A Better World

CHAPTER 26

The last time he’d been in New Canaan it had been the height of summer, and even so the evenings had been chilly. Now, midnight in late November, it was twenty degrees. Even standing in a crowd, the wind on the airfield cut through the leather jacket he’d brought, and he stomped his feet and blew into his hands.

Too bad you ditched your security detail. They probably could have lent you a proper coat.

It had not been the most diplomatic move, slipping out the second-story window of his loaner office and hailing an electric cab. But he wasn’t on the airfield as an ambassador.

With a last roar, the 737 came to a stop on the runway. Ground crew drove a stair car up to the side of the plane as the engines wound down. Around him, the crowd surged with barely restrained desire.

“Can you believe it?”

The man who’d spoken was in his midfifties, his face leathery and lean. No one had water fat in Wyoming, but it was more than that. The guy looked like someone who had fallen asleep and woken up in misery every day for a long time. Cooper said, “Son or daughter?”

“Son,” the man said. “Peter. He’ll be fifteen now.”

The more Cooper looked, the more he realized he’d been wrong about the man’s age. Biologically, he was probably forty. It wasn’t hard to figure out why he looked so ragged. The Treffert-Down test that identified abnorms was administered at age eight. The man hadn’t seen his son for seven years.

“We never gave up. Every year on his birthday we’d have a cake, try to sing. Last year my Gloria died.” The guy’s voice was soft. “After that, it got harder to believe.”

It got harder to believe. Truer words. Seven years ago, Cooper had just been promoted to agent status in Equitable Services. He had been a believer then, eager to hunt the targets Drew Peters had given him. While he’d never been affiliated with the academies—hadn’t seen one until last year—it would take the worst kind of self-deception to suggest that his work hadn’t landed children in them.

For all Cooper knew, he had been instrumental in stealing this man’s son.

The thought was a railroad spike of guilt. For a moment, Cooper’s defenses fell away, and he realized the full weight of the stakes he played for. Even striving every day to do the right thing, working to create a better world for his children, he had made unforgivable mistakes, caused unimaginable pain. And meanwhile, despite his best efforts, every day the world had gotten more complicated, the solution farther out of reach. It was, indeed, getting harder to believe.

With a clunk, the door of the 737 opened. The crowd chatter died, leaving just the whine of the dying jets and the howl of the wind.

A figure stepped out onto the stairs. Shannon wore the same black fatigues he’d seen in the news footage and held a little girl in her arms. Even from a distance, something about her looked different. When he saw the girl’s face, Cooper understood.

It might be getting harder to believe, but Shannon had found a way.

The scene was happy chaos, and even desperate as he was to talk to Shannon, Cooper waited. Children streamed off the plane, the little ones first. Their reaction was uniform; they froze at the doorway of the jet, staring, hoping, straining. Some of them saw parents in the crowd and raced down the stairs into their arms, mothers and fathers openly weeping, crushing their stolen children to their chests, swearing never to let go.

Others milled, the hope in their eyes draining slowly. Of course—not every parent would be here. At least, not yet. Cooper had a feeling several hundred families were about to uproot their lives and join the NCH, and screw the consequences.

It was the older ones he really felt sorry for. The teenagers had spent half their lives in that academy. It had become their reality, and they had the darty eyes and nervous bearing of felons released from prison.

Except felons are allowed to keep their names.

Cooper caught a glimpse of the man he had been talking to, a scrawny kid almost hidden in his embrace, the guy squeezing so hard it was like he was trying to push his son inside his own chest.

Amidst the crowd, armed commandos became the eyes of miniature hurricanes, people crowding around them to slap their backs and shake their hands, women kissing them, people offering them money, love, faith. But Shannon waited atop the stairs until the last child had disembarked.

Then, staying out of the fanfare, she strolled down, skirted the edge of the crowd, and started to move away, the little girl in her arms. No one seemed to notice them.

Cooper dug out his phone and dialed.

The girl squirmed in her arms. “You can put me down now, Aunt Shannon.”

“I know, sweetie,” she said, but didn’t. Even tired as she was, the weight was sweet.

But man, was she beat.

Honey, you’ve been beat before. This is different.

Bone-weary. No, not just bone—soul-weary. It wasn’t simple exhaustion, although she had that in spades. Shannon was going on forty hours awake, some of that high-adrenaline time, and the world was bleary; her muscles ached, and her head hurt, and her eyes felt like sandpaper.

All of which she’d expected. She’d just also expected to feel . . .

What? Redeemed? Cleansed of your sins?

Well, yeah.

Killing people is a strange way to accomplish that.

Whatever. They were bad people, and Charles Norridge hadn’t been her first. If there was an afterlife and the people you’d murdered were waiting, she was going to have a pitched battle to make it through the gates.

No, it wasn’t the killing that was bugging her. It was something more abstract. A feeling of . . .

Pointlessness?

There it was. All the time she’d been planning this op, she’d imagined the moment when they returned triumphant, and in that imagining she’d been at the center of the celebration, champagne spraying and everyone laughing. But when the moment had arrived, she’d just stood at the top of the stairs and watched.

It didn’t matter. Thread through the airport, snag a cab, find a hotel. Sleep for a week. Then dig into the problem of finding—

“Hey.”

The voice froze her. She set the girl down, then turned slowly.

Nick stood ten feet away. He looked a little haggard, but still good. Homey, which was a strange way to think about a man she barely knew. Shannon stood locked for a moment. So many things she wanted to say, but she didn’t trust herself to speak. He was a government man, and she had just led an attack on a government building. She knew the raid had been right, but she was so tired. If Nick started a fight, she might just lie down on the concrete and weep.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ll never doubt you again.”

It was the last thing she’d expected. She felt her throat tighten, and just nodded.

“Hi, Alice,” Nick said. “I don’t know if you remember me. I’m Cooper. We met at your parents’ house a couple of months ago.”

Oh, don’t say that. A squad of soldiers stormed their building because we were there. Alice spent the last months being called “Mary” and crying herself to sleep because we were at her parents’ house . . .

“I know you’ve had a long day,” he said, “but I’ve got someone who wants to talk to you.” He held out his phone. Alice Chen stared at it, her expression blank.

“Go ahead. It’s okay.” He put it in her hand. Slowly, she lifted it to her ear. Said, “Hello?”

And then, “Mommy?”

And, “Daddy!”

Something in the girl gave, and she started crying and babbling, a mix of Chinese and English, and even the words Shannon couldn’t understand she understood. And for a second, just a second, she felt the emotion she had imagined she would in the first place, a pure joy thumping in her chest like a kick drum. There was the meaning she’d been missing, and Cooper had been at the heart of it.

“When I saw the news,” he said, “I woke Bobby up and gave him a direct order from the office of the president to find and release her parents. Lee and Lisa are being processed now. They’ll be on the first flight in the morning.”

“You can do that?”

“It’s done.”

“Won’t you get in trouble?”

“I’m going a little bit rogue.” He shrugged. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. Tired.”

Nick stepped closer. He needed a shave, and his eyes were red, something manic in them. He cast a quick glance over at Alice—sitting on the cold ground clutching the phone in both hands and cry-talking—then said, “I need to clarify something.”

“Yeah?”

“I was wound up last night. Saying things I didn’t really mean. You and me, we may not see things the same way. But I know you don’t want biological weapons. I was being stupid.” He reached for her hand, and she let him take it, warm against the cold. “I know the things you won’t do.”

She didn’t trust herself to speak, just nodded.

“Listen,” Nick said. “What I want more than anything right now is for us to check into a really expensive hotel and spend a week talking.” He smiled. “And not talking.”

“But?”

“But right now we can’t. And I need to ask you about something.”

She sighed, pulled her hand away. “Come on, you know I’m not going to—”

“Wait,” he said. “Just hold on. I’m going to tell you what I know. After that, speak, don’t, it’s up to you. Okay?”

She rubbed at her eye with the heel of one hand. “Sure.”

“You broke into the DAR to get classified information on bio and genetic research labs. But you didn’t take information on one place or one project; you took most of what we had nationwide. That means John Smith believes that a laboratory is creating something he wants, only he didn’t know which lab. I bet he does now: a place called the Advanced Genomics Institute, run by a scientist named Dr. Abraham Couzen.

“Couzen is by all accounts a genius. His work has offered new ways to look at the genome. Which means new ways to look at humanity.” He cocked his head. “Last night when I asked what you were after, you said a magic potion. I thought you were being a smart-ass. But you weren’t, were you?”

She kept her gaze level and her breath steady.

He gave her that smile, soap-opera scruff, the one he knew was charming. “You’re not going to help me here?”

“Your rules.”

“Right. Okay. I’m guessing here. But I’ve been patterning it, and I can only find one thing that fits. Only one thing important enough for you to risk breaking into the DAR; only one thing that Dr. Couzen could develop that John Smith and Erik Epstein would both want desperately.” Cooper paused, laughed. “God, this sounds crazy.”

“So go crazy.”

“I’m thinking that Dr. Couzen has figured out what makes people abnorms.”

It was a struggle, but Shannon kept her poker face up. You wouldn’t have gone for the guy if he were dumb.

“He’s discovered the genetic basis behind the gifts,” Cooper continued. “Not only that, but he’s found some way to . . . to . . .”

Say it, Nick. Say the thing that no one dared hope.

“Shannon, has he found a way to give gifts to anyone? A magic potion that turns normal people into abnorms?”

It was her turn to watch intently. She wasn’t a reader, had no gift to tell if someone was lying to her, to cobble together their unspoken thoughts. But it wasn’t hard to see the incredulity on Cooper’s face. She remembered having the same feelings herself when John had told her why he wanted her to break into the DAR.

But what does it mean to you, Nick? Is it exciting? Or terrifying?

Because your answer determines so much.

Picking her words carefully, she said, “If that were true, what would you do about it?”

“The opportunity for anyone to be gifted? It would be a hundred thousand years of evolution in a blink. The status quo would vanish. All our systems, our beliefs.” He shook his head. “The government would want to keep it quiet, control it.”

“Yeah,” she said. “But I asked what you would do.”

“What you’re really asking,” he said, “is whether I would do the same thing I did last time. Because when I shared the truth behind the Monocle, behind President Walker and Drew Peters and Equitable Services, it had massive consequences. I was trying to do the right thing, and in the process I pushed the world closer to disaster. And you want to know if I would do the same thing again.”

She waited.

“Absolutely,” he said. “Without hesitation. This can’t be a decision made behind closed doors, by people who have agendas. This belongs to all of us.”

A glow started in her chest and spread out through her body, a tingle of warmth that the cold Wyoming night couldn’t touch. She stepped forward, put a hand on his cheek. Looked him in the eyes. “Good answer.”

He sagged, not as though weight had landed on his shoulders, but rather like something rigid within him had fallen away. Like he could breathe for the first time in a long while. “It’s true, then? It exists?”

“Yes.”

“My God.”

“Yes.”

“This changes everything.”

“Yeah,” she said. Then smiled at him. “Don’t think it means I’m done being pissed at you yet, though.”

Nick laughed. “Never dreamed of it.”