A Better World

CHAPTER 43

Ethan leapt to his feet. In the opposite chair, Amy startled, joggling Violet. His wife read his face, said, “What is it?”

“Someone’s here. Take Violet into the kitchen.”

She didn’t hesitate, and he loved her for that, for not wasting precious time. His wife was stronger and better than he was. She’d manage without him. He wished he could have told her he loved her, that he could have apologized for bringing this all down on them. But they’d survive, and that was the most important thing.

The revolver was on the side table. The weight that only a week ago had felt so strange in his hands was now comforting. He made sure all six chambers were loaded.

You keep telling yourself you’ll do anything to protect them. Time to prove it.

He slipped to the front door and flattened himself against the wall beside it. The door had a small window with a dusty curtain. Through it the front yard looked as he remembered, dotted with thin trees and carpeted with pine needles. Their stolen truck was parked facing out, ready to bolt at a moment’s notice. No sign of another vehicle. Had he been hearing—

Something moved behind the truck bed. Ethan’s chest felt like there wasn’t room for air, and his hands went sweaty. Best to do this fast. If he stalled, he might lose his nerve.

A sharp, short inhale through his nostrils, and then he yanked open the door and came out with the gun up. Cold air and the smell of pine sap, needles crunching underfoot, the gun shaking. Two steps, three, and then he caught another flash of movement, from the other side of the truck; the guy had circled around. Ethan whirled and lined up the sights and pulled the trigger.

The gun jumped in his hand like it was alive, and the roar startled him. A flock of birds leapt from a nearby tree, cawing. The man was still on his feet and coming, just feet away, Ethan had just this one chance, and he leveled the gun and didn’t flinch as he pulled the trigger again, only somehow the man wasn’t where he was supposed to be. He’d stepped aside as if pulled by invisible strings, and his left hand flashed out to knock the pistol aside while at the same time he lunged forward, Ethan’s world suddenly filled with the man’s head, a crack and a whirl and an explosion of pain between his eyes, and the sensation of falling.

He landed on his back, the breath whistling out of him, and stared, coughing and squinting at the figure above him.

“Hi, Ethan,” the man said. “I’m Nick Cooper.”

The ground screamed beneath Holly Roge. She took the F-27 into a smooth pitch turn, the horizon falling fifteen degrees and spinning as she banked around the east edge of Tesla. From her altitude she had a clear view of the rest of the military presence, the ground troops and armored column just miles away. Domed prefab buildings and the glint of metal, helicopters buzzing like dragonflies. Her brothers- and sisters-in-arms, the coiled might of the United States military. A force that would have looked at home in a desert far away, ready to rock and roll.

Idly, she generated the alpha wave patterns to change the heads-up display to quarter-thermal. No specific reason, but Holly liked information, was constantly swapping displays to screen the ground and sky around her. Her baby made it so easy, this marvel of machinery, a chair strapped to a rocket managed by a computer she controlled with her brain.

With the partial thermal overlay, the city seemed to glow in gauzy yellows and oranges, heat sources marked out against the cold air. Squinting, it made it look like Tesla was on fire.

That’s enough of that. She swapped the HUD back to standard, then did a reflexive positioning check. Her Wyvern was in perfect formation with the other two, five hundred meters apart and level. Just as they had been ten seconds before, and ten seconds before, and ten seconds before, and she took more than a little pride in knowing that the same would be true ten seconds hence.

Out the cockpit glass, the city slid by. Holly had spent a fair number of hours flying over it in the last few days, and she knew its topography, the shift and shape of buildings and boulevards. It wasn’t a bad-looking little town, despite the lousy location; plazas dotted the landscape, and gene-modified gardens grew atop the buildings. The beating heart was a complex of more than twenty blocky cubes of mirrored glass that reflected the Wyverns’ passage. The tallest buildings bristled with gear, satellite dishes and climatology equipment as well as surface-to-air missiles, the antiaircraft weapons they’d all laughed about earlier. All of it would be utterly ineffectual against her Wyvern.

“Leopard One, we have new orders for you.”

“Roger, Ground, ready.”

A stream of text began to scroll across the cockpit glass. Standard operating procedure during a mission with combat potential, don’t announce intentions over verbal transmissions, even coded ones, not when it was easy to send them—

Holy shit.

“Ah, Ground, I think we may have an error of some sort.”

“Checking.” A moment passed. “Negative, we’re showing everything green on your bird, Leopard One.”

Holly stared at the display. Hoping that somehow she had misread it. Knowing that she hadn’t.

MISSION PROTOCOL DELTA ONE, and then a stream of familiar details. They reviewed all anticipated protocols before wheels ever left runway, and she knew what this one said without reading it, but words kept leaping at her: TARGET and COMPLEX and FULL PREJUDICE and AUTHORIZED.

“Ground, can you confirm this order?”

“Roger, proceed with Delta One.”

“What? No.” Her mind was racing, and yet it felt like she was lagging behind. This couldn’t be happening. “Ground, this is an attack order.”

“Roger.” The voice cool and distant, and Holly wondered if she knew the person on the other end. “Proceed.”

Cooper’s forehead was throbbing from the head butt, one more part of his body that hurt. Pretty soon it was going to be easier to catalogue what wasn’t in pain.

Up on his elbows now, Ethan Park said, “You’re going to have to kill me.”

“Huh?” He bent down and picked up the revolver with his left hand. Should’ve asked for a weapon in addition to a car. But it would have meant a delay, and Soren was on his way. “You’ve got the wrong idea, Doc.”

“Who are you with?”

“I’m with the United States of Get Off Your Ass.” He smiled. “Look, I’m here to help. You’re in danger like you don’t even know. Besides, there’s a war about to start.”

“I’m . . . what?”

“I realize head-butting you wasn’t the best introduction. But then, you did try to shoot me.” He slid the revolver into his pocket, the barrel warm through his pants. “I’ll explain everything, but first, no bullshit, we gotta get out of here.”

“Let my wife and daughter go, and I’ll come with you.”

“Okay.”

“I mean it—wait. You’ll let them go?”

“Sure.”

Ethan Park stared up at him, distrust radiating from every muscle. But below it, fear, and not for himself. The man was scared for his family. Cooper could relate.

“Listen,” Cooper said, “I’m one of the good guys. I’m not out to steal your work. I’m not after your family. I’ve got kids of my own. All I want is to stop a war. And the happy news is, we do it right, it gets you out of the crosshairs too. So please. With sugar on top.” He reached a hand down. Ethan hesitated. Cooper said, “The other guy coming for you? He’ll feel differently.”

The scientist took his hand, and Cooper pulled him up. A twig cracked behind them, and his left hand flew to his pocket, fumbling awkwardly with the sidearm, stupid putting it away just to be able to help the guy up, but luck was with him and the gun didn’t snag as he yanked and pointed in one clean motion, framing up his sights on . . .

“Jesus,” he said. “You two are a pair.”

He recognized Amy Park from photographs in her file. An attractive woman, fire in her eyes, ten feet away and cocking an axe like a baseball bat. The head was rusty and pitted, a wood-splitter. Cooper lowered the gun, said, “Doc, would you mind?”

“It’s okay, babe,” Ethan said, his voice only marginally convincing. “If he wanted to kill me, he could have already.”

She hesitated, then lowered the axe. “You’re not with the DAR.”

“No.”

“Then who?”

“Right now what you need to know is that people are on their way here to murder your husband. You and your daughter too, I imagine.”

Her features tightened at that, a sudden ferocity. He didn’t need to be gifted to recognize a mama bear protecting her cub. Cooper had to admit he was starting to like the Parks. “Your daughter is inside?”

She nodded.

“Go get her. Hurry.”

Amy and Ethan silently conferred, their eyes locked. Then she dropped the axe and ran back around the house. Cooper turned to Ethan. “Anything here you can’t live without?”

Ethan shook his head. “We got robbed.”

“What about your research? Any notes or samples?”

“Abe kept all of that. What I have is in my head.”

Cooper had expected as much, but it would have been nice to be wrong. While President Clay would listen to him, it was hard to say whether he would act on their word alone. Especially without any sort of data. Of course, Bobby and the DAR could corroborate to a point, but—

Don’t get ahead of yourself. First get out of here.

The Porsche was pure sex, but it was also a two-seater. They’d have to take the pickup. He could call ahead, have a plane waiting to get them to DC. Time was running short.

God, he was tired. Cooper straightened and took a deep breath, drew it into the base of his lungs. The air was clean and cool, fragrant with the needles scattered on the ground. The bright cherry ember of a cigarette glowed near his feet, and he stepped on it idly, bad idea to be smoking out here with all this dry stuff, only the bright dot was on top of his foot now, weird—

Cooper whirled. A red dot darted up Ethan Park’s chest, and then Cooper noticed the silence, hadn’t there been birds before? He hurled himself at Ethan’s chest, a graceless tackle that tangled them and brought them down in a heap as the woods around them exploded with machine-gun fire.

“What are you talking about?” President Clay’s lips were twitching.

Leahy rose from the couch, walked to face the man. What was Mitchum’s phrase?

Play for all the marbles.

“Right about”—he glanced at his watch—“now, three F-27 Wyverns are launching their ordnance at the Epstein Industries complex in New Canaan. I don’t know how much you know about Wyverns, sir, but they’re capable of carrying—”

“What have you done?”

“I thought that was obvious.” Leahy shrugged. “I gave the order to level those buildings. In your name. We’re at war.”

Clay stared, hollow-eyed and disbelieving, like he was trying to convince himself it was a joke of some kind.

“If we’re lucky,” Leahy continued, “we’ll get Epstein himself. But either way we’ll cripple the governing body, not to mention set them back technically.”

“No,” Clay said. He reached for the phone. “I’m going to stop this.”

“God, you really have no business behind that desk, do you?” Leahy laughed. “It’s already done, Lionel. Three planes just launched a devastating attack on a civilian building, resulting in the deaths of thousands. And they did it on your watch.”

Clay’s skin went ashen. Slowly he sank down into his chair. “You’ll hang for this.”

“No,” Leahy said. “I won’t. Instead, you’re going to pick up that phone and back my play. You’re going to order a full-scale attack against the New Canaan Holdfast.”

“I’ll do no such thing.”

“America just declared war. There’s no going back. It’s us versus them now. You can act, and secure a quick victory that saves countless lives. Or you can dawdle, and risk all-out genocide.”

“I’ll tell them it was you, that I didn’t—”

“That you didn’t order the attack? That the president of the United States can’t command his own military?” Leahy shook his head. “None of the dead will care who ordered the strike, and none of their surviving family members will split that hair either. You’ll have nationwide anarchy, riots that make Cleveland look pleasant. Plus, you’ve never worn a uniform, so you might not understand this, but soldiers don’t like it when their commanders abandon them. I wouldn’t be surprised if you face a coup d’état. Regardless, America will be destroyed, and millions will die.”

Clay stared across the desk, a desk that had seen the rise and fall of nations, that had been here when the atom was split, when the first gifted were born. His hands gripped it like he was trying to hold on, like the wood might provide a solution.

“I’m going to say it one more time.” Leahy leaned in. “We. Are. At war. Your country needs you. What are you going to do?”

For a long, gut-churning moment, Clay just stared, and Leahy wondered if he’d pushed too hard, if he’d gone catatonic again.

Then, like a man in a nightmare, the president reached for the phone.