wishing they could hear even part of what he was so enjoying. He moved his finger up and down, then side to side. “The stylus vibrates vertically as well as horizontally, causing the transducer to produce varying voltage, which is amplified and fed into the speakers.” He pointed to the speakers on either side of him. “The physical movements are converted into electrical energy, which is then converted into acoustic energy.”
After a moment, he lifted the needle from the record, and the music stopped. “But when it’s no longer audible, where does that energy go?” He looked around the room to the various members of the audience like a master showman. “Ha! Wrong question, right? We know it’s here. Know it, know it, know it!” He looked in one corner, then another. He checked under a trash can, then peeked behind the whiteboard.
The room was SILENT. Or, at least, as silent as it could be given the constant din of the fluorescent lighting, heating vents, and other nuisances, which Eddie did his best to ignore.
He continued. “The question is, what form?”
Skylar looked on in amazement as he moved to the echo-box prototype, which was now connected to a somewhat bulky-looking laptop computer. At the press of a button, the sides of the echo box sprang open, revealing eight one-inch satellite microphones pointed around the room. Each one cost $20,000. When Eddie clicked a command on the laptop, the microsatellites came to life, performing a perfectly synchronized ballet as they acoustically mapped the room.
Their movements were mesmerizing. Programming them had been a nine-month project during which Eddie almost never left his room. Everyone on the staff had grown worried about him except for Dr. Fenton, who had assured them that he would never let any harm come to any of their patients, especially not Eddie.
The statement was a lie. Eddie would have had no trouble flagging it as such, had he ever heard it. Which was why Fenton had never said it in front of him.
Everyone in the recreation room sat perfectly still, staring at the echo box, except for Nurse Gloria, who moved slowly toward Eddie.
“The basis for sound-wave retrieval and reconstruction, which is called acoustic archeology, has existed since 1969. We just haven’t had equipment sensitive enough to acoustically map an enclosed space or the algorithms necessary to re-create the original sound wave.” He paused for emphasis. “Until now.”
Several of his spectators turned toward the computer, realizing it did not bear any type of familiar brand name. That was because the machine wasn’t commercially available. It was a portable supercomputer, one of the very few in the world. Clocking in at 17.2 PFLOPS (petaflops, or quadrillions of calculations per second), the machine could easily make the International Supercomputing Conference’s biannual list of the five hundred fastest supercomputers in the world, if the government ever admitted this machine existed. There were fewer than a dozen laptops on the planet with this much unique computing power. The machine cost in excess of $3 million—which had utterly no meaning to Eddie, because he had never used money in his life. His father had never allowed him to buy anything as a child, and residents of Harmony House had no need for currency. They were never allowed to leave the facility, so no one on the staff had bothered to teach the patients about money and its purpose.
Gloria kept creeping toward him.
“While decaying infinitely, a sound wave retains a distinct signature, which can allow us to reconstruct its original form the same way a mastodon can be re-created from a partial bone fragment.” Eddie had read about the recent proof of gravitational waves when two different Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory detectors, instruments two and a half miles long, simultaneously moved one-thousandth the diameter of a proton. That was an almost unimaginable level of sensitivity, which had led Einstein to believe that no one would ever be able to prove his 1916 theory. It only took a hundred years. By comparison, Eddie’s scientific leap of faith was more of a small skip. He was truly certain the proof of his theory was at hand as he clicked “Reconstruct” on the laptop. The computer was SILENT for a moment, then produced a horrendous, shrill SCREECH.
Eddie cringed, quickly closing the laptop. He then exploded, screaming at the top of his lungs, “As soon as I can figure out what the equations are!”
He slapped himself hard across the face. Once. Twice. Then instinctively grabbed for any sharp object within reach to do some real damage. Nurse Gloria immediately moved to restrain him. His flailing arm punched her repeatedly in the face and pulled her hair, but she was not about to let go. She gritted her teeth as she held on tight. “Easy, Eddie. Take it easy.” He was hyperventilating and on the verge of a seizure.
The other patients all reacted immediately. The shy woman in the front row wearing the Harvard sweatshirt began to whimper uncontrollably. The heavyset Dartmouth guy in the back fled the room, pulling his hair out. Stanford, Princeton, Northwestern, and all the others screamed or cried or babbled incoherently.
Nurse Gloria raised her voice loud enough to be heard over the cacophony without sounding too alarming. “That’s all for today, everyone! Head on back to your rooms!”
More staff arrived quickly. So quickly, it was as if they had expected this to happen. Which, of course, they had. Each knew exactly what to do. They moved with precision. It was impressive. Skylar went toward Nurse Gloria, who continued holding Eddie tight, carefully pulling him down to the floor. Nurse Gloria turned to Skylar. “Do us all a favor. Before you think of them as geniuses, think of them as children, because that’s what they are.”
“How did you see it coming?”
The veteran nurse shook her head at the young doctor. Even with all her schooling, she still could not see what was right in front of her face. “I didn’t see anything, Doctor. It always happens at the exact same point every time he gives his lecture.”
“Always?”
“Since the day he first walked through the door.”
CHAPTER 14
Eddie’s Childhood Home, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, April 9, 2001, 4:00 p.m.
Eddie was eleven years, two months, seven days, and eight hours old when the envelope containing the brochure arrived at his home. His father brought it in from the mailbox. “What the hell is Harmony House?” he muttered out loud, in an accent that was pure Philadelphia. Their town house was small but respectable, a perfectly fine place for a residential electrician to call home in South Philly.
“I don’t know what Harmony House is,” Eddie answered. He had no such accent.
His father, Victor Parks, rarely got such official-looking envelopes except ones he didn’t want, like from the IRS or some stupid lawyer. “Shut up, Eddie. I wasn’t talking to you.”
“Who are you talking to? I’m the only other person here.”
Victor stopped and stared at his son. “You know how I told you there are some times I just need you to be quiet?”
“Yes.”
“This is one of ’em.”
Eddie turned back to the computer he had disassembled, whose
parts now covered the kitchen table along with a half-eaten cheesesteak.
Victor passed him without looking up from the large envelope. “You’re going to be able to put all that back together, right?”
Eddie didn’t answer.
Victor repeated the question a little louder. “Right?”
Eddie still didn’t answer.
“Right, goddammit?”
“I thought this was one of those times you just need me to be quiet.”
“Answer the question!” Victor yelled.
Eddie yelled in response, “Yes, I am going to be able to put it back together.”
Shaking his head, Victor moved into the den, where he opened the brochure to Harmony House. Included in the packet was a letter addressed to Victor: Dear Mr. Parks, Harmony House is a government facility uniquely qualified to help your son, Edward . . .
The more Victor read, the more excited he became. Eddie could hear his father’s breathing get faster with excitement, kind of like it did sometimes when he watched the Eagles playing football on television. Harmony House said it could take good care of people with special needs like Eddie, and even help him in ways nowhere else could.
Best of all, it wasn’t going to cost Victor a dime.
When given a winning lottery ticket, most people don’t wonder how they came to receive it. They’re just lucky, they figure. The same was true of the parents who’d received brochures from Harmony House.
Five days later, Eddie packed his Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles suitcase and got into the car with his father. “This is for the best,” Victor told him on the drive from Philadelphia. “These are people who can help you a hell of a lot better than I can. It’s not that I don’t want to, believe me.”
Eddie nodded, knowing with certainty that his father was not telling the truth. Eddie didn’t understand why people sometimes told the truth and sometimes lied. He just knew that was the case. Dr. Fenton would later tell him that he was the best human lie detector ever tested.