loved the way she touched him. Just like Mom.
“You did well, sweetie.”
She unlocked the handcuffs and folded him into her arms as a reward, again repeating how well he’d done and how special he was.
Adam had said the same thing. You’re special. He’d told him he could turn Jack into a superhero.
Jack didn’t know what that meant exactly, except that it wasn’t all good. Not if it meant handcuffs and that huge needle.
Only now, Evie was rocking him in her arms. And Adam, he knelt down beside them and put his arms around them both. The way he looked at Jack. He’s proud of me, too.
They were both smiling at him, Adam and Evie. And he could hear them talking inside his head. Even though their lips didn’t move, the message was so clear. We’re a family.
Family. That’s the only word that described the emotions he felt coming from Adam and Evie. They cared about him. They loved him.
He wanted to reach out and hug them back, but he couldn’t move. He realized he was paralyzed or something.
But he could listen. So that’s what he did. He just lay there, in Evie’s arms, and listened to the sound of their voices inside his head.
7
The great city of San Diego did not claim to be paradise on earth, but it came damn close. An average temperature of seventy degrees Fahrenheit, less than twelve inches of precipitation annually, a slice of blue sky and seventy miles of beach pretty much clinched it. After Morgan Tyrell weathered one too many Boston winters, the city was also the site of the Institute for Dynamic Studies of Parapsychology and the Brain.
The Institute, as it was known, commanded a nice piece of real estate on the Point Loma peninsula. With the pounding surf below, the compound’s architectural design—a central galleria ringed by labs and offices—assisted its multidisciplinary collaboration. Hard science worked alongside soft, some might even say pseudoscience, the Institute being home to a phalanx of psychics.
Morgan had long ago adapted the scientific method to the study of paranormal phenomena, a feat for which he had been equally revered and ridiculed. Over the years, the Institute had a finger in extrasensory perception, psychokinesis and remote viewing, as well as sundry other psi disciplines. There’d even been a case involving a poltergeist that had, unfortunately, received quite a bit of publicity.
In the early years, Morgan hadn’t minded making headlines. The opposite, in fact. Morgan Tyrell had been accused of being quite the publicity whore. His motto: Create a scandal! That’s how a man made his mark on the world.
These days he had more than his reputation to think about. After living his life with his work as a singular focus, he’d somehow managed the coup of having a family.
The one thing his daughter didn’t want was publicity.
So Morgan had brought it down a notch—several, in fact—enjoying a more subdued lifestyle. On weeknights, he would send his limo for an evening out with Gia and Stella. Sometimes he even had his granddaughter, Stella, up for the weekend. There wasn’t anything Morgan enjoyed more than watching her peek in on the laboratories to discuss ongoing research conducted under the Institute’s many grants.
For the sake of his daughter and granddaughter, the only scandal Morgan created these days happened in a laboratory. Morgan and his minions at the Institute had handily managed to alienate both the scientific and paranormal communities, a fact that often brought a smile to the face of its fearless leader.
The Institute bragged state-of-the-art facilities that included a Cray Supercomputer and a NMR spectrometer. It housed ten laboratories in over three hundred thousand square feet overlooking the Pacific Ocean. At any one time, its offices supported a minimum of eight hundred professors, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students in research that spanned from conventional to downright weird, anything that demonstrated how human consciousness interacted with the physical world.
While nonprofit, it was a well-known fact that Morgan’s millions floated the Institute’s continued existence—which seemed only fair considering many believed he’d been unusually lucky in the stock market. Again, that rumored army of psychics.
When asked if he employed some paranormal technique in choosing his investments, Morgan always winked and answered it never hurt to bet on a good hunch.
At the moment, the Institute’s crowning gem, its self-proclaimed Brain Trust—a secret circle within what was already a circumspect community—held court in one of several glass-enclosed conference rooms. A teak sideboard from the Jaipur region of India lay loaded down with pastries and gourmet coffee. An ornate tapestry of a White Tara, the female Buddha worshipped in Tibet, added to the room’s tranquil atmosphere. Around an antique oval table carved in the traditional Tibetan style sat five famous, as well as infamous, academic figures.
At the head of the table, Morgan sat with steepled fingers pressed against his mouth as he leaned back in the soft leather chair. He wore a perfectly tailored Armani suit in a shade of gray that complimented his silver hair and pale blue eyes. As always, he played moderator for today’s topic of choice: Does God play dice with the universe?
The question, originally asked and answered by Einstein in the negative, had inspired one member, Gonzague de Rozières, or Zag as he was called, to publish a provocative article entitled Dark Matter and Free Will in the most recent issue of Journal of Parapsychology. Morgan had signed on to the article, bringing on the ire of one particular member of their sacred circle.
“Dark matter, dark energy, I don’t care what you want to call it, the concept has nothing to do with free will, the soul, the color of your aura or any other mumbo jumbo that you, Zag, want to legitimize with some slight-of-hand quantum equations.”
The challenge came from the cosmologist of the group, Dr. Theodore Fields. Theodore—never Ted or Teddy—was the group’s resident skeptic. At the moment, the man’s receding hairline did a nice job of displaying his furrowed brow. Zag never brought out the best in the man.
Theodore’s penchant for colorful bow ties—today’s was a splashy red-and-yellow-striped number—seemed to magnify rather than update his age. Despite Theodore’s valiant attempt, there was nothing cool or modern about the dumpy figure tossing verbal grenades from across the table, which made absolutely no difference to those who coveted his company. The man was a certified genius in physics.
“Once again, Theodore, you seemed to have missed the point.”
The challenge came from the article’s author and the group’s more colorful personality. Zag, the youngest member of the Brain Trust, never tired of waving the psi flag before Theodore’s nose.
“Really?” Theodore replied, acid in his voice. “And here I was certain you didn’t make a point, at all. Not a valid one, in any case.”
“Oh, come now. I was quite clever in citing your own take on the uncertainty principle to validate my thesis,” Zag replied silkily.
Morgan held back a smile. In the world of quantum physics, the location of a particle can never be discussed with a hundred percent certainty. Rather it can be discussed only in terms of probabilities. And while a Google search of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and free will would yield over a hundred thousand hits, it was the mathematical dexterity Zag used,
