Blink of an Eye Read Free Page A

Mark Nobel who attended the small Nazarene university on Point Loma had watched him surf and insisted Seth give his surfboard a spin. By the time Seth washed back to shore, the student had left for class. Seth wandered onto the campus looking for Mark.
    Half an hour later Seth found him in the math department, wading through a calculus equation with twenty other students and a professor who seemed to be having difficulty showing them just how simple this particular equation really was.
    Seeing Seth at the door, the professor jokingly suggested that he come forward and show this band of half-wits how simple math could be. He did.
    Then he solved another, more complex equation that the professor scribbled on the board. And another. He left the stunned students twenty minutes later, not quite sure how he knew what he knew. The equations just came together in his mind like simple puzzles.
    The teachers at his grade school learned of his little adventure the next day, and their attitude toward him brightened considerably. He agreed to some tests. They said that less than 1 percent of humans had an IQ greater than 135 and that Einstein’s was estimated to be 163. Seth’s IQ was 193. They told him he couldn’t dare waste such an exceptional mind.
    But Seth still had to find a way to cope with reality at home, which meant losing himself in books and riding waves off the point. School simply wasn’t a meaningful part of his world.
    Life improved when his dad left for good after discovering just how effectively an angry thirteen-year-old boy could fight back. But by then Seth had lost his taste for formal education altogether. It wasn’t until he was twenty that he began responding to pressure that he pursue a real education.
    He’d selected Berkeley in part for its proximity. It wasn’t in his backyard, where he was the local curiosity who could count by primes in his sleep; it wasn’t two thousand miles away either. He thought he’d be a blue guy in a green world at Harvard or Yale or any of the other half-dozen universities that begged him to attend. Berkeley seemed like a good compromise.
    The three years that followed failed to challenge him. As much as Seth hated to admit it, he was bored. Bored with academia, bored with his own mind.
    The only real challenge to this boredom came from an unlikely source: a recruiter from the NSA named Clive Masters.
    Berkeley’s dean of students had summoned a gathering of drooling recruiters exclusively for Seth during his freshman year. They came from IBM, NASA, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, and a bunch of Japanese companies. Sony Pictures sent a rep—evidently movie magic took brains. But Clive was the only recruiter who captured Seth’s attention.
    â€œYou have a gift, Seth,” he’d said. “I’ve been watching you for ten years because it’s in my job description to watch people like you. Your disinterest in education just might be a crime. And I’ve given my life to fighting crime, first with the FBI and now with the NSA.”
    â€œFBI, huh? Were you born wrapped in a flag?”
    â€œNo. I was born to be challenged,” Clive said.
    â€œLocking heads with fugitives,” Seth said. “With the dregs of society. Sounds like a ball.”
    â€œThere are two kinds of bad guys. The stupid ones, which make up about 99 percent of the lot, and the brilliant ones—each single-handedly capable of the damage done by a thousand idiots. I’ve gone up against some of the sharpest.” He paused. “But there’s more to the thrill than raw intelligence.”
    â€œAnd what would that be?”
    â€œDanger.”
    Seth nodded. “Danger.”
    â€œThere’s no substitute for the thrill of danger. But I think you’ve already figured that out, haven’t you?”
    â€œAnd the NSA is all about danger.”
    â€œI split my time between being called in on the