Undetectable (Great Minds Thriller) (31 page)

He
showered and
dressed for school and
came back out to the living room
,
and
Andrew
was bringing b
reakfast
to
the dining room table. Kevin sat down heavily and began tearing into the food. His appetite was back
.

“Learn anything interesting?”
Andrew asked.

Kevin paused, his mouth full. He looked up with a questioning glance.

“I just wondered…” Andrew said, hesitating.
H
e looked briefly lost. His eyes moved back and forth as he pictured
the
great sea of scattered books
on
the living room floor. “So
many
of them,” he said at last, with a little shrug. And then he frowned at himself. First the too-honest comment about Kevin’s smell, and now a direct question about his employer’s reading habits. He was having an off morning. “Never mind,” he said quickly. “More toast?”

Kevin shook his head. “No, that’s okay. Let me think.”

He looked up at the ceiling, wondering if he could begin to recite something. He could feel the information there somehow, all of it. And yet there was too much. Trying to explain it would have been like trying to explain how to build a diesel engine from scratch, because technically you’d first have to build a cast for pouring steel to make the engine block, and then you’d need a CAD system to design the cams for the cylinders to make sure you got the timing mechanism just right, and then…

Hold it
.

He looked back at Andrew. “Apparently I know how to build a diesel engine. For one thing.”

Andrew blinked. “Oh. Well. Excellent.”

Kevin nodded slowly. “Thanks.” He took a breath. It was a deeply weird feeling, to be only tangentially aware of the vast quantity of knowledge he had just acquired. Especially since he had no specific memory of the acquisition itself.

How can that work? How can I remember something without remembering how I learned it in the first place?

He shrugged to himself. It didn’t matter. He felt as though he had walked into a quiz show on elementary arithmetic. He knew he’d be able to answer all the questions, even if he would never be able to recall the moment when he had actually
learned
how to multiply 7 and 5 to get 35.

In any case
, he seemed to be retaining the information quite well.

“I learned a bunch of other stuff, too,” he said, returning his attention to Andrew. “
Lots
of other stuff. But it’s all pretty technical.”

“I’m sure.”

“The breakfast is great,” Kevin said, trying to change the subject. He felt he was somehow making Andrew uncomfortable.

“Thank you,” Andrew said. And he turned once again, with evident relief, to escape to the kitchen.

Kevin watched him go, and then he went back to eating. Now there was near-silence in the dining room
, and he realized that
those pestering, anxious voices inside his head hadn’t made a peep yet this morning.

Ready,
Kevin thought.
Right?
He nodded to himself. There was something deeply satisfying about the idea. It made him feel so calm.
Ready enough, I guess.

He certainly
felt
ready.

But he wasn’t. Not by a long shot.

Face Down On The Ground

Jacob Savian
was
in the chair at his desk, waiting for the door buzzer to ring. He was expecting a visitor that morning. In the meantime, he was watching George work on his latest painting, a process Jacob found mesmerizing. George’s easel and paints were set up near Jacob’s work station, because he knew his brother liked to watch him at work. The gigantic canvas he had been building two days before was complete and resting on the easel’s support brace; the beginnings of a winter scene were taking shape on the canvas surface. The slim brush George was using looked like a toothpick in his hand. His movements were small and careful. Delicate.

Jacob was transfixed, as always. Creativity of this kind was especially wondrous to him, not only for the aesthetic sense and fine motor skills required – neither of which Jacob had ever possessed – but because his brother’s paintings seemed to represent creation in the purest sense. George had no goal. He was not solving a puzzle, or addressing a need. And the scenes he painted were not even necessarily based on real places. They simply
occurred
to him, and something about this notion, this transformation of a non-existent, imagined thing into an actual form, an actual physical representation, was endlessly fascinating. Jacob was a genius at coding – an actual, strict-definition genius who could solve problems on a computer that most people couldn’t even understand – but his work was invariably responsive.
Reactive
. People came to him with problems, and he solved them. He had never created a program that existed for its own sake, a program that stood on its own. He was, at his core, a trouble-shooter. Without an error to fix or a challenge to meet, Jacob knew he would have been left to sit looking at his computer screen for hours on end, doing nothing but sucking away time. George, on the other hand, possessed a creative spark of his own, a
prime mover
ability that Jacob found miraculous.

“
This
is what I’m trying to protect,” Jacob said suddenly.

George turned, brush still in hand. He waited for his brother to explain himself.

“I am
not
going to let Pascal Billaud turn us all into watchers. Turing and von Neumann, they were visionaries, not watchers. They knew how to solve
and
create.” George squinted at the unfamiliar names, but Jacob wasn’t paying attention. He was on a roll. “And
you
are not a watcher.
You
are a visionary. You
make
things. From scratch, out of nothing. Out of the air. It’s incredible, it’s…”

He held up one hand, searching for the proper superlative. Then he put the hand down with a little shake of his head. Words would not suffice. “It’s incredible,” Jacob said again. “And I’m not going to let him take it away. It’s for us, and it’s for God.
Not
for him.” His face grew dark, and he glared at his computer screen as though he were picturing an image of Pascal Billaud there.

George turned back to his painting. The hillside was giving him problems. The sleds and the children would be easy, but getting a snowy slope to look right was turning out to be far more difficult than he had anticipated. The shadows were killing him.

There was a buzzing noise at Jacob’s desk, and he picked up an old-fashioned looking phone that was connected to the side wall by an extra-long cable.

“Yes. Send him up.”

He turned again to his brother. “George, would you mind grabbing me a large bottle of Ice Tea?”

George put down his paintbrush. “Hold on,” he said, and headed for the corner of the loft that served as their kitchen. There was a stove and a refrigerator there, neither of them showing signs of any real use. The Savian brothers preferred to order most of their food from restaurants and delivery places.

“No, we don’t have any left,” Jacob called. “I mean from the deli.”

“You need it right now?”

Jacob nodded apologetically. “Sorry. Would you mind?”

George shook his head placidly, and he veered toward the exit. He decided he could use the ten minutes to figure out a strategy for those hill shadows. There was a knock at the front door just before he got there, and he opened it to reveal a short, stocky man wearing black army fatigues. His nose was heavily taped, and there were dark circles under his eyes that might have been the result of a recent injury. A sharp blow to the face, for example. George glanced questioningly over his shoulder.

“It’s okay,” Jacob called, with a little wave. “Send him over.”

George stood aside to let the man pass, and then he continued out to do his errand. He let the door close behind him.

Jacob waved the man over. “You’re the one called Gun Two?”

The man nodded.

“Yes, okay. You know what’s funny?” Jacob asked casually, as if the two of them were old friends. As if he were picking up a conversation they had been having in fits and starts over a period of several years. “A computer can’t get a feeling. Can’t get a
hunch
. Not yet, anyway. The technology’s not there. A system can be programmed to watch out for low-probability events, but each event has to be entered ahead of time.”

Gun Two remained silent. This information did not seem funny.

“But a
man
,” Jacob said quickly, “now,
he
can get a hunch. A man has so many millions of loosely associated ideas and images floating around in his head, it’s a wonder he doesn’t go crazy making sense of it all. Still, it’s those associations that let us figure things out. We can sort of jumble things together until they seem to make a pattern, and that process helps us make
new
connections that might not seem obvious at first. That’s a hunch, you see?”

Gun Two nodded slightly. He supposed he did see, but it still wasn’t funny.

“Right,” Jacob said. “So here’s the problem. We’ve got this very carefully laid-out plan in progress, and part of that plan involves a bunch of white vans. We need those vans to arouse
no
suspicion, no nervousness of any kind, which is why we’ve got them circling that area like bees around an apple tree. Right?”

Gun Two nodded again. He wasn’t sure where this was headed, but he was starting to feel nervous. The Organizer hadn’t told him why the Client wanted to see him, but face-to-face contact was usually forbidden for someone at his operating level. The only sensible explanation was that he was going to receive some sort of formal congratulation for having eliminated the cop.

Except that the Client didn’t seem to be leading that way.

“And that would be fine,” Jacob was saying now, “except that for some reason you felt the need to kill a cop whose beat patrol included the block where the vans have been parking.”

“He was asking questions,” Gun Two explained. “He was writing things down.”

“Of
course
he was writing things down,” Jacob said, sounding tired. “And the information he recorded would have gone down with the hundreds of other useless bits of crap he collected this week. No one would have cared.”