Warren Murphy: Brain Storm

Preliminary research, he claimed, had reaped great results with servomechanisms and electrode attach-ments, but his ultimate goal was to make wire connection between human subjects and computers ob-solete.

In the article—dated five years previous—Dr.

Newton vowed that his process would eventually become simplified to the point that wires would be a thing of the past. Radio signals would take their place.

Using the CURE mainframes' massive search ability, Smith sifted through all Pentagon information concerning PlattDeutsche. The search proved unen-lightening. There were files that concerned the company's dealings with the Air Force and Army, all inactive. Smith hit similar dead-ends with the NSC, NSA and CIA. All had had accounts with the corporation in years past, but all had either completed the specifications of their various contracts or pulled the plug on whatever arrangements they had with the company when the national-security funds dried up.

In all the government, only the FBI continued to divert a modest hundred thousand dollars to PlattDeutsche for research into a prototype crowd-control device using radio-enhanced ocular signals.

Smith returned to his computer's main menu.

There were other articles, but none offered any great insight. Smith scanned them all carefully before finally snapping the computer off. The screen within the desk winked out dutifully.

He turned slowly in his cracked leather chair and stared through the one-way glass office window at the silent black waters of Long Island Sound.

PlattDeutsche was a virtual island in the field of technology. It had apparently earned enough in government contracts to sustain itself during the long dry period. Indeed, it had used its earlier wealth to buy up a few other small companies—not related to the computer industry—making it a miniconglomerate. It had also started up the PlattDeutsche America Security Systems Corporation.

All of this was cushion enough to allow it time to develop the technology Smith had witnessed at the bank that morning.

But the technology was imperfect. It seemed that of all the people in the bank, Smith was the only one besides the robbers themselves who wasn't affected by the new device. He didn't know why this was so, but it remained a problem with the system that its designers would have to discover for themselves.

Smith's work was far too sensitive for him to have given himself away.

But that didn't mean the technology did not hold great promise.

Smith, an old hand at computers since a time when the simplest calculators were measured in tons, was impressed by what he had seen. It was apparent that the intricate computer system necessary to immobilize the entire population of the bank was also able to differentiate between individuals. This would explain why the robbers themselves had remained un-affected. Any computer program that was able to scan and eliminate individual brain-wave patterns had been developed by an unquestionable genius.

So the ultimate question was, did Smith need to worry?

He doubted it.

As a contributor to sensitive government agencies, PlattDeutsche had received many high-level security checks. They had passed all unfailingly. It was obvious that the strange event at the Butler Bank was a public-relations exercise by the company to announce its arrival in the commercial world.

This Curt Newton had achieved what he had set out to do; he had become the world's first physical cryptologist. He had, in part, broken the code of the human mind—to what extent Smith didn't know. But it was remarkable that this man had, in such a small amount of time, identified and neutralized the structures in the brain involving conscious movement. In effect, he had learned how to rewrite at least part of the program of the human brain.

But fully integrating a human being with a computer was still many years off, Smith was certain.

He spun back around to his desk and clicked his computer back on.

As his hands reached for the edge of the desk, a capacitor-style keyboard appeared beneath his fingertips, its orderly rows of letters and numbers lined like patient soldiers waiting to do his bidding.

Smith paused before he began work. He pursed his lips, considering an idle thought.

After a moment of hesitation, he typed a few brief commands into the computer that would track PlattDeutsche America activities, as well as the media's take on the events of that morning.

As a participant in the event and a proponent of technology, Smith had more than just a passing interest in seeing how such a development panned out.

That task accomplished, Harold W. Smith returned to the more mundane work of safeguarding America.

Remo took a shuttle flight from LaGuardia to Boston's Logan International Airport. He hired a taxi outside the airline terminal and settled into the back seat, arriving at his Quincy, Massachusetts, home late in the afternoon.

If Remo had owned a suitcase, he would have spent the better part of his adult life living out of it as he shuffled back and forth across the country from hotel room to hotel room on his business as enforcement arm for the secret agency CURE. It was only within the past few years that he had finally gotten what most people took for granted. A home.

Unfortunately home for Remo Williams was a gar-ish condominium complex that had been foisted on Remo and his aged Korean mentor, Chiun, by their employer, Harold W. Smith. The place was an eye-sore.

A former church, converted to its current state in a fever of real-estate-boom-inspired optimism, it combined several of the most unpleasant styles of architecture under one roof.

He sighed inwardly as the cab pulled up to the curb in front of the large building. It was true what they said. There was no place like home. But Remo doubted that most people thought of the phrase in quite the same way he did.

This day, unlike most other times when his eyes alighted on the building Chiun insisted on referring to as "Castle Sinanju," Remo's spirits were light.

He paid the taxi driver and, grabbing the bag of rice he had brought with him from New York, bounded up the front staircase into the building.

His finely tuned senses told him that Chiun was in one of the rear rooms on the lower floor. Remo deliberately steered in the opposite direction. He'd let Chiun find him.

In the kitchen, Remo dropped the brown canvas bag on a low taboret and scooped the phone up.

Moving to a safe spot across the room, Remo sat up on the counter and stabbed out the 1 button repeat-edly, activating the simplified code system that automatically rerouted his call through various dummy repeater accounts along the East Coast before leading finally to a small office in Rye, New York.

"Yes," the lemony voice of Harold W. Smith said crisply over the secure phone line.

"You know, you never say hello or ask me how I'm doing, Smitty," Remo remarked.

Nor did Smith now. "Dominic Scubisci?" he asked.

Remo sighed. "His goose is cooked/' he said, proud of his private little joke. His acute, Sinanju-trained hearing detected nearly silent footsteps in the hallway. He held the phone closer to his ear and pretended not to be looking at the door.

"May I take that to mean the assignment was carried out successfully?" Smith inquired dryly.

"Didn't you see it on the news?" Remo asked, disappointed.

Smith suddenly sounded vague. "No," he admitted, "I was...otherwise occupied."

"Counting beans again, eh, Smitty?"

Chiun chose that moment to enter the kitchen. He was a frail figure in a bright green kimono. His skin and bones were seemingly as delicate as those of a newly hatched bird. He regarded Remo with a look that one would generally reserve for a persistent sidewalk beggar.