Undetectable (Great Minds Thriller)
Page 18
Craig shrugged. He liked the procedure as it currently stood. A little reminder now and then seemed like a good idea. “Whatever,” he said at last. “Will he be ready?”
“You are, without question, the stupidest man I have ever met,” Petak said. “This is what I’ve been trying to tell you. He’s not going to just sit around. Induced amnesia of this kind makes you frantic enough by itself, and he’s got the mental capacity to suck up everything he reads – or does – between now and next Friday. His bookshelf is stacked, and he’s in perfect physical condition. Or at least he will be, once he gets some rest.”
“Was that a yes?”
“If you leave him alone,” Petak said. “Yes, he’ll be fine.”
“Ready?”
“Ready, yes. Christ almighty.”
“All I needed to hear,” Craig said. And with that he turned and left the office.
“Go shoot yourself in the foot,” Petak said when he was gone.
Tough Elias
It was nice to be able to walk again. To be able to dart across the street against the light if he chose, or to weave around a baby carriage or a couple holding hands. Kevin knew he had only an hour or so left on Petak’s special energy cocktail, but for the moment he was enjoying himself. And with his strength back, getting back to school took less than ten minutes.
The academic day was over – the boys had already been packed up in buses to go play soccer on the fields at Randal’s Island – so the building was quiet. Kevin went straight to the principal’s office. The door was open, and he knocked on the wall to get her attention.
Ms. Stewart looked up from her desk. Her expression turned cautious. And concerned.
“I wanted to apologize,” Kevin said.
Ms. Stewart shook her head.
“No, I do have to. But I also wanted to thank you for getting me out of here. I saw a doctor. I’ll be all right tomorrow. I’d come in, but I think I still don’t smell quite right. Apologies again.”
The principal smiled. “Glad to hear you’re okay. See you tomorrow.”
Kevin nodded and went on his way.
One down, one to go.
He headed for the library. If he remembered correctly, this was the time when an extra tutorial session would be going on. A special session for Elias Worth and a few other lucky students. Surely no one would mind if he stepped in for one second to offer an apology for today at lunch.
But when he arrived he realized he should not go in. She was there, of course, because she had said she would be. Emily Beck was a dream teacher not only in that she was kind and smart and sympathetic and attractive – and she was certainly all these things – but also in that she was sincere. Consistent. She had promised Elias an extra help session, and a gaping head wound changed nothing. Kevin could see the Worth boy through the little window of the library door, and Elias’ head was so heavily bandaged, so layered and wrapped with gauze and cotton and tape, that it seemed incredible that he was at school at all. Kevin pictured the negotiations that must have occurred at the Worth household that morning, the incredulous look on the face of Mrs. Worth as she struggled, struggled to understand her young son’s eagerness to return to school that day. He had been bullied. The principal had told her so. And she had let Elias know that he could stay home for a day. For a week if necessary. Two weeks. When Mrs. Worth had come to get him in the hospital, the size of the bandages on his head made her cry out in startled grief and fear. She wept and shook while the doctor told her, assured her that Elias would be fine, that everything looked far worse than it was, that her son was very brave, and that he would be as good as new in no time.
“I got staples in my head,” Elias announced to her proudly from the E.R. bed. “Like staples, like real staples that go in paper, but even bigger. In my head.” He beamed at her, one eye obscured by the thick overhang of gauze and tape.
Mrs. Worth burst into a fresh bout of tears.
And now here was little Elias the next morning, having dressed himself in his khakis and his shirt and tie and blazer before his mother had even stirred from her bed, and he was demanding breakfast (politely, of course) and insisting that he should go to school.
Mrs. Worth could not convince him to explain why. Though she tried and tried. All she wanted was for him to be happy, and yet the idea of staying home seemed to make him miserable. So in the end she let him go. She called the school repeatedly to check on him, to the point that the secretary in the main office simply kept the Worth boy’s class schedule tacked up on the board so that he could be located more quickly. Elias, meanwhile, barely noticed the bandages on his head that day, any more than he noticed the steady throbbing coming from his skull. And he was only vaguely aware of the respect his appearance was gaining him throughout the school.
“See Elias?”
“Kid fought off Feeney. Cracked his own head open to do it. Didn’t take a day off, either. You should see him.”
“Kid is tough.”
Elias was aware of none of this. He knew only that Ms. Beck had said he could be part of her study hall session that afternoon, and that 2:30, therefore, could not possibly come quickly enough. After the last bell he got his backpack and went to the library and sat down, and a minute later she arrived and came over to his table, right over to his table and sat next to him, and said “Hello, Elias,” and smiled at him as though he were her friend.
All in all, it was the best first week of school Elias could remember.
Kevin watched Elias for a minute, watched the boy working contentedly at history or math or whatever he was pretending to have difficulty with, and he reminded himself that he was, after all, still a very smelly man.
I can talk to her tomorrow, he thought. When I’ve had some rest.
So he backed away from the door, and in another minute he was back on the street. He had at least another forty-five minutes of energy left, but he wasn’t taking any chances.
He headed for home.
Stack Them Up
Andrew was in the vestibule waiting for him. Psychic as always.
“How was your day, Sir?”
“Better,” Kevin said briskly, without breaking stride. He headed for his bedroom, and for the bathroom. “Sorry about the smell,” he added over his shoulder.
Andrew remained diplomatically silent.
Kevin cleaned himself as quickly and as thoroughly as he could. Two shampoos, suds everywhere. He washed as if he were preparing for entry into a hot zone, for close-contact work in an infectious disease lab, for open-heart surgery.
Hopefully that’ll last for a few hours, he thought, stepping out and drying off.
He dressed and went to the living room. And then to the bookcase. He stood before it, considering.
“Okay Andrew,” he called.
His assistant appeared beside him, quick and silent as ever.
“Sir.”
“Here’s what I need. A bunch of non-fiction. Doesn’t matter to me what you pick, just make it a serious pile. Fifteen or twenty at least. And then stack them up over there, at the head of that long couch.”
Andrew nodded and got to work. Kevin did the same. He picked titles at random, pausing only long enough to make sure he was selecting books that seemed thick enough. He didn’t want to run out of material before his rest period was over.
The two of them made a couple of neat piles on the floor, at the long end of the largest couch in the room, and when they were done Kevin assessed the setup.
“This looks good,” he said. Then he gave Andrew his full attention. “We’re going to turn off all the lights except the one right here, and then I’m going to lie down and read. Don’t bring me any dinner. In fact, I’d like you to stay out of this room altogether until six tomorrow morning, when you should come in and give me a tap on the shoulder.”
Andrew listened, nodding along slowly. “Shall I turn off the phones?”
“I have a phone? A land-line?”
“Indeed. It hasn’t made
a sound since I’ve been here, but you never know.”
“Definitely. Unplug it. Unplug them all. I’ve got a cell anyway, which I’ll turn off as well.”
“Very good.” Andrew glided around to each window pulling the curtains together, and when he was done he took a moment to scan the area in case there might be anything that could disturb the long rest his employer was planning. Finding nothing, he turned and walked quietly out of the room without a second glance.
Kevin nodded with satisfaction. He lowered himself gently onto the couch, taking a minute to enjoy the soft, welcoming feel of the huge cushions. The temperature in the room was just right, and the light was exactly bright enough to read by. He reached over and took the topmost book from the stack Andrew had made, and as he was opening the front cover he could feel the energy from Petak’s drug suddenly begin to drain out of him. It was if someone had flipped a switch. His body sank deeper into the couch, and all at once he was glad he had not dallied any longer back at school.
I wouldn’t be able to get up now even if I wanted to.
He looked at the first page of the book he was holding and prepared to settle in.
A Practical Guide to Handguns and Small Arms.
He smiled gently. “Just what I’ve always wanted to know about,” he whispered. It was no effort at all to let his mind slip into that single-stream, hyper-focused state he had found the day before. It was the same as with the Spanish book, and the physics.
The room went gray around him, and Kevin Brooks began, finally, to rest.
Part 4 – Bulk Processing
Hung Over
There was a tap on his shoulder a minute later, and Kevin’s first reaction was annoyance. His instructions had been so clear. No interruptions at all until 6 AM. But in the next moment he reminded himself that Andrew was a profoundly considerate man. Not only that, he was a precise man. Which meant that there were two possible explanations for the interruption. Either there was something incredibly important that needed Kevin’s attention…
Or Andrew followed my instructions to the letter. And to the minute.
So instead of sighing, instead of turning to glare at Andrew, Kevin took an extra second to check the title of the book he was reading. Just to be sure.
“Electrical Engineering for the Second Year Graduate Student,” he read out loud.
“Yes,” Andrew said quietly, from above him. “Absolutely riveting, no doubt.”
Kevin stared at the book for a minute, feeling somehow tricked. He had no memory of putting the first one down, or of picking this one up. He looked to his right, to the neat stacks of books he and Andrew had created.
The stacks were gone.
In their place was a mess, a riot of books that seemed to have been attacked by a hoard of small, insufficiently-exercised children. Books had been thrown in every direction, lying half-open, face down, on-end, and in one case teetering on the edge of the table at the other side of the room. There was a small, still-neat pile remaining where the original stacks had been, but here there were only five titles left, as opposed to the twenty or thirty that had been here just a minute ago.
Or maybe that was yesterday.
Kevin took a deep breath. Was that really possible? He had come home at a little past three o’clock, and if it was six in the morning now, then that meant he had been lying here for more than fourteen hours.
Nope. Not possible.
He tried to sit up, and several parts of him – his entire body, really – seemed suddenly to cry out in pain.
“Holy Lord,” he said, letting himself relax into the cushions again. He put the engineering book slowly to the side and looked down at himself. He could see no obvious bruises.
So why do I feel as though someone crept in here and drove over me with a tank?
“How are you feeling?” Andrew asked him.
“Horrible.”
“That was a long rest. And a lot of reading, if I may say.” Andrew scanned the living room, noting with dismay the lack of respect his employer seemed to have for textbooks. “You must be hungry,” he added.
“I feel like throwing up. I feel hung over.”
“That would make sense,” Andrew said, his tone flat and disapproving. “You’ve hardly slept in the last three days, and you’ve been exercising far too much.”
Haven’t slept at all, Kevin wanted to correct him, but kept silent. In any case, the man was right.
“Go clean yourself up,” Andrew commanded, “and I’ll bring in some breakfast.”
Kevin nodded. It would be time for school soon. Which reminded him –
“Hey.”
Andrew paused on his way to the kitchen. “Sir?”
“Do I still reek?”
Andrew hesitated. An answer of any kind would be to acknowledge, however obliquely, that Kevin had indeed reeked at one time or another. He took a small, cautious sniff of air through his nose, as though testing the room for a deadly gas. “You are passable,” Andrew declared. And then, in a rare moment of frankness, he added, “Much better than yesterday.” A quick shake of the head, perhaps out of embarrassment. Or to scold himself for such impropriety. “I would say one last shower is all you need now. You’ll be fine.” He turned away without waiting for Kevin to say anything more, so that he could retreat to the kitchen and his breakfast preparations.
Kevin grinned.
Passable. All right.
Now he was ready to try getting up again, but this time he did it much more carefully. First he sat up slowly. Then one leg off the couch, then the other. Kevin groaned, but he was smiling now. These were familiar pains. Good pains. This was how you felt when you had gone through a two-hour, pre-season football practice in the high-humidity August heat of a New Hampshire summer. You trudged into the cafeteria afterwards, filled your plate with pasta and burger meat and coleslaw and rolls and anything else you could fit on that little plastic tray, and then you crawled back to your dorm, played an hour of Madden on XBOX because classes hadn’t even started yet, and collapsed into bed. When you woke up the next morning, you felt just like this. Sore as hell, kicked in the butt, and grumpy.
But also strong.
And ready for whatever bone-jarring drills the coach was planning to throw at you that afternoon.
Kevin stood up from the couch, stood and squared his shoulders and listened to the half-dozen popping sounds coming from his knees and hips and neck. “Yeah, yeah,” he said to his body, still smiling. “Stop your grousing.” He walked slowly down the hall to his bedroom, still enjoying the solid feel of his legs under him. He was steady again. Sure on his feet again. Such a wonderful sensation.
He showered and dressed for school and came back out to the living room, and Andrew was bringing breakfast to the dining room table. Kevin sat down heavily and began tearing into the food. His appetite was back.
“Learn anything interesting?” Andrew asked.
Kevin paused, his mouth full. He looked up with a questioning glance.
“I just wondered…” Andrew said, hesitating. He looked briefly lost. His eyes moved back and forth as he pictured the great sea of scattered books on the living room floor. “So many of them,” he said at last, with a little shrug. And then he frowned at himself. First the too-honest comment about Kevin’s smell, and now a direct question about his employer’s reading habits. He was having an off morning. “Never mind,” he said quickly. “More toast?”
Kevin shook his head. “No, that’s okay. Let me think.”
He looked up at the ceiling, wondering if he could begin to recite something. He could feel the information there somehow, all of it. And yet there was too much. Trying to explain it would have been like trying to explain how to build a diesel engine from scratch, because technically you’d first have to build a cast for pouring steel to make the engine block, and then you’d need a CAD system to design the cams for the cylinders to make sure you got the timing mechanism just right, and then…
Hold it.
Andrew blinked. “Oh. Well. Excellent.”
Kevin nodded slowly. “Thanks.” He took a breath. It was a deeply weird feeling, to be only tangentially aware of the vast quantity of knowledge he had just acquired. Especially since he had no specific memory of the acquisition itself.