The Speed of Sound (Speed of Sound Thrillers #1)(22)
Jacob glanced again toward the bathroom, then quickly opened the composition book. He read as fast as he could. The patient’s name was Edward Parks. He had been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome at the age of four. Jacob was moderately familiar with the disorder from their earlier conversations, but had never heard of acoustic archeology.
The more he read, the more his eyes widened with amazement. He actually mouthed the words echo box the first time he read them. This truly was astonishing stuff. No wonder she was so eager to learn more. He was, too.
That’s when he realized the water had turned off. He quickly tossed Skylar’s composition book onto her pillow and resumed reading a student’s work just as she came dripping wet out of the shower. She stood next to the bed, staring at him. “I’m sorry about dinner.”
“Me, too.” He admired her body because he couldn’t help himself, and because he knew she wanted him to.
“How much more reading do you have?”
He smiled slightly. “A ton.” It would take him all night.
She walked around the bed. “Not anymore.” She removed the laptop from his hands and climbed on top of him.
CHAPTER 19
Harmony House, Woodbury, New Jersey, May 22, 10:43 p.m.
The facility had a lights-out policy at nine thirty in the evening, and tonight was no exception. The lights in every patient’s room had already been off for over an hour. The night air was cold and still. The only sounds were the leaves crunching beneath the feet of the perimeter guard on his rounds, and those could barely be heard. You could see the man had training simply by the way he moved. His gait was rhythmic and determined. An intruder would be unfortunate to come upon him or his associates. The night security staff consisted of four personnel: one outside, one inside, one at the driveway gate, and one at the front entrance, who checked in with the other three at exactly twenty-minute intervals. “Baker, do you copy?”
The outside man answered quietly through his headset. “Baker clear, over.”
The front-desk guard tracked the locations of his two men on patrol with transmitters in their radios, which appeared on an electronic map of the facility. Surveillance cameras provided views of every inch of the grounds, both inside and out. “Copy that, Baker. Charlie, status?”
“Charlie’s clear, over.” He continued patrolling the hallways.
“Copy that, Charlie. Danger, do you copy?”
“Danger clear, over.” He continued watching the driveway-gate monitors.
“Copy that, Danger. Able out.” Able, Baker, Charlie, and Danger signified military, confirming the training evident in the gait of the outside man, Baker. Each was considerably overqualified for the job he now held. They had each taken the lives of no fewer than three people. One had killed eleven. These were men capable of becoming death machines, but only if the circumstances required it and they were ordered to do so.
Over the years, they had been required to make adjustments for Eddie. The boots initially provided to security personnel made a particular clicking sound on the linoleum floors, which disturbed Eddie’s sleep, even after the installation of the acoustic panels in his room, so he developed a composite rubber for new soles that made the boots practically silent. It turned out this new composite also lasted three times as long as the previous one, so Eddie’s composite soon became part of standard-issue US military footwear.
For someone who didn’t understand the concept of money, he was certainly doing a nice job making the government quite a bit of it.
It was exactly 10:47 p.m. when Eddie’s eyes opened. He sucked in a deep breath as if he’d been punched in the stomach. Or hit by a lightning bolt. And maybe this time, he had been. Maybe, finally, this was it. The answer. The fix. The conclusion to his equations, Eddie’s Theorems, which had eluded him for all these years. Could this really be it? Could it?
He raced to the light switch by the door, then over to his desk, where he grabbed the most recently filled book of equations and a number-two pencil. He had a cup full of them—twenty-four, to be exact, because the number was the product of two cubed times three, and Eddie liked that. Each pencil was properly sharpened and awaiting its turn.
The math was a blur, simply flying out of him at stunning speed. Lost in a torrent of thoughts, he went through one pencil quickly, maintaining its sharpness with an electric sharpener that was over ten years old. Having filled the remaining pages of the current notebook, he readily went through another. And two more pencils in the process.
Like a composer lost in his own world, the incomprehensible equations were pouring out of him so rapidly that his writing hand struggled to keep up with his brain. It was frenzied and spontaneous moments of revelation like this that had made him wonder, earlier in life, if he should learn to write with both hands simultaneously, thereby doubling his already tremendous output. But his left hand proved to be less adept at writing, and although he had two eyes, the two hemispheres of his brain refused to act independently of each other, forever condemning him to the one-handed pace of the rest of us.
Whatever he was hearing in his head, he was not hearing anything else. Nothing in his room or outside the windows. Nothing down the hall. It was as if his remarkable sense of hearing had shut down to focus all his considerable processing power on the singular task at hand. When a person experiences extreme cold, frostbite results from the body trying to survive by withdrawing blood circulation from the extremities to protect the critical organ, the heart. That same principle seemed to be at work as Eddie continued writing wildly. Two hours passed. Then three. He showed no signs of slowing down.