Geniuses Ii

By Neil W. Flanzraich

The cosmos is vastinfinite and incomprehensible. Trillions of galaxies, sextillions of stars, and countless planets, moons, and asteroids all spiral in space, not caring about or noticing what is happening on Earth. But for those living on the planet, a momentous battle prophesied more than fifteen centuries ago by the wizard Merlin is about to begin.

Roger Reynolds is one of a small group of super Geniuses who have secretly been influencing the world. He recently defeated a very powerful evil Genius determined to kill him and his beloved wife and daughter, and rule the world. He hoped this victory had ended the threats against his family prophesied by Merlin. But now Roger is being plagued by nightmares and attacked by people whose brains are controlled by an unknown enemy. Roger senses a terrible menace is approaching. Only time will tell whether he is strong enough to protect his family and the world from the coming evil.

Merlins sixth-century prophecy unfolds as Roger battles an immensely powerful evil Genius.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Apr 28, 2018
• ISBN: 9781546237303

Neil W. Flanzraich

Neil Flanzraich graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School. He has worked in the pharmaceutical industry for over thirty years, and is currently the executive chairman of a biotech company, and lead independent director of a New York Stock Exchange- listed company. Flanzraich and his wife, Dr. Kira Flanzraich, live in Coral Gables, Florida. They have two adult sons who live in New York City. This is the second novel in his Geniuses series.

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© 2018 Neil W. Flanzraich. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 08/24/2018

ISBN: 978-1-5462-3728-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-3729-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-3730-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018904292

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Contents

The Double-R Prophecy Continues

Chapter 1 Dreams

Chapter 2 Roxanne’s Senior Year Begins

Chapter 3 The Course

Chapter 4 Roger’s Day Begins

Chapter 5 Lucille Wu

Chapter 6 A Dance

Chapter 7 Denise Parker

Chapter 8 Chelsea vs. Queens Park Rangers

Chapter 9 MI5

Chapter 10 Denise’s Message

Chapter 11 Roger’s Plan Takes Shape

Chapter 12 Simone’s Decision

Chapter 13 Return to Maryland

Chapter 14 A Different Plan

Chapter 15 The Trial at Laurel Glen

Chapter 16 A Program Change

Chapter 17 The Past

Chapter 18 Friend against Friend at US Genius HQ

Chapter 19 Disembodied

Chapter 20 A Trying Flight

Chapter 21 Still Underground

Chapter 22 Dima Chort

Chapter 23 Roxanne and Andor Prove Their Mettle

Chapter 24 Pasternak’s Late Night

Chapter 25 A Way to Re-embody It?

Chapter 26 Return to the Crystal Cavern

Chapter 27 Final Preparations with Jean Paul and Simone

Chapter 28 Jean Paul and Abaddon

Chapter 29 Rebecca and Roxanne’s Secret Flight

Chapter 30 Astrakhan’s Tests

Chapter 31 The Battle of Camelot

Chapter 32 The Battle of Stonehenge

Chapter 33 After the Battle

Epilogue

This is the second novel in Neil W. Flanzraich’s Geniuses series. The name Geniuses is trademarked and owned by Neil W. Flanzraich.

To my darling wife and love, Kirochka, and my wonderful sons, Derek and Jordan.

The Double-R Prophecy Continues

T he cosmos is vast—infinite and incomprehensible. Trillions of galaxies, sextillions of stars, and countless planets, moons, and asteroids all spiraling, swirling, and spinning in limitless space, not caring about, not even noticing what is happening on the small, unimportant planet we call Earth. But for this planet, our planet, and those living on it, a momentous battle, one prophesied more than fifteen centuries ago by the wizard Merlin, will soon begin.

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Chapter 1

Dreams

London: Sunday, September 17, this year, 4:30 a.m.

N ight covers a portion of the planet. A full moon shines down on the barren plain where Roger Reynolds stands. His thick golden hair catches the moonlight. Roger is one hundred feet in front of his beloved wife and daughter, protecting them as always. He is fighting an unseen opponent hidden in the shadows. From his powerful brain, Roger fires a series of strong energy pulses, but the enemy’s invisible shield deflects them. His enemy hurls a massive energy pulse at Roger. He sees it coming straight at him, looming larger and larger.

Despite his shield, he instinctively turns his body sharply to avoid the oncoming energy pulse. Suddenly, Roger felt his bed beneath him and awoke. Oh—it was only a dream. It was so real, but just another nightmare. He’d been having a lot of them.

Roger Reynolds rubbed the sleep from his eyes, yawned, and got out of bed. He pushed aside the window curtain and saw night still blanketing the city. He quickly put on his jogging gear and descended the five flights from his rented prewar Westminster studio apartment. This old apartment building, the peeling paint in the stairwell, and the lingering smells from his neighbors’ dinners all felt so comfortable. He was at home in this building, and had chosen it over more conveniently located modern ones.

The cold wind and rain assaulted Roger as soon as he exited the building. He started jogging, hoping it would warm him. After passing a few deserted streets, he reached the south bank of the Thames. As he jogged along the shore, an old clock in a nearby famous bell tower chimed three.

It was bitter cold, and the driving rain stung Roger’s face. I must be the only fool running along the River in this miserable weather, he thought, proving again that one can be both a fool and a Genius. Roger wiped the rain from his face as he considered this irony. He and all the others of his tiny Genius breed, those now living, and those who had for over a millennium come before him, were as capable of human foolishness as anyone else—despite having IQs of well over one thousand. Roger increased his pace, trying to raise his body temperature. He was troubled.

He had hoped jogging would relax him, but with the cold wind and rain, he was tempted to do something about the weather. With his powerful mind, it would be quite easy, but the Code of Western Geniuses discouraged Genius interventions. He looked to the heavens, hoping the night sky would take his mind off his cares. Trillions of galaxies, sextillions of stars, but with the overcast sky and rain, none of them were visible tonight. Gradually, the cloud cover cleared just enough for Roger’s sharp eyes to make out a pale moon. He also saw a blinking light move across the sky. Roger thought it was one of the additional surveillance satellites he’d ordered because of increased terrorist activity. No. Tonight the sky would offer no relief.

Perhaps music would help. Because of their special genetics, careful diets, and exercise regimens, Geniuses could live hundreds of years. Roger was himself more than 170 years old and had a vast collection of visual and audio memories—perfect visual memory of everything he had ever seen, and perfect audio memory of everything he had ever heard. When Roger jogged, he often wore a Bluetooth headset for appearances, but did not need or use it. He scanned the large collection of great music in his memory and chose to hear Mozart’s Concerto for Flute, Harp, and Orchestra in C major, exactly as he originally heard it played in 1880, by the Vienna Philharmonic. The conductor, Otto Dessoff, was brilliant, and the concerto was exceptional. Roger’s perfect audio memory was not simply of the music itself but of the way the music actually sounded and affected him the first time he heard it. He was able to remember and bring to his recalled listening experience the same expectations and the same historical context, of music and sound that he and the other members of the audience would have brought to the first live performance of that concerto, not dulled or otherwise infected by later musical developments. While enjoying the delightful flute and harp solos, Roger finally began to relax.

As he continued jogging, he suddenly became aware of a presence and raised his mental shield, an invisible barrier harder than granite. When he passed a tree cloaked in shadows, a large man came out from behind the tree and lunged at him. Roger whirled around to face his assailant as the man’s dagger struck his shield. The pain and shock to his shoulder and arm from the impact with Roger’s shield were so severe he dropped the dagger and collapsed to the ground in a massive convulsion of muscle spasms and twitches.

There was a chance that this had been just an attempted mugging. Such things occasionally happened along this stretch of the river. Also, Roger’s impressive six-foot four-inch physique often attracted a certain amount of trouble. He had run into toughs in the past who wanted to fight the big, confident man. He took no pleasure in his assailant’s suffering. With a thought, he caused the man’s injured body to increase production of endogenous pain relievers and muscle relaxants. Roger erased the incident from the man’s memory and put him to sleep.

Seconds later, two men sprang out from behind bushes bordering the path. The one in front of Roger fired an assault rifle at him, emptying a sixty-round magazine of armor-piercing bullets, and the man behind him fired shoulder-launched, rocket-propelled grenades. They watched in disbelief as the bullets and grenades disintegrated before reaching their target. Since he had not heard a ping (the warning alert Geniuses receive when another Genius’s nervous system is near), Roger knew these men were Ordinaries. Given the heavy weaponry, this was not a simple mugging. Still, he was mildly amused. If this was a planned attack on him, it was comically inadequate. With a smile, he recalled the line from the film The Untouchables: Brings a knife to a gunfight.

He probed the minds of the two men and learned they were members of an international crime syndicate. Someone or something had taken control of them and directed their actions. They had come to the river to kill him. They had been instructed to bring powerful weapons but did not know why. Roger telepathically caused the men to toss the weapons away and fused the weapons’ firing mechanisms. He made the would-be assassins lie face down on the ground, erased their recent memories, and put them to sleep.

Roger telepathically communicated with the minds of the MI5 officers on duty at Thames House, the British Security Service’s headquarters in Central London. Within seconds, they were speeding to the location with the siren blaring in a vehicle large enough to secure three very dangerous men.

Roger jogged off. He was going home. He continued listening to the Mozart concerto, beginning right where he had been interrupted—as if he had pressed pause. For more than a hundred years, he had fought successfully in numerous wars against armed and dangerous Ordinaries (who were never really a challenge for him), and against far more dangerous and powerful evil Geniuses. Those three Ordinaries were not the problem. He understood that with this primitive and futile attempt on his life, someone or something powerful was sending him a message. He saw this incident as just a piece of the larger problem that had been troubling him for months.

Roger was concentrating on that problem when he stepped onto a crosswalk. He glanced to his left and saw a black sedan speeding toward him. Instantly he raised his shield, and in a second, the sedan crashed into it. The effect on the car, regrettably for the driver, was the same as if it had hit a stone wall at eighty miles per hour. The airbags inflated, but Roger doubted they would be enough to save the driver’s life.

He scanned the driver’s brain, and learned she was an Ordinary on the way home after a marathon day at work. Someone had taken control of her mind to use her and her car for another attempt on his life. Roger wanted to try to save the injured woman. He slowed her heart and stopped the bleeding. His scan also found an aneurysm in a cerebral artery caused by the crash that would soon kill her. With a pulse of mental energy, Roger prevented rupture of the aneurysm. He also erased her traumatic memory of the crash.

Roger telepathically summoned the nearest traffic unit of the Metropolitan Police Service and the nearest ambulance. The poor woman! What a shame. A villain with no regard for human life is working overtime to send me a message, he thought. I’ve received it and now I will punish whoever is behind this.

Roger continued jogging home, but he was no longer in the mood for music. Who or what had caused these futile attacks? The rain had stopped. When he reached his neighborhood, he slowed to a walk. As he arrived at his apartment building, he heard Big Ben chime four. Roger’s brilliant mind assessed the implications of these attacks, and he came up with numerous possibilities and contingency plans as he slowly climbed the stairs. He entered his apartment and quickly got into bed.

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As he lay there, Roger thought of his darling wife, Rebecca, and their dear teenage daughter, Roxanne. They lived in Golden Gables, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, DC. Because of the dangers confronting Europe and the Middle East, Roger had to remain in London. He suffered terribly being away from his family, but he led the only force that might be able to save the world from the approaching evil. How he wished he could roll over in bed and hug Rebecca. Talking with her, touching her, always eased his mind. Roger could use telepathy to reach Rebecca, and she would comfort him. But he hesitated to do it at this hour. Even thinking about his wonderful wife and daughter brought a smile to his lips and banished his gloom.

For a moment—for a bit of relief—he replayed his perfect memory of a recent conversation with Rebecca and Roxanne. Just hearing them speak, aloud or telepathically, gave him pleasure. Their cadence and vocabulary were so like those of Ordinaries. Although Rebecca was a powerful Genius, her parents had been Ordinaries, and she had always gone to Ordinary schools. And Roxanne also attended Ordinary schools, supplemented by special Genius programs. During their formative years, the speaking patterns of his wife and daughter had been greatly influenced by Ordinaries.

Roger’s upbringing was quite different. His parents were Geniuses. After they were murdered, he had been raised by another Genius family, and he had attended only Genius schools. So Roger tended to employ longer words and more complex sentence structures. He never left time for his listeners to think about what he said or to formulate a reply, since Genius telepathic communication and thought were virtually instantaneous. Listening to his wife and daughter speak somehow made him feel more normal.

His thoughts about Rebecca and Roxanne brought a smile to his lips. But his mind now raced to consider whether the night’s events posed a danger to his family. Roger knew from long experience that his mind was better at unraveling mysteries when it was calm. He could have simply adjusted the chemical balance in his mind to calm his nerves, but he preferred to use more human, natural means. So he got up, took a warm shower, and returned to bed. He still did not want to fall asleep. When he slept, he had bad dreams. But bed did seem to be the place to be at 4:30 in the morning, so he remained there as he kept searching for answers.

He had been a warrior—fighting against powerful villains—for most of his long life. His successes in those fights had made him confident and self-assured. He was now the head of the Western Council of Geniuses, the governing body for the 250 Geniuses who lived in the Western hemisphere. The other half of the world’s Geniuses lived in the East, and had their own council. There was no denying he was a brilliant and powerful Genius. Additionally, with hard work and the aid of his amazing memory, he had accumulated vast knowledge and experience. He was in the prime of life for a Genius at 170-plus years old, but looked and felt like a very fit Ordinary of forty.

Roger had plenty of reason to feel he could handle anything that might come at him. He had recently defeated Alexander Astrakhan and Karl and Klaus Kleper. The Klepers were the evil leaders of the Council of Eastern Geniuses. And Alexander Astrakhan, a Western Genius, had been considered the most powerful Genius in the world. Alex was Roger’s mentor and superior at the Western Council, but he had secretly been collaborating with the Klepers. Driven by lust for even greater power, the three were trying to take control of the whole world and dominate all its Ordinaries.

Several months ago, Alexander Astrakhan and the Klepers captured Rebecca and Roxanne, and summoned Roger after dark to the London Eye, the 400-foot illuminated Ferris wheel suspended over the Thames. They wanted him to watch as they burned Rebecca and Roxanne to death with energy pulses from their minds. As he battled them in the moonlight high above the river, Roger’s love for and desperate desire to save his wife and daughter had impelled him to find new mental powers within himself. These powers were greater than any he had before.

During the climactic battle, Astrakhan had taunted Roger, saying he had always hated him and his family, had long wanted to kill them, and had murdered Roger’s parents during the Civil War. He also told Roger how, in the sixth century, an Astrakhan ancestor had betrayed and murdered Roger’s ancestor, Sir Reginald Reynolds.

With his victory that night, Roger had defeated the three most powerful Geniuses in the world and had avenged many wrongs. He had every reason to be content and confident.

So why was he troubled and having nightmares?

As Roger tossed and turned in bed, his mind kept searching for answers. He considered what had brought him to this point and what was going on currently in his life. He was certain part of the answer had to be the prophecy. Ever since he was a little boy, Roger had been told of a prophecy concerning his family. It had come to be known as the Double-R Prophecy because of the Reynolds family tradition of giving their children first names with the same first letter as their last name. The prophecy had been made by the wizard Merlin more than fifteen hundred years ago at the request of Sir Reginald Reynolds (a Genius and a knight at the court of King Arthur) as the knight lay dying. Only a small part of the prophecy had survived down to the present, and it had become the stuff of legend. According to that legend, Merlin told the dying Sir Reginald that one of his descendants would attain great power and avenge some great evil. That was all that was now known of the prophecy. When Alexander Astrakhan informed Roger that an Astrakhan ancestor had betrayed and killed Sir Reginald Reynolds, Roger connected the dots and assumed the murder of his ancestor had led to Merlin’s prophecy. After he defeated Astrakhan in the battle above the London Eye, Roger thought—hoped—the Reynolds-versus-Astrakhan saga had ended, and his victory had fulfilled the Double-R Prophecy.

However, shortly after the battle, Roger received a warning from a group of disembodied Genius brains. These brains had been removed from the heads of extremely powerful Geniuses in the remote past. The brains survived in disembodied form in the Crystal Cavern, four miles deep, in the roots of the Andes Mountains. The brains called themselves the Enkefalons. Once they had saved his daughter, Roxanne. After his battle above the London Eye, they warned Roger there was still more to the Double-R Prophecy. Merlin had foreseen further dangers for him and his family. Even the Enkefalons didn’t know what those dangers were. All Roger could do was wait for the next shoe to drop. There were times when Roger regretted ever having received the Enkefalon warning or ever having heard of the prophecy.

But even if the prophecy was part of why Roger was so troubled and having bad dreams, the full answer still eluded him. The dreams (if they were dreams) had started more than a month ago. Although he had lived through many dangerous times in the past, he had never experienced such dreams. I’m not even sure they are dreams," he thought. My whole life has taught me that if I keep thinking, I can solve any problem. But this time feels different. Roger feared the coming evil would not spare his family. I hope and pray I will be able to protect my darling wife and daughter.

From his partially opened window, Roger could hear the beginnings of early morning traffic on the street below and some of his neighbors preparing breakfast. He was extremely tired and finally fell asleep. In his mind’s eye, he saw only darkness, and he felt a cold mist seep into his bones. As he strained to see into the blackness, a sinister, gravelly voice filled his head:

As always it’s cold and dark as night, and I am filled with hate!

I have slept long—too long—perhaps for decades or centuries, and my hate has kept growing! There was, for a time, another in whom I took delight, but now he is gone. I will avenge him!

I am all alone in this dark world. I take pleasure in my isolation. I have lost much, but what remains is more than enough for what I must do. I have killed many times. Soon I will kill again and make many suffer.

I hate everyone and will kill and maim and torture multitudes, but I have one special enemy. I hate him most of all! He has offended and injured me. He thinks his actions were just, as all self-righteous, self-proclaimed virtuous people do. Who made him the judge of what is just and right?

But it is all delusion! There is no value in virtue. There is no justice in this world. There is nothing fair or just about life. There is only power, irrationality, chaos, hatred, and vengeance! I will have my revenge, however unjust and irrational! Vengeance is mine! I will not rest until I have had my fill of it!

Roger awoke with a start. It may have just been another dream or nightmare, but he couldn’t easily dismiss it. If it was a dream, was it someone else’s dream? That voice and those words disturbed him. But it was more. He sensed the mind behind the words, and—dream or not—he knew the mind meant every word.

He thought again about communicating with Rebecca; he needed her comfort. But he didn’t want her to sense how disturbed he was, so he did the next best thing: He again used his Genius total recall to relive in his mind’s eye, as vividly as if it were happening now, the last time he was together with Rebecca and Roxanne. It was several months ago. They were at home. It was a much more relaxed and happy time. It was game night around the Reynolds family’s dinner table.

Some nights they would have others, like their good friends the Geniuses Chaim and Shelly Katzman, join them for game night. But on the evening Roger was now reliving in his mind, the only players were himself, Rebecca and Roxanne. The evening began, as usual, with three-dimensional chess. Three-dimensional Scrabble followed. Whenever Roxanne won, she would look intensely in her parents’ eyes and say, You let me win. That’s not fair! I can’t know if I’m improving if you keep letting me win.

Later, they challenged each other with some of the most difficult of the world’s unsolved mathematical problems. Rebecca and Roxanne were excellent at this mental exercise. Roger, of course, solved the most problems. As always, they would wait until the world was ready for a particular mathematical advance before inspiring some Ordinary to come up with the solution—so he or she could bring it to the world.

As that night was replayed in Roger’s mind, he watched again as he and Rebecca chose not to play one of their favorite games, which they called International Conflict Resolution.

In that game, one of the Genius players would be given the challenge of coming up with the optimal solution to a difficult, recent international problem, and demonstrate how the player’s solution was superior to the outcome achieved by the Ordinaries who dealt with the actual situation.

Owing to Roxanne’s teenage lack of experience and maturity, it was especially difficult for her to anticipate the reactions of world leaders, which were inevitably greatly influenced by pride and emotion. So to make it a more relaxing time for all, the family decided to end the evening by playing instead the Genius version of the dice game that Ordinaries call craps. They moved to the living room, telekinetically moved the furniture to create a large game space, and then Rebecca brought out and placed in the center of the living room floor a special Genius-made device. It was designed to toss from one die to two hundred dice into the air at the same time with a uniform, preset force. The device was regularly recalibrated and certified for precision.

Rebecca, Roxanne, and Roger sat on the floor, equidistant from the device. Each player in turn would initiate a toss, carefully observe it, and attempt to predict which of the six sides of each of the tossed dice would be face up when they stopped bouncing. The prediction had to be communicated telepathically to the other players before any of the dice landed.

They were using multifactorial analysis and prediction, which, when used by Geniuses, could be absolutely accurate, unlike the error-filled, probabilistic systems employed by Ordinaries. This approach was well beyond the capability of Ordinaries or current computers. It was an application of the same aptitudes that a few Geniuses could use in predicting the weather.

Ordinaries considered it virtually impossible to accurately predict the weather on a consistent basis. For example, until practically the moment of impact, hurricane forecasts were remarkably inaccurate, both as to location and severity. Ordinaries believed there were too many variables, many of which were extremely small, and others were thought to be unknowable. It was said that a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazonian rain forest could influence the weather halfway around the world.

While much of this was true, Geniuses knew the real limitation on predicting the weather was not the number or complexity of the variables, but rather the brain power of the person or computer trying to make the prediction. A very tiny number of extraordinarily gifted Geniuses had the ability to accurately predict global weather. Roger was one of those. How they did it would have been impossible to explain to Ordinaries. Genius brains just worked differently.

What’s more, those same few Geniuses could use that capability to make small interventions that they knew would change the weather. Generally, they chose not to alter the weather because while they could improve conditions where they were, the interventions might well seriously worsen weather elsewhere. And the prime directive of Western Geniuses was: Unless required to save lives, do not interfere in the affairs of Ordinaries!

Genius multifactorial predictive abilities were not only useful in dice or weather prediction. This ability permitted most Geniuses to make better informed decisions in every aspect of their lives. It was extensively employed in their sporting activities and battles. This aptitude gave Geniuses an insurmountable advantage over Ordinaries in competitive endeavors in which