AMPED (8 page)

“Roger that. How will you explain the explosion, sir?”

“Gas leak? Grease fire? I don’t know. We have some very creative people who can handle that end. I’m confident we can pull this off.”

“Sir, are you certain all of this is necessary? Even if they’re
all
better than we are, we have superior numbers and tactical position. We can capture them or take them out without the need of a JDAM. I’m sure of it.”

A scene from a movie materialized in Jake’s head. It involved several policemen breaching a building to apprehend a lone woman. The police were certain they had the situation well in hand.
I think we can handle one little girl
the lieutenant in charge had said. Jake put on the deadpan voice of one of the characters in the film, an agent named Smith, and whispered his memorable reply: “No, Lieutenant—your men are already dead.”

A confused voice came through Jake’s earpiece. “I’m sorry, Colonel, but I didn’t quite make that out.”

Jake cleared his throat. “I said, proceed as ordered, Captain. Proceed as ordered.”

8

Van Hutten sat in the room’s only chair and closed his eyes, waiting for . . . he had no idea. The pill could have been nothing more than a placebo, but he suspected it was either a strong hallucinogen or worse. It could well be lethal.

There was nothing he could do about it now, in any case, regardless of its effect. Whatever was inside that gellcap was coursing through his bloodstream, and no power of will or sleight of hand could remove it now.

He turned his thoughts to the group he had just left. They seemed genuine and caring people. Not that a psychotic who had been told by a humming bird to kill his wife for the good of mankind couldn’t be genuine and caring as well.

One thing was certain, though: Kira Miller was a force of nature. She had a potent combination of physical and intellectual appeal that he had never seen matched. A persuasiveness, a charisma, and a winning personality that were off the charts. If he were a younger man he could see himself falling in love with that one in a hurry.

His mind exploded.

A hundred billion neurons rewired themselves in a chain reaction that was almost instantaneous.

He gasped.

His thoughts had been traveling at pedestrian speeds, but they had suddenly been punched into warp drive—and then some. His mind experienced the equivalent of a starfield rushing toward it; a starfield that elongated and blurred as his mind made the impossible leap into hyperspace.

Everything they had told him was true! Everything.

He diverted a tiny portion of his mind to ponder the implications of this while the rest explored its newfound power.

Somehow he knew that only 1.37 seconds had elapsed since the effect had hit him—exactly 1.37 seconds. He wasn’t sure how, but his mind was now as accurate as a stopwatch.

An hour
—
a period of time that once seemed stingy
—
suddenly seemed generous beyond measure.

He turned his attention to problems in theoretical physics that had proven to be insurmountable and epiphanies presented themselves almost as quickly as he could focus on them.

His fingers began flying over the keyboard, faster than he had thought they were capable of moving.

He hadn’t wanted the effect brought on by the mysterious gellcap to begin. Now he wished fervently that it would never end.

***

The Stanford physicist shoved yet another glazed devil’s food cake donut into his mouth and washed it down with his second sixteen-ounce bottle of apple juice.

“That was unbelievable! Extraordinary,” he said to Kira and Griffin for the third time, not realizing he had settled into a verbal feedback loop.

“Even if I had believed you completely,
nothing
could have prepared me for that! I could have never come close to even
imagining
it.”

“Sorry we had to force it on you,” said Desh with a sly smile, just having entered the room with Connelly.

“No you’re not,” said van Hutten happily as Desh took a seat. “And I’m not either. Thank you. I couldn’t be more grateful. Maybe that penicillin analogy wasn’t so bad after all. Although penicillin is like an incantation from a medicine man compared to that gellcap of yours, Kira.”

 
“Make some astonishing breakthroughs in our work, did we?” said Griffin.

“Absolutely,” replied van Hutten, as this part of the experience came rushing back to him. “I had a perfect memory of everything I’ve ever seen, heard, or read; and every thought I’ve ever had. And I could access all of this
instantly
.
Incredible
. I contemplated problems I’ve spent my entire career trying to solve. I just had to focus on one for a few seconds and an answer revealed itself like . . .” He paused, searching for the right metaphor. “Like an exhibitionist in a peep show,” he finished

“Wow,” said Griffin. “Well said. Linking the powers of an amplified intellect to live pornography is truly inspired.”

“I don’t suppose you’d let me rephrase that?”

“Why would you want to?” said Griffin.

Van Hutten smiled and turned to Kira. “Okay, then. Consider me a true believer. Can you bring me fully up to speed?”

A delighted smile lit up her face. “I thought you’d never ask,” she said.

“You and David are in love, aren’t you?” he said out of the blue.

“One of the things you picked up during your hour?” responded Kira in amusement.

He nodded. “You just seemed like close colleagues to me. But to my improved mind, you both might as well have been holding billboards advertising the fact that you’re madly in love.”

“An unexpected bonus to heightened intelligence,” explained Kira. “Body language and other subtle clues to human behavior become so clear you can almost read minds.”

“I assume you also discovered your ability to direct every cell and enzyme in your body?” said Matt Griffin. “And to change your vital signs at will?”

The physicist grinned. “Oh yeah,” he replied giddily. “That too. All in all, it was the ultimate ride.”

The group spent the next hour sharing their history with van Hutten. They covered Kira’s early days after her first batch of gellcaps were stolen. How she was framed for a bioterror plot and hunted by the government. How David Desh was recruited to find her, and how lurking in the shadows, orchestrating it all, was her brother Alan, whom she had thought was dead.

They explained how the therapy altered personality in a dangerous way—creating megalomania at best and sociopathy at worst.

“Did you notice this kind of change in your personality?” asked Desh.

 
“Not really. I was having too much fun solving problems.”

Desh nodded. “These effects start mild for most, but seem to build,” he explained.

“And you’ve been vetted far more than you know,” said Griffin. He grinned and added, “or as David might say in that more direct vernacular of his favored by the military,
we screened the living crap out of you
.”

“You’ll be happy to know you’re at the very top of the scale when it comes to ethics,” said Kira, “as well as the innate stability of your mind and personality.”

“How do you screen for something like that?”

“In ways that only someone using Kira’s therapy could devise,” replied Desh, clearly not wanting to sidetrack the conversation with any details. “Given the stability of your personality and the fact that, as Kira once put it, the first time you’re enhanced you feel like Alice in Wonderland, it isn’t all that surprising that this effect didn’t hit you yet.”

“Just for the record,” said Griffin. “I never went through the
Alice
stage. The treatment seems to have hit me the most negatively of anyone. Along with everything else, I become the most outwardly arrogant.”

“The team has come up with a more technical term to describe good old lovable Matt when he’s enhanced,” said Desh with a broad smile. “He’s what we call a
total asshole
.”

Van Hutten laughed, now completely at ease.

“Okay, okay,” said Griffin. “I’ll admit it. I turn into an asshole. But a prodigiously productive asshole,” he added proudly—the word prodigious long since having become an inside joke among the group.

“That’s the only kind of asshole we allow,” said Desh.

Kira didn’t want to spoil the mood, but there was still a lot of ground to cover. “Colonel, do you want to walk Anton through the logistics of the operation,” she said.

“Colonel?” repeated van Hutten.

Connelly nodded. “In a past life.”

“Why am I not surprised?”

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” said Connelly, taking the small remote from Kira. “So given our history, and some troubling events that occurred early this year that we’ll brief you on later,” he began, “our security is tighter than ever. The building you’re in is our headquarters, so to speak. The four of us are the leadership. Not because we’re more intelligent or capable than any other recruit—well, other than Kira here, of course—but because we were the founders. Grandfathered in.”

For many months Kira had objected to the steady stream of flattery from the rest of the core council, which she considered greatly exaggerated, but had finally given up. Desh had explained that anyone who created a tool that led to breakthrough after breakthrough, and that was certain to alter the course of human history as profoundly as fire or the wheel, deserved to be put on a pedestal.

“The think tank and this building are fronts, of course,” continued Connelly. “It’s not a place of business—basically it’s our home. It has bedrooms, kitchens, etc. Maybe a better way to think of it is an apartment complex. We’re not zoned for it, but then again . . .” Connelly shrugged. “That’s the least of our worries.”

Connelly pressed the remote and an image of a long corridor came up on the monitor, about as wide as a two-lane highway, its concrete floors and walls painted white. “At the far south end of this building is a corridor—a concrete tunnel—about twenty feet below ground level and eighty yards in length. It leads to a hundred-thousand-square-foot warehouse.”

An aerial image of a windowless warehouse, which looked to be abandoned, flashed up on the monitor. Connelly explained that it had been sealed up tight and the only entrance was now through the corridor linking it with the headquarters building they were in. They had purchased the warehouse first and then built the headquarters and tunnel, using a number of different groups of contractors and carefully disguising, erasing, or confusing all records of the work.

Connelly then showed images of a row of standard golf carts in the tunnel that were used to cross back and forth between buildings.

Images of the inside of the warehouse came next. Each photo showed different views of a number of state-of-the art labs. The first to be shown was the biotech lab, within which Kira produced additional gellcaps and her longevity therapy. Then additional labs were shown in quick succession; high-energy physics, chemistry, electronics, optics, and others. Each was pristine, and no expense had been spared on equipment.

“Hopefully, we’ll have time to take you over there and give you a tour before you leave,” said Kira. “Showing you photos is a bit, well . . . lame, but we still have a lot to cover. Besides, being enhanced is physically taxing, so we’ll let you relax and eat donuts for a while longer.”

“Very thoughtful of you,” said van Hutten, realizing that he hadn’t yet consumed the last of the dozen dense black donuts and reaching for it as though he hadn’t eaten in a day. “Impressive set-up,” he added.

Only the core council knew that there was a second facility, nearly identical, in Kentucky, also connected by tunnel to a distant warehouse filled with labs, and also housing a room in which Kira’s therapy could be given securely.

The group recruited from across the country and the world, although they had focused primarily on the U.S. to begin with for logistical reasons. All recruits were signed up as consultants, which gave them an excuse to visit their respective facilities frequently, although they kept as low a profile as they possibly could about this.

Both facilities were within a thirty minute drive of a major airport, and had been located so that no one in the contiguous United States would be more than two or three hours flight away. They had taken a map of the United States, split it into equal east and west halves, and then tried to pick international airports in approximately the middle of each half that could be reached by direct flight from surrounding states. Denver International was the winner in the western half, and the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International airport held this honor to the east. The core counsel split their time between both facilities about equally, even though they considered the Denver facility to be their true headquarters.

“Thanks,” said Desh. “We’ve put a lot of thought into this. Not to mention a mountain of money. The good news is that enhanced Matt is basically able to create money at will.”

“Really?” said van Hutten, raising an eyebrow.

Matt shrugged. “Just change a few pixels and bytes in computer systems around the world and your bank account never runs dry. There are safeguards and checks against doing this, but by removing relatively modest sums from thousands of the largest banks and businesses in the world, and overcoming the cross checks, it can be done. I also make sure all the accounting is fixed to show that those pixels and bytes never existed in the first place. So the money is never missed.”

“Nice trick,” said van Hutten.

“We try not to abuse it,” said Kira. “But we do go through, um . . .” she glanced at Griffin mischievously, “
prodigious
amounts of money. We contract out a lot of manufacturing and other work, which tends to be expensive, especially since we’re not the patient type. And doing things in a way to maximize security and cover our tracks takes even more money.”

“What’s nice,” added Desh, “is that if you need something, or think an item might be of use to you, even in the slightest, all you have to do is ask.” He pulled out his cell phone. “Jim and I, for example, wanted phones that could survive a war, but that look like normal phones anyone would have. This is a ten thousand dollar phone, but it’s as rugged as it gets: military grade and fully submersible. I could use it to pound a steel spike into concrete and then check my messages.” He paused. “So don’t be shy. If you want something, we’ll get it for you.”