Mind's Eye

by Douglas E. Richards

  Gray had never shed literal tears for them, because this wasn’t his way, but the sacrifices they had made tore him up on the inside. Nothing had ever brought him more pain. But part of his greatness was the willingness to endure this kind of pain for the greater good. Something people like Altschuler were incapable of understanding.

  “I just have one more loose end after I take care of you,” explained Gray. “And then there’s nothing between me and immortalization.”

  “Loose end?”

  “Yes. This Nick Hall I was telling you about. He was a visiting scientist from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts who was lucky enough to join the La Jolla contingent on the Explorer. Seems he managed to escape from us recently. We’ve been trying to kill him, but he’s managed to slip the noose a few times. It would be nice to have him alive for follow-up testing, but it isn’t an absolute requirement. We have all the data recorded for the positioning, intensity, and signaling parameters of his implants. But now that I know his implants are working, my life is greatly simplified. Because I left a backdoor in his implants I can use to instant-message him. So I can reach out to him, wherever he is. Lure him in and then capture him again. Or kill him. Either way, no more loose ends. Easy to do, since my friend John has also learned that Hall has no memory of being experimented on.”

  Gray paused for a moment and then smiled. “With all the amnesia-inducing drugs we gave him during the past seven months, it’s not surprising. The slightest tap on the head would probably cause him to re-lose his memory, even without an additional dose. Hell, after the number of doses he’s had along the way, putting on a baseball cap might be enough to do it.”

  “So once you’ve captured or killed Hall, then what?”

  “Well, then I go through the FDA to get the implants approved for blindness and deafness, and separately, for thought-controlled web access. But now that I know the precise placement, we can be ever so cautious and plodding. Proceed with the utmost concern for patient safety. All the while knowing that we’ll nail it on the first try. A miracle.”

  Gray locked his eyes on Altschuler. “Had I not taken this short-cut, Alex, we’d have never gotten there. I’d have never been able to make so many wild attempts; wild attempts that resulted in scores of deaths. The FDA would have pulled the plug long before this. So it isn’t just that we would have been delayed crossing the finish line by eight or ten years if I hadn’t considered the subjects expendable. It’s that we would have never finished the race.” He frowned. “It will still take a few years to get proper authorizations and approvals, even though the implants will work perfectly right out of the gate. But we’ll have gone through all the right channels. The technology will be as clean as a whistle.”

  Gray shook his head sadly. “I only wish the public could know that the members of the Explorer gave their lives in the service of mankind. Alas, I’m afraid this won’t be possible. Society, pathetic as it is, would not react well to this knowledge.”

  Altschuler was glancing nervously around the room.

  “What’s the matter, Alex? Run out of questions to ask to stall me? Are you expecting someone?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m afraid your mercenary buddy won’t be coming to save the day. What’s his name? Ed Cowan perhaps? Well, my friend John only had one of his men nearby tonight, so we have to wait a little. I’ve actually been stalling you, not the other way around. John told me his man would take out Cowan, which he’s now had ample time to do, and then come here to take you, um . . . off my hands. Which I really hate to dirty more than I have to.”

  Altschuler blanched and shrank into the chair in horror. Gray suspected he would have rolled up into a fetal position had the chair allowed it.

  Gray shook his head sadly once again, a kindly grandfather having to share troubling news with a beloved child. “You’re a very talented man, Alex. And I wish this could have turned out otherwise. But you’re weak. Like the vast majority of your fellows. So it’s up to men like me to move the species forward. I’m just sorry you had to get caught up in the gears.”

  He gestured to the bottle beside him. “More wine?” he asked pleasantly. It was a shame to waste wine of this quality on someone who wouldn’t live out the night, but he considered it a noble, last supper sort of gesture.

  Altschuler’s eyes were vacant, and he was long past the point of being able to respond. Gray was pouring himself another glass of Merlot when the door chime sounded.

  “That would be John’s assistant, arriving to take you off my hands.”

  Gray walked over to the wreck of a man across from him and undid his cuffs, forcing him ahead at gunpoint.

  The bell chimed one more time and then was silent as they made their way to the entry foyer. As they reached it, Gray ordered Altschuler to unlatch the door and open it. He thought for a moment that Altschuler might pass out, but his soon-to-be-deceased subordinate managed to carry out his instructions.

  The door opened slowly to reveal a tall man with blood-soaked bandages on his left arm and right leg.

  “Ed?” whispered Altschuler in disbelief.

  At that instant a terrible realization hit Kelvin Gray. Delamater’s man had failed. Instead of eliminating Ed Cowan, Ed Cowan must have eliminated him.

  Gray desperately yanked the gun from Altschuler’s back and began to raise it, but he was too late. A gun had appeared in Cowan’s hand as if by magic, swinging up to point at Gray’s head, which towered above his shorter human shield.

  Cowan depressed the trigger, giving Gray only a thousandth of a second to process the deafening explosion before his head was almost torn from his shoulders by the high caliber slug, and leaving him no time at all to reflect on what a tragedy the world would now suffer from the loss of a veritable god like himself.

  24

  Ed Cowan had showered and dressed his wounds while Alex Altschuler had gotten right to work cracking Gray’s home computer for evidence—after having another large glass of wine to steady his nerves and wait for his hearing to return. Cowan had fired his gun practically in Altschuler’s ear. Not that he had complained. The man had also saved his life.

  Altschuler still couldn’t quite process just how blatantly psychopathic his boss had truly been, and how badly he had been fooled by the man’s charm and charisma. Gray had been totally devoid of a soul. Altschuler’s meeting with Gray, which had included being threatened at gunpoint and his boss’s face exploding like a watermelon, was like a nightmare from which he couldn’t quite awaken.

  Cowan borrowed fresh clothing from the deceased Gray, since the men were of roughly equal size, and he and Altschuler worked through the night. Cowan had sent a man to Altschuler’s home and office, and as expected, he had found and removed several listening devices.

  Before sunrise, still in Gray’s house, they had amassed mountains of unimpeachable evidence of Gray’s involvement in the kidnapping and imprisonment of twenty-seven people who had been on board the Explorer. And the murder of twenty-six of these.

  They discovered the location of the warehouse at which the abductees had been kept month after month, while Gray was using their brains as his personal playground. They learned of the specialized amnesia drug Gray had used, one that had only recently been discovered by street chemists, accidentally, while they were trying to improve the date rape drug. This nasty cousin, however, was able to erase recent memories, along with a lifetime of core, sense-of-self memories, while leaving all other memories intact. It was so potent and horrific, it made the date rape drug from which it had spawned look like a harmless chewable kids vitamin. And they had learned the full name of the man Gray had been working with, John Delamater. Cowan had run this name through his computer and sources and had come up empty, and he was convinced this was an alias.

  Gray was a meticulous note-taker and his notes, video, and rantings made it clear he thought of himself as so god-like, so smart and invulnerable, that he wasn’t the sligh
test bit nervous about keeping a treasure trove of incriminating material on a relatively insecure home computer. As though he was sure he would never be caught, but if he was, he wanted the evidence of his involvement to come out, since he considered his actions praiseworthy. Hitler and the Third Reich had similarly kept meticulous records of their atrocities, which had astonished the allies after these records were seized.

  While the evidence implicating Gray was overwhelming, Delamater continued to be an enigma. His ability to organize teams of mercenaries and assassins was well-documented, as was the military precision with which he had carried out the raid on the Explorer. But where he could be found, and who he really was, wasn’t clear at all. They ran across notes explaining that Delamater had access to Gray’s computer, and had warned him not to write anything more about him than he had.

  Gray may have wanted to advertise his involvement for posterity, but John Delamater had threatened to kill him if he ever wrote anything that someone could use to identify him. While Gray almost courted attention, Delamater guarded his privacy with all the ferocity of Cerberus guarding the gates of hell.

  There was more to the Madera facility than met the eye. There was a hidden basement room under Gray’s private labs. The implant machine Gray had used on his prisoners, which combined a top-of the-line MRI to visualize the brain with a robotic placement device capable of inhuman precision, had been removed from the warehouse just a few days earlier and stored in this room, along with hundreds of finished and fully programmed implants, awaiting the next batch of victims.

  The bug Altschuler had been wearing had transmitted his encounter with Gray flawlessly, and Ed Cowan had had no trouble recording the conversation. Cowan had described for Altschuler his run-in with one of Delamater’s men, and how he had been able to disarm his attacker after being shot in the arm.

  Both men had apparently possessed high-level martial arts skills, and while Cowan downplayed it, Altschuler could only imagine the battle royale that had ensued, resulting in Cowan suffering a knife wound in his leg to complement the hole in his arm. In the end, Cowan had won the day, but had been forced to kill his assailant, whom he would have loved to interrogate. As it was, the man had no identification or cell phone on him, and while a potential lead, did not look to be a path to the mysterious Delamater.

  Altschuler and Cowan had reported immediately to Cameron Fyfe the night before, but at five in the morning they decided it was time to give the man another update. Cowan and the diminutive scientist sat together on Gray’s maroon leather sofa facing a three-dimensional image of Fyfe on a television screen that occupied almost an entire wall.

  Fyfe listened with very few interruptions for fifteen minutes as they detailed all they had found. When they were finished, Alex Altschuler said, “I think we’re overdue calling the authorities. We’ve got recordings of Kelvin admitting to the crimes. And enough evidence on his computer to cover a tropical island.” He paused. “And I’m pretty sure you’re supposed to report when you gun someone down in self-defense, you know . . . fairly promptly.”

  Ed Cowan shook his head. “I recommend waiting another forty-eight hours,” he said. “It’s not exactly standard procedure, and we’ll have some explaining to do about the delay. But if we report what we know now, there’s no way it doesn’t leak. And I’d bet good money this John Delamater has his fingers in at least one of the organizations that’ll be called in.”

  “So you’re saying if we report this, we lose the chance to get this guy?” said Fyfe.

  “Very likely.”

  Fyfe pursed his lips in thought. “Alex, what do you think about this?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Altschuler. “This would be bad enough if we were just sitting on two deaths, even if they were in self-defense. But like you said earlier, Cameron, we’re sitting on the story of the century.”

  Altschuler frowned. To be precise, Fyfe had called it the shitstorm of the century, but Altschuler hadn’t felt the need for this level of accuracy. “And how likely is it that we catch this guy, anyway?” he asked. “Even if we don’t risk tipping him off by alerting the authorities?”

  “Good question,” said Cowan. “I’ve put traces on Gray’s phones and computers. Delamater may be so good that he has safeguards in place that will alert him to this. But if not, if he reaches out to Gray, we can nail him. Even if he doesn’t, my team will have a lot to go on now. Operational details on the Explorer raid. A dead man with dental records who worked for Delamater. And we can do further work with his name. There’s no guarantee we’ll find him, but if we go to the authorities, I think our chances will be reduced significantly.”

  Fyfe nodded, and it was clear he had made up his mind. He had a reputation for being decisive, and this was well-earned. “I say we do whatever we can to get this son of a bitch,” he hissed with a chilling intensity. “This bastard deserves to die miserably. We cannot let him get away with this.”

  Fyfe’s 3-D image on the TV stared intently at Cowan. “Ed, spend whatever money and resources you need. Let’s work around the clock. If we don’t have him in forty-eight hours, we won’t delay any further. We’ll go to the authorities and lay everything we have out for them. Alex, does this work for you?”

  Alex frowned, but did not dissent. He wasn’t cynical by nature, but after recent events it was hard not to be. He didn’t doubt that Fyfe was outraged and sincerely wanted Delamater to fry, but he couldn’t help but wonder how much Fyfe was motivated by the pursuit of justice, and how much by an interest in putting the best face on this for Theia Labs. The nicer he could tie a bow on this case, the better it would be for Theia’s rehabilitation in the public eye.

  “Okay,” said Fyfe. “Alex, I need you to send a global e-mail to everyone who reports to Kelvin—or reported, past tense, I guess, is now the more accurate way to say this. Anyway, let them know he’ll be out of pocket for several days and won’t be responding to calls or e-mails.”

  Fyfe sighed heavily. “Let’s hope we find Delamater and anyone else involved before forty-eight hours passes—which I guess would put us at Tuesday morning. Regardless, whenever we do alert the authorities, I’ll call a press conference for just afterward. As Alex said, this will be a huge story. Huge. I’ll prepare two sets of remarks. One if we catch Delamater, and one if we don’t. In both cases, I’ll be stating our remorse, outrage, and intent to move forward and put this behind us through philanthropy and improving human lives.” He stared meaningfully at Altschuler. “And I’ll be announcing Alex as our new CEO.”

  The thin scientist blew out a long, tired breath. He had dreamed of being a CEO of a transformative tech company someday. But never like this. Who could have? It was as if Altschuler had been second-in-command to Adolf Hitler, who had just died while captaining the Titanic into an iceberg. And now he was being named the new captain.

  Congratulations, Alex, on your promotion.

  “It goes without saying,” continued Fyfe, “that we keep anything and everything having to do with Kelvin Gray and with these implants strictly between the three of us until the press conference. Ed can give his hired team assignments, but not even a whiff of the true background. And the same goes for you, Alex. Not even the hint of this. To anyone. Agreed?”

  Altschuler and Cowan assured him they understood the importance and agreed entirely.

  “Anything else for now?” said Fyfe.

  “Yes,” said Altschuler. “As you no doubt heard Kelvin say on the recording of our meeting, one of the Explorer crew is still alive. Nick Hall. We need to bring him in as soon as possible. In fact, he should be part of the press conference.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” said Fyfe. “Good point. Any idea how to do that?”

  Altschuler nodded tiredly. Recent events had nearly depleted his reserves. If he didn’t get at least a few hours sleep very soon, he would be useless.

  “As a matter of fact,” he said, managing the briefest flicker of a smile. “I do.”

  25
>
  Megan Emerson and Nick Hall had been kissing passionately for five minutes on the Glandons’ couch, and the small part of Megan’s brain still capable of rational thought wondered how Nick was managing to keep his hands from roaming, even a little. Either she was losing her touch or he had an iron will.

  Then her mind turned to the real question. How had this happened in the first place? Had she made the first move? She couldn’t seem to remember. One second they had been talking and the next . . . not.

  Please tell me I didn’t make the first move, she thought to herself.

  “I’m not sure which of us did,” replied Nick Hall telepathically. “It just sort of . . . happened.”

  “Damn!” thought Megan, separating momentarily from the embrace. She had forgotten that she couldn’t think strong thoughts in the form of words without Hall picking them up. “You weren’t supposed to hear that.”

  “Sorry,” replied Hall. “But if it makes you feel any better, whichever one of us initiated this is a genius.”

  Megan smiled. She leaned in and kissed him for another full minute before separating once again. “I’m going to the fridge for a bottle of water,” she said aloud. “Want anything?”

  “Can you get me a Diet Mountain Dew?”

  “You do know it’s still morning, right?”

  He shrugged. “Think of it as coffee. Cold, yellow-green coffee.”

  Megan walked gingerly to the kitchen, trying to ignore the giddy feelings that were now gushing from her like water from a broken fire hydrant. She needed to concentrate. What had happened? Was this a wise thing to be doing?

  The long conversation they had started over their late lunch on Saturday had continued seamlessly when they returned to their temporary home, and had magically morphed into a late dinner conversation. Nick Hall didn’t have to know about himself to be entertaining, and thoughtful, and witty. With some people it was like pulling teeth to keep a conversation going for five minutes. With Hall, it was effortless.