A Better World

CHAPTER 34

He was a dead man, haunted by the words of another dead man.

“If you do this, the world will burn.”

Had it only been three months since Drew Peters had said that to him? Three months since he’d sat on a park bench outside the Lincoln Memorial with a bomb in his hands, deciding whether to set it off. Deciding that the world deserved the truth, no matter the potential costs.

You pitiable fool. What naïveté, what blind optimism, to tempt the universe.

As a direct result of his decision, Equitable Services had been shut down, and the DAR’s teeth had been pulled. John Smith had been exonerated in the court of public opinion and given free rein to act. President Walker had resigned and was facing trial, making room for a good man without the will or wisdom to be president, a man who was about to plunge them into the civil war Cooper had spent his whole adult life fighting to prevent. The mailed fist of the United States government was clenched just outside the city walls. And his son lay in a coma, lost in a world of nightmares for the sin of trying to protect his dad.

Yet again, his children were suffering for his actions. Not in some metaphoric way, but literally. The d-pad on his lap played the video again and again. The whole nightmare was only ten seconds long: Soren entering the restaurant, cutting the throat of one guard and the brachial artery of the other before turning. Cooper throwing the chair, leaping onto the table, attacking. The dumb look on his face as he stared at his hand cut near in half. Todd charging. The assassin spinning with his elbow up. His son’s eyes gone glassy and his body limp. Cooper hurling himself onto the dagger, the knife spearing him through the heart. Falling beside his son as Soren walked away.

Freeze. Skip back. Soren entering the restaurant . . .

He’d made himself watch it over and over, the impact never going away, the images never losing their horror.

Cooper rubbed at his eyes with his good hand. In the hospital bed, his son lay still, breathing and little else. Tubes running into his arms. A mass of bandages around his shaved head.

After the Epsteins had left, Cooper had convinced Natalie to lie down. She’d been reluctant, but exhaustion finally won over, and she’d curled up with Kate in the next room. Cooper, meanwhile, didn’t think he’d ever sleep again. His meds were wearing off, and it felt like talons were digging into his chest while a red-hot chainsaw spun in his hand. The pain was good, the tiniest penance for his hubris. Like watching the video again and again. Like picturing the troops massing outside New Canaan. Seventy-five thousand troops, a ridiculous excess of force. It wasn’t about subduing the Holdfast, it was about obliterating it. Even in this subterranean space, he could hear jets streak by overhead.

If he could give back the life that had miraculously been returned to him in trade for Todd to be up and playing soccer, he’d do it without hesitation. But even that felt like it would be just a reprieve. John Smith would have his war, and the world would burn. No one was safe.

And here you sit, helpless to do a thing about it. Hell, you couldn’t even protect your son.

He could feel a scream building inside him and pictured it like a blast wave, a force that would sweep outward and flatten the world. But if the last months had taught him anything, it was that he was only a man.

For lack of anything useful to do, he stabbed at the d-pad, shutting down the video and opening the file on Soren Johansen, the man who had tried to take his son.

The file was extensive. Information on Soren’s birth, his early diagnosis. Every note from Hawkesdown Academy, where he’d grown up. Detailed analysis of his gift.

Tier-one temporals were extremely rare, even amidst the rarified numbers of gifted, and Cooper hadn’t dealt with any personally. Philosophically, they presented a fascinating notion; like relativity, they proved that the very things people thought of as constants were in fact anything but. Of course, temporals didn’t actually bend time the way velocity did. It was entirely a matter of perception, and for most of them, it was a very slight variation. In the lower tiers, fours and fives, the difference might not even be noticed. An individual with a T-naught of 1.5, after all, might simply seem particularly quick-witted.

But at 11.2, Soren’s T-naught was the highest Cooper had ever heard of. How strange the world must appear to him, every second stretched to agonizing lengths.

Good. I hope your whole life has been misery.

It also explained why his own gift hadn’t been of any use. Cooper read intentions, built patterns based on physical cues and intuition. But Soren hadn’t possessed any intention. He didn’t plan to swing here or stab there; he simply waited for his opponents to move and then took advantage of their molasses-slow crawl to put his knife where it would do the most damage. In fact, he’d made only two real attacks: the first security guard, whose throat he had cut, and . . .

Cooper saw the moment again, squaring off against the guy, and in that time getting just one flicker of intent, one moment when he knew what was going to happen, the fucker spinning with his elbow up and arm locked.

Todd’s breath caught for a second, and Cooper jumped, filled at once with unbearable hope and unimaginable terror. But then the breath rattled out again in a snore. A tiny biological hiccup. Even so, Cooper watched unblinking for another twenty breaths.

The explanation of how he’d been beaten so handily did little to help. Okay, fine, Cooper read intentions, and the guy had none. But how that translated into practical action was less clear. How did you beat a man who used you to defeat yourself?

Stand in front of him and stare him to death?

The truth was, everything in life came down to intentions and results. Cooper’s intentions in killing Peters and releasing the video had been good; the results had been a disaster. Did that make his intentions wrong? If so, that meant morality was really only a way of talking about how we wished things were. Hope, empathy, idealism—maybe they didn’t matter. Maybe the only thing that counted was results.

A cold pragmatist’s way of looking at the world, and he’d always felt Ayn Rand was a humorless hack. Intentions had to mean something, had to—

Wait a second.

He caught his own breath. Stared straight ahead, mind running in overdrive. Not patterning, not his gift, just thinking, and if he was right, then . . .

Cooper dumped the d-pad from his lap and stood up. The move sent a spike of pain through his chest, and his head went wobbly, but he didn’t let that stop him. A quick look around the room, and there it was, in the corner of the room, a tiny bump about the size of a marble. He moved to the camera and started waving his arms. “Erik! Erik! I know you hear me, you bastard, this is your little world, come on—”

The phone on the side table rang. Cooper moved to it, snatched it before a second ping. “Erik, I need data.”

“Data. Yes. What?”

“You said that Dr. Couzen was kidnapped by the DAR.”

“Yes, statistical projection based on multiple variables—”

“Yeah, I don’t care how you know. What matters here is intention.”

“Statistically speaking, intention is rarely relevant—”

“If the DAR took Dr. Couzen, then someone had the intention of seizing his work. We’re not talking about statistics, we’re talking about people.”

A pause. “Explain.”

Use Erik-speak. “I know President Clay. You’ll posit what I mean?”

“Your gift for patterning. Yes. Posited.”

“Clay is a good man. He doesn’t want a war; he’s being pushed into one. It’s the extremists on both sides. They’re trying to remove all options for compromise, for discussion. But Clay would seize on any reasonable way to avoid a disastrous conflict.”

“Posited.”

“Dr. Couzen’s work offers such a way. The fact that Clay hasn’t used it means that we can presume he’s not aware of it. And yet the DAR is a government agency. Which means?”

“Forces within Clay’s administration have concealed it from him. Presumably the same forces that are pushing for war.” A beat. “And if you are able to prove that—”

“Then in one stroke we can neutralize the hawks surrounding the president and foil John Smith’s plan for war. Because not only can we show him that he’s being played, but we can also give him the good doctor—because Couzen is already in government custody.”

Cooper could picture Epstein in his cave of wonders, that darkened amphitheater where he danced with the datastream. Imagined him gesturing for charts and graphs, bright holograms of information that no one alive could interpret the way he could. Knowing that the man would be checking Cooper’s work, correlating it against a hundred other factors. He held his breath. So much came down to the next thing Erik said.

When the man did speak, there was something like excitement in his voice. “Your theory is statistically valid. I’ll send all data on Dr. Couzen’s abduction to your system.”

Cooper didn’t say good-bye, just hung up the phone and returned to his datapad. His chest felt like molten steel had been poured on it, his hand throbbed with every beat of his repaired heart, and it didn’t matter, because there was a way to make things right. To fix it, like Natalie had told him to. There was a way, and he had figured it out, goddammit. Not so helpless after all.

He dropped in his chair, set the d-pad on the bed to free his good hand. The screen showed a massive file transfer in progress, but the most important pieces had already arrived. Cooper could feel his pulse, the rasping of his breath, and a joy that made his fingers tremble as he began to read, looking for the proof that he needed.

It took five minutes to realize he was wrong.

Five minutes to realize that things were even worse than he had imagined.