The Devil's Interval Read online

  Praise for Kevin Tumlinson’s “Dan Kotler”

  ★★★★★ “Move over Daniel Silva, James Patterson, and Dan Brown.”

  —Chip Polk, Amazon Review for ‘The Atlantis Riddle’

  ★★★★★ “Part Doc Savage, Part Indiana Jones.”

  —Bruce Boughner, Amazon Review for ‘The Atlantis Riddle’

  ★★★★★ “Half way through I was waiting for Harrison Ford to leap out of the pages!”

  —Deanne, Amazon Review for ‘The Coelho Medallion’

  The Devil's Interval

  A Dan Kotler Thriller

  Kevin Tumlinson

  Copyright © 2017 by Kevin Tumlinson

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Print ISBN: 9781386882909

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part II

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Part III

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Epilogue

  Keep the Adventure Going!

  A Note at the End

  Here’s how to help me reach more readers

  About the Author

  Also by Kevin Tumlinson

  Prologue

  Manhattan, New York | March 29

  It was quiet, and Ashton Mink hated quiet. He’d been in the music business for nearly forty years now, and there had been very few moments of absolute quiet during his life. He had always lived for the noise. It fed him, nourished him. It was part of his DNA. Sound made him who he was.

  Even now, after retiring from touring, he still hit the stage for local sets. He still recorded and produced and performed. He helped other musicians get their sound right, get in front of the right audience, and get into the business of spotlights and autographs and groupies.

  It was never about the spotlight for him, anyway. The girls and the drugs and the parties were perks, but it was always, could only have been, would forever be all about the sound.

  In fact, sound was at the heart of everything Ashton did in his life. His charity, for example, was built on the idea of sound changing the world.

  It had started with that little girl.

  Agnus Janson. Known as “Aggie” here in the states. She was a Latvian orphan whom Ashton met while on his final tour. She’d been a big fan of his—Latvia had only just opened as a market for Ashton and other musicians, a few years ago. Decades of music that had played out in the States was now fresh and new in some parts of the world. Little Aggie had just discovered Ashton Mink when she moved to the US. As a treat, her guardian brought her to one of his concerts, and somehow managed to get her backstage to meet Ashton and the band, to get some photos and, hopefully, an autograph.

  It was the kind of thing that happened all the time, and Ashton wasn’t upset about it in the least. It was routine. He’d probably signed a million autographs and posed for a million photos with a million little girls over the years. And so, he had knelt beside her, put an arm around her, and said, “Smile for the camera, love.”

  And for the first time he noticed that her guardian, standing just to the side of the photographer, was using sign language.

  The photographer snapped the photo, and Ashton turned to face little Aggie. It was the first he noticed the bulky devices behind each of her ears, hidden somewhat by her hair, but still visible if you were looking. Aggie was smiling, blissful, and she hugged him tight. He returned the hug, and patted her on the back as she ran back to her guardian, the two of them signing to each other in excitement.

  Before they could leave, Ashton caught up with them.

  “I’m sorry,” he said to the guardian. “But, is she … well, is she deaf?”

  The guardian, whom Ashton would later learn was named Amanda, nodded and smiled. “She has cochlear implants, but she still has profound deafness. It’s hard for her to make out what people are saying in situations like this,” she waved a hand around the crowded room, where thousands of Ashton’s fans were waiting for autographs and photos of their own.

  Ashton shook his head. “Why bring her to a concert? Can she even hear the music?”

  Amanda laughed. “She feels it! And yes, she can hear it. It’s … well, it’s kind of loud.”

  Ashton smiled and laughed a little. Loud was part of the game.

  Amanda and Aggie left, but not before Ashton had his manager get their contact information. He wanted to follow up with these two, later. He wanted to know more.

  He had heard of cochlear implants, but they weren’t really anything top of mind for him. His world was absolutely filled with sound—music and crowds and a million other noises and tones that washed over him every day. But he had a secret. Something he hadn’t told anyone but his closest friends.

  The sound was starting to fade.

  He’d noticed it in the studio first. He kept having to up the gain on his headphones, to make out the nuances of the tracks he was producing. He could once pick out a sour note buried three tracks deep, and now he was struggling to hear all the subtleties of even one track.

  Doctors confirmed it for him. He was losing his hearing. Years of exposure to loud environments had wrecked him. It was part of the reason he decided to retire after a forty-year career. He kept the real reasons quiet, of course. Publicly, he was “just ready to move on to other challenges.”

  He would still be a part of the industry, still produce new music with new artists. And he’d play from time to time, with some ear protection in place. But how could he walk away from music entirely? It was unthinkable.

  But there were other things in life besides music. If he was being honest with himself, Ashton was starting to feel the pull of paths he hadn’t taken. Not regret, exactly. More like a longing for things he’d left undone to the point of never doing them at all. A family. A legacy.

  He wanted to leave something behind in the world that wasn’t just plug-and-play. Years on the road had prevented him from having any real family, but maybe he could leave something else as his legacy. Maybe there was a way to do some good in the world, and have that be what people remembered about him.

  After meeting Aggie and Amanda, and later talking with them at length about Aggie’s implants, Ashton felt he had his new mission.

  Cochlear implants weren’t a new technology. They were invented in 1979, by Professor Graeme Clark, at the University of Melbourne in Australia. Over the next thirty years they saw a great deal of advancement and improvement, and by 2012 there were over three-hundred-thousand implants in use, worldwide. Almost forty-thousand of those who depended on cochlear implants were children.

  In the years since that official number, hundreds of thousands of additional adults and kids had gotten cochlear implants. A quick tour of YouTube had shown Ashton dozens of “first sound” videos—children and even adults hearing th
e sound of a loved one’s voice for the first time in their lives. These videos were profound, and brought tears to his eyes. He could barely imagine what it would be like, to suddenly hear for the first time.

  It didn’t happen all at once, but over the course of months, after retiring from the stage, Ashton started to come up with a plan. He consulted with his business manager, who put him in touch with a few people in the know. From there he met with experts and advisors. He’d seen more suits in the past two months than he’d seen in his entire life up to then, but they were telling him exactly what he had hoped to hear.

  After half a century of being a rock star, he had the money and the connections to do something, and as someone suffering from progressive hearing loss himself, he had plenty of motive. But the real driving force for him was Aggie, and kids like her. He had a chance to leave a legacy that involved children after all.

  Within six months of retiring from the stage, the Ashton Mink Sound Lab was established—a research and development facility set up as a hybrid charity.

  That last bit had been particularly interesting to Ashton. It had come as advice from several of the big movers and shakers he knew—people who regularly did TED Talks and created startups that had a real impact on the world. Ashton had played enough charity and fundraising events for these folks that a lot of them knew him, liked him, even owed him favors. And it was through them that he came across the hybrid charity concept.

  The idea was that, overall, charities weren’t very effective.

  Completely reliant on donations and good-will benefactors, charitable organizations rarely had the funds to attract top talent, much less to conduct the kind of highly technical and innovative research that Ashton wanted his organization to do. The real movers in the world were businesses—corporations set up for profit. The problem was, for-profit businesses tended to make decisions based on what was in the best interest of shareholders, while charities were designed to benefit people in need.

  One of Ashton’s high profile friends pointed him to a TED Talk by Dan Palotta, titled “The way we think about charity is dead wrong.” Palotta’s talk focused on the concept that a charitable organization could do more good if it could attract better CEOs, better marketing experts, better researchers, and so forth. The only way to attract that kind of talent, however, was with money. An organization that is set up for profit is in a better position to fund humanitarian efforts than a non-profit.

  This presented some challenges.

  The answer, according to Palotta, was a hybrid of the two models, in which a for-profit business used part of its revenue to further humanitarian causes, typically in exchange for tax relief and other benefits. The result, though, would be a corporation built around people in need as its primary shareholders.

  That talk changed everything for Ashton, giving him a perspective he’d never had before. It also cinched what he planned to do.

  Rather than make his organization a non-profit, he instead made it a profit-based business that shared what it produced for the benefit of those in need. The direction and goals of the company incorporated two directives, with the for-profit side directly facilitating the non-profit side.

  AMSL—often pronounced AM-SUL by the press—conducted research and developed new sound-based technologies that were sold or licensed for profit. Those profits were used to fund the growth of the charitable side of the business, which was aimed at the development of better technologies to help the hearing impaired.

  It worked better than Ashton had even dreamed. With his endorsement, and with the company’s ability to attract top talent—from marketing to management to research—the business grew rapidly. Within the first year, AMSL had hired some of the most respected experts in a variety of disciplines, and it was starting to make waves in the world, across a variety of industries.

  To date, AMSL held nearly a thousand new patents, and was licensing many of those to major corporations worldwide. The business was directly responsible for radical new advancements in fields such as surround sound, noise cancelling, improved smartphone tech, and more. Even the medical industry was benefiting from advancements in sonic-based equipment, including new non-invasive scanning and surgical tools.

  But the biggest success came from the original mission—these new advancements were making cochlear implants better by reducing their size, increasing their capabilities, and dramatically reducing their costs. In the three years since founding AMSL, the cost per implant had gone from nearly fifty-thousand dollars per unit to around five-thousand. And for every implant sold, another was donated to a child in need.

  It was a company and a legacy to be proud of. It was something honorable for Ashton to leave in the world. His music had touched hearts and changed lives over a long and successful career, but his technology would improve the lives of millions, and for centuries to come. He couldn’t think of a better mark to leave.

  And then there was the discovery.

  It had started innocently enough. One of the researchers and his partner pitched the idea of technology that could directly interface a cochlear device with a human brain, without the need for surgery. A ‘wearable,’ as they called it—a device tuned to the individual, and something they could carry with them, without having it attached to their skull. Maybe it would be a necklace. Or a watch. Or a pair of glasses. It could even be integrated with existing technology, such as a smartphone.

  If this team succeeded, it would change everything for so many people. A new way to bring hearing to the deaf, better hearing to the impaired, maybe even super hearing to people with no impairments at all.

  Basically, the pitch was a cure for deafness.

  That really got Ashton worked up. He was all smiles about it, every time the updates came. He didn’t have much to do with the day-to-day research of his company, since he was more of the face of the business than a director. But he’d taken a very personal interest in this one. He was highly invested.

  The coolest thing, though, was that the research was based on something old and archaic.

  The lead researcher—Dr. Simon Patel—happened to have a background in studying acoustic theory and technology throughout the ages. He was an expert on everything from the inventions of the phonograph and the telephone to more obscure audio technology that was nearly lost to history. He was a profoundly gifted engineer, Ashton was told, and brought a very fresh and innovative perspective to his work.

  Ashton wasn’t much for history, but he appreciated the idea of taking something old and making it serve a new purpose. Maybe it was his age. He was feeling a little ancient, these days, but he’d managed to find new purpose, to be put to new use. So, he could appreciate what Dr. Patel was bringing to the game.

  In fact, Patel’s knowledge of history eventually led to an obscure collection of research conducted in the early 1700s.

  Ashton couldn’t remember all the details, but he knew that it involved a priest or a monk or someone studying the tritone—what a lot of people referred to as ‘the devil’s interval.’ Some chords were thought to cause people to think naughty thoughts, was how Ashton perceived it. The devil in the music.

  Ashton knew what a tritone was, of course. Most musicians did.

  Basically, a tritone, or a ‘tri,’ was half an octave, or three whole steps between two notes. It was a perfect fifth, with a flat, or an augmented fourth, with a sharp. When you played a series of tritones it could sound like an old horror movie soundtrack—kind of creepy and edgy. But most music resolved the tritones, transitioning into music that people were familiar and cool with. Music with an emotional impact tended to stick with a listener.

  The point of what Simon Patel uncovered, however, wasn’t really the tritone itself. He’d come across research about how tone and frequency could influence people, creating feelings and impressions, maybe even hallucinations. And even better, he’d discovered that the right frequencies created these impressions even in people who were incapable of hearing.

>   Sound could influence thinking, even if someone couldn’t hear it.

  That was exactly what they needed. And as soon as Ashton heard it he put the full weight of his 51 shares in AMSL behind digging deeper, making sure Patel got all the funding and resources he needed.

  For months, Patel led a team of squints—Ashton’s name for the white-coated lab workers who mostly knew his music from TV commercials and movie soundtracks. They were a square bunch, but very good at their work. It took less than a year for them to make the breakthrough everyone had been hoping for, with Patel feeding them insights and ideas to drive things along. Patel was a marvel, coming up with new theories and practically inventing new technologies overnight. And this tech, which they had jokingly codenamed “Devil’s Interval,” was purely next-level. Patel would go into the history books over this work.

  They had technology that could transmit sound directly into the brain, without the need for surgery.

  Trials started as soon as they had a prototype, and that was when Ashton wanted to yank his hair out. There was a protocol to these things, he was told repeatedly. Everything had to be done in order, and on a timeline, before they could get approval for human trials. But eventually those hoops were jumped through, expedited a bit by donations to the right lobbyists at the right time.