The President's Brain Is Missing Read Online Free Page A

give Dave my report in”—he glanced at his watch—“three and a half hours.”
    â€œI’m surprised you haven’t told him this already,” Stein said.
    â€œHe’s apparently one of those people who thinks night is for sleeping,” Alex said, and yawned. “Speaking of which, I’m going to go grab a cab and crawl into my apartment and see if I can’t get a couple of hours before I have to get back here.”
    â€œI’ll try to have something for you then,” Stein said.
    â€œThank you,” Alex said, and made his way out of the West Wing to the guard station, where the cab he’d ordered was there to take him to his apartment. He was enjoying that pleasantly light-headed feeling he got when he’d been up all night, right up until his cab drove away and a white panel van drove up in its place, the side door slid open, and someone from inside reached out and grabbed him.
    Oh, shit, North Koreans, Alex thought, before something was shoved over his mouth and nostrils and he blacked out.

    Alex woke up on a cot in a concrete room bare except for a man with a gun, the donut he was eating, the chair he was sitting in and a television set he was watching, apparently with the sound turned down.
    â€œWho are you?” Alex asked the man.
    â€œYour babysitter,” the man said, and then reached into his pocket and pulled out a cell phone without looking up from the television. “He’s awake,” then man said, after he had dialed a number.
    â€œCan I get up?” Alex said, after the man had completed his call.
    The man shrugged. “Do what you want. Commode is through that other door.”
    â€œWhat if I want to leave?” Alex asked.
    The man motioned to the door. “It’s locked from the outside. You can try it if you like.”
    â€œWhy am I here?” Alex asked.
    The man finally looked over at Alex. “Relax, Mr. Lipsyte,” he said. “No one’s going to kill you.”
    â€œYou have a gun,” Alex said.
    â€œI always have a gun,” the man said, turning back to the television. “I’m Secret Service.”
    Ten minutes later the door opened and Brad Stein entered the room, holding a bag. “Hello, Alex,” he said, and walked over to the cot to hand Alex the bag. “I brought you dinner. Hope you like cheeseburgers.”
    Alex took the bag. “Dinner,” he said.
    â€œYou’ve been asleep for a while,” Stein said. “Don’t worry. I saw Dave and told him how I sent you home after I came in at six and saw you throwing up into your wastebasket, the victim of some genuinely awful 24-hour flu bug. I also passed on your information to him, minus a few details.”
    â€œLike about Lisa and Martha Reynolds,” Alex said.
    â€œYes, that,” Stein said, and leaned up against the wall of the room. “I have to say I was really rather annoyed when you asked to see the list of dead scientists,” he said. “I didn’t think that anyone would ask for something like that. You caught me with my pants down.”
    â€œLouis Reynolds is alive,” Alex said.
    â€œHe is,” Stein said. “Faked his death and has been working in a NSA black ops lab ever since, with his wife and daughter attached to the lab staff. All under new names. Standard issue federal relocation.”
    â€œAnd he’s solved that transporter thing,” Alex said. “The thing where living things get turned into meat.”
    â€œNo, actually, he hasn’t,” Stein said. “But we did the next best thing. Rather than trying to push the President’s brain through a spacetime hole, we wrapped a spacetime hole around the President’s brain. The President’s brain is still in his head. Always has been. There’s just no way to access it, except through the spinal cord and the arteries and veins in his neck. From any other angle, anything