Page 80 of The Session

Norm translated again: “The lieutenant has told him to step aside or be arrested and is ordering his officers to move the bus.”

“Will they?” Mark asked.

“We’ll see,” Norm said. “According to the drone, there aren’t a lot of people around. Sometimes they can get a crowd at this time and make it really difficult. Sometimes they can’t. They might threaten us with the gunmen on the roofs. I can see one over on the burned-out store to the right. Burton and the guys have eyes on the three others off to the left.”

Burton’s voice came over the radio. “Get your flashlights ready.”

Norm rolled down the window and rested the light on the edge of the door.

“Three, two, one,” Burton counted. “Now.”

Norm flipped the switch, and a brilliant beam shot across the night, lighting the top of the building like daytime. Even from this distance, Mark could see the surprised expression on the man leaning over the edge with a rifle. Three other beams appeared on the other side of the convoy as they picked out their targets.

Mark could tell the negotiation had taken a different direction by the change in pitch in the negotiator’s voice.

“They’re going to clear out,” Norm said.

“Just like that?” Mark asked.

“They’ll find somebody else to rob. If they open up with gunfire on the police, it’s bad enough. If they open up on us, none of them are getting away. It’s not worth the risk.”

“Does it usually go this way?” Mark asked.

“Usually. The other times we don’t really talk about. But it’s like Lightman says: It’s not enough to know your math; you’ve got to know their equation and make sure the numbers check out. If you don’t, that’s when problems happen.”

Mark’s ears perked up at Norm quoting Max Lightman on Equation Matching.

“You keep up on the tech?” Mark asked, using the phrase that Lightman students used to identify each other.

“Of course. We all do,” Norm replied. “Don’t you?”

The Trillion-Dollar Brain

One of the things Mark had been surprised to discover in his research into Max Lightman and Arnold Feingold’s work was how pervasive it had been over the decades, making its way into a wide range of industries.

Early on, Lightman had tried to draw attention to himself and his earlier organization, Echo, but at some point in the 1970s, he realized there was more value in anonymity than branding when the goal was to distribute it as widely as possible without attracting competition. By then, he had identified several profit centers in which appearing to be an industry giant was a disadvantage. The first was training phone-sales agents, then working with companies with troubled reputations. Another area where they found significant growth was professional-certification training. Whether it was the person working behind the counter at a pharmacy or a nurse entering someone’s name into a computer, they all had to go through routine, state-required certification. That meant purchasing books and courses to help them prepare.

Summit Strategies had quietly acquired a number of publishers and certification-training companies and consolidated them. The one thing they all had in common, even if different owners appeared on paper, was that they paid licensing fees to use the tech.

A nurse could purchase a course and complete in-person training to get certified and never realize that the course materials were secretly based on the work of Lightman and Feingold.

Outside of corporate training, individuals could enroll in personal-development programs with names like Nova, Supernova, and Chronicle. However, unlike Scientology, which had a religious view buried beneath it, these were closer to professional training and, at worst, self-help motivational programs.

They were also the programs that drew the most allegations that Summit Strategies was cultlike. This created a hard-to-control vector for external criticism. Yet some of Summit Strategies’ most valuable employees were people who had taken the programs on their own initiative and sought to work more closely with the founders.

Then there were people like Michael “Norm” McFarris, who worked as a military contractor for Constellation yet had somehow found his own way to the tech.

After they returned to base, Mark approached Norm as he stowed his gear.

“How did you get into the tech?” he asked.

“I was in a hospital overseas, recuperating from an injury. A nurse lent me an audiobook by Lightman with one of his older lectures. Those are my favorites—not so corporate. It wasn’t the most original thing I’d ever heard, but it was the way he delivered it. I’d taken some shrapnel in my knees, and surgery was a real bitch. I kind of just wanted to sit around and do nothing. But I knew guys like that. They came back demoralized, just wanted to sit in front of the TV and drink beer. I mean, in moderation, that’s fine,” Norm added with a laugh, pointing toward a couch where some of his colleagues were drinking beers and watching a football game.

“What was the audiobook?”

“It’s funny because even at the time, I knew Lightman—no offense—was, we’ll just say, a storyteller, but I knew there were elements of truth to it. He was describing his awakening when he and Arnold took a motorcycle ride across the country. Now, I didn’t have to believe that everything they said happened, happened. But the way he described it—just being free, driving down the highway, close to nature, the wind, stopping wherever the fuck you want, whether it’s a diner or some mesa to go stare up at the stars—that gave me something to think about. It gave me a goal.

“I’d sit there while they pulled out my stitches and dug around in my legs, reading motorcycle magazines and flipping through catalogs. After a while the pain didn’t matter. I didn’t care. The dream was more real,” Norm said.