Warren Murphy - Brain Storm

Utter panic struck him.

"Hold it! Hold it! I know everythin'!" Dominic begged. He tried turning toward his assailant, but found that he couldn't move. Hot steam curled up into his nose and mouth.

"That seems unlikely," Remo ventured. "What's six times seven?"

"What?" Dominic asked. His thick nose hairs were curling.

"See? You don't know everything."

The bubbling water came closer.

"I'll turn state's evidence." Dominic screamed as the pot closed in. "I'll give you my brother Anselmo on a silver platter. Just let me go."

The downward movement arrested. Bubbles of boiling water burst against Dominic's hair.

"You want me to let you go?" The voice behind him sounded puzzled.

"Yeah, yeah. Please."

Behind Dominic, Remo shrugged. "Suit yourself."

None of the members of the Scubisci Family had ever been very well supplied in the brain department, but it had been agreed by the rest of the clan that they could all safely look down on Dominic's limited mental capacity with superior disdain. But in that infinitesimally brief instant before his scalp touched the water, Dominic Scubisci realized that he had mis-spoken.

Before he could speak, before he could shout, before he could take back his ill-chosen words, gravity plunged Dominic's wrinkled head below the boiling water.

He immediately tried to pull himself free. Strong hands were again upon him, holding him in place.

Though he thrashed in place like a large fish in a small boat, his head didn't move an inch from below the burning water. He tried briefly to fight the brilliant pain, but it wasn't long before it proved too great. All at once, he let himself succumb to the exquisite torture, and in that instant it was as though the bottom had dropped from the pot and Dominic felt himself slipping through the boiling water and into a greater, more eternal flame.

The fire here burned brighter and more fiercely hot than anything Dominic had ever imagined, and long after his earthly shell returned to the dust from which it had come, the name of Guillermo Murietta and countless others tormented him in unending flaming anguish.

Setting the timer on the back of the stove, Remo held Dominic in place for a good five minutes. The mobster had stopped wiggling in under a minute. Just like a lobster.

Once he was satisfied the man was done, Remo pulled him out of the water and dropped him back atop the stainless-steel counter.

The skin on Dominic Scubisci's head and neck was so bright it was nearly orange. Stringy bits of flesh hung off in reddish white tatters.

"You look done to me," Remo commented happily.

Milky white eyes stared ceilingward with unseeing horror. For good measure, he pounded a large meat thermometer between Dominic's open white eyes.

"Ooh, mobster head's trickier than I thought."

Remo frowned. "You could have stood another minute or two. I'll have to remember that when it's time to parboil your brother."

Remo found his bag of rice on a table near the door. Scooping it up in his thick-wristed hand, he ducked out the emergency exit.

The scent in the air gave promise of a beautiful day.

Harold W. Smith carefully scrutinized the information on PlattDeutsche America as it scrolled across his computer screen. The monitor was buried beneath the onyx surface of the desk and angled upward.

Only the person seated behind the large high-tech desk could view the information as it passed silently across the screen and back into electronic limbo.

Hardly an hour had passed since he had fled the Butler Bank, and Smith was already firmly en-sconced in his office at Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York. This unassuming office was the nerve center of the secret government organization CURE.

It was here that Smith had spent the bulk of the past four decades of his life. He fully expected to die at his desk, alone and unheralded at the helm of the secret agency that identified, tracked and addressed crises both domestic and international. Created by a young president, himself the eventual victim of an assassin's bullet, CURE was always in demand to safeguard America, and was many times the last best hope of each man chosen to serve in the Oval Office.

Smith had heard of PlattDeutsche, and knew it to be a company on the cutting edge of information technology. Because of this, the breakthroughs made by PlattDeutsche America at its New Jersey plant were sought-after by the Pentagon, particularly during the military buildup of the 1980s. Though quieter than Lockheed or Raytheon or any of the other military giants, PlattDeutsche America had carved out a comfortable niche for itself supplying technology and hardware to all branches of the United States armed services. This comfortable arrangement had lasted until the determined gutting of the American armed forces in the early 1990s.

The company was hit hard by the drastic downsizing of the military. In spite of its quiet achieve-ments in computer-related research, for some reason, PlattDeutsche had never quite forced itself into the spotlight of popular culture. It was therefore not equipped to reroute its efforts into post-Cold War endeavors. Smith suspected that with the morning's flamboyant introduction of its new Dynamic Interface System, PlattDeutsche America was now poised to make the great public-relations leap necessary to survive in the fast-changing business climate.

The information bubbling up from Smith's buried computer screen was vast and complex.

There were several articles culled from the leading science magazines in the country extolling the breakthroughs PDA had made for the government's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. In particular the company was singled out for a

DARPA-sponsored neural-network chip they had developed. The microchip was so advanced its function outstripped its closest competitor in the market by a factor of five. With a processing capacity roughly fifty thousand times faster than its biological counterpart, the chip used electrons to transmit information instead of the sodium and potassium ions required by the human brain.

Again in a more esoteric scientific quarterly, the company was praised for its work—alongside the New York State Department of Health—training users to emit brain signals to command a computer to move a cursor around a screen.

A seemingly small program that had apparently netted great results for the relatively obscure company, if the events at the Butler Bank were any indication.

A few minor articles in some of the local Boston papers several years before mentioned that Dr. Curt Newton, a noted MUT researcher and lecturer in the fields of applied mathematics and cybernetics, had been lured away to PlattDeutsche. The scientist boasted in one article that the unlimited funding offered by the large corporation would, in less than a decade, allow him to become the world's first physical cryptologist.

Smith wrinkled his nose at the phrase. At its most basic, cryptology was the science that dealt with en-ciphering and deciphering messages. He had known cryptographers since his OSS days during World War II. Indeed, it was a young Harold W. Smith who had worked alongside British and American cryptologists on the top secret Ultra project, which was one of the most successful counterespionage operations in modern history and broke the Nazi Enigma coding machine and contributed to the Allied victory in Europe. But Smith had never before heard of anyone referring to himself as a "physical cryptologist."

He input the phrase into the computer and stuck the Search key. The computer responded almost instantaneously. There was only one article on the subject other than the one Smith had already read.

It was in a European computer journal, and the phrase was highlighted seven times, all in reference to its cover interview subject, Dr. Curt Newton. He described physical cryptology as the science of deciphering the neural codes in a living subject and transferring them to an artificial host via an electronic uplink. Physical cryptology would break down the very codes that defined human thought.