A Better World

THREE WEEKS EARLIER CHAPTER 1

Arms wide and palms empty, hyperconscious of how many weapons were trained on him, Cooper was thinking about all the ways things hadn’t gone as planned.

It had been a busy month. A busy year. He’d spent half of it undercover, away from his children, hunting the most wanted man in America. But when he’d found John Smith, Cooper had discovered that everything he believed was built on lies. That his agency wasn’t just covert—it was corrupt, led by a man who was fostering a war for his own gain.

The aftermath of that discovery had been bloody and dramatic, especially for his boss. And the weeks since had been split between cleaning up the mess and reconnecting with his children.

But today was supposed to have been quiet. His ex-wife Natalie was taking the kids to visit her mom. Cooper had no meetings, no details to attend to, and at the moment, no job. He planned to hit the gym, then go out for lunch. Afterward maybe a coffee shop, spend the afternoon lost in a book. Whip up dinner, open a bottle of bourbon, read and drink his way to an early bedtime. Sleep ten straight hours for the sheer luxury of it.

He made it as far as lunch.

It was a hole-in-the-wall Arabic place he liked, lentil soup and a falafel sandwich. He was sitting at a two-top by the front window, hollow November sun glaring off the silverware, dumping hot sauce into his soup, when he realized he wasn’t alone.

It happened just like that. One moment, the opposite chair was empty, the next, there she sat. Like she’d formed from sunlight.

Shannon looked good. Not fit and healthy good, but make a man think wicked thoughts good: a fitted black top that bared her shoulders, hair slipping past her ears, her lips quirked in that half smile. “Hi,” she said. “Miss me?”

He leaned back, regarded her. “You know, when I asked you on a date, I meant soon. Not a month later.”

“I had some things to take care of.”

Cooper read her, not just the words, but the subtle tensing of her trapezius muscles, the sideways dart her eyes wanted to make but didn’t, the alert readiness with which she took in the room. Still a soldier, and not sure if you’re on the same side. Which was fair. He wasn’t sure himself. “Okay.”

“It’s not that I don’t trust—”

“I get it.”

“Thanks.”

“But you’re here now.”

“I’m here now.” She leaned across to help herself to half of his sandwich. “So, Nick. What are we going to do today?”

The answer, it turned out, was perfectly obvious to both of them, and they spent the afternoon knocking pictures off the walls of his apartment. Funny, it was only the second time they’d made love—and the third and semi-fourth—but they had an unselfconscious comfort that normally required long intimacy. Maybe it was because he’d been thinking about her all month, waiting for her to appear, and the anticipation had been akin to actually being together.

Or maybe it was just that their relationship already had enough complications. He was an abnorm who had spent his career hunting other abnorms for the government. She was a revolutionary whose methods verged on terrorism. Hell, the day they’d met, she’d held a gun on him, and that hadn’t been the last time.

On the other hand, she also saved your children’s lives and helped you bring down a president.

As the top agent at the Department of Analysis and Response, Cooper had built a career on intercepting terrorists, usually before they struck. But the one who had eluded him—had eluded the whole country—was also the most dangerous. John Smith was a charismatic leader and a strategic mastermind. He had also been blamed for the slaughter of countless innocents.

After a particularly horrifying attack in Manhattan that cost more than a thousand lives, Cooper had gone undercover to find Smith. It was during that time that he and Shannon had first connected, first as mortal enemies, then reluctant companions, and finally lovers. But when Cooper had finally tracked Smith down, the man opened his eyes to a horrifying truth—the real monster was Cooper’s mentor Drew Peters. The proof was a video in which Peters and the president of the United States planned a massacre in a popular Capitol Hill restaurant. It was a political maneuver, a way to polarize the country and place more power in the hands of the government. By blaming the attack on abnorm terrorists, Peters and those like him gained enormous power to control and even assassinate brilliants.

And all it cost was the lives of seventy-three innocent people, six of them children.

After Cooper discovered the truth, Drew Peters kidnapped his children and ex-wife as leverage. Shannon had helped Cooper rescue them. He had no doubt, none, that without her his kids would be dead.

So, yeah, complicated. He and Shannon were like those diagrams of overlapping circles. Parts of them might always be held back, but that middle intersection, oh man.

Regardless, the sex had been great, the shower had been great, the shower sex had been great. The conversation had been easy. She’d filled him in on her last month: time in New Canaan Holdfast, the enclave in Wyoming where abnorms were trying to build a new world. The mindset there, how people were getting worried. They talked about the tagging that was slated to begin next summer, the government’s plan to implant a tracking device against the carotid artery of every abnorm in America. Starting with tier ones like Shannon. Like himself.

Near as anyone could figure, the abnorm phenomenon started in early 1980, though it wasn’t detected until 1986, when scientific study revealed that for unknown reasons, one percent of all children were born “brilliant,” possessed of savant abilities. These gifts manifested in different ways; most were impressive but unthreatening, like the ability to multiply large numbers or perfectly play a song heard only once.

Others were world-shifting. Like John Smith, whose strategic gift had let him defeat three chess Grandmasters simultaneously—at age fourteen.

Like Erik Epstein, whose talent for data analysis had earned him a personal fortune of $300 billion and prompted the shuttering of the global financial markets.

Like Shannon, who could sense the vectors of the world around her so completely that she could move unseen, just by being where no one was looking.

Cooper’s own gift was for recognizing patterns in people. A kind of souped-up intuition. He could read body language, know by the motions of subcutaneous muscles what someone might be about to do. He could look at a target’s apartment, and based on the books they’d read and the way they organized their closet and what they kept on their nightstand, he could develop a good notion of where they might try to run. It had made him an exceptional hunter, but it came at some cost. The things he had seen haunted him. There was an irony to being an elite soldier desperate to prevent war.

You’re not a soldier anymore. And it’s not your war.

A mantra he’d been repeating for a month. But repetition hadn’t made it seem like fact.

“Did they interrogate you?” They were on the couch at that point, naked and sore, a blanket draped over them. Shannon had her head on his shoulder and one hand toying with his chest hair. “Your old agency?”

“Yeah.”

“What did you tell them about Peters?”

“They didn’t ask.”

“Seriously? The director of a DAR division goes off a twelve-story building, and they’re willing to let bygones be bygones?”

“I’m sure they knew it was me. But Quinn took care of that.” Cooper’s old partner had been the third member of the team that night. His friend had commandeered the building’s security center and erased all trace of their presence. “If there’d been explicit proof, they wouldn’t have had a choice. But without it, they’d rather avoid the scandal right now. They even offered me my old job back.” He felt her tense. “Relax. I declined.”

“So you’re unemployed?”

“We’re calling it a personal leave. Technically I’m still a government agent, but I’ve done enough for God and country. I need time to sort things out.”

Shannon nodded. His gift, never idle, never under his control, put a thought into his head. She has something to ask you. There’s an agenda here, besides this.

But when she spoke, all she asked was, “How are your kids?”

“Amazing. They both had nightmares for a while, but they’re so resilient, it seems like it’s behind us. Kate is in a nudist phase, keeps stripping off her clothes and running around the house giggling. And Todd has decided he wants to be president when he grows up. Says that if the last one did these things, we need a better one.”

“He’s got my vote.”

“Mine too.”

“And Natalie?” she asked, too casually.

“Good.” Cooper knew enough to leave it at that.

Later, they went for a walk. Magic hour, the sun almost down and the light coming from everywhere at once. It had been a mild autumn, the trees a riot of color that had only started to fall in the last week. Blue jeans weather, leaves crunching beneath their shoes, red cheeks and her hand warm in his. DC in the fall, was there anything better. They strolled the Mall, past the Reflecting Pool.

“So how long are you here?”

“I’m not sure,” she said. “Maybe awhile.”

“Doing what?”

“Things.”

“Ah. More things.”

“It’s getting worse, Cooper. That war you’re always worrying about is closer than ever. Most people, norm or abnorm, just want to get along, but the extremists are forcing everyone to take sides. You know that in Liberia they’ve started abandoning babies with birthmarks? They believe it’s a sign of the gifted, so they just dump them. In Mexico, brilliants have taken over the cartels and are using them against the government. Private armies headed by abnorm warlords and funded by drug money.”

“I watch the news, Shannon.”

“Not to mention that there are right-wing paramilitary groups popping up across America. The KKK all over again. Last week in Oklahoma, a gang of straights kidnapped an abnorm, tied him to their pickup, and dragged him around a field. You know how old they were?”

“Sixteen.”

“Sixteen. School bombings in Georgia. Microchips implanted in people’s throats. Senators on CNN, talking about expanding the academies to include tier-two or even tier-three children.”

He turned away, walked to a park bench, and took a seat. The pillars of the Lincoln Memorial glowed white in the floodlights, the steps still crowded with tourists. From this distance he couldn’t see the statue, but he could picture it, Honest Abe lost in thought, weighing the issues that threatened to tear apart his union.

“Cooper, I’m serious—”

“It’s too bad.”

“What is?”

“I was kind of hoping you came to see me.”

Shannon opened her mouth, closed it.

Cooper said, “So what does John want?”

“How did you—”

“Your pupils dilated, that’s focus, and you glanced left, that’s memory. Your pulse picked up ten beats. You laid out a bullet list of horrors, easy enough, but you did it in geographical order, far to near, which isn’t likely to happen randomly. And you called me Cooper, instead of Nick.”

“I . . .”

“That whole argument was memorized. Which means that you’re trying to convince me of something. Which means that he is trying to convince me of something. So let’s have it.”

Shannon stared at him, the corner of her lip tucked between her teeth. Then she sat down beside him on the bench. “I’m sorry. I really did come here for you. This was separate.”

“I know. That’s what John Smith does. He dresses his agendas in plans and wraps his plans in schemes. I get it. What does he want?”

She spoke without looking at him. “Things have changed since he’s been exonerated. You know he wrote a book.”

“I Am John Smith. Really put his heart into the title.”

“He’s public now, lecturing and talking to the media.”

“Yeah.” Cooper pinched at the bridge of his nose. “And this has what to do with me?”

“He wants you to join him. Think how compelling that would be—Smith and the man who once hunted him, working together to change the world.”

Cooper stared out at the fading light, the people climbing the stairs of the memorial. It was open twenty-four hours a day, which he’d always found moving.

“I know you don’t trust him,” she said softly. “But you also know he’s innocent. You proved it.”

It wasn’t just Lincoln, either. Martin Luther King Jr. had stood on those steps and told the world about a dream he had. And now anyone could come here, any hour of the day, from the aristocracy to the guy emptying the trash—

The garbageman’s posture is rigid, his hair is agency short, and he’s been emptying that can for a long time.

While he does, he’s looking everywhere except to his right . . . where a businessman is talking on a cell phone. A cell with a dark display. A businessman with a bulge under one arm.

And that sound you hear is the rev of a high-cylinder engine. Super-charged.

—and everyone was welcome.

Cooper turned to Shannon. “First, John is as innocent as Genghis Khan. He may not have done the things he was blamed for, but he’s bloody to the elbows. Second, get out of here.”

She was a pro and didn’t make any sudden moves, just took in the space like she was enjoying the view. He caught the subtle tightening in her posture as she spotted the trashman. “We’re better together.”

“No,” he said. “I’m still a government agent. I’ll be okay. You’re a wanted criminal. Do your thing. Walk through walls.”

The sound was growing louder, engines coming from multiple directions. SUVs, most likely. He glanced over his shoulder, turned back. “Listen, I mean it—”

Shannon was gone.

Cooper smiled, shook his head. That trick never got old.

He stood and removed his jacket, took his wallet from his pocket, and set both on the ground. Then he stepped back and put his arms out, his palms empty.

They were good. Four black Escalades with tinted glass swept in at the same time from four different directions, a Busby Berkeley raid. The doors winged open, and men spilled out with choreographed precision, leaning across the hood with automatic rifles. Easily twenty of them, nicely arrayed, with clean firing lines.

The good news was that this team was so clearly professional, and operating with such impunity, that they were almost certainly governmental. The bad news was that there were plenty of people in the government who wanted him dead.

Ah well. Keeping his hands wide, he shouted, “My name is Nick Cooper. I’m an agent with the Department of Analysis and Response. I’m unarmed. My identification is in my wallet on the ground.”

A man in a nondescript suit climbed out of the rear of one of the SUVs. He walked across the circle, and as he did, Cooper noticed that the guns were now swiveling to cover other directions.

“We know who you are, sir.” The agent reached down, picked up Cooper’s wallet and coat, and handed them back. Then he spoke in the clipped tone used to broadcast into a microphone. “Area secure.”

A limousine pulled around the circular drive. It bumped up over the curb, glided between two SUVs, and stopped in front of them. The agent opened the door.

With a mental shrug, Cooper climbed in. The car smelled of leather. There were two occupants. One was a trim woman in her midfifties with steely eyes and an aura of intense competence. The other was a black man with the look of a Harvard don . . . which he had in fact once been.

Huh. And you thought the day was headed in a strange direction before.

“Hello, Mr. Cooper. May I call you Nick?”

“Of course, Mr. President.”

“I apologize for the rather dramatic way this meeting came about. We’re all a little bit on edge these days.” Lionel Clay had a lecturer’s voice, rich and deep and dripping erudition, rounded just slightly with South Carolina twang.

That’s a polite way to put it. As the gifted continued to dominate every field from athletics to zoology, normal people were growing nervous. It wasn’t hard to imagine a world divided into two classes like something out of H. G. Wells, and no one wanted to be a Morlock. On the other hand, the more extreme elements of the gifted weren’t fighting for simple equality—they believed they were superior, and were willing to kill to prove it. America had grown accustomed to terrorism, to suicide bombers in shopping malls and poison mailed to senators. Worst of all had been the March 12th attacks; 1,143 people died when terrorists blew up the stock exchange in Manhattan. Cooper had been there, had wandered the shattered gray streets in a daze. Sometimes he still dreamed about a pink stuffed animal abandoned in a Broadway intersection. We’re more than on edge—we’re batshit scared. But what he said was, “I understand, sir.”

“This is my chief of staff, Marla Keevers.”

“Ms. Keevers.” Though Cooper had been a government agent for eleven years, politics had never been his thing; still, even he knew of Marla Keevers. A hardcore political fixer, a backroom dealer with a reputation for ferocity.

“Mr. Cooper.”

The president rapped his knuckles on the partition, and the limo slid into motion. “Marla?”

The chief of staff said, “Mr. Cooper, did you release the Monocle video?”

Well, so much for preliminaries.

He thought back to that evening. After Shannon freed his children, Cooper had chased his old boss up to the roof. He’d retrieved the video of Drew Peters conspiring with President Walker, and then he’d tossed his mentor off the twelve-story building.

That had felt good.

Afterward, Cooper sat on a bench not far from here deciding what to do with the video. The massacre at the Monocle restaurant had been the first and most incendiary step in dividing the country: not North versus South, not liberal versus conservative, but normal versus abnorm. Revealing the truth about that attack felt like the right thing to do, even though he knew it would have consequences beyond his control.

What was it Drew had said just before the end? “If you do this, the world will burn.”

President Clay was watching him. It was a test, Cooper realized. “Yes, I did.”

“That was a very reckless decision. My predecessor may not have been a good man, but he was the president. You undermined the nation’s faith in the office. In the government as a whole.”

“Sir, if you’ll forgive me saying, President Walker undermined that when he ordered the murder of American citizens. All I did was tell the truth.”

“Truth is a slippery concept.”

“No, the great thing about the truth is that it’s true.” A hint of that old antiauthority tone was coming out, and he caught himself. “Sir.”

Keevers shook her head, turned to look out the window. Clay said, “What are you doing these days, Nick?”

“I’m on leave from the DAR.”

“Are you planning to return?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Come work for me instead. Special advisor to the president. How does that sound?”

If Cooper had listed a hundred things the president of the United States might have said to him, that wouldn’t have made the cut. He realized his mouth was open, and closed it. “I think maybe you have bad information. I don’t know anything about governing.”

“Let’s cut through it, shall we?” Clay fixed him with a steady gaze. “Walker made a mess of things. He and Director Peters turned the DAR, which might have been our best hope for a peaceful future, into a private spy shop for personal gain. Would you agree?”

“I—yes. Sir.”

“You yourself have killed more than a dozen people and leaked highly classified information.”

Cooper nodded.

“And yet out of the entire catastrophe, you were the only person who acted righteously.”

Keevers wrinkled her lips at that, but said nothing. The president leaned forward. “Nick, things are getting worse. We’re on the edge of a precipice. There are normals who want to imprison or even enslave all brilliants. There are abnorms who favor genocide of everyone normal. A new civil war that could make the last one look like a minor skirmish. I need help averting it.”

“Sir, I’m flattered, but I really don’t know the first thing about politics.”

“I have political advisors. What I don’t have is the firsthand opinion of an abnorm who dedicated his life to hunting abnorm revolutionaries. Plus, you’ve proven that you will do what you believe is right, no matter the cost. That’s the kind of advisor I need.”

Cooper stared across the limousine. Scrambled to remember what he knew of the president. A history professor at Harvard, then a senator. He had a vague memory of an article he’d read, a piece suggesting that the real reason Clay had been chosen as VP was for electoral math. As a black man from South Carolina, he’d mobilized both the South and the African-American vote.

Jesus, Cooper. A vague memory of an article? That right there tells you whether you belong in this car.

“I’m sorry, sir. I truly appreciate the offer, but I don’t think I’m the man for the job.”

“You misunderstand,” Clay said mildly. “Your country needs you. I’m not asking.”

Cooper looked at—

Clay’s posture, his body language, they’ve been perfectly in line with his words.

This isn’t a PR move or a way to quiet you.

And everything he said about the state of the world is accurate.

—his new boss.

“In that case, sir, I serve at the pleasure of the president.”

“Good. What do you know about a group called the Children of Darwin?”