LITMIR.BIZ

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the study of paranormal phenomena, a feat for which he had been equally revered and ridiculed. Over the years, the Institute had a finger in extrasensory perception, psychokinesis and remote viewing, as well as sundry other psi disciplines. There’d even been a case involving a poltergeist that had, unfortunately, received quite a bit of publicity.

      In the early years, Morgan hadn’t minded making headlines. The opposite, in fact. Morgan Tyrell had been accused of being quite the publicity whore. His motto: Create a scandal! That’s how a man made his mark on the world.

      These days he had more than his reputation to think about. After living his life with his work as a singular focus, he’d somehow managed the coup of having a family.

      The one thing his daughter didn’t want was publicity.

      So Morgan had brought it down a notch—several, in fact—enjoying a more subdued lifestyle. On weeknights, he would send his limo for an evening out with Gia and Stella. Sometimes he even had his granddaughter, Stella, up for the weekend. There wasn’t anything Morgan enjoyed more than watching her peek in on the laboratories to discuss ongoing research conducted under the Institute’s many grants.

      For the sake of his daughter and granddaughter, the only scandal Morgan created these days happened in a laboratory. Morgan and his minions at the Institute had handily managed to alienate both the scientific and paranormal communities, a fact that often brought a smile to the face of its fearless leader.

      The Institute bragged state-of-the-art facilities that included a Cray Supercomputer and a NMR spectrometer. It housed ten laboratories in over three hundred thousand square feet overlooking the Pacific Ocean. At any one time, its offices supported a minimum of eight hundred professors, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students in research that spanned from conventional to downright weird, anything that demonstrated how human consciousness interacted with the physical world.

      While nonprofit, it was a well-known fact that Morgan’s millions floated the Institute’s continued existence—which seemed only fair considering many believed he’d been unusually lucky in the stock market. Again, that rumored army of psychics.

      When asked if he employed some paranormal technique in choosing his investments, Morgan always winked and answered it never hurt to bet on a good hunch.

      At the moment, the Institute’s crowning gem, its self-proclaimed Brain Trust—a secret circle within what was already a circumspect community—held court in one of several glass-enclosed conference rooms. A teak sideboard from the Jaipur region of India lay loaded down with pastries and gourmet coffee. An ornate tapestry of a White Tara, the female Buddha worshipped in Tibet, added to the room’s tranquil atmosphere. Around an antique oval table carved in the traditional Tibetan style sat five famous, as well as infamous, academic figures.

      At the head of the table, Morgan sat with steepled fingers pressed against his mouth as he leaned back in the soft leather chair. He wore a perfectly tailored Armani suit in a shade of gray that complimented his silver hair and pale blue eyes. As always, he played moderator for today’s topic of choice: Does God play dice with the universe?

      The question, originally asked and answered by Einstein in the negative, had inspired one member, Gonzague de Rozières, or Zag as he was called, to publish a provocative article entitled Dark Matter and Free Will in the most recent issue of Journal of Parapsychology. Morgan had signed on to the article, bringing on the ire of one particular member of their sacred circle.

      “Dark matter, dark energy, I don’t care what you want to call it, the concept has nothing to do with free will, the soul, the color of your aura or any other mumbo jumbo that you, Zag, want to legitimize with some slight-of-hand quantum equations.”

      The challenge came from the cosmologist of the group, Dr. Theodore Fields. Theodore—never Ted or Teddy—was the group’s resident skeptic. At the moment, the man’s receding hairline did a nice job of displaying his furrowed brow. Zag never brought out the best in the man.

      Theodore’s penchant for colorful bow ties—today’s was a splashy red-and-yellow-striped number—seemed to magnify rather than update his age. Despite Theodore’s valiant attempt, there was nothing cool or modern about the dumpy figure tossing verbal grenades from across the table, which made absolutely no difference to those who coveted his company. The man was a certified genius in physics.

      “Once again, Theodore, you seemed to have missed the point.”

      The challenge came from the article’s author and the group’s more colorful personality. Zag, the youngest member of the Brain Trust, never tired of waving the psi flag before Theodore’s nose.

      “Really?” Theodore replied, acid in his voice. “And here I was certain you didn’t make a point, at all. Not a valid one, in any case.”

      “Oh, come now. I was quite clever in citing your own take on the uncertainty principle to validate my thesis,” Zag replied silkily.

      Morgan held back a smile. In the world of quantum physics, the location of a particle can never be discussed with a hundred percent certainty. Rather it can be discussed only in terms of probabilities. And while a Google search of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and free will would yield over a hundred thousand hits, it was the mathematical dexterity Zag used, manipulating Field’s own equations, that made his take truly unique, worthy of publication in a peer-reviewed journal and bearing the Institute’s name with Morgan as a coauthor.

      The younger man reminded Morgan of himself during his early years: self-made, fearless in establishing his dominance in the field of parapsychology. There was even a slight physical resemblance. Both men possessed a shock of white hair; Morgan’s the product of age, Zag’s, a credit to his stylist.

      Morgan had never seen hair so white-blond it was almost translucent. And the fashion eccentricities didn’t stop at his hair color or the occasional eyeliner. Last week, Zag had shown up wearing a leather kilt.

      But then, given the company he kept, rock stars and Oscar winners, the choice in wardrobe was hardly surprising. His suit today was a patchwork of suede dyed in shades of brown, making the man’s near-colorless eyes appear almost beige. Like Morgan, he was popular with the ladies. Only his broken nose prevented his delicate features from being too pretty.

      Morgan always claimed it was Zag’s seminal work in auras that had granted him the keys to the Brain Trust. But there was also the matter of money. Zag’s corporation, Halo Industries, made even Morgan’s vast fortune appear modest. Even now, work was being done on a new underground laboratory, courtesy of Halo Industries, one to rival any used by the government for its supersecret black projects.

      “If all the laws of physics are set,” Zag continued, “then from the moment of the big bang, everything is predetermined. How you act, how you think, even if you should want spaghetti for dinner, these are just atomic interactions—in your brain, in your body. At a fundamental level, even people interacting are just atoms interacting.”

      “But even as you yourself point out in the article, the laws of physics are not set. Under quantum physics, the world is full of uncertainties.”

      This soft lob came from Martha Ozbek, considered by many as Theodore Fields’s opposite number in academia. An anthropologist by training, she had developed an expertise in psychic artifacts and the paranormal. Her recent book, How To Find Self, a tome discussing man’s unique relationship with the paranormal over the centuries, had remained on the New York Times bestseller list for half a dozen weeks.

      While cagey in revealing her own beliefs, she was a fervent advocate for the paranormal, often coming to Zag’s defense in these clashes. She’d had the privilege to work with the likes of Thelma Moss, a parapsychologist known for her work in Kirlian photography, photographs that purportedly supplied tangible proof of supernatural auras. To Martha, the belief in the paranormal dated as far back as the cave drawings in France, and therefore, was a legitimate area of study for an anthropologist.

      Martha herself was worthy of a little study. At almost sixty, she could still catch a man’s eyes. She favored flowing caftans in colors that accented her bright blue eyes and

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