“I figured out something to try, but I wanted to make sure it was okay with you.”
The billionaire managed a raspy laugh. “Well, so long as it doesn’t interfere with my zip-lining and my trampolining, I’ll give it a shot.”
Jax was worried. “Shouldn’t we ask Dr. Finnerty’s permission first?”
For a moment, Jax heard the young, confident Avery Quackenbush he had only met in memories.
“I give the orders around here. Finnerty does what he’s told.”
It was the same tooled-leather table, but now it was bracketed by two massive mirrors that must have stood twenty feet high, literally scraping the ceiling of the billionaire’s sitting room. Both were intricately decorated in the Art Nouveau style, and gleamed with gold leaf.
“Sorry,” Mr. Quackenbush apologized briskly. “Zachary couldn’t come up with mirrored walls on such short notice, so I had the Metropolitan Museum of Art truck these up. I’m told they used to belong to Emperor Franz Josef of Austria-Hungary.”
“They’re incredible!” Jax told him.
The tycoon offered as much of a shrug as his prison of tubes and wires allowed. “They’re not much use to me where I’m headed. Let’s just hope they get the job done.”
Jax took his seat opposite his subject. The effect was like a carnival funhouse — the two of them sandwiched between the mirrors, reflections extending to infinity. Jax focused his powerful gaze not only on the tycoon, but on his own image repeated dozens of times over. His eyes were already deepening through a plum violet. And when the PIP appeared, it was dizzying. Not only was the subject looking back at Jax, but also at his own image in perfect Austrian glass replicated in shrinking form until it became the tiniest dot.
“You’re very relaxed,” Jax heard himself say as he watched his countless mouths form the words. “Your breathing is calm and very steady. Your heartbeat slows….” How was he going to concentrate on the subject when there was so much to distract him — so many multi-sized Jaxes and Averys, so much light and detail? He was fast approaching the very limit of his powers of mesmeric control, and the thought of what might come next scared him.
Suddenly, he was aware of a blast of acceleration inside his head, like a plane speeding up for takeoff. The mirror images blurred, and he rocketed into a roiling maelstrom of white-and-gray static. Jax tried to draw in a breath and instead inhaled ice crystals and paralyzing cold. The blizzard was real.
I’m in another one of Quackenbush’s memories.
Wind and snow howled in his ears. Spikes on his boots dug into a world that was tilted at an impossibly steep angle.
I don’t understand how I’m still on my feet!
He felt a rope in his gloved hands, and traced it to a sturdy harness around his midsection. He was on a mountain! High up, too, because he was panting in the thin air, struggling to gasp out a single word:
“Oscar!”
He knew it as soon as the name passed his cracked lips. He accessed the information in the billionaire’s brain. He was on the Abruzzi Spur of K2, the second-highest mountain in the world. He was climbing it with his brother; their native guides had deserted them in the storm, and something had just gone wrong.
Instinctively, he understood exactly where Oscar had to be — less than two hundred feet away, at the other end of this rope. Follow the rope, and he’d find Oscar. Then they could descend to safety together.
Creating footholds by kicking the front points of his crampons into the thick ice, Jax began to work his way laterally across the spur, wrapping the loose cord over his shoulder as he moved. The fatigue was unlike anything he had ever experienced — the screaming of overextended muscles, the Herculean effort required for the simple task of taking in a breath. Visibility was absolutely zero. The air was practically solid with swirling snow and ice. It would be so easy — pleasant almost — just to give up.
But then Oscar would have no chance.
The rope was becoming heavy around his shoulder as he inched along the rock face. Surely the cord was nearing its end. “Oscar!” he shouted into the wind. The billionaire’s voice carried less strength and volume than even the papery ninety-six-year-old version Jax had come to know. The call brought no reply.
At first, it was no more than a grayish shape through the blizzard. But as he crept closer, it became all too clear what he was looking at. The other end of the rope was just a few yards away. The harness lay against a snow cornice, empty.
Oscar was not there.
Panic rose in his throat, and he began to scream, discovering in that awful instant all the volume that had eluded him before. Turbulence surrounded him, and for an instant, he thought that he, too, had suffered a catastrophic fall.
And then a huge fist swung out of nowhere and caught him flush in the jaw. He saw stars, wondering who on K2 could muster such strength at this altitude. But as he reeled and regained his balance, he realized that the mountain was gone. In its place was a huge soccer stadium, draped in British Union Jacks. Fans poured out the exits, sprinting for the parking lot, where an enormous brawl was in progress. Rather than trying to escape the violence, they were running joyfully toward it, eager to take part. And he was right in the middle of everything, trading blows with the best of them.
No! Jax thought desperately. I can’t be here! I’m supposed to be on K2!
He attempted to concentrate all the power of his hypnotic mind on a return to Pakistan and K2, but a haymaker took him across the side of the head, and fighting off the dizziness required all his attention.
He shook himself back to awareness, ducking a punch that struck a hapless combatant behind him. He had to get out of this session. He wasn’t sure if it was the mirrors or not, but he was hopelessly lost in these memories, and needed to ground himself before he was carried even further away from reality.
“When I snap my fingers,” he tried to say, “you’ll wake up….”
It didn’t work. He was still in the fight outside the soccer stadium, wrestling with somebody huge. He dispatched his opponent with a well-placed knee, and made a concerted effort to return to the mansion and the real world: “Wake up, Mr. Quackenbush. We have to talk about this!”
Something was misfiring, because he was pretty sure he never said it out loud.
Another punch rocked him full in the face, and he felt his nose breaking. Through the unimaginable pain, he caught sight of a familiar face at the center of a murderous scuffle by a lamppost. Jax had only seen him before as a child. He was in his late twenties now, but Jax knew instinctively that this was Oscar Quackenbush. Jax watched through his subject’s eyes as his younger brother went down under a turmoil of scrambling feet.
He’ll be trampled!
With a sense of purpose that lent him superhuman strength, he plowed through the battling crowd and launched himself into the tangle of arms and legs where he’d seen his brother go down. He began pulling off bodies and staring into faces.
“Oscar! Oscar!”
Jax barely noticed the blood dribbling down his chin as he hauled the battered fighters from the pile. Where was Oscar?
The last man staggered up off the tarmac. Jax stared. Oscar was nowhere to be found.
Impossible! He was right here! I just saw him!
The soccer stadium receded as the maelstrom encircled him once more. True fear surged inside Jax, and it had nothing to do with any sports brawl or mountaineering accident. He was going to another place — another memory — and he had absolutely no idea how to stop it. There was no clear path back to the real world.
The nightmare continued, accelerating in pace. A theater fire, Oscar lost in the chaos. Jax as Avery, hysterical, running up and down the sidewalk, staring into faces as the building burned. Scuba diving in the Caribbean, a passing pod of dolphins turning clear water murky, Oscar’s air hose sliced open by a sharp spike of coral. The brothers joyriding on the autobahn in a souped-up Mercedes, Oscar at the wheel, crowing with delight. Jax could see the speedometer needl
e tipping into unbelievable territory — 270 kilometers per hour … 280….
“Slow down, Oscar! Slow down —”
The vehicle that merged onto the highway in front of them was a Russian-made Lada, its tiny engine laboring to accelerate as the driver shifted gears. Through the billionaire’s mind, Jax understood that this was a common hazard on these no-speed-limit roads — the meeting of a high-powered German automobile and a motorized roller skate built somewhere in Eastern Europe.
The gap between the two cars vanished in the blink of an eye.
“Hit the brakes — !” Jax bellowed.
The crash propelled him clear through the windshield, over the Lada, and across the pavement. The thought registered that he was probably dead, or at least Quackenbush was. At this moment, there didn’t seem to be much difference between the two. Gasping, he attempted to pull himself up off the asphalt, and found his hands gripping soft, thick carpeting.
Someone was bending over him. “Are you all right?”
“My brother was driving,” Jax mumbled, still half in the memory. “Is he alive?”
Dr. Finnerty’s concerned face came slowly into focus. “You fell out of your chair. Actually, it was more like you threw yourself out of it.”
It meant only one thing to Jax: I’m back! He’d been not at all sure it was going to happen that way.
“How long was I under?” he asked, and held his breath for the answer. It could have been two minutes. It could have been two days.
“Nearly three hours,” the doctor replied, helping him to his feet. “I didn’t want to disturb you. It was going so well.”
“Really?” After what Jax had just been through, he couldn’t imagine that the billionaire could be anything but the same trembling wreck that he was.
Finnerty nodded. “I admit I had my doubts. This mirror business still seems very gimmicky. But his vital signs were excellent throughout the whole thing.”
Jax looked over at Quackenbush, who was being attended to by his nurses. There was a hint of color in his normally ashen cheeks, and he was sitting upright instead of slumped. “Hey, kid,” he called. “Never thought you’d be the one they’d have to pick up off the floor.”
So the mirrors worked, and Benders Only knew what it was talking about. Jax summoned a smile of resignation. “Mr. Quackenbush, did you ever make it to the top of K2?”
The tycoon laughed. “Ah, so that’s what knocked you on your can. No, I never summitted. A freak storm hit high on the mountain and we had to turn back.”
“Was that where Oscar got lost?” Jax probed.
Quackenbush looked puzzled. “What are you talking about? Oscar wasn’t with me on K2.”
At the FBI’s Cyber Crime division in Washington, Special Agent Frobisher examined the photograph Agent Lee had just placed on his desk.
“It’s just a kid,” he said.
“That’s consistent with the Vote Whisperer reports,” Agent Lee confirmed. “The voice of a young boy.”
The Vote Whisperer. Just when it seemed as if the case would go away, someone had dug up this picture — a fair-haired boy, perhaps middle-school age, staring out at the viewer with haunting intensity.
“Some set of peepers on him,” Frobisher commented.
“You don’t see that every day,” Lee agreed. “Of course, they could be purple contact lenses.”
“Not sure I’d call that purple. More like phlox, or maybe amethyst.” Frobisher frowned. This home renovation was making him color-crazy. He’d started calling yellow lights saffron. “You said the clip was all over the Internet. How come we’re only finding the picture now?”
“Maybe because of this.” She produced a pocket recorder and pressed PLAY.
“In a moment, I will disappear,” declared a young voice. “You will remember nothing of me or this message. Life will continue as usual. But the next time you operate the lever of a voting booth, it will be your overwhelming desire to vote for Trey Douglas.”
“The Johns Hopkins professor said it wouldn’t work,” Frobisher pointed out.
“Well, it did,” she countered. “Nobody we showed the clip to had any recollection of seeing it. But when we edited out the command to forget, people remembered just fine.”
Her boss took this in. “And Douglas won the election in a landslide.” File Twenty-Seven was out of the question now. He was going to have to alert his superiors. There seemed to be something truly sinister going on — not that the boy in the picture seemed like a criminal. Still, election tampering, hypnotic mind control — it was really serious stuff.
He asked the million-dollar question. “Who’s the kid?”
“We already ran the picture through the facial-recognition database,” she replied. “One hit: Jackson Opus, twelve years old, a seventh grader at I.S. 222 in New York City. His file’s been altered, but it’s definitely him.”
“Well, what are we waiting for?” Frobisher exclaimed, tossing the Vote Whisperer file into his briefcase. “Have the Manhattan field office bring him in. I’ll be on the next flight.”
“There’s a problem,” Lee said gravely. “Jackson Opus disappeared months ago. Nobody has seen him or his family since.”
Axel Braintree’s short legs pumped the pedals of the bike, which tooled along the roadway in New York’s Central Park. He hadn’t cycled in years, but his daily exercises kept him in top physical shape. And here was the payoff — strength in his body and plenty of wind. He needed his breath in order to run this extraordinary emergency gathering of the Sandman’s Guild.
Eighteen of his members had answered the call, buying, renting, and borrowing bikes for this powwow on wheels. No one needed to ask why it had to be a mobile affair. All knew that the guild was in crisis. At least two and possibly more members had been kidnapped, and Braintree himself had been targeted for capture. They were being hunted. It would be far too risky to put so many sandmen under one roof. A conference room could be ambushed or bugged. But no one could bug the great outdoors. And if an attack should come, nineteen people could ride off in nineteen different directions.
They were a motley crew, ranging in age from eighteen to eighty, looking like college kids, homeless people, Wall Streeters, and senior citizens, dressed in everything from sweatpants to suits. Dennison Cho, who was a competitive racer, was glorious in black-and-yellow spandex, riding rings around the others, disappearing up ahead, and then soaring back into view on his ultralight Trek.
Braintree was disgusted. “This isn’t the Tour de France, Dennison. We can’t have a meeting if one of our members is three quarters of a mile away.”
“This is the way I ride,” Cho defended himself. “It’s not my fault you guys are such slugs. You know, you’re not going to build muscle mass unless you feel the burn.”
“You want to feel the burn?” panted Tuck, who always wore the robe and rush sandals of a Franciscan friar — not exactly cycle-friendly garb. “How about I set fire to that bumblebee suit of yours?”
“We accomplish nothing if we argue among ourselves,” Braintree said sternly, pedaling steadily to keep himself alongside the others. “Evelyn and Ivan are missing. Are there any others I might not be aware of?”
Several names were tossed out — guild members who had not been seen in the last couple of weeks. Three were known to be out of town, a third was under arrest at Rikers Island, awaiting trial for petty larceny. That left two sandmen unaccounted for.
“I knew it.” Braintree was visibly agitated. “I could feel it in my sinuses. Four of our people — vanished, probably in hostile hands! How are we going to find them?” He grimaced as Cho took off again, his racing bike barely a whisper and a blur. “We’re not finished yet!”
Dennison Cho pivoted on his seat and tossed a friendly wave over his shoulder. No way was he going to hold himself back just because the others couldn’t keep up. They might have been good sandmen, but athletically, they were all sucking air. Powerful minds; not-so-powerful bodies. Fine, he’d sprint up to
the reservoir and swing back in time to catch the end of their conversation.
He was at full speed, the wind whistling through the openings in his helmet, when he noticed a long black SUV keeping pace with him on the main roadway. As he turned to have a look, the big vehicle swerved to cut him off.
His brakes were good, but the action of stopping so suddenly caused the bike to skid out, scraping his left leg painfully against the pavement. Stunned, he lay there, still straddling the Trek.
The rear door of the SUV opened and a tall man with a hawk nose unfolded himself from the backseat.
“Calling the police isn’t an option,” Braintree was saying as the mobile meeting rolled on. “To them, hypnotism is science fiction. They don’t believe anything they can’t zip into an evidence bag. Besides, any investigation could lead to Jackson Opus.”
“You know, Axel,” piped up a young mother who was pulling a baby in a covered infant trailer, “I like Jax, too. And I did my part to help him when he was in trouble. But we need to look after ourselves, too. I mean, I’ve got my own family to worry about.”
“I hear you,” Tuck acknowledged with a nod of his tonsure. “We’re all in danger now, not just the Opus kid. Don’t our lives count as much as his? I’m not saying throw him to the wolves, but what about us?”
Braintree pulled over to the side of the road, and the others gathered around him. “Make no mistake: One day Jackson Opus could very well be the only person alive capable of containing Elias Mako and his ambitions. We need him. The whole world may need him.”
A streak of black and yellow screeched to a halt beside them. “What did I miss?”
Tuck shot him a sarcastic glare. “How could we settle anything important without you?”
As the group started up again, Cho maneuvered himself next to Braintree. “I need to talk to you, Axel.”
The founder of the guild sighed. “Are you sure you’ve built enough muscle mass today?”
Cho lowered his voice. “In private.”
The two riders hung back until they were bringing up the rear.