Brain Storm by Richard Sapir, Warren Murphy Page A

Though he moved like a marionette with hopelessly tangled wires, he was closer to Lothar Holz.
    Holz stood. His face grew more concerned and he spoke urgently.

    "Curt, he is moving."
    For the first time, Remo noticed a small device pressed into the man's ear. It was no larger than a hearing aid. Apparently he was giving and receiving signals from some outside source.
    A second later, Remo had forgotten about the transmitter-receiver. With no warning, Remo's left hand moved in a deadly arc.
    It whipped up and around, slashing down solidly onto the back of an old oak office chair. The chair protested, but only for an instant.
    All at once the legs buckled, the back and seat shattered apart and the entire chair collapsed into an unrecognizable pile of splinters.
    The hand continued its vicious arc and slapped audibly against Remo's thigh. It rested there as Holz looked on, wide-eyed.
    Holz wasn't the only one who was shocked. Remo looked at the pile of debris, a dumbfounded expression on his twitching face.
    Something was profoundly wrong. He had been focused in on Smith's visitor. He hadn't told his body to shatter the chair. It had acted independently, exerting some foreign will over him.
    The tingling at the base of his skull grew more intense.
    "Mr. Holz, I have acceded to your demands.
    There is no need for random acts of violence," Smith said.

    Holz. The man from the bank. The stunt with the interface system. And all at once, Remo knew. It was some sort of mind-control device. Smith had sold him out. To Holz. Remo fixed the man with a deadly glare.
    "He is not under control," Holz snapped at Smith.
    He tapped the receiver in his ear. "Newton! Newton!" Frightened and cornered, he backed up against Smith's desk.
    And though he moved with an uncertain, jerky motion, Remo still had his body partially under his control. With a look that would have inspired terror in hell's most stone-hearted demon, Remo took another step toward the cowering intruder.
    "What on earth was that?"
    "Autonomic response."
    "From the peripheral system?"
    "That's just it. This guy has no peripheral nervous system. It's all autonomic."
    "That's impossible." In the back of the van, surrounded on all sides by various scientists, technicians and programmers, Dr. Curt Newton was having an impossible time figuring all this out.
    He had been overjoyed to learn that Harold W.
    Smith had been contacted and even more delighted when he learned that Holz had set up a meeting with the doctor at Smith's place of business. But he didn't know why Holz wanted him to bring the interface van from the New Jersey complex.
    "We have someone special I want you to download," Holz had said.
    This was troublesome in and of itself.
    There was a problem with the ethics of duplicating the contents of a person's mind when that person hadn't given prior consent. Indeed, Newton had learned earlier in the morning that some of the people at the bank were threatening PlattDeutsche with lawsuits—so Newton had assumed that they were going to put a hold on this aspect of the project. Curt Newton didn't have much of a problem with that. They had already demonstrated to the world that the process worked. Surely the government contracts would start rolling in now.
    But Holz had been insistent, and so Dr. Curt Newton had loaded everything into the van and driven up to Rye to await the "someone special" he'd been promised.
    The man had arrived at the building mere moments before. He had been a problem right from the start.
    Not only did his synaptic and neural patterns not match anything the computers had on file, but something as simple as a cerebellum lock was proving to be near impossible. The man was going into some sort of nervous-system overload. Where they should have gotten control of him the moment the heat sensors picked him up in the rear office—which was where Holz had arranged for his meeting—the man was proving virtually impossible to detain. His acetylcholine levels were