Brain Storm

8

On the sixty-third ring, Remo picked up the phone.

"Joe's Taxidermy. You snuff 'em, we stuff 'em,"

he said in a bored tone.

There was a slight moment of hesitation from the other end of the line. Then Smith spoke, his voice tighter than usual. "Remo, report back to headquarters immediately."

Remo was mildly surprised that he wasn't chastised for making the CURE director wait. "Aw, Smitty, can't you just overnight-express the autograph?"

"Never mind that," snapped Smith. "Something important has come up."

"It's always important," Remo complained. "I was in the middle of something pretty important myself." In truth, Remo had been out in the large parking area beside the condominium complex that was his home watching some of the neighborhood children skateboarding. One of the kids had pretty good balance.

"Remo, please, just get down here as quickly as possible."

There was something odd about this call. Something much different than usual. Remo pressed on.

"What's all that noise in the background?"

"I am, er—" there was a pause on the line "—not at the office."

"Well, where, er, are you?" Remo asked.

"At a nearby fast-food establishment."

"Outside?"

"There is an amusement area of some sort here."

There were children's voices shouting raucously in the background. Remo tried to picture Smith in his gray suit, rimless glasses, seated on a painted tin mushroom with his battered briefcase on his lap while dozens of children ran screaming around him.

Try as he might, he couldn't summon up an image that could possibly do justice to the reality.

Remo sighed. "You could have told me about this earlier." Remo's internal clock—more accurate than any government-built atomic clock—told him it was only eighty-seven minutes and twelve seconds since he had gotten off the phone with Smith.

"This problem has just come up. Remo, please."

There was a strange desperation in his voice.

"Okay," Remo said resignedly. "I'll be there as quick as I can."

He hung up the phone and went to inform the Master of Sinanju that he was leaving. He found the tiny Asian seated in the center of the glass-enclosed upper room of the building. Chiun's wizened face was pointed east and slightly upturned. The warming rays of the midmorning sun suffused his parchment skin and reflected brilliantly off the hand-embroidered gold piping of his fire-engine red kimono.

"That was Smith on the phone," Remo said upon entering the room. "He needs me back at Folcroft."

He took a deep breath and stared out at the traffic on the street below. "He sounded strange."

Chiun didn't open his eyes. "And this struck you as odd?"

Remo shrugged. "No." His brow furrowed, un-convinced. "I don't know. He just didn't sound like himself."

Chiun's eyes instantly shot open. Hazel irises quickly flashed to shards of flinty concern.

"He did not hack?" the Master of Sinanju demanded.

Remo shook his head patiently. "It was nothing like that, Little Father," he insisted.

Only a few short weeks before, Remo had un-knowingly charged headlong into an ancient Sinanju prophecy. An unholy band of false prophets had re-established the two-thousand-year-old Delphic Oracle in America's West. Those who breathed the smoke of the Pythia, as it was called, were possessed by the demon force. Remo had been unlucky enough to become the vessel of the Pythia for a time. His coughing spasms had been an early sign of posses-sion to the Master of Sinanju.

"You are certain Smith has not been infected by Apollo's minion?" the old Korean pressed.

"Of course not," Remo said. "We blew Ranch Ragnarok to Kingdom Come, and the Pythia's urn along with it."

Chiun studied Remo's hard features. They had not discussed those events much. Something had happened to Remo while he was entrapped by the oracle.

The old man suspected that it had something to do with yet another Sinanju legend—the one in which Remo was said to be the avatar of Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction.

Finally Chiun closed his eyes. "Do not be confident that we have seen the last of the Pythia," he said ominously.

"We smoked him once, we can do it again,"

Remo said, spinning to the window. His sure tone belied an inner concern. "And I was talking about Smith."

"Did he mention the autograph?"

Remo rolled his eyes heavenward. He turned back to the master of Sinanju. "Chiun, I told you. Smith's autograph is worth diddly."

"Now," Chiun said. "But it might not always be so."

"I guarantee you, a hundred years from now, Smith's autograph will still be worth diddly."

"But if it increases in value, I will be in a position to make a tidy sum. This with no personal investment, Remo."

"You plan to be around in a hundred years to sell it?" Chiun opened his eyes. The ancient eyelids, as thin as rice paper and seemingly as delicate as a cluster of cobwebs, revealed a pair of surprisingly young-appearing hazel eyes. The Master of Sinanju regarded his pupil levelly. "I am not quite ready to climb into my grave." The eyes were cold.

"I didn't mean anything by it," Remo said. "It's just that one appearance on the evening news isn't going to make Smith a star."

''Robert Dedero had to start somewhere."

"De Niro," Remo corrected.

"A worthless currency," Chiun said. "Almost as worthless as the ruble. I will only sell Smith's signature for gold. But I will only sell it if you collect it, so make haste." Chiun closed his eyes once more.

And rather than attempt to explain to the Master of Sinanju that it was unlikely that Robert De Niro got his first big break on the evening news, Remo left.

Remo took an afternoon flight and arrived by taxi at Folcroft by three that afternoon.

The security guard didn't even lift his eyes from his tiny portable television set as Remo strolled through the open wrought-iron gates and up the main driveway. He headed directly to the main sanitarium building.

Remo noticed a strange white van sitting in the no-parking zone in front of the large stone staircase to the main building. Its engine purred almost imperceptibly. He guessed it to be some kind of utilities truck, since his heightened senses detected a lot of electrical equipment inside the back.

Veering away from the main entrance, Remo took the narrow flight of stairs near the employee parking area up to Smith's office.

Smith's outer office was deserted. Remo considered that a stroke of good luck. Mrs. Mikulka, Smith's secretary, must have been away somewhere on an errand. Remo was pleased that he didn't have to contend with the older woman. She sometimes took her job as the personal secretary to the head of Folcroft Sanitarium far too seriously.

He moved across the outer office on silent, gliding feet.

Remo paused at the door to the office. There was someone else inside with Smith. He didn't know why his senses told him this; he just knew. Maybe this was the reason for Smith's urgency on the phone.

Without hesitation, Remo popped the heavy lock on the inner office door and slid stealthily inside. He hadn't passed more than a foot into the Spartan office before he felt a huge pressure on the back of his skull. The pain was intense and immediate. It was as if someone were compressing the fused bones of his skull in a vise. His ears itched. Remo reeled at the pain.

Smith sat behind his desk. The other man, a stranger Remo somehow found familiar, sat in a chair across from Smith. The stranger turned to Smith as Remo staggered in pain near the still-open doorway.

"This man is white."

"That is true, obviously." Smith's eyes darted over to Remo.

There was a hint of concern etched in the deep recesses of his flinty gray eyes.

"The Masters of Sinanju have always been Orientals. Koreans, specifically."

"Remo was able to absorb the training when no Asians could."

The man's tone became threatening. "It would be regrettable if I discovered you have been lying to me, Dr. Smith."

By the door, Remo was attempting to regain his equilibrium.

It felt as if someone had jammed two rusty ice picks in his ears.

The itching had moved inward. It now felt as though a starving rat were trying to claw its way out of his skull.

With a colossal effort, Remo forced his jaw and larynx to work.

"What is going on, Smitty?" Though he was able to speak, the words were labored, sounding as though they were spoken by a stroke victim.

Dimly Remo recognized the man as the one he had seen on the news the previous evening. A look of mild surprise spread across the man's regal features.

"Unusual," he said. He nodded approvingly, as if Remo had just passed some private test.

Remo decided he didn't like him. The way he looked at Remo was maddeningly condescending. He wasn't going to wait for the order. He'd settle this guy's hash and then ask Smith what the hell was going on.

The look of surprise on the face of Lothar Holz became one of shock as Remo took a hesitant step toward him.

"Curt," the man said to no one in particular.

"You don't have a lock yet." There seemed to be a nervous crack in his usually calm demeanor.

Remo took a second step. Though he moved like a marionette with hopelessly tangled wires, he was closer to Lothar Holz.

Holz stood. His face grew more concerned and he spoke urgently.

"Curt, he is moving."

For the first time, Remo noticed a small device pressed into the man's ear. It was no larger than a hearing aid. Apparently he was giving and receiving signals from some outside source.

A second later, Remo had forgotten about the transmitter-receiver. With no warning, Remo's left hand moved in a deadly arc.

It whipped up and around, slashing down solidly onto the back of an old oak office chair. The chair protested, but only for an instant.

All at once the legs buckled, the back and seat shattered apart and the entire chair collapsed into an unrecognizable pile of splinters.

The hand continued its vicious arc and slapped audibly against Remo's thigh. It rested there as Holz looked on, wide-eyed.

Holz wasn't the only one who was shocked. Remo looked at the pile of debris, a dumbfounded expression on his twitching face.

Something was profoundly wrong. He had been focused in on Smith's visitor. He hadn't told his body to shatter the chair. It had acted independently, exerting some foreign will over him.

The tingling at the base of his skull grew more intense.

"Mr. Holz, I have acceded to your demands.

There is no need for random acts of violence," Smith said.

Holz. The man from the bank. The stunt with the interface system. And all at once, Remo knew. It was some sort of mind-control device. Smith had sold him out. To Holz. Remo fixed the man with a deadly glare.

"He is not under control," Holz snapped at Smith.

He tapped the receiver in his ear. "Newton! Newton!" Frightened and cornered, he backed up against Smith's desk.

And though he moved with an uncertain, jerky motion, Remo still had his body partially under his control. With a look that would have inspired terror in hell's most stone-hearted demon, Remo took another step toward the cowering intruder.

"What on earth was that?"

"Autonomic response."

"From the peripheral system?"

"That's just it. This guy has no peripheral nervous system. It's all autonomic."

"That's impossible." In the back of the van, surrounded on all sides by various scientists, technicians and programmers, Dr. Curt Newton was having an impossible time figuring all this out.

He had been overjoyed to learn that Harold W.

Smith had been contacted and even more delighted when he learned that Holz had set up a meeting with the doctor at Smith's place of business. But he didn't know why Holz wanted him to bring the interface van from the New Jersey complex.

"We have someone special I want you to download," Holz had said.

This was troublesome in and of itself.

There was a problem with the ethics of duplicating the contents of a person's mind when that person hadn't given prior consent. Indeed, Newton had learned earlier in the morning that some of the people at the bank were threatening PlattDeutsche with lawsuits—so Newton had assumed that they were going to put a hold on this aspect of the project. Curt Newton didn't have much of a problem with that. They had already demonstrated to the world that the process worked. Surely the government contracts would start rolling in now.

But Holz had been insistent, and so Dr. Curt Newton had loaded everything into the van and driven up to Rye to await the "someone special" he'd been promised.

The man had arrived at the building mere moments before. He had been a problem right from the start.

Not only did his synaptic and neural patterns not match anything the computers had on file, but something as simple as a cerebellum lock was proving to be near impossible. The man was going into some sort of nervous-system overload. Where they should have gotten control of him the moment the heat sensors picked him up in the rear office—which was where Holz had arranged for his meeting—the man was proving virtually impossible to detain. His acetylcholine levels were off the charts. Some rogue spark had just caused him to destroy a piece of furniture. Who knew what he'd go after next?

"Why haven't you gotten a lock yet?" Newton demanded of his panicking staff.

"He's resisting."

Newton shook his head. "Impossible." Newton, who had been acting in a supervisory capacity, pushed one of the technicians away from his terminal and dropped into the vacant seat. And immediately saw a problem. "Your readings are wrong," he said, indicating the neural monitors. "Your nervous-system model is shot," he said, waving toward the monitor. "These axons and dendrites aren't even from a human."

"Yes, they are," one of the scientists insisted. "I triple-checked. They've been reconfigured somehow.

The interface program is having a hell of a time trying to adjust to the new system pattern."

"Afferent indicators are negative," a technician piped up.

"Shh! Shh!" one of the men hissed. He cocked an ear toward the speaker that connected the back of the van via a special radio signal to the headset of Lothar Holz. "He's still speaking!" the man said, incredulous.

Newton's face was severe. "He shouldn't have hypoglossal control at this point."

The scientists collectively shrugged or shook their heads in confusion. They redoubled their efforts.

An instant later, there was another crash from the office speaker.

In the back of the van, Dr. Curt Newton froze. He prayed that nothing had happened to his mentor. For without Holz, the money flow for the Dynamic Interface System would trickle to a stop. With wary eyes, he turned toward the heat-sensing apparatus.

The chair holz had been sitting in shuddered as if from some unseen inner force, then collapsed into a shattered lump on the threadbare carpeting. There was nothing left to indicate that the pile of splinters had been, until a few seconds before, a rather worn and uninviting office chair.

In a lightning-fast flash, Remo's hand returned to his side.

"Control your man, Smith!"

Holz looked clearly terrified. His unflappable facade had given way to a look of sheer horror as Remo, struggling to fight the interface signal, slowly advanced.

Smith kept his expression bland. He dared not allow Remo's unexpected resistance to raise any visible signs of hope. If Remo was able to battle the signal and take care of Lothar Holz, then perhaps this situation could be rectified quickly. But there was still the matter of the white van out in the parking lot. "Master of Sinanju, I meant you no harm," Holz cried out as Remo closed in.

Remo managed a puzzled frown. Master of Sinanju? What was he talking about?

Remo wanted to ask, wanted to put the question to Smith.

But it had become too much of an effort to speak.

He would take care of Holz first.

Remo's deep-set eyes were focused on his target, but he still moved in an awkward, stilted manner. He was battling a nervous system that had for years obeyed his every move and now felt sluggish and unresponsive. The itchiness inside his skull was a constant irritant.

His ears rang dully.

But he had Holz. The man cowered like a frightened, craven dog before him. He would finish him with a simple blow. Nothing fancy. Then he'd find out from Smith what the hell was going on.

But the blow he planned had a mind of its own.

To Remo's surprise, his hand slashed out automatically, his spear-sharp fingertips aimed directly at the sternum of the man who cringed before Smith's desk.

Sweating profusely, Holz cowered, petrified and utterly defenseless against the killer attack.

Out in the van, Curt Newton was frantic.

"Boost the signal!"

"I can't."

"There's got to be interference coming from somewhere!"

"There's no interference. The signal's fine."

Newton shook his head. "This is impossible," he said again, desperately.

Information raced across the screen at a rate Newton had never before seen. The lightning-fast binary scroll was reflected in his owlish glasses.

"Master of Sinanju, I meant you no harm," the pleading voice of Lothar Holz hissed over the tinny speaker. Newton glanced at the speaker with a worried expression.

"Can you get the cerebellum lock yet?" Newton pleaded with one of his white-coated associates.

The man was bathed in sweat, red faced and pale in turns. He nodded sharply. "I could get it now, but we don't have the capacity."

"What do you mean?"

"His neural system is incredibly complex. There's not enough room for the file. That's why we've had a problem so far." The man wiped the sheen of perspiration from his forehead as he spoke.

"There's no way one man could fill the entire system." "I don't think this guy is human," the technician explained, shaking his head in awe. "It's almost like his neural codes have been entirely rewritten."

"But you're saying we don't have the capacity to duplicate the file?"

"Only if we destroy the other files in the system."

Newton's jaw was firmly set. "Copy over them."

"Are you sure?"

Newton nodded sharply. "Copy over everything we have. Get the cerebellum lock on him first."

"Yes, sir." The man immediately went to work, setting up the interface system to automatically delete old files as it copied the synaptic information from the individual in the rear office. The portable computers in the van whirred anxiously to life as the information flowed back over the radio signal from the rear office.

The massive databases rapidly began to fill with a wealth of new information.

"I've got cerebellum control," a tech announced after only a few seconds. He hunched over his screen excitedly.

Newton watched in fascination as new sets of binary codes—translated automatically by the preprogrammed interface system—began scrolling across the screen. The speed was far greater than before.

Where they had first moved by in a flash, they were now a blur. When he blinked, the bands of white numbers seemed to congeal into single, static lines of washed-out white.

"Wow, this is great," said the technician who had informed the others of the cerebellum lock. He had isolated the information from that section of the brain and was now playing around at his keyboard.

"This guy's got some killer programming." He punched out a simple command on the cerebellum board.

"What did you do?" Newton asked. He was still nervous, still thinking about the funding that a major screwup could cost him. Still thinking about his place in future scientific textbooks.

The man shrugged. "I just ran a program this guy's brain had started. It was something that was already along the neural net. Pretty basic compared to the rest of this guy's programming."

"What was it?"

"It was a move."

Newton pressed. "What kind of move?"

Again the young man shrugged. "It was like a karate chop, sort of." He scrunched up his face at the inadequacy of the description.

Newton felt his heart turn to water and slide down into his stomach. This foolish little hacker in the van had no idea what he might have done. The man in the office was like no one he had ever downloaded before. He was something more than a man. And he had already been advancing on Lothar Holz.

Newton prayed that the blow had missed its mark.

Fortunately for Lothar Holz, it had.

And fortunately for Remo, as well, it had been a simple stroke.

Any maneuver more complex might have ripped his arm from his shoulder.

His arm shot out, but the aim wasn't true. Holz had moved to one side. And while Remo's brain would have ordinarily compensated for the movement, he found to his supreme surprise that his brain was no longer his own. His hand breezed past Holz's shoulder. The powerful blow dissipated in the empty air above Smith's desk. His hand returned to his side, seemingly of its own volition.

Now, though Remo struggled against the mind control, he couldn't budge even a fraction of an inch.

Holz caught his breath. With grateful eyes, he watched Remo's hand slap back against his leg. It didn't move again.

Holz stood erect, straightening his tie. He tugged the cuffs of his suit jacket primly and, with a half turn of his neck, adjusted his Adam's apple against the collar of his white dress shirt.

"Well done, Curt," he said to the microphone.

"Though a touch on the late side," he muttered under his breath. He walked over to Remo.

Smith looked deflated. Any hope that Remo could rebuff the interface signal was lost. His only hope now was the true Master of Sinanju. He prayed that Chiun would be strong enough to fight off the powerful radio signal. Hopefully, by lying about Remo's true identity, Smith had bought the organization a few hours.

Maybe, just maybe, Chiun would introduce a random element that Holz hadn't planned on. The element of surprise.

Smith took his seat. "You have what you came for. Could you please leave now?" he said.

"Not quite yet."

Smith's brow furrowed. "I do not understand."

Holz slipped his slender, perfectly manicured fingers around Smith's desk telephone. He lifted the receiver and extended it toward the lemony-faced man. His next words made Smith's already erratic heart muscle skip a beat.

"Call the other one."

And a Cheshire Cat smile displayed a row of gleaming, perfect teeth.