Brain Storm by Richard Sapir, Warren Murphy Read Free Book Online

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.

    4
    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