The Dragonfly Effect Read online

  But that didn’t mean much, because Jax didn’t trust the army.

  As bad as the food was, Jax always gulped it down quickly so he could enjoy a few minutes to himself before the afternoon’s activities began. Brassmeyer had an endless to-do list: The HoWaRDs bent soldiers to make them give up their weapons, give up intelligence, and just plain give up. The HoWaRDs even bent one another, trying to learn who had resistance to whom, and for what reason. They worked with volunteers to see if hypnotism could be taught to ordinary people. This last effort was a pet project of the colonel’s. Brassmeyer dreamed of an entire division of GI mind-benders marching into hostile territory and conquering the enemy without firing a single shot. But Jax knew it wasn’t going to happen. Although hypnotic power could be developed and refined, it couldn’t be created out of nothing. Which didn’t stop Brassmeyer from trying to force it to happen.

  “Nobody likes a smart aleck, Opus,” the colonel told him when Jax had the nerve to complain about all the hours watching soldiers staring at each other.

  “But it’s never going to work,” Jax persisted. “It’s a total waste of time!”

  “I own your time,” Brassmeyer informed him smugly. “That makes it my time. And I’ll waste it any way I want to.”

  That day, when Jax, Wilson, and Stanley went for their mandatory three hours of schooling, the first vocabulary word was:

  insubordination (n): disobedience to authority, especially in the military

  See also: mutiny

  The instant Jax stepped out of the building, he felt his mood lighten a little. The walls were closing in on him in that place. It was getting worse every day. Here, he was still on Fort Calhoun property — living behind barbed wire. But at least a guy could breathe out in the open. Not having to look at Wilson helped.

  The northwest quadrant was the quietest part of the post, but it was still a busy place. Soldiers and a few civilians walked here and there, and the occasional jogger went by on a circuit from the parade ground located to the south. There was car traffic, too — mostly Jeeps and Humvees. Fort Calhoun was a small city, offering fast-food restaurants, movie theaters, and grocery stores. There was everything — unless you were a lost New Yorker yearning for home.

  A military police Jeep was heading Jax’s way, the driver rubbernecking, as if searching for something. With a jolt of alarm, Jax recognized the two people under arrest in the backseat.

  He broke into a run, and by the time he reached the vehicle, he was sprinting, flashing the Fort Calhoun ID that he always wore around his neck. “Mom! Dad! What’s going on?”

  Ashton Opus tried to put on a brave face. “It’s just a misunderstanding. We went off post and forgot to bring our badges. It’s not a crime.”

  “Actually, it is,” the MP informed him. “Especially when you’re looking at a secure installation with binoculars.” He indicated two sets of field glasses on the front seat beside him.

  “We were bird-watching!” Monica Opus exclaimed bitterly.

  Bird-watching had been Captain Pedroia’s suggestion. Jax had begged the psychiatrist for something to occupy his poor parents while their son was here at HoWaRD. There was quite literally nothing for them to do — and they were doing it. Mom was trying to keep herself occupied sprucing up their dreary military-issue quarters with decorative items ordered over the Internet, and Dad had become addicted to a new social networking and gaming site called FreeForAll. Ashton Opus was a cultured and educated man in his prime. When he looked back on this part of his life, he would see himself watching videos of other people’s pets drinking out of the toilet.

  The Opuses were nothing less than miserable here. True, it was impossible to die of boredom. But the black shadows under their eyes told of sleepless nights, and the lines etched into their faces could not be explained by worry alone.

  Looking at them, handcuffed together in the backseat, Jax’s heart was wrung. “Let them go! They’re my parents!”

  The MP was unimpressed. “Good. They’re your parents. Who are you?”

  Jax bit his lip. As far as the rest of Fort Calhoun knew, there was no such thing as the Hypnotic Warfare Research Department. The MP probably assumed he was a soldier’s son from one of the family cottages.

  “You have to talk to Colonel Brassmeyer,” Jax advised. “He’ll vouch for all three of us.”

  “Already tried that,” the MP replied. “The colonel’s off post for the rest of the day. I’ll have to keep these two on ice until I can reach him.”

  “Don’t say that!” Mr. Opus exclaimed. “Jax has an ID, and he’s obviously our son — why would he claim to be if he wasn’t? Can’t we be sensible about this?”

  “I have my orders,” the MP informed him. “There’s nothing anybody can do.”

  Jax knew that wasn’t strictly true. He fixed the MP with a double-barreled stare. Almost immediately, a new image appeared in his field of vision. It looked very much like a picture-in-picture window on a TV — Jax, standing by the Jeep, staring straight ahead. It meant that a mesmeric link had been forged between Jax and the MP. He was inside the man’s mind, peering back at himself, seeing what the soldier saw.

  It meant the MP was under his power.

  “I guess you’re pretty tired,” Jax said conversationally. “I think you should rest a bit…. That’s it…. You’re very relaxed….”

  “Oh, honey, this is not a good idea,” Mrs. Opus began. “You know the rule.”

  The rule she was referring to came from Brassmeyer. It went something like: If you ever hypnotize anyone without direct orders from me, I’ll skin you alive and nail your hide to the nearest wall.

  But there was no way Jax was going to let his parents spend a day under arrest for the innocent offense of trying to make the best of a bad situation that the army had foisted on the Opus family in the first place.

  Besides, a good mind-bender knew how to cover his tracks.

  He held up a hand to quiet his mother and continued, “Now you will unlock the handcuffs, give back the binoculars, and let them come with me. When I snap my fingers, you’ll wake up, feeling calm and refreshed. You never found two people with binoculars outside the post. You never saw them at all, and you never saw me.”

  The MP immediately released Mom and Dad. They were grateful to be free, but they couldn’t hide their fascinated horror at this demonstration of their son’s capabilities. Even Dad — who had grown up with hypnotic parents — would not meet Jax’s gaze.

  Jax snapped his fingers, and the man got back behind the wheel and drove off.

  “Sorry, son,” Mr. Opus said in a husky voice. “We didn’t mean to put you on the spot like that. I hope it doesn’t get back to the colonel.”

  “Don’t worry, Dad,” Jax assured him. “That MP’s already forgotten us. It should be me apologizing to you guys. You’re here because of me.”

  Monica Opus was distraught. “Don’t ever blame yourself! You didn’t ask for all this hocus-pocus! We gave it to you — our ancestors, anyway.”

  “This won’t last forever, Mom and Dad. I promise we’ll get our lives back. The minute Brassmeyer’s through with me —”

  “Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” Ashton Opus interrupted. “Why would the army ever let you go? Look what you can do. Even the other hypnotists can’t match your power.”

  “I don’t know,” Jax ventured, thinking of eight-year-old Stanley. “Maybe there’s somebody coming up who can take my place.”

  He said it in a hopeful tone. But for some reason, the idea troubled him.

  It was after three AM when Jax padded down the hall of their post cottage in search of a drink of water. As he passed the small living room, the glow of the TV caught his attention. It took him a moment in the dim light to spot his mother, sitting motionless in an armchair, staring blankly at the screen.

  “Must be a good movie,” he commented, keeping his voice low to avoid waking his father.

  She was startled. “Huh — oh, this? I think it’
s an infomercial — that spray paint to cover up your bald spot. I just couldn’t fall asleep tonight.”

  Tonight and every other night, Jax reflected morosely. And who could blame her? She used to be a chiropractor with a successful city practice — and now she was reduced to a faceless, purposeless life as a hypnotic fugitive and mother of the army’s plaything.

  Before he had a chance to think about what he was doing, he was staring into her careworn eyes, bringing all his mesmeric power to bear. It was a betrayal — no question about it. He had promised never to hypnotize his parents. This was in exchange for their promise to stop looking away every time he glanced in their direction.

  But how could he let her suffer like this? And anyway, she wasn’t going to remember what he was doing to her now.

  Soon, the PIP image appeared — Jax’s face as Mom was seeing it, peering down at her as she sat.

  “You are feeling very sleepy…. Your eyelids are growing heavy…. All you can think about is your head hitting the pillow….”

  Almost immediately, his mother stretched and yawned.

  “When I clap my hands, you’ll go back to bed and fall into a deep, restful sleep. You’ll wake up refreshed and you will remember nothing about seeing me tonight. And this is important — you’ll feel happy and content.”

  He clapped once and watched as she started past him toward the master bedroom.

  At least she’ll get some sleep, he thought. The rest of his post-hypnotic suggestion was pretty much a lost cause. He’d learned from his two mentors — Mako, and later, Braintree — that this was one of hypnotism’s few limitations.

  It was impossible to command someone to be happy.

  The F-15 cockpit was cramped, overloaded as it was with wires, hoses, buttons, switches, and dials. It all seemed to be swallowing the pilot in his flight suit — but that might have been the effect of the fish-eye lens that was broadcasting the video to Jax’s monitor.

  “You are very calm … relaxed … drowsy …” Jax was saying into the microphone below his own camera.

  “Not too drowsy,” Colonel Brassmeyer murmured tensely from just over Jax’s shoulder. “The last thing the air force needs is a drowsy fighter pilot.”

  “But you’re not so drowsy that you can’t fly the plane,” Jax added quickly.

  He could see himself now, eyes deep purple, through the mesmeric link — the picture-in-picture image of what the pilot saw. Jax’s face was framed by a screen in the cockpit, surrounded by instruments. He was inside the man’s mind.

  This was the ability that made Jax unique, even among mind-benders. Most hypnotists needed to be face-to-face with their subjects. But Jax was so powerful that he could mesmerize remotely, via a screen. The implications were enormous, since a video clip could be broadcast on TV or distributed through the Internet to millions of viewers at the same time.

  “Have you got him yet?” Brassmeyer urged. “Is he under?”

  Jax waved him off with a gesture similar to swatting a fly. Remote hypnotism was not easy. Jax could do it, but it took all of his concentration.

  The commander of the Hypnotic Warfare Research Department was not accustomed to being brushed off so dismissively. He opened his mouth to fire an angry rebuke, but Captain Pedroia stepped in and took the brunt of the colonel’s anger.

  “You have to let the kid be, sir,” he counseled. “He can’t keep the pilot under control and talk to you at the same time.”

  “The army has protocols!” Brassmeyer sputtered.

  “He’s not a soldier,” the psychiatrist reminded him. “And there’s nobody else in the world who can do what he’s doing right now.”

  Jax maintained concentration on his monitor as the PIP image grew sharper and more vivid — his own face on the screen, the sky as the fighter jet knifed through it, the horizon, vague and distant. Along with the visual information, random details of the pilot’s life began to leach through: He was twenty-four, from Ohio; he had a dog named Honus Wagger. There were also wisps of memory — a family Christmas; a high-school football triumph. The longer Jax spent inside the man’s mind, the more he’d get of the true person.

  Brassmeyer handed him a card with a list of instructions on it — mostly numbers representing speed, altitude, and heading. It meant nothing to Jax, but as he broadcast the commands to the pilot, he could see that the aircraft was executing a series of dramatic maneuvers. The earth replaced the sky and hurtled upward as the fighter went into a dive. This was followed by a barrel roll at such high speed that the world outside the cockpit was just a blur. The ground whizzed by as the pilot made an upside-down pass at low altitude. Jax could almost feel the F-15 shudder as it was put through its paces.

  At last, he reached the final instruction on the card. “Initiate special order 4414.”

  The hypnotized pilot complied immediately. Through his peripheral vision, Jax could see Brassmeyer and Pedroia sitting forward in their chairs, watching breathlessly.

  The plane was in another dive, the features on the ground growing larger every second. Jax waited for the pilot to pull out.

  He didn’t.

  The fireball lasted only a split second before the video went blank.

  Jax leaped to his feet and turned on Brassmeyer. “He crashed! He’s dead! You made me kill him!”

  “You’re out of line, mister!”

  “You’re out of line!” Jax shot back. “The whole army’s out of line if they think it’s okay to waste somebody just for a stupid experiment! He was a person! He had a family — and a dog! Honus Wagger!”

  The colonel was livid. “We’re done here, Opus. Go someplace and cool off before I call the MPs.”

  “You won’t get away with this!” Jax was in tears, but they were tears of rage. “I’m going to tell on you. I’ll do it the army way. I’ll find a general who can dump on a colonel the way you dump on everybody else!”

  “Shut up, Jax,” Pedroia said sharply. “Nobody’s dead.”

  “He is! You saw!”

  Brassmeyer regarded the captain disapprovingly. “We don’t have to explain anything to this — brat!”

  “You put me in charge of the mental health of the HoWaRD team,” the psychiatrist argued. “If he thinks he caused that pilot’s death, that’s an unacceptable burden for a twelve-year-old to carry.”

  The colonel chewed this over, breathing hard. Finally, he turned to Jax. “Just this once,” he fumed, “I’m going to explain to you what you’ve got no right to know. The pilot you bent was never in a plane. He never crashed.”

  “Don’t tell me what I saw with my own eyes,” Jax snapped back.

  “You’re making this very hard,” Brassmeyer warned. “The pilot was in a simulator. We needed to see if a hypnotic command could bring down a plane. And you succeeded. But no one is dead. Honus Wagger still has a master.”

  “I saw fire,” Jax persisted. But even as he said it, he picked up a faint impression of the picture-in-picture image through the pilot’s eyes. Now he was pouring himself a cup of coffee. Dead people certainly didn’t do that.

  “The simulators are lifelike,” Pedroia supplied. “And you saw what you thought was happening. Just because you’re good with your mind doesn’t mean it can’t play tricks on you. Now why don’t you quit while you’re ahead? The colonel’s been patient with you.”

  Jax studied his sneakers in embarrassment, yet stopped short of apologizing to Brassmeyer. Okay, this was just a simulation, but what about tomorrow? Why would the army have to practice bringing down a plane if they weren’t prepared to do it for real one day?

  Jax had already met someone who was willing to take mesmeric power to its catastrophic limit in order to achieve his goals.

  His name was Elias Mako.

  The Colston Maximum-Security Penitentiary in South Carolina was a grim place, with high walls of reinforced concrete ringed by multiple guard towers. It housed many of the most dangerous offenders in the prison system. Inmates were seldom seen in the common ar
eas without handcuffs and leg-irons, surrounded by armed guards. It was a point of pride to the warden and his staff that no one had ever escaped from Colston in the facility’s sixty-six-year history.

  The cells were cramped and depressing, separated by two-foot-thick walls and iron bars. Comforts were virtually nonexistent beyond thin mattresses and skimpy blankets … except for isolation unit 1727 in cellblock D.

  Compared to the other cells, it was a five-star-hotel suite. It was roomy, with a memory-foam bed and a sixty-inch wall-mounted TV offering four hundred seventy-five satellite channels. There was a computer and a well-stocked library. The furniture had been shipped from Harrods in London, and was made from the finest leather. Meals were delivered from local restaurants — not exactly gourmet, but infinitely better than prison food.

  Most amazing of all, when the guards looked into isolation unit 1727, they noticed none of this luxury. They saw an ordinary cell with an ordinary inmate in an ordinary orange jumpsuit. There was nothing wrong with their vision. A powerful post-hypnotic suggestion was affecting their minds. They saw only what the inmate wanted them to see.

  Life here was so comfortable that sometimes Dr. Elias Mako wondered why he would ever consider leaving. It was restful to stay in here and let the country forget the nasty business of his arrest and trial, and the fact that he’d been declared a menace to society.

  But Dr. Mako had big plans — plans that could not be executed from inside Colston’s massive walls.

  The guard arrived with a tray from Barbie’s Q. Excellent ribs, but the Styrofoam and aluminum foil definitely detracted from the dining experience. No matter. Dr. Mako wasn’t planning to eat it anyway.

  He peered into the guard’s eyes and said, “Hello, Ralph. You will now come in and shut the door behind you.”

  Three minutes later, Ralph was wearing the orange jumpsuit and enjoying Barbie’s ribs while Mako, in Ralph’s uniform, was striding purposefully down the corridor.