The Dragonfly Effect Read online

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

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  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY GORDON KORMAN

  COPYRIGHT

  The M1 tank rumbled across the Oklahoma countryside, its long gun sweeping back and forth on the rotating turret. The commander’s eyes never left the screen. He had it on the highest authority — post rumor — that a lot of top officers would be watching this training exercise. The three members of the tank crew knew they had to be ready for anything.

  The commander scanned the image of flat land and scrub brush, expecting the unexpected. When it happened, though, he was still caught completely off guard.

  The tank’s driver spotted it, too.

  “Is that a kid?” he asked in disbelief.

  The commander stared. The figure that had stepped out from behind a tree and was walking toward them at a leisurely pace looked like he had just gotten off a school bus. He was probably around twelve or thirteen, tall for his age and slender, with light brown hair. He was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt.

  The commander was astounded. Was this some kind of trick? Were the generals throwing him a curveball to see how he’d react to a middle-school kid strolling out in front of a speeding tank?

  “Stop!” the commander barked to the driver. “You’re going to run him down. Stop!”

  The corporal was already braking. The M1 rolled to a halt, and the kid stood before it in the shadow of the long gun.

  The commander scrambled up the ladder to the hatch. “Be ready to get us out of here on my word!” he tossed down to his crew.

  He popped the top and emerged, staring at the slight figure dwarfed by tons of military armor.

  The kid took something out from behind his back. A weapon? No, it was a small electric megaphone. He brought it to his lips and spoke four words:

  “Look into my eyes …”

  The commander did. And what amazing eyes they were — large and luminous, a pale green that changed to blue, then darkened through indigo to a deep violet.

  “You are very calm now … very relaxed …”

  The commander was amazed to find that he was calm. In fact, he couldn’t recall having ever felt quite so tranquil. He was still aware that he was in the middle of a major exercise, but that didn’t seem so important anymore.

  The boy spoke through the megaphone again. “Now you will order your crew to unload all your ammunition. Toss it on the grass beside the tank.”

  By the time the Humvee roared up, heavy tank shells were scattered like ten pins on the grass all around the M1.

  An irate military officer jumped out of the Humvee. His name was Colonel Roderick Brassmeyer, and he was the director of the army’s Hypnotic Warfare Research Department, also known as HoWaRD.

  Brassmeyer was crimson with rage. “What’s going on here?”

  Twelve-year-old Jackson Opus faced down the colonel’s anger, but kept his eyes averted. “I disarmed the tank.”

  “You weren’t supposed to disarm the tank!” Brassmeyer roared. “Your orders were to instruct the commander to fire on Building F!”

  “I decided this was safer,” Jax explained.

  “You don’t decide! I decide! You follow orders!”

  “Yeah, but what if there’s somebody in there?” asked Jax.

  “There’s nobody in there! It’s a target! You’ve ruined the whole maneuver!” He looked up at the tank commander, who had resumed his place atop the turret. “Lieutenant, restore this ordnance!”

  The tank commander wouldn’t even glance in Brassmeyer’s direction. His eyes remained on Jax.

  “Oh, sorry, I haven’t broken the mesmeric link yet.” Jax turned to the commander. “When I snap my fingers, you’ll awake feeling refreshed and happy —”

  “Not too happy,” the colonel interjected in an irritated tone.

  “— and you’ll do everything Colonel Brassmeyer tells you to do.”

  “You don’t need that last part,” Brassmeyer growled. “He’s a soldier. He knows how to follow orders.”

  Jax snapped. The commander seemed startled for an instant, then saluted his superior officer.

  “Sir!” he called out. Spying the scattered ammunition, he added, “Uh — what just happened, sir?”

  The colonel swallowed an angry retort and softened. “Don’t worry about it. You were just following orders — which is more than I can say for this young civilian here.”

  Brassmeyer had been in the US Army for thirty-five years. He’d seen action on three different continents, and had trained with every conceivable piece of equipment. But this weapons system — the one he was now in charge of developing — had to be the most bizarre.

  Hypnotism.

  The first thing Jax had learned about the Hypnotic Warfare Research Department was that, technically, it didn’t exist. The soldiers stationed at Fort Calhoun believed that the low warehouse in the northwest quadrant housed the post archives — endless shelves holding tens of thousands of boxes dating back to the 1920s.

  In reality, the building was the headquarters of a top secret project centered around nine civilians of varying ages. They had only one thing in common: All were mind-benders.

  It had come to the attention of the army that there were hypnotists out there — people who could command the obedience of others just by gazing into their eyes. The purpose of HoWaRD was to develop military uses for mesmeric power — from hypnotizing a tank commander to swaying the decisions of a world leader across a negotiating table.

  A year earlier, Jackson Opus hadn’t even known what a mind-bender was, much less realized that he was one. Yet Jax was much more than an ordinary hypnotist. He was the nexus of the two greatest bloodlines in mesmeric history — the Opus and Sparks families. Neither of his parents had any hypnotic power at all. But the two clans had come together in Jax, endowing him with the potential to be the most gifted mind-bender ever — “the real McTavish,” as Axel Braintree had described it.

  The thought of Axel brought a sharp stab to Jax’s chest. Braintree had been Jax’s mentor and the founder of the Sandman’s Guild. If it hadn’t been for Jax, the old man never would have left his comfortable, oddball life in New York.

  And, Jax reflected ruefully, he never would have died trying to protect me from Dr. Elias Mako.

  Mako was in jail now, but that was a small comfort. Axel was gone.

  The Jeep dropped Jax off in front of the building. Captain Pedroia, HoWaRD’s psychiatrist, was there to meet him at the door.

  “How did it go?” Pedroia asked.

  “Not so good,” Jax answered. “The hypnotism part went okay, but I messed up following the rest of the orders.”

  Pedroia sighed. “You’re a nice kid, and I know you’ve been through a lot. But you just don’t understand the colonel. He’s a hundred and ten percent army, real spit and polish. He can only operate one way — his way. He tells you what to do, and you do it.”

  “Sometimes I’m tempted to bend the guy just to mellow h
im out,” Jax admitted.

  “Don’t ever say that, even as a joke!” the psychiatrist snapped. “The army may be the greatest fighting force the world has ever known. But make no mistake — they’re scared of what you can do. If they get the slightest sense that you might turn against them, they’ll lock you up and throw away the key. I know you’re only kidding. The colonel, though? He has no sense of humor — as in zero.”

  On some level, Jax understood that he should be grateful to the military for the protection they were offering him and his family. When Colonel Brassmeyer had scooped him up from the streets of New York, Jax had been under attack by Dr. Mako and his Sentia Institute, under arrest by the NYPD, and devastated by the loss of Axel Braintree. At the time, the army was the only safe haven available. It had been the best of a selection of bad choices, which didn’t change the fact that it was a bad choice. His parents had gone from having prosperous careers to no careers at all. Yes, the military was looking after them, but they were leading boring, purposeless lives. And though Jax had a purpose, it was the army’s purpose, not his own.

  Technically, he was free. He wasn’t a soldier, and he wasn’t under arrest. His official status was “under military protection.” Yet it had never been made clear to him what that meant.

  “This is really hard on my mom and dad,” he told the doctor. “I’m wondering if maybe I should just quit.”

  Captain Pedroia turned pale. “That wouldn’t be safe! We all know what happened in New York.”

  “Yeah, but Dr. Mako is in jail and Sentia has disbanded. Why do I still need protection?”

  “This is a small world full of spies,” the psychiatrist explained. “If the army found out about you, somebody else can find out about you, too. Do you think Dr. Mako’s the only bad guy out there?”

  Jax was taken aback. “You mean — we can’t leave if we want to?”

  “That’s the wrong question,” Pedroia replied carefully. “Why would you want to? You’re safe here, and you’re serving your country.”

  Jax stared at him in dismay. It came out okay the way Pedroia said it. But when you cut away all the trimmings, it sure sounded like Jax was a prisoner.

  Another part of army life Jax wasn’t too fond of was the food. HoWaRD’s meals were sent in from the officer’s mess, and mess was the right word for it. It wasn’t horrible, exactly, but everything was cooked in such bulk that all the dishes tasted the same, including fish sticks, cheeseburgers, green beans, and fruit salad. The gravy was gray and covered practically everything, and the pizza was enough to turn a New Yorker’s hair limestone white. Jax knew it was even worse for his parents, who had enjoyed fine Manhattan dining before all this craziness began.

  The mind-benders of the Hypnotic Warfare Research Department ate in a small dining room off their main work area. Jax took his seat at the round table and looked down at his tray without enthusiasm. Chicken à la king with a side of asparagus spears — also known as library paste and soggy cigars.

  “What’s the matter, Dopus?” rumbled a deep, unfriendly voice. “Don’t you like sludge?”

  Jax didn’t bother to look up. He and Wilson DeVries had been hypnos at Sentia together, and enemies from day one. Back then, Jax had been Dr. Mako’s star, and Wilson had been Dr. Mako’s thug. He was still a thug — fifteen years old and built like an NFL linebacker. Wilson loved Fort Calhoun, and not just because being chosen for HoWaRD was probably the only thing that had kept him out of juvie when Mako went to prison.

  Sludge or not, Wilson pounded down a remarkable amount of the food here. He wore heavy GI boots, even though the HoWaRDs weren’t required to. If he could have gotten away with it, he would have asked the army to outfit him from head to toe. It went with his tough-guy image.

  Wilson’s divorced parents lived in New York and St. Louis, so he was here on his own, quartered with the other male HoWaRDs. To him, this was all a big adventure — or at least sleepaway camp for hypnotists.

  “Can it, Wilson,” ordered Evelyn Lolis, who was in her thirties, as tall as Wilson, and not easily intimidated. She had been a member of Axel Braintree’s Sandman’s Guild — although she’d spent most of her energy lobbying to change the name to Sandperson’s Guild. “Lay off Jax. Brassmeyer’s leaning on him, and we all know what that’s like.”

  “That’s old news,” Wilson scoffed. “I took down a CIA agent in the exercise today. The guy’s trained to resist torture, but I bent him just like that.” He snapped his fingers for emphasis.

  “Get over yourself, sonny,” advised Eunice Krieder, who could easily have been the boys’ grandmother. “We’ve all bent CIA agents. It’s nothing special.” Eunice had raised eleven children, using generous doses of mesmeric power. Until the army had come to recruit her, she hadn’t realized that her ability was anything more than positive parenting.

  “The colonel decides what’s special, and what isn’t,” Wilson muttered. “He was pretty impressed.”

  “A spy isn’t harder to hypnotize than anybody else,” Jax commented. “Some subjects have more natural resistance than others, but it has nothing to do with CIA training.”

  “Like you know anything about it!” Wilson shot back. “It’s all over HoWaRD that you botched the tank maneuver today. Way to earn your name, Dopus!”

  Jax lifted his head and peered deliberately into Wilson’s face. The bigger boy almost dislocated both shoulders turning away. Wilson was a pretty good mind-bender, but his ability could not begin to match the force of Jax’s color-changing eyes. Even experts like Dr. Mako and Axel Braintree could only begin to guess how strong Jax might become. There were nine recruits in HoWaRD, but it was clear that the entire program had been designed around Jax. At least, it had been word of his abilities and achievements that had prompted the government to investigate whether hypnotism could be put to military use.

  Suddenly, Jax was aware of an odd sensation, almost like swallowing water down the wrong pipe — but in his mind rather than his throat. He had long since learned to recognize when someone was trying to hypnotize him — a stirring in the brain that oozed along his spine.

  He looked across the table at the youngest member of the HoWaRD team — a short, slight boy with fair crew-cut hair and a seemingly permanent sniffle. Eight-year-old Stanley X was a ward of the United States military. He had been discovered in an orphanage in Houston, where the staff had suspected that something strange and paranormal was taking place between him and the other orphans. At HoWaRD, the boy was only beginning to discover his mesmeric gifts.

  Stanley’s huge eyes, almost yellow gold, gave him an owl-like appearance, which was magnified by his slight features. Of the nine HoWaRDs, Stanley was the least experienced in the art of hypnotism. He was already a powerful mind-bender, but like most eight-year-olds, he was distractible, and struggled to keep a subject under mesmeric control. He was a source of constant frustration to Brassmeyer — the boy had so much potential but so little maturity. To Eunice, who had raised kids, Stanley was a typical eight-year-old; to the colonel, he was the equivalent of a piece of equipment that wouldn’t perform the way it was designed to.

  Yet, for all his shortcomings, Stanley was the only member of the HoWaRD team who could reach out with his mind and touch Jackson Opus. Jax suspected that it wasn’t even on purpose. That was the unnerving part. If the kid was this strong without even knowing what he was doing, what would he be like when he was a little older and had learned to direct all this energy?

  Jax turned his luminous eyes on Stanley and fired his own hypnotic potshot back at the eight-year-old. Stanley recoiled, but not as much as Jax expected him to.

  “Leave Wilson alone,” Stanley said resentfully.

  This was another sore point. Wilson treated Stanley like a cockroach who’d taught himself to stand upright. Stanley responded by hero-worshipping Wilson. It made sense in a way. Wilson was everything Stanley wasn’t — older, bigger, stronger, tougher.

  Wilson grinned at Jax. “Yeah, Dopus. Lay off.�
�

  “I’m at the end of my rope with you two!” exclaimed Eunice in exasperation.

  A burst of rapid-fire Romanian came from Anatoly Cescu, another HoWaRD. It effectively quieted the table, since nobody else spoke Romanian. Although Anatoly was a gifted mind-bender, his English was so limited that he had to perform hypnotism with an interpreter at his side. Even then the language barrier could be tricky — like the exercise in which Anatoly’s mesmeric command to reveal secrets had been translated as “Spill your guts!” and his subject had vomited all over the interrogation room. Still, the army remained committed to Cescu’s training, since true military hypnotism would have to account for different cultures and tongues.

  There were three other HoWaRDs. Across from Jax sat Jerry Katsakis, a recent college grad who had been working in the complaint department of Marshall Field’s department store in Chicago. The army had discovered him because his client satisfaction rating was 100 percent — a number that would not be possible without some kind of mesmeric influence on his customers.

  Dirk Starkman was the former head of the West Coast branch of the Sandman’s Guild, and had volunteered for HoWaRD after the death of Axel Braintree. The Guild was a support group for mind-benders who were struggling to resist the temptation to use their mesmeric gifts for personal gain. But while the New York branch consisted of con artists and pickpockets, the Los Angeles Sandmen were mostly unemployed actors trying to kick the habit of hypnotizing producers and casting directors into hiring them.

  “I was an aspiring actor once, too,” the stocky Dirk had confessed. “I bent this director to cast me as Robin Hood. The problem was, I weighed over three hundred pounds, and I had to wear those skinny green tights! You know how they talk about how much movies gross? Well, my movie was truly gross. That’s how the West Coast chapter of the Guild got started.”

  The final chair around the table was occupied by Ray Finklemeyer. Ray used to make his living as the Amazing Ramolo, a stage hypnotist who specialized in school groups. It had been Ray who’d first discovered Jax and recommended him to Elias Mako.

  Jax was never completely at ease around Ray because the man had once worked for Sentia. The army seemed to trust him, though.