by Richard Bard
His mom’s uncontrolled sobbing was the first thing he’d heard when he regained consciousness after the exploratory “staging” surgery. Dad seemed okay, but that’s because he kept it bottled up as usual. Jake felt their fear, knew they were both petrified they might lose their second son too. When Jake’s older brother died in a motorcycle accident, grief had shaken the family to its core. Now it was Jake causing the grief.
Months of chemo and radiation therapy had followed. His weight had dropped from two hundred down to one forty in less than six weeks. He’d lost all his hair. But he hadn’t quit, on himself or his family. Halfway through the treatment, Dad had died of a heart attack. A broken heart, Jake remembered thinking—his fault. That’s what unbridled grief did. His mom would be next if he didn’t pull through. His little sister would be all alone. Jake couldn’t let that happen. He’d beat it. He had to.
In the end, the aggressive treatment regimen had defeated the disease. The war was won—at least the physical part of it. His health improved, and he became the anchor that allowed his mom and sister to pick up the pieces of their lives.
No, Jake didn’t want to be surrounded by pity again. He couldn’t handle it a second time around.
Marshall paced back and forth in front of the rail, his fingers unconsciously playing over the smooth corners of the iPhone snapped into a holster on his belt. He took another slug from his bottle of beer. “Dude, at least tell me what happened when you were inside that machine. You’ve barely said a word since we hightailed it out of there.”
Jake still couldn’t remember the sequence of events that actually occurred while he was in the MRI machine, but he recalled the resulting sensations all too clearly: heart pounding, shortness of breath, helplessness, uncontrollable panic—feelings he wanted to banish, not talk about. “Something weird happened to me. I’m still trying to sort it out. I freaked in there. A full-fledged, your-life-is-on-the-line panic, like when your chute doesn’t open and the ground is racing up at you.”
His voice trailed off. “The next thing I can remember is the news talk-radio show in the Jeep. The announcer was reeling off the game scores, and somehow that relaxed me. I saw each score as a different image in my mind. It’s crazy, but instead of numbers I saw shapes.” Jake closed his eyes for a moment. “I can still recall every one of them, and the scores that went with them.”
“Of course,” Marshall said.
“No, really, Marsh, I’m serious.” Jake closed his eyes and recited, “Boston College over Virginia Tech, fourteen to ten; Ohio State beat Penn State thirty-seven to seventeen; USC–Oregon, seventeen to twenty-four; California–Arizona State, twenty to thirty-one; West Vir—”
“Sure, dude. Here, it’s my turn.” In a mock sports announcer voice, Marshall said, “West Virginia–Connecticut, fifteen to twenty-one; Texas A&M–Missouri, fourteen to three.”
“Cool it,” Jake said, “West Virginia didn’t play Connecticut; they played Rutgers and trounced them thirty-one to three. And Connecticut played South Florida and beat them twenty-two to fifteen.”
Marshall took a hard look at his friend, as if he was searching for a sign that he was joking around. Jake accepted the stare with a determined clench of his jaw. To him, this was anything but a joke.
Shaking his head, Marshall pulled the iPhone out of his belt holder, his index finger tapping and sliding along the surface of the touch screen. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s do this again.”
Jake started over but recited more slowly this time so Marshall could confirm each score. Following the first several answers, Marshall’s surprised look shifted to a grin. After hearing all thirty-one scores, he looked up from the small screen. “Son of a bitch.”
Jake smiled. “See what I mean? I’m not even sure how I did that. Pretty cool, huh?”
“Sweet is what it is. Kind of reminds me of Dustin Hoffman in that old movie Rain Man.”
Jake remembered the character. “He was really good at math, wasn’t he? He did it all in his head. I think I can do that too.”
“Like simple math or complicated equations?”
“I’m not sure.”
Marshall brought up the calculator on his iPhone and tapped the screen. “Okay, what’s four thousand seven hundred and twenty-two times twelve hundred and thirty?”
Jake didn’t hesitate. “Five million eight hundred eight thousand sixty.”
“Suuuuu-weet!” Marshall tapped a few more keys. “Give me the square root of seventy-eight thousand five hundred and sixty-six.”
“To how many decimal places?”
“You’re kidding, right?”
Jake shook his head.
Marshall studied the long number stretched across the screen, his lips moving as he counted the digits. “Twelve.”
Jake closed his eyes and rattled out the answer. “It’s 280.296271826794.”
“You have got to be abso-friggin’ kidding me.”
“Did you just say abso-friggin’? What a geek.”
“Shut up and tell me how you did it.”
“It’s easy, Marsh. The numbers feel like shapes, colors, and textures, each one unique. The shapes of the original numbers morph into the answer in my head. All I have to do is recite it.”
Marshall’s hands danced in a blur over the tiny screen. He talked while he worked. “Jake, I’ve heard of this before. How head injuries sometimes give people unusual new abilities.” His fingers paused, and he handed the device to Jake. “Here, read this.”
Jake scanned an article about Jonathon Tiel, a genius savant who developed his incredible mental abilities after a car accident. He developed a gift for memorization, mathematical computations, and languages. He could recount the numerical value of pi to over twenty thousand digits without a single mistake. He spoke fifteen languages fluently, and it was reported that he learned Swahili—considered one of the most complicated languages in the world—in less than a month.
Tapping the screen, Jake opened the link to another article. His eyes blinked like a camera shutter, and he tapped the screen again. A second later, another tap, and then another. He was amazed at the speed that his mind soaked in the information.
Jake wondered how in the hell he was doing it. It was as if each page he read was stored on a hard drive deep in his brain. He could pull each one up just by thinking about it. But what was going to happen when the drive reached full capacity? When that happens on a computer, things go wrong.
The blue screen of death.
“Are you actually reading the pages?” Marshall asked.
Jake nodded but kept his eyes glued to the small screen as he sped from one article to the next, each one describing incredible mental feats, artistic talents, and even enhanced physical attributes, all exhibited by ordinary people after various types of head trauma. Marshall watched for a moment from over his shoulder. The images shifted at an incredible speed as Jake absorbed the information on the screen. Marshall shook his head. He sat down on a chair beside Jake, propped his Keds on the deck rail, and nursed his beer.
After four or five minutes, Jake sank back in his chair. He stared at a contrail high over the water, thinking back.
Two years after his first illness—seven years ago—he’d moved to Redondo Beach to take a flight instructor position at Zamperini Field in Torrance. It wasn’t a high-paying job, but it got him in the air. He was a natural stick, and advancing to the lead acrobatic instructor position had taken only a few months. There’s nothing quite like sharing that first-time thrill with a sky virgin. And besides, hot-doggin’ in an open-cockpit Pitts Special was about as close as he could get to the rush he’d felt when he was screaming across the sky in his F-16. The crazier the stunt, the more he liked it. Sure, his boss said he sometimes skirted the edge of flight safety parameters, but Jake had an uncanny knack for knowing just how far he could push it without losing it. Of course, the inverted flyby over a packed Hermosa Beach crowd on the Fourth of July wasn’t his smartest move. He’d almost lost his
license over that one, until Marshall hacked into the FAA database and inserted a post-dated permit into the system.
All that had changed when he met Angel.
She’d bounced in the front door of the flight school amidst a circle of girlfriends. They’d dared her to take an acrobatic orientation flight, and she wasn’t about to back down. She’d sized Jake up with a twinkle in her eye that stood him back on his heels. With hands on her hips she gave him a spunky attitude that shouted, “You can’t scare me.” Between that and a contagious smile that melted his heart, Jake had all the excuse he needed to show off.
But once in the air, Angel’s false bravado turned quickly to panic when Jake followed a snap roll with a split-S that came uncomfortably close to the ground. She lost consciousness from the intense maneuver. When she came to, she was violently sick in the cockpit. Jake couldn’t forgive himself. He knew better. He spent the next several days trying to make it up to her with apologies, flowers, and finally, dinner. They were married a year later. Their daughter, Jasmine, was born eighteen months after that. Jake had never been happier.
Until a year ago, when a drunk driver killed them both and ripped his heart to shreds.
Jake had little doubt that the pain of that loss is what led to his cancer coming back—unbridled grief.
The airliner overhead disappeared from view—the dissipating contrail the only evidence of its passing—heading due west over the ocean. Next stop, New Zealand? Fiji? Hong Kong? Places that had been on his and Angel’s vacation list. Places neither of them would ever see.
“You with me, pal?” Marshall asked, reaching over to take the iPhone from Jake’s hand.
“For now.”
Marshall hesitated, apparently unsure of what to say.
“No worries,” Jake said with a somber grin. He clinked his bottle of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale against Marshall’s, escaping into the marvel of his new mental abilities. “What the hell, man? I’m a bona fide freak of nature.”
Marshall downed the rest of his beer in salute.
“Something strange happened to my brain in that MRI, Marsh. It changed me. And you know what? It might be just what the doctor ordered.”
Jake rubbed his temples.
“You need some downtime, or what?” Marshall asked.
Determined to ignore the sudden buzzing that crawled from the back of his neck up across his scalp, Jake said, “No. I’d just as soon head out and meet Tony at the bar to watch the game like we planned. But remember, no more talk about my health. Tony still doesn’t know. Got it?”
Marshall’s lips thinned, but he nodded.
Chapter 3
Venice, Italy
LUCIANO BATTISTA SOAKED IN THE VIEW through the triple-arched windows overlooking the sparkling waters of the Grand Canal. The late-afternoon sun reflected off the pastel facades of the centuries-old palaces across the water, pressed up against one another like books on a shelf. A tourist-filled vaporetto motored up the canal. A row of shiny black gondolas tied at their posts bounced and swayed in its wake. He caught the faint scent of fish drifting up from the open-air market around the corner.
Battista admired the scene from his richly paneled private office on the top floor of the six-hundred-year-old baroque palazzo. The magical floating city drew tourists from around the world who were hoping to get a taste of its mystery and romance, knowing little of its dark historical underpinnings of violence, greed, and secrecy. It had become his European headquarters seven years ago.
He had made a point of being meticulous in his efforts to blend into the upper-crust society of the ancient city, to perfect his image of sophistication and elegance. Today he wore his steel-gray Armani suit and Gucci shoes. He knew the outfit complemented his dark eyes, olive complexion, neatly trimmed black Vandyke, and thick stock of salon-styled hair that left no trace of his underlying scatters of gray. All part of his refined disguise.
Turning his back on the view, he moved in front of his hand-carved, cherry wood desk, his attention on the bank of thirty-inch LCD screens that covered the wall in front of him.
The subject on the central monitor had been recruited two years ago and taken to Battista’s hidden underground complex deep in the mountains of northern Afghanistan. He’d completed his training and passed all the medical tests before he had been flown here a week earlier to receive his implant. The young man sat at a small dinette table absorbing the pages of a technical journal. The electrical diagrams and parts schematic he drew on the tablet beside him indicated a thorough understanding of the information he was reading.
The implant was working.
“It’s been seven days, Carlo,” Battista said.
“Si, signore.” Carlo sat in the winged leather reading chair next to Battista’s desk, wearing loose-fitting khaki slacks and an open-collared white shirt, its sleeves rolled up. He absently trimmed his fingernails with the razor-sharp, five-inch blade of his automatic knife. His weathered hands and thick forearms were crisscrossed with a patchwork of scars. The rich olive skin of his bald head was so shiny it looked waxed and polished. A deeply furrowed scar slashed diagonally through one bushy eyebrow, its arc continuing into his cheek, pulling his eyelid down into a droop and giving his dark face a constant scowl.
The subject on the monitor closed the technical journal and picked up his notes, scanning his completed drawing. With a satisfied grin, he looked into the camera. In perfect English with an accent that hinted of Boston, he said, “Well, how do you like that? All I need now is a Home Depot, a Radio Shack, and about twelve hours of quiet time.” He flicked open the fingers of his fist. “And ka-boom! I’ll give you a makeshift device no larger than a backpack that can obliterate half a city block. Or if you prefer a more subtle approach, how about a cigar-sized aluminum cylinder that can be slipped into the plumbing at the neighborhood school to release a tasteless delayed-reaction poison at the water fountains? Not bad, huh?”
Battista nodded. This one was truly remarkable. Before the implant, the man’s English was broken and heavily accented. Now he had an astonishing command of the language that included the extended a’s and missing r’s prevalent in the blue-collar crowds of south Boston. With his surgically softened features and his dyed light-brown hair, he could easily pass as a beer-drinking Red Sox fan from Hyde Park—the last person one would suspect as a terrorist cell leader on a jihad to incinerate Americans.
Carlo stood to get a better look at the monitor. Next to Battista’s lean frame, he looked as sturdy as a fire hydrant. “Is he stable?”
“This one has lasted days longer than most of the others. The team was quite confident that they solved the problem.” And they had better be right, Battista thought. This was the thirty-seventh subject to receive the experimental transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) implant. The first dozen or more trials were utter failures; the subjects died immediately after the procedure. But they had learned something new from each variation in the tests, and the thirteenth subject lasted for nearly twenty hours, during which time his mind exhibited extraordinary savant-like abilities. That had been eighteen months ago. Each of the subjects since then had lasted longer. But only two of them were still alive after several months, one just a boy. None of the others had lasted more than four days after receiving the implant. Thirty-four loyal subjects dead. Battista would not allow their sacrifice to be in vain.
He continued to monitor the screen, hopeful. This subject had lasted a week, thanks to clues they had gleaned after studying the brain of another one of the autistic children. Unfortunately, the exam had proved fatal to the child, as had happened before. Battista knew that such sacrifices were unavoidable, but it still tore at his heart, reminding him of his own son.
“Imagine it, Carlo, an army of our brothers able to perfect their command of the English language in less than a week, to adopt its nuances, its slang, its mannerisms.”
Battista clenched his fists as he continued. “Let the Americans use their racial profiling to try to stop
us. These new soldiers will talk circles around their underpaid and complacent screening employees. Their confidence is their weakness, Carlo. Their belief that we are a backward people is the blindfold that will bring them to their knees.”
Carlo twitched his thumb, and the knife blade snapped back into its slender, contoured handle. He slid the knife into his pocket.
“Believe it, Carlo, for it will soon be upon us. One final hurdle and our research will be complete. Then, within a few months we will introduce more than one hundred such soldiers into America, any one of whom will be capable of unleashing his own personal brand of terror without guidance from us or help from the others.” He took a step forward and focused on the young man on the screen. “Here is our future, a single soldier of Allah with the mind of Einstein, multiplied by a hundred, and later a thousand.”
It happened suddenly. The subject on the monitor leaped up from the table. The chair behind him fell backward. His hands shot up, palms pressing hard against his temples as if to keep his head from exploding. His eyes squeezed closed, his mouth agape in a silent scream. The young man’s body twisted violently, and he fell hard to the floor, curled into a fetal position, shaking uncontrollably. After several seconds, there was one final spasmodic jerk, and he lay still.
Battista didn’t allow the flush of anger to overtake him. Instead, a dark calm spread over him.
Carlo knew to keep his mouth shut.
Battista’s eyes never left the monitor. After several moments, three men in white lab coats stepped into view and stood in a semicircle around the body, facing the camera, shifting uneasily.
One of the doctors said, “We are close, signore. Very close. But I’m afraid we’ll need to examine another autistic subject before the next implant.”