Geniuses® Iii: The Double-R Prophecy Continues

© 2021 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 09/16/2021

ISBN: 978-1-6655-3235-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-3234-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-3236-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021914697

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

The Double-R Prophecy Continues

Prologue

Chapter 1 The Harem

Chapter 2 Confidants

Chapter 3 The Arena

Chapter 4 The Champion and the Citizens

Chapter 5 Assassination?

Chapter 6 The Scream

Chapter 7 Roxanne Goes Shopping

Chapter 8 Roger’s Wild Ride Home

Chapter 9 A Sleepless Night and Wedding Preparations

Chapter 10 A Short Trip

Chapter 11 The Last Will and Testament of Arkan Astrakhan

Chapter 12 Roger’s Team

Chapter 13 The Wedding and the Uninvited Guest

Chapter 14 Arkady Adjusts to Life in DC

Chapter 15 Arkady Takes a Trip

Chapter 16 Let’s Talk

Chapter 17 Arkady’s Journey to Earth

Chapter 18 They All Have Doubts

Chapter 19 More Failures, Chechens, and a Lady of the Night

Chapter 20 His Team Talks, Roger Thinks, and an F-35 Attacks

Chapter 21 What Really Happened?

Chapter 22 The Team’s Reaction

Chapter 23 A Mother–Daughter Excursion

Chapter 24 Arkady Just Being Arkady

Chapter 25 Simone Is Very Influential

Chapter 26 Arkady Wants to Be the President

Chapter 27 Roger’s Mole

Chapter 28 The Campaign Begins

Chapter 29 Arkady Meets Sammy Slick

Chapter 30 Arkady Becomes a Celebrity

Chapter 31 A Visitor

Chapter 32 Seduction?

Chapter 33 Arkady’s First TV News Interview

Chapter 34 The First Primary Debate

Chapter 35 The Second Primary Debate

Chapter 36 Freddy and Ellis vs. Arkady

Chapter 37 Designing a Weapon

Chapter 38 The Final Weapon Test

Chapter 39 The Last Debate

Chapter 40 Attack on the Reynolds Home

Chapter 41 The Final Battle

Chapter 42 Technology in Action

Chapter 43 Back Home

Acknowledgements

This is the third novel in Neil Flanzraich’s Geniuses® series. The

name Geniuses is trademarked and owned by Neil W. Flanzraich.

To my darling wife and love, Kira, 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. Though unnoticed by the cosmos, a momentous battle has been raging on our planet ever since it was prophesied by the wizard Merlin fifteen centuries ago, and it will soon reach its climax.

Prologue

F or thousands of years, a small group of people have secretly lived among us on Earth. These people have IQs of more than 1,000, extraordinary mental powers, and unusually long lives; they call themselves Geniuses. Geniuses look like ordinary people, whom they call Ordinaries, and through the millennia have been able to blend seamlessly into the world around them, hiding in plain sight and concealing their existence from Ordinaries. There are fewer than five hundred Geniuses throughout the world; about half of them live in the Western Hemisphere and are led by the Western Council of Geniuses. The Geniuses of the Eastern Hemisphere have their own council.

Much more recently, about four hundred years ago, Ordinaries began using the term geniuses, adopting it from the same Latin root. They spell it with a lowercase g and use the term to mean people whose intelligence and creativity are about 40 to 60 percent greater than the average Ordinary. To be considered a Genius with an uppercase G by other Geniuses, a person must have an IQ at least ten times that of the average Ordinary. The IQs of some Geniuses are far higher.

In addition to great intelligence, the Genius genes confer differing degrees of extraordinary mental abilities, including, among others, telepathy, telekinesis, levitation, the ability to read and control minds, the ability to fire powerful laser-like electromagnetic energy pulses from their eyes, the ability to understand and speak any human or animal language, and the ability to project illusions. Their invisible mental shields can, for a time, make them virtually invulnerable.

A very small percentage of Geniuses have other mental powers, such as extraordinary vision and/or extraordinary hearing, the ability to change their appearance to match any human form, the power to control the weather, the power to alter or influence the minds of other Geniuses, and the almost mystical power of prophecy. Some Geniuses can even generate an exact double of themselves, with identical powers.

Even more rare is the ability to intensely focus mental energy on another Genius’s mind, exerting a force that counteracts the subatomic forces holding together the neurons and synapses in the mind of the other Genius. A Genius with this exceptional ability can, for example, use this power to weaken another Genius’s powers of levitation and telekinesis.

Some Geniuses are good, some evil, and others somewhere in between. The evil ones often abuse and dominate Ordinaries. The extremely evil ones take pleasure in torturing and killing Ordinaries.

Most Geniuses are law-abiding. They try not to interfere with the lives of the Ordinaries—except to protect them from serious injury or death. Virtuous Geniuses do not reveal their extraordinary abilities to Ordinaries or try to control them. On occasion Geniuses work with Ordinaries, befriend them, and even try to inspire them. The ancient Greeks became aware of such influencers and called them muses.

Roger Reynolds is the current leader of the Western Council of Geniuses. Certain good Geniuses, including Roger Reynolds, his family, and his friends, have devoted their lives to protecting Ordinaries from evil Geniuses—so they can live free of abuse and control. This has invariably earned the enmity of the evil Geniuses, who have retaliated against the good Geniuses, causing bad blood and generational conflict between families of Geniuses.

For thousands of years, generations of the evil Genius Astrakhan family have waged war against the Genius Reynolds family. Roger Reynolds learned this only six months ago. He was summoned at night to the London Eye, the giant illuminated Ferris wheel on the Thames. There Roger learned that Alexander Astrakhan and two other evil Geniuses (with whom Alexander was conspiring to take over the world) wanted to kill him, his wife, and his daughter. Roger had always considered Alexander a close family friend. Alexander was Roger’s superior at the Western Council of Geniuses, and he was believed to be the most powerful living Genius.

During that late-night battle over the Thames, Roger and the three evil Geniuses levitated above the Ferris wheel, hurling powerful energy blasts at each other. While they fought, Alexander taunted Roger, saying that he had always hated him and his family and had long wanted to kill them all and that he had murdered Roger’s parents during the Civil War. Alexander hoped his revelations would distract and weaken Roger. He did not explain why he hated the Reynolds family.

As the battle reached its climax, Alexander Astrakhan and his two evil allies tried to incinerate Roger’s wife and daughter with energy pulses. Desperate to save his family, Roger found within himself greater strength and mental power. He ended Astrakhan’s life by slamming his body into the spike-like mast of a forty-foot sailboat floating below them on the Thames.

Roger’s family and friends, relieved by the victory, hoped this would end the Astrakhan threat. That relief was short-lived. Soon the still-living, disembodied brain of the ancient evil Genius Abaddon Astrakhan began attacking Roger’s family and friends. Abaddon Astrakhan was a distant ancestor of Alexander Astrakhan.

Abaddon Astrakhan had first attacked the Reynolds family in the sixth century. A young Abaddon Astrakhan had betrayed and driven his sword into the back of Roger’s ancestor, Sir Reginald Reynolds. Sir Reginald was a Genius and a knight of King Arthur’s Round Table. He had lowered his mental shield, believing Abaddon was a good friend. Within moments of his unprovoked attack on Sir Reginald, Abaddon also murdered Sir Reginald’s wife and small daughter. (Roger Reynolds would descend directly from Sir Reginald’s first child, Richard, who had left Camelot to seek his fortune two years before Abaddon Astrakhan showed up.)

As Sir Reginald lay dying, he called upon his friend Merlin to look into the future and tell him if Abaddon Astrakhan or his descendants would be punished for the terrible wrong he had done to the Reynolds family. Although Merlin was known as a wizard, he was also a Genius, and one of his powers was clairvoyance. Merlin peered into the mists of time and told his dying friend what he saw in the distant future.

What Merlin foresaw became known as the Double-R Prophecy, derived from the Reynolds family’s tradition of giving their children first names that, like the family’s last name, began with the letter R. Sir Reginald Reynolds died moments after he heard Merlin’s prophecy, and neither Roger nor any other living person knew what Merlin had prophesied.

After murdering Sir Reginald and his family, Abaddon became terrified that the knight’s powerful friends, including Merlin and King Arthur himself, would inflict terrible retribution against him. Abaddon immediately fled the scene of his crimes. Realizing that no place would be safe from such formidable Geniuses, Abaddon chose to go underground and give up his corporeal form. He endured the desperate and unimaginably painful ancient Druid disembodiment ritual.

Abaddon Astrakhan’s powerful, evil, disembodied brain subsisted for more than fifteen centuries in a subterranean bunker below Stonehenge; from there it caused the deaths of millions with plagues it generated, and it tortured and murdered generations of Reynolds family members. Eventually, the brain drifted into a serotonin-induced stupor. But it was awakened when Roger killed Alexander Astrakhan, Abaddon’s only living descendant. The disembodied brain began immediately taking revenge on the Reynolds family.

To get Abaddon Astrakhan out of his virtually invulnerable bunker, Roger arranged for an agent, a Genius unknown to Astrakhan, to telepathically offer the disembodied brain a chance to acquire a new, bioengineered body—much like Abaddon’s body in the distant past.

One of Roger’s team members had mystical, mind-altering powers that could not be blocked by Astrakhan’s mental shield. She subtly managed to decrease the disembodied brain’s skepticism. Then Roger’s agent offered the brain a risk-free way to again experience physical pleasure—which it sorely missed, having been without a body for fifteen centuries.

In this way, Roger tricked the fiend into leaving the safety of its bunker. Astrakhan’s brain emerged from the bunker and entered the new bioengineered body. Soon Roger and Abaddon Astrakhan began battling on the ground where Camelot had stood.

Abaddon and Roger repeatedly blasted each other with strong energy pulses from their brains, but both were protected by their invisible mental shields. Each projected illusions into his opponent’s mind. They also played various other mind games on each other, achieving only fleeting advantages. When he began tiring, Abaddon levitated himself ninety miles away to Stonehenge. Roger followed him there, and the battle continued.

After several hours of fighting, Roger propelled himself into Astrakhan, forcefully knocking his head into one of Stonehenge’s megaliths. That blow jolted Astrakhan’s mental shield out of kilter and incapacitated it. Roger lowered his own shield, and the battle continued with bare fists.

Physically touching the villain ignited a deep, repressed anger within Roger over all the harm the Astrakhans had caused his family and other innocents over the centuries. In a rage, Roger pummeled Abaddon ferociously. When he realized that he was beating a foe who could no longer defend himself, Roger let Abaddon drop to the ground, turned his back, and walked away.

As Roger walked off, Astrakhan began to recover. Roger, still in emotional turmoil, was slow to raise his mental shield. Abaddon struck Roger from behind with repeated energy blasts and was about to kill him. Just then, Merlin, the Reynolds family’s sixth-century friend, miraculously materialized from the distant past to rescue Roger. He left Astrakhan alive but prostrate on the ground, as a forty-ton Stonehenge megalith hung two hundred feet above him.

Abaddon was frozen with terror. Knowing that his life hung by a thread, he thought:

My whole life is flashing before me. I just saw my birth—two thousand, five hundred years ago. I recall traveling a long distance in a strange vehicle when I was an infant. It was a difficult journey. When the journey ended, I was in sixth-century Germany, and a few years later, I made my way to England.

There I managed to become the friend of a knight named Sir Reginald Reynolds. But I secretly hated him. Later, I betrayed and killed Reynolds, his wife and little daughter. To escape horrific reprisals, I chose painful disembodiment.

In a subterranean bunker beneath Stonehenge, all my flesh, muscle, sinew, and bone were surgically removed in an ancient ritual by Druid priests—without any anesthetic or other means of deadening the agony. The excruciating pain seemed endless. But in this way I managed to obtain security and a kind of immortality for my brain and personality. I thanked the Druids for their efforts by inflicting on them the most painful deaths I could devise.

From that time until just hours ago, I lived as a disembodied brain in a cold, dank bunker below Stonehenge. During those long, dark years, I continued to seek pleasure—even if sanctimonious mystics and clerics would have condemned it as evil pleasure. I mentally provoked wars around the world. Through the eyes of others, I watched as millions of innocents died. What delight!

My greatest pleasure in the millennium and a half I spent disembodied came from causing the genetic modification of animal diseases, so they would be transmitted to Ordinaries. I watched as tens of millions of Ordinaries died horrendous deaths from the plagues I created. The Black Death in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was one of my greatest achievements! What joy!

Hatred kept me going through all those dark centuries, an all-consuming hatred of that venomous breed, the Reynolds family! I hated them all. I have been torturing and killing members of that clan since I slew Sir Reginald. What pleasure! I didn’t even know why I hated them. Only now, with my life hanging by a thread, have I begun to understand my hate, and I glory in it!

It shames me to say that I cast off my protected, disembodied, underground existence when I was hoodwinked by a Genius con artist. He was, no doubt, in league with my archenemy—Roger Reynolds. That con man seduced me into wanting a body so I could again experience the pleasures of the flesh. Where was my vaunted skepticism?

I foolishly emerged from my underground bunker into the light of day and allowed my mental force to enter the body which that con man provided. For a few minutes, it seemed glorious.

The breeze caressing my skin, the sweet odors of flowers and grass, the blue sky and birds flying overhead, and the warmth of sunlight on my body for the first time in fifteen centuries—it was a fantastic dream come true.

But then my enemy appeared and attacked me. Roger Reynolds and I battled throughout the day. When Reynolds rammed my head into one of the massive Stonehenge megaliths, my mental shield, a Genius’s ultimate defense, stopped working.

I stood defenseless against my enemy. He could have ended my life with his weakest energy pulse. Instead, he lowered his own shield. The fool! We fought on with fists, exchanging crushing blows. Taller and stronger than I, he beat me almost senseless. Then strangely, he turned his back on me and walked away. He did not quickly raise his mental shield. The absolute fool!

This was my chance. With all my remaining strength, I fired a series of energy pulses at his back and knocked him to the ground. I could hardly contain my joy. My greatest victory, the validation of my existence, was at hand, and I savored the moment. But just as I stood over him and was about to destroy my foe, I was knocked off my feet by a powerful earth tremor.

One of those massive, forty-ton Stonehenge megaliths had been torn from the ground—by what force I do not know. I could do nothing as some force raised that stone, seemingly effortlessly, two hundred feet into the air. Now directly above my head, it hangs like an avenging angel.

If that gigantic stone crashes down on me, it will crush the life out of me. Or will it? Somehow, even as death hovers over me, I feel a glimmer of hope. Perhaps my evil life force will not be extinguished. Perhaps my essence will somehow survive.

Frozen with fear, I cannot move. If that gigantic stone starts to plummet, and I see doom race toward me, all I will be able to do is scream. But my scream will be unlike any other! It will travel throughout all time and space—from the beginning of time to its end, to every corner of the universe and beyond!

Chapter 1

The Harem

On the planet Astrakon in a galaxy far, far away

T he Supreme Ruler was enjoying himself. He had turned off his mental shield and given his current favorite the privilege of shaving his face. She was a voluptuous, raven-haired beauty from a continent in Astrakon’s eastern hemisphere. Unfortunately, her hand slipped when he unexpectedly moved his head, and the razor nicked his chin. He felt an instant of sharp pain, and droplets of blood stained his silk shirt and an elaborate rug. Because of the protection provided by his invisible mental shield, he had not bled or felt pain in almost two thousand years. For a moment the Supreme Ruler was afraid. She could have killed me!

Then he became incensed. Like a lightning bolt, a powerful, laser-like blue energy beam pulsed from his cold, black eyes. The ill-fated young woman was instantly incinerated. The careless trollop! he snarled. What a waste … of a shirt and rug! He cared not a whit about the life he had just snuffed out.

In an instant, the Supreme Ruler thought better of what he had done. He preferred not to openly display his hard heart and callous disregard for life. And given the distress he saw on the faces of his other harem beauties, he became concerned that the incident might diminish their lovemaking enthusiasm. I wouldn’t like that! But happily, I can always erase impulsive mistakes.

The Supreme Ruler swiftly erased his harem’s memories of the incident and of the young woman he had killed. Then he telepathically directed another of his harem ladies to finish shaving him and smiled warmly at her.

Arkady Astrakhan appeared to be about fifty years old. He was six feet six and powerfully built, with a full head of jet-black hair and a jet-black mustache and goatee. He thought himself handsome, with no interest whatsoever in what others thought. This powerful Genius, the absolute dictator of Astrakon, a planet in the Andromeda Galaxy, ruled by fear. People so feared him that they didn’t dare to speak his name. They referred to him only as the Supreme Ruler.

Even as he used fear to compel obedience, he skillfully created the impression that he was kindhearted and benevolent. To engender fear and sympathy simultaneously was no simple feat, but Arkady Astrakhan was anything but simple.

The Supreme Ruler had spent the afternoon in his harem. Of course, while his body was in the harem, his powerful mind was wherever he wished it to be, spying on his subjects and administering his empire. The harem’s large grand salon constructed of marble and gold had a dome-shaped ceiling that spectacularly depicted the night sky of the Andromeda Galaxy. The harem was on the top floor of the east wing of the magnificent royal palace. A century ago, Arkady had ordered the palace to be built