Third Eye Patch

Third Eye Patch has it all: Adventure, Suspense, Romance, High Tech, Zen, and even a little taste of Speculative Fiction.
The Third Eye Patch is a biomedical device that allows a person to reset his or her natural body rhythms with an algorithm based on a musical melody. It also unleashes telepathic-like powers, as Mike Chen and his friends discover along the way, as they flee from agents and assassins from the corporate pharmaceutical industry, the hi-tech world, and the U.S. Government.
Mike Chen the Grasshopper is a has-been inspirational writer, philanderer, and new age toastmaster whose good fortune and fifteen minutes of fame have sadly passed him by. After being swindled in a shaky business deal resulting in bankruptcy, foreclosure, and the walkout of his current girlfriend (the beautiful but fragile Beta Bronski), Mike has come to the conclusion that he is a royal fraud, and decides to announce it to the world in a comeback bid.
At his father's funeral, Mike hooks up with his first wife, the notorious literary agent Jennifer Morgan, who offers him a job with The Table Foundation, the brainchild of brilliant 'outlaw' electronics billionaire, Boffin Syznic. In a fit of inspiration, Mike proposes the Third Eye Patch, a meditative patch similar to a nicotine patch, that delivers a calming pulse, instead of added nicotine and other drugs. Syznic not only flips over the idea, he commissions Mike to undertake a journey, a quest: The Search for the Lost Chord, or more accurately, the elusive melody that will be chosen as the algorithm for the meditative patch: The Third Eye Patch!
Along with musicologist Steve Shank, one-time rock god and guitar-slinger, Mike's odyssey takes him from Athens, Macedonia, Istanbul, and the Central Asian Republic of Tuva. The pair are shadowed by nosy reporters and shadowy assassins, because powerful special interests (including Mega-Corporation Perry Pharmaceuticals) cannot allow a meditative patch that promises, in the words of Boffin Syznic: "A life of optimal health and happiness for humankind." The Third Eye Patch is an intolerable threat to their control, and must be stopped right in its tracks.
A shadow agency of the United States Government, the National Agency of Science and Technology (NASTY), has been directed to get the Patch at any cost, and ruthless spymaster FW Piltdown is dispatched to the West Coast, where he recruits and brainwashes Beta Bronski, to spy on the Table Foundation (in the name of "National Security") and acquire the Patch, and pass its secrets on to PerryPharm, and other corporations, to "maintain the balance of power." Will they succeed in suppressing the Third Eye Patch, or will Mike Chen realize his quest for the "Betterment of Humankind”, along with a comfortable amount of cash!
Excerpt:
Mike Chen finds himself sailing, sailing, sailing.
He glides ever closer toward the geographical center of the world, the great heartland where the peoples and tribes arise from fissures in the earth… and from there swarm outward in wave after wave to the south, east and west to conquer the meek, huddled civilizations in the river valleys. Armies march, and horsemen with bows of yew gallop across the endless steppes and plains. Wain-wagons laden with women, children and slaves make their way down two wheeled tracks of beaten down grass—

A bump of turbulence jolted Mike out of his daydream. No, it was only Rex setting the jet on autopilot.
“Nature calls. I don’t even have to ask you not to touch anything, right?”
“You talking to me, Rex?”
Mike had come up into the cockpit to chat with Rex and enjoy the stupendous view, and oh what a view! Below them was all of Russia, once the stamping grounds of the Kazaks, Cossacks, and the Golden Horde. Alternating valley and forest, high barren mountains and grassland steppes, stretched endlessly on the Earth’s curved horizon.