Read Brain Storm for Free Online Page A

tormented him in unending flaming anguish.
    Setting the timer on the back of the stove, Remo held Dominic in place for a good five minutes. The mobster had stopped wiggling in under a minute. Just like a lobster.
    Once he was satisfied the man was done, Remo pulled him out of the water and dropped him back atop the stainless-steel counter.
    The skin on Dominic Scubisci's head and neck was so bright it was nearly orange. Stringy bits of flesh hung off in reddish white tatters.
    "You look done to me," Remo commented happily.
    Milky white eyes stared ceilingward with unseeing horror. For good measure, he pounded a large meat thermometer between Dominic's open white eyes.
    "Ooh, mobster head's trickier than I thought."
    Remo frowned. "You could have stood another minute or two. I'll have to remember that when it's time to parboil your brother."
    Remo found his bag of rice on a table near the door. Scooping it up in his thick-wristed hand, he ducked out the emergency exit.
    The scent in the air gave promise of a beautiful day.

    3
    Harold W. Smith carefully scrutinized the information on PlattDeutsche America as it scrolled across his computer screen. The monitor was buried beneath the onyx surface of the desk and angled upward.
    Only the person seated behind the large high-tech desk could view the information as it passed silently across the screen and back into electronic limbo.
    Hardly an hour had passed since he had fled the Butler Bank, and Smith was already firmly en-sconced in his office at Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York. This unassuming office was the nerve center of the secret government organization CURE.
    It was here that Smith had spent the bulk of the past four decades of his life. He fully expected to die at his desk, alone and unheralded at the helm of the secret agency that identified, tracked and addressed crises both domestic and international. Created by a young president, himself the eventual victim of an assassin's bullet, CURE was always in demand to safeguard America, and was many times the last best hope of each man chosen to serve in the Oval Office.

    Smith had heard of PlattDeutsche, and knew it to be a company on the cutting edge of information technology. Because of this, the breakthroughs made by PlattDeutsche America at its New Jersey plant were sought-after by the Pentagon, particularly during the military buildup of the 1980s. Though quieter than Lockheed or Raytheon or any of the other military giants, PlattDeutsche America had carved out a comfortable niche for itself supplying technology and hardware to all branches of the United States armed services. This comfortable arrangement had lasted until the determined gutting of the American armed forces in the early 1990s.
    The company was hit hard by the drastic downsizing of the military. In spite of its quiet achieve-ments in computer-related research, for some reason, PlattDeutsche had never quite forced itself into the spotlight of popular culture. It was therefore not equipped to reroute its efforts into post-Cold War endeavors. Smith suspected that with the morning's flamboyant introduction of its new Dynamic Interface System, PlattDeutsche America was now poised to make the great public-relations leap necessary to survive in the fast-changing business climate.
    The information bubbling up from Smith's buried computer screen was vast and complex.
    There were several articles culled from the leading science magazines in the country extolling the breakthroughs PDA had made for the government's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. In particular the company was singled out for a
    DARPA-sponsored neural-network chip they had developed. The microchip was so advanced its function outstripped its closest competitor in the market by a factor of five. With a processing capacity roughly fifty thousand times faster than its biological counterpart, the chip used electrons to transmit information instead of the sodium and potassium ions required