Colonel Brassmeyer was in a good mood. “We’re assessing our capability to disrupt an entire population through hypnotism. It goes far beyond stopping. Drivers would cease driving, people on the streets would stand still, a man stepping into an elevator would be incapable of pressing a button, everything would grind to a halt. Even the people who are untouched by the post-hypnotic suggestion would be stuck in the gridlock. The population would be completely incapable of responding to an outside invasion. The military applications are astounding!”
Jax was torn. This was the first thing he’d ever done that Brassmeyer actually approved of. But the thought of being used as a weapon of war — of Jackson Opus having “military applications” — made his stomach queasy. Before, he’d been a puppet on a string; now he was a live grenade.
Captain Pedroia seemed to understand what he was feeling. “It will save lives, Jax. On both sides. Less resistance means less destruction, less shooting.”
“So it’ll conserve resources, too,” Brassmeyer concluded, pleased.
Jax wasn’t sold, but he had to admit that bending people to stand still and be invaded was better than commanding them to jump off buildings or harm themselves in some other way.
“When does the message start to run?” he asked.
“That’s on a need-to-know basis,” the colonel informed him.
“Well, I need to know,” Jax insisted. “This kind of hypnotism comes with blowback. It’s like I’m making a connection with every single person who’s bent by the video. I could be getting images from seven hundred minds at the same time. It’s pretty hard to take.”
Brassmeyer leafed through his notes. “How come this isn’t in any of our research?”
“It isn’t exactly established science,” Pedroia supplied. “Jax is the only one who’s ever tried it.”
“And I’ve only done it once before,” Jax added.
“How did it affect you?” Brassmeyer inquired.
“It almost killed me,” Jax said evenly.
The colonel directed his reply to Captain Pedroia. “See to it that it doesn’t.”
“Yes, sir,” the psychiatrist acknowledged.
Jax shook his head in amazement. Only in the army could you be ordered not to die.
For Jax, the next several days were like living with a time bomb. He knew that his video message would be broadcast in Delta Prime at any moment, and that he would suffer horrible blowback. The fact that it hadn’t happened yet only made it worse.
Waiting for the thing to happen was as bad as the thing itself. He knew that the mesmeric impressions would keep him awake, so he couldn’t sleep just worrying about it. He also knew that the dizzying effect would take his appetite away, so he stopped eating in advance.
“Jax, what’s wrong with you?” his mother demanded. “Are you sick?”
How could he ever explain it to her? No other mind-benders had experienced the kind of blowback that came from a mass remote hypnotism. He’d be going through it under a psychiatrist’s care, surrounded by his family and an army post full of people. Yet he’d be enduring it alone.
Adding to his distress was the big shift in power at HoWaRD. Suddenly, everything orbited little Stanley X. And it was Stanley, not Jax, who disappeared for long sessions with Colonel Brassmeyer.
“You’re a has-been, Dopus,” Wilson said cheerfully. “Or maybe more like a never-was.”
Wilson had appointed himself Stanley’s best friend, which made Stanley insanely happy. While Stanley was off with Brassmeyer, Wilson peppered the group with glowing reports of the young boy’s accomplishments, 90 percent of which had to be baloney.
“Stanley bent a quartermaster and got us free stuff.”
“Stanley made a general gobble like a turkey.”
“Stanley got the cook to fly in lobster for us.”
“Stanley bent a sapper and made him disarm a warhead.”
On Thursday, Brassmeyer revealed the army’s hypnotic database, and the HoWaRDs spent the day in a classroom setting, sifting through this new information. The name Opus was all over it. Jax thought he’d studied most of mesmeric history, between Sentia and his private lessons with Axel Braintree. To his surprise, the army had managed to come up with a lot that was unknown to him.
There was a black-and-white picture of Gerald Opus, peering into the eyes of two explorers as they entered the bathyscaphe on the very first voyage to Challenger Deep, the deepest part of Earth’s oceans. The caption suggested that they never would have been crazy enough to go if they hadn’t been hypnotized.
There was an audio clip, circa 1932, of the unmistakable voice of Winston Churchill saying, “Your eyelids are growing heavy….” It supposedly came from a moment when he was having an audience with King George V.
The oldest artifact was a series of cave paintings that seemed to depict one primitive man peering into the eyes of another. Right after that, the second man went out and did battle with a saber-toothed tiger. The last picture was of the tiger enjoying a meal.
Most startling of all was a grainy, sepia-tone photograph of the wedding of Irina Arcanov. Computer enhancement techniques had blown up the faces of the bride, groom, and wedding party. Kneeling at the front was the ring bearer, a boy of about eight or nine, with knee breeches, a lace collar, a page-boy haircut, and an owl-like expression.
He was a dead ringer for Stanley X.
“Whoa!” Wilson exclaimed, eyes wide.
The HoWaRDs all stared at the image on the big screen at the front of the room.
“Does this mean what I think it means?” mused Evelyn Lolis.
Captain Pedroia took note of their reaction. “So you see it, too. Obviously, we’ll never know for sure because there’s no DNA to test. But it seems like we’ve found a real live Arcanov.” He smiled. “X marks the spot.”
Stanley looked confused. “Is that good?”
“Of course it’s good!” Wilson jumped in. “Being an Arcanov is a thousand times better than being a Dopus! Everybody knows that.”
“Actually, we don’t know much about the Arcanovs at all,” Ray Finklemeyer put in. “Even at Sentia, we …” His voice trailed off. The army may have trusted him, but an association with the fugitive Elias Mako wasn’t something to be proud of.
“You’re right, Ray,” the captain chimed in quickly. “The Arcanovs are still largely a mystery. But now everything we learn will give us insight into Stanley, and why his ability is so special. That’s why the army continues to pump money into this research. Anything the Arcanovs could do, there’s a chance Stanley can, too.”
Stanley made a sour face at the image on the slide. “I don’t like the haircut. It’s a girl’s haircut.”
Everybody laughed.
“You don’t have to have the haircut, dear,” Eunice promised him in her grandmotherly tone.
That was the thing about an eight-year-old mind-bender. A connection to greatness wasn’t as important as not looking like a dork.
The blowback still hadn’t started when Jax was torn out of bed the next morning at four AM.
“Let’s go, Opus. The colonel’s waiting. And you know how patient he’s not.”
Jax blinked bleary eyes, trying to gain focus on the soldier who stood over his bed. “Doesn’t the colonel sleep?”
“That’s classified, kid. Hurry up.”
Jax threw on some clothes. “Can I leave a note for my parents?”
“Sorry. No can do.”
“But if they wake up and I’m not here, they’ll worry.”
“You’ll have to take that up with the colonel. Let’s go.”
As the Jeep bore him across the darkened post, Jax’s mind raced. Why did Brassmeyer need to see him now? What was so urgent that it couldn’t wait at least until sunup? Maybe they were about to start airing the message, and the colonel wanted to observe the effect it had on Jax. But that didn’t make sense. Why would they broadcast in the wee hours of the morning, when there was nobody awake in front of the TV to see it?
&
nbsp; Instead of Brassmeyer’s office at HoWaRD, the Jeep dropped Jax off at the helipad, where the colonel was pacing impatiently. Jax, whose socks didn’t match, and who hadn’t been allowed to drag a comb through his rats’ nest of hair, couldn’t help noticing that HoWaRD’s commanding officer was perfectly shaved, coiffed, and turned out. He could have made the cover of a manual on spit and polish.
“Let’s move,” he ordered, waving Jax into the bubble chopper.
Jax stuck out his jaw. “Not till my parents know where I am.”
“Captain Pedroia is ringing your doorbell as we speak.”
“Okay, then,” Jax conceded. “Where are we going?”
“I’ll brief you on the way.”
They were airborne, passing over the Oklahoma countryside, when Brassmeyer spoke again. “This is Operation Flower Power.”
Jax frowned. “What happened to Operation Aurora?”
“That’s still on. This is different. We’re going to see if you can use your skills to get inside a high-security facility. That’s why we had to drag you out of bed at four in the morning. We don’t want any planning time. You’ve got to do it using your hypnotic skills and your wits.”
“What secure facility?” Jax asked uneasily.
“It’s not Gymboree, believe me,” the colonel replied. “We’re going to the secure data storage center for military intelligence. They will shoot you. Make no mistake about that. So don’t mess it up.”
Jax felt a chill climbing up his spine. “What do I have to do?”
“You have to get past security” — Brassmeyer handed him a plastic Walmart shopping bag containing an old-fashioned alarm clock with a circular analog face and a double-bell ringer — “with this.”
Jax was mystified. “Why?”
“Can’t you tell? Security will take one look at this thing and assume it’s a bomb. If you can hypnotize them to pass you through with that, then you can get in anywhere with anything.”
“What if I can’t bend them before they arrest me?” Jax queried nervously.
“That’s what this exercise is designed to find out. Now — after you clear security, you make your way to the commander’s office, and shoot him.”
“Shoot him?” Jax echoed, horrified. “I can’t kill anybody! I don’t even step on ants!”
“Shoot him with this,” Brassmeyer amended, grinning broadly. He held out a garish plastic daisy connected to a long clear plastic hose and a squeeze ball filled with water. He stuck the flower through Jax’s buttonhole, running the tube underneath his shirt, and down into his pants pocket.
“A … squirt flower?”
“It’s just another part of the exercise,” Brassmeyer explained. “If you can get close enough to the commanding officer to give him a faceful of water, it’ll be a perfect demonstration of what our Hypnotic Warfare unit is capable of.”
“Squirting people,” Jax repeated skeptically.
“Penetrating top security,” the colonel amended. “Hypnotism was tailor-made for this. You’re in and out without a shot being fired, and no one has any memory that you were ever there.”
The Ryviker Military Data Storage Center was located outside Little Rock, Arkansas. It was a six-story structure that could have been a small office building, except that it was completely unmarked, and surrounded by a wide perimeter.
The chopper landed at a municipal helipad, and Brassmeyer drove out to the facility in a rental car. A quarter mile short of the gate, the colonel pulled onto the shoulder. “This is your stop.”
“Aren’t you coming?” Jax asked in alarm.
“You’re the one breaking in, not me. I’ve got security clearance.”
“But — they’ll know something’s up! I’m a kid walking down the road with an alarm clock in a Walmart bag like some random hobo! It’ll be obvious something’s weird.”
“Exactly,” Brassmeyer agreed. “Use your skills to get past that. You have to make them think that letting you in is the most natural thing in the world. I’ll pick you up back here. Good luck.”
Before Jax knew it, the colonel made a tight U-turn and drove away, and he was walking down a lonely road in the middle of Arkansas toward a gate manned by soldiers with guns. The morning sun had just cleared the horizon. Jax had been through a lot of peculiar experiences since discovering he was a mind-bender, but this one was right up there.
There were three sentries in the gatehouse, one of them equipped with a large assault rifle. In addition, they were able to watch his approach along the deserted road, step by agonizing step, for at least ten minutes before he got anywhere near them. The gun wasn’t actually pointed at him, but he couldn’t shake the image of the crosshairs trained on his forehead.
The problem was clear: There were three guards, and he could only bend them one at a time. It was ironic. At Delta Prime, Jax’s video was going to hypnotize seven hundred and fifty-three people almost simultaneously. Yet here he was, stymied by three.
That was when he saw it. About forty feet before the gate, a camera was stationed to give the sentries an advance peek inside any approaching vehicles. Jax bent down and peered directly into the lens, gambling that the sentries would check the monitor to see what he was doing.
A PIP image appeared almost immediately. It was grainy, Jax’s face in close-up, framed by the monitor in the guard station. He had one of them. He bore down, leaning further into the camera. A second PIP appeared, from a slightly different angle. Two of the three were bent, but that wasn’t good enough. He maneuvered himself so close to the lens that his color-changing eyes filled the monitor entirely. He could see that in the two images he’d already captured.
Come on, he implored the third man. Look at the screen — just for a second! That’s all I need!
The guy wasn’t coming. How long before he discovered there was something wrong with his two partners? Of course, Jax could sprint to the gate and bend the third man in person. But how would he know which of the three was still unbent?
A third PIP image, very faint, appeared between the other two. It winked out, reappeared, and stabilized. The bag with the clock tucked under his arm like a football, Jax sprinted the forty feet to the gatehouse. Now he was face-to-face with all three of them, huffing and puffing, but in control.
“Look into my eyes,” he panted. It was a little disorienting to shift their attention from the monitor to his actual face, but he was able to swing the transition without losing any of them.
“You don’t see me. I don’t exist. You never admitted me through this gate,” he told them. “But you” — he read the closest ID tag — “Staff Sergeant Ortiz, you have urgent business at the main building. You have to get there as soon as possible. Take the Jeep.”
The instruction nearly worked too well. Sergeant Ortiz ran for the Jeep so quickly that Jax barely had a chance to get himself on board. Clutching the bag, he was still squirming over the spare tire into the backseat as the vehicle roared off up the road. The other two sentries watched benignly. They did not see the intruder hanging off the back of the Jeep. The hypnotic command was in full force. In their eyes, he did not exist.
As Ortiz approached the main entrance of the Ryviker facility, Jax labored to get his breathing under control. Hypnotic power was only one component of his bag of tricks. He also needed to be able to communicate clear instructions to his subjects. That wouldn’t be possible if he couldn’t catch his own breath. And he had a sinking feeling that the next little while would test his powers as they’d never been tested before.
When the Jeep came to a halt, Jax jumped out, alert for his next challenge. Sergeant Ortiz fidgeted at the wheel, frowning deeply. He’d been bent to believe he had urgent business, but hadn’t been told what it was. This often happened when a hypnotic command was not specific enough. It was a loose end that Jax could not leave hanging.
“You’re done here. You can go back to the gate.” Jax had to scramble to get out of the way of the Jeep, which very nearly ran him down. The
original command was still holding. Ortiz couldn’t see him.
Through the sliding glass doors, Jax spied his next obstacle: a security desk with an officer checking IDs. He had none, and no business being there either, other than his mission.
At least it was only one person on duty this time, instead of three. She was a master corporal MP, and her brow furrowed at the sight of a twelve-year-old entering this very adult, very military facility.
“All right, kid. What’s in the bag?”
Jax gave her his sweetest smile and made sure his eye contact was a little more than just friendly. “My lunch,” he told her. “Peanut-butter sandwich and a Twinkie.”
When the MP opened the Walmart bag to reveal the clock, a peanut-butter sandwich and a Twinkie were exactly what she saw.
“You’re very relaxed, very laid-back,” Jax informed her. “You’ve already seen my ID, and it explains everything about what I’m doing here. Now please point me in the direction of the commander’s office.”
She pointed toward the elevator. “Fourth floor. Major Widmark is in suite four-twenty.”
Jax’s heart sank. Between here and the way up was a fully staffed security checkpoint, complete with metal detector and X-ray machine.
He placed the Walmart bag on the conveyor belt, knowing that the alarm clock wasn’t going to be a big hit with the crew. As it disappeared inside the body of the scanner, Jax surveyed the checkpoint. There were four personnel. He could easily bend any one of them, but he needed to find the right one — the guard who was watching the monitor. In a matter of seconds, something was about to appear on that screen that greatly resembled a bomb. After that, things were going to get complicated real fast.
The monitor was located on the other side of the machine. Which meant that the soldier about to get an eyeful of alarm clock was on the other side, too — out of Jax’s field of vision. It was a real dilemma. Jax couldn’t very well bend the guy if he couldn’t make eye contact.
Under the conveyor belt, Jax spotted the bottom of the man’s chair and a pair of shiny black boots. The boots jumped as the soldier leaped to his feet. “Hey —!”