Brilliance

CHAPTER ONE

The radio host had said there was a war coming, said it like he was looking forward to it, and Cooper, coatless and chilly in the desert evening, was thinking that the radio man was an asshole.

He’d chased Vasquez for nine days now. Someone had warned the programmer just before Cooper got to the Boston walk-up, a brick rectangle where the only light had been a window onto an airshaft and the glowing red eyes of power indicators on computers and routers and surge protectors. The desk chair had been against the far wall as if someone had leaped out of it, and steam still rose from an abandoned bowl of ramen.

Vasquez had run, and Cooper had followed.

He’d gotten a hit on a forged credit card in Cleveland. Two days later a security camera tagged Vasquez renting a car in Knoxville. Nothing for a while, then he’d picked up the trail briefly in Missouri, then nothing again, then a near-miss this morning in a tiny Arkansas town called Hope.

The last twelve hours had been tense, everyone seeing the Mexican border looming large, and beyond it, the wide world into which someone like Vasquez could vanish. But with each move the abnorm made, Cooper got better at predicting the next. Like peeling away layers of tissue paper to reveal the object beneath, a vague form began to resolve into the pattern that defined his target.

Alex Vasquez, twenty-three, five eight, a face you wouldn’t notice and a mind that could see the logic of computer programs unfolding in three dimensions, who didn’t so much write code as transcribe it. Who had waltzed through MIT’s graduate program at age fifteen. Vasquez had a talent of wondrous power, the kind they used to say happened only once a generation.

They didn’t say that anymore.

The bar was in the first floor of a small hotel on the outskirts of San Antonio. Cooper made himself a bet as he walked in. Neon signs for Shiner Bock, smoke-stained drop ceiling, jukebox in the corner, pool table with worn felt, chalkboard with specials. Female bartender, a blonde showing dark roots.

The specials turned out to be on a dry-erase board, and the bartendress was a redhead. Cooper smiled. About half the tables were occupied, mostly men but a few women too. The tabletops held plastic pitchers and cigarette packs and cell phones. The music was too loud, some country-rock act he didn’t know:

Cooper pulled out a high-backed stool, sat down, tapped out the beat on the bar with his fingertips. He’d heard once that the essence of country music was three chords and the truth. Well, the three chords part still stands.

“What can I get you, hon?” The roots of her red hair were dark.

“Just coffee.” He glanced sideways. “And get her another Bud, would you? She’s about done with that one.”

The woman on the stool beside him was peeling the label off her longneck. The knuckles of her right hand brightened for a moment, and her T-shirt tightened at the shoulders. “Thanks, but no.”

“Don’t worry.” Cooper flashed a wide smile. “I’m not hitting on you. Just had a good day, thought I’d share the mood.”

She hesitated, then nodded, the motion catching light on a slender gold necklace. “Thanks.”

“No trouble.”

They went back to looking straight ahead. A row of bottles lined the back of the bar, and behind them faded snapshots had been tacked up in a collage. A lot of smiling strangers hanging on each other, holding up beer bottles, all of them seeming to be having a great time. He wondered how old the photos were, how many of the people in them still drank here, how their lives had changed, which had died. Photographs were a funny thing. They were out of date the moment they were taken, and a single photograph rarely revealed much of anything. But put a series together and patterns emerged. Some were obvious: haircuts, weight gained or lost, fashion trends. Others required a particular kind of eyes to see. “You staying here?”

“Sorry?”

“Your accent. You don’t sound local.”

“Neither do you.”

“Nope,” Cooper said. “Just passing through. Be gone tonight, everything goes well.”

The redhead returned with his coffee, then pulled a beer from a cooler, the bottle dripping ice water. She spun an opener from her back pocket with easy grace. “Four dollars.”

Cooper set a ten on the bar, watched the woman make change. She was a pro, returned six singles rather than a five and a one, made it easy for him to tip extra. Someone at the other end of the bar yelled, “Sheila, sweetheart, I’m dying here,” and the bartendress headed away with a practiced smile.

Cooper took a sip of coffee. It was burned and watery. “You hear there was another bombing? Philadelphia this time. I was listening to the radio on the way in. Talk radio, some redneck. He said a war was coming. Told us to open our eyes.”

“Who’s us?” The woman spoke to her hands.

“Around here, I’m pretty sure ‘us’ means Texans, and ‘them’ means the other seven billion on the planet.”

“Sure. Because there aren’t any brilliants in Texas.”

Cooper shrugged, took another sip of his coffee. “Fewer than some other places. The same percentage are born here, but they tend to move to more liberal areas with larger population density. Greater tolerance, and more chance to be with their own kind. There are gifted in Texas, but you’ll find more per capita in Los Angeles or New York.” He paused. “Or Boston.”

Alex Vasquez’s fingers went white around her bottle of Bud. She’d been slouching before, the lousy posture of a programmer who spent whole days plugged in, but now she straightened. For a long moment she stared straight ahead. “You’re not a cop.”

“I’m with the DAR. Equitable Services.”

“A gas man?” Her pupils dilated, and the fine hairs on the back of her neck stood up.

“We turn out the lights.”

“How did you find me?”

“We almost had you in Arkansas this morning. That’s ten hours and change from the border, too far to make in daylight. You’re smart enough to plan to cross during the day, when it’s crowded and the guards are sloppier. And since you’re more comfortable in cities, and San Antonio is the last big one before the border…” He shrugged.

“I could have just hidden somewhere, laid low.”

“You should have. But I knew you wouldn’t.” He smiled. “Your patterns give you away. You’re running from us, but you’re also running toward something.”

Vasquez tried to keep a straight face, but the truth was revealed in half a hundred tiny tells that glowed like neon signs to his eyes. You could give this up and play poker, Natalie had once told him, if anyone played poker anymore. “I thought so. Not working alone, are you?”

Vasquez shook her head, a tight, controlled gesture. “You’re awfully pleased with yourself.”

Cooper shrugged. “Pleased would have been catching you in Boston. But keeping you from releasing your virus counts as a win. How close were you?”

“A couple of days.” She sighed, lifted the beer bottle, and tilted it to her lips. “Maybe a week.”

“You know how many innocent people that could have killed?”

“It only targeted guidance systems on military aircraft. No civilian casualties. Just soldiers.” Vasquez turned to look at him. “There’s a war, remember?”

“Not yet there isn’t.”

“Fuck you.” Vasquez spat the words. The bartender, Sheila, glanced over, and so did a couple of people at nearby tables. “Tell that to the people you’ve murdered.”

“I’ve never murdered anybody,” Cooper said. “I’ve killed them.”

“It isn’t murder because they were different?”

“It isn’t murder because they were terrorists. They hurt innocent people.”

“They were innocent people. They could just do things you couldn’t imagine. I can see code, do you get it? Algorithms that confound straights are just patterns to me. They come in my dreams. I dream the most beautiful programs never written.”

“Come in with me. Do your dreaming for us. It’s not too late.”

She spun on her stool, clutching the beer bottle by its neck. “I bet. Pay my debt to society, right? Stay alive, but as a slave, betraying my own people.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Cooper smiled. “Are you sure?”

Her eyes sparked and then narrowed. She drew a shallow breath. Her lips moved as if she were whispering, but no words came out. Finally, she said, “You’re a gifted?”

“Yes.”

“But you—”

“Yes.”

“Hey. You all right, ma’am?”

Cooper broke the gaze for the split second he needed to take the man in. Six one, two twenty, fat over hard muscle that came from working, not the gym. His hands in front of him, half raised, knees slightly bent, balance good. Ready to fight if it came to that, but not anticipating it would. Cowboy boots.

Then he turned back to Alex Vasquez and saw what he had expected when he noticed the way she was holding the beer bottle. She had taken advantage of the distraction to swing at him backhanded. Her elbow was up and she put her back into it, and the bottle was whistling around to shatter on his skull.

But he was no longer there.

All right, then. No way to know for sure how the cowboy would react. Better to be safe. Cooper slipped sideways and snapped a left hook into the cowboy’s jaw. The man took it well, rolling with the impact, then lashed out himself. It wasn’t a bad punch, probably would have laid a normal man out. But Cooper saw the flicker of motion at the man’s eye, the tightening of the deltoid, the twist of the obliques, caught it all in an instant the way a straight might recognize a stop sign, and the meaning was as clear to him. The punch was a jackhammer, but for Cooper, who could see where it would be, avoiding it was the easiest thing in the world. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Vasquez slide off the stool and sprint for a door on the far wall.

Enough of this. He stepped in close, cocked his elbow and slammed it into the cowboy’s throat. All the fight went out of the man in an instant. Both hands flew to his neck, the fingers clawing at the skin, carving blood trails. His knees wobbled and gave.

Cooper thought about telling the man he’d be all right, that he hadn’t crushed the trachea, but Vasquez was already vanishing through the far door. The cowboy would have to figure it out for himself. Cooper pushed past and wove through the crowd, most of them frozen and staring, a few starting to move but too slowly. A stool was toppling as a man leaped off, and he read the pattern of the man’s muscles and the arc of the falling stool and split the difference, jumping the metal legs without engaging the guy. The jukebox had switched to Skynyrd, Ronnie Van Zant asking for three steps, mister, gimme three steps toward the door, which would have made him laugh if he could’ve spared the time.

The door had a sign that read HOTEL GUESTS ONLY. Cooper caught it just before it closed, yanked it all the way open to be sure Vasquez wasn’t waiting on the other side—he would have noticed a weapon on her, but she could have stowed it before she came into the bar—and then, seeing it was clear, spun around the frame. The hallway continued forward to another door, probably the lobby. A staircase carpeted in a bland pattern of orange and gray went up. He took the stairs, the music and bar sound fading, leaving the sound of his breathing echoing off the cinderblock walls. Another door led to a hallway, hotel rooms lined up on both sides.

He raised his right foot to take a step down the—

Four possibilities.

One: An unplanned panic sprint. But she’s a programmer; programmers deal in logic and anticipated possibility.

Two: She’s thinking of taking a hostage. Unlikely; she wouldn’t have time to try more than one room, and no guarantee she could handle the occupant.

Three: Going for a hidden weapon. But that doesn’t change the equation; if you can see her, she won’t be able to hit you.

Four: Escape. Of course, the building was surrounded, but she would have known that. Which means an alternate route.

Got it.

—hall. Eleven doors, ten of them identical except for the room number. The door at the end was plainer and unmarked. Janitor’s closet. Cooper ran to it, tried the handle, found it unlocked. The room was a dingy five by five. Inside was a cart of cleaning supplies and mini-toiletries, a vacuum, a steel rack of folded towels, a deep sink, and bolted to the near wall, an iron ladder to a roof hatch. The hatch was open, and through the square he could see the night sky.

She must have set this up after checking in. The hatch had probably been locked; Vasquez must have cut it or broken it, leaving herself a neat little escape. Clever. The hotel was a squat two-story in a row of similar buildings, and it wouldn’t be hard to move from one to the next, then climb down a fire escape and stroll away.

He reached for one of the slender rungs and hauled himself up. Spared a moment to be sure she wasn’t waiting at the top to brain him with a rock, then grabbed the lip and crawled onto the roof. Sludgy tar clung to his feet. Even through the wash of city lights, stars spilled across the horizon. He could hear traffic from the street below, and yelling as his team moved into the bar. Staying low, he glanced left and then right, saw a slender figure with her back to him, hands planted on a three-foot abutment that marked the edge of the roof. Vasquez pushed herself up, hooked a knee on the ledge, then rose to stand.

“Alex!” Cooper drew his sidearm as he stood but kept it low. “Stop.”

The programmer froze. Cooper took a few careful steps closer as she turned slowly, her posture conveying a mix of frustration and resignation. “Goddamn DAR.”

“Get off the ledge, then put your hands behind your head.”

Light from the street revealed her face, eyes hard, lips set in a sneer. “So you’re gifted, huh?” Another glint of gold from her necklace, a delicately wrought bird. “What is it for you?”

“Pattern recognition, especially body language.” He moved up until only half a dozen paces separated them. Kept the Beretta lowered.

“That’s how you moved so fast.”

“I don’t move any faster than you. I just know where you’re going to hit.”

“Isn’t that sweet. And you use that to hunt your own kind. Do you like it?” She put her hands on her hips. “Does it make you feel powerful? I bet it does. Do your masters pat you on the head for every one of us you catch?”

“Get down, Alex.”

“Or you’ll shoot me?” She glanced across the narrow alley at the building opposite. The leap was far but doable, maybe six feet.

“It doesn’t have to go this way. You haven’t hurt anyone yet.” He read the hesitation in her body, the tremble in her calf and the tension in her shoulders. “Get down and let’s talk.”

“Talk.” She snorted. “I know how you DAR boys talk. What’s that term the politicians like? ‘Enhanced interrogation.’ Very pretty. It sounds so much nicer than torture. Just like the Department of Analysis and Response sounds so much nicer than the Bureau of Abnorm Control.” Her body told him she was making up her mind.

“It doesn’t have to go this way,” he repeated.

“What’s your first name?” Her voice soft.

“Nick.”

“The man on the radio was right, Nick. About a war. That’s our future.” A strange resolve came over her, and she slipped her hands into her pockets. “You can’t stop the future. All you can do is pick a side.” She turned, glancing back at the alley.

Cooper saw what she intended and started forward, but before he’d taken two steps, Alex Vasquez, hands tucked deep in her pockets, dove off the roof.

Head first.

CHAPTER TWO

Cooper spent all night and most of the following day cleaning up.

The broken body of Alex Vasquez was the least of it. The medical examiners took care of that, joking about cause of death as they loaded her onto a gurney. He and Quinn had watched, the other agent holding an unlit cigarette, spinning it, sliding it between his lips, tucking it behind his ears. It wasn’t that he was trying to quit. He just savored the tension between holding the cigarette and the moment he lit it. Cooper watched facial muscles as Quinn finally took a deep drag and was pretty sure that the smoke itself was a letdown.

“I always wondered if someone would be able to do that.” Quinn looked up at the roof of the hotel thirty feet above. “Must be hard to fight the survival reflexes, keep her skull leading the way.”

“She put her hands in her pockets before she jumped.”

Bobby Quinn whistled. “Shit, Cooper. What did you do to her up there?”

They’d found her missing datapad in her hotel room and a stamp drive in her pocket. He’d given both to Luisa and Valerie, told them to hit the San Antonio field office and check them out. Vasquez had claimed the virus needed another week of coding. If she was telling the truth, the thing was far too complex for another programmer to easily finish.

I dream the most beautiful programs never written.

About two in the morning he’d put in a call to Drew Peters, director of Equitable Services. Despite the hour, his boss sounded wide awake. “Nick, good. What’s the word?”

“Alex Vasquez is dead.”

There was a pause. “Was that necessary?”

“She killed herself.” Cooper hated talking on the phone. He felt handicapped when he couldn’t see the other person, the play of their muscles and the change in their pores and the widening of their pupils. When he couldn’t see someone, he had to take their words for what they were instead of reading the meaning beneath them. He’d heard that some readers actually preferred the phone because it stripped away the wild dissonance between what people said and what they were thinking, but for him, that was akin to cutting out his tongue because he didn’t like the way something tasted. “I couldn’t stop her.”

“Too bad. I’d have liked to have talked to her.”

“I think that’s why she killed herself. We spoke before she jumped, and she mentioned interrogation. It scared her. Not the process, but what she might tell us.”

Another long pause. “Hard to see an upside to that.”

“Yes, sir.”

“All right. Well, still a success, even if not total. Nice work, son. Get everything settled and come home.”

After the call, there had been cops to deal with, and jurisdiction issues. The department wielded broad powers no local dared question, but government work always had a CYA factor, and there had been forms to fill out, authorization codes to pass, after-incident reports to write. His team had questioned the other patrons, making sure that Vasquez didn’t have a partner among them. He’d arranged to have the body shipped back to DC—thirty years since the first brilliants, and the scalpel crew still liked to take their brains apart—and put in calls for regional law enforcement to deliver the bad news to next of kin. Vasquez had a mother in Boston and a father in Flint, both normals. One brother, Bryan, also normal, a once-promising engineer turned dropout, last seen peddling weed in Berkeley.

The previous days had been a long run, and Cooper felt raw and exhausted with the forms and the procedure, all the trappings of civilized law enforcement. Patience for bureaucracy wasn’t his strong suit even when he wasn’t worn out. When he finally got on the charter jet back to DC, the reclining seat felt like a featherbed. He glanced at his watch, figured a three-hour flight with an hour time difference, plus a ride from Dulles to Del Ray, call it ten o’clock. Late but not too late. He leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. Found a vision of Alex Vasquez waiting for him, that quarter turn she made when he had realized her intention, the way she had thrust her hands deep in the pockets of her jeans. The way she had planted herself off her right foot as she bent into her leap.

I dream the most beautiful programs never written.

Cooper was asleep before wheels up. If he dreamed of anything, he didn’t remember it.

A hand on his shoulder woke him. He blinked, looked up, saw the flight attendant smiling down at him. “Sorry. We’re landing.”

“Thanks.”

“No problem.” The woman held the smile. It was a coquettish look, but he could see that it was practiced. “You need anything?”

“I’m okay.” He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and glanced out the window. DC was smeared with rain.

From the seat across the aisle, Quinn said, “I think she’s sweet on you.”

“That’s because she doesn’t realize I work for the government.” He stretched, the joints in his shoulders and elbows popping. The jet was a commercial charter, nicer than the military gear they often used. He and Quinn were the only passengers. Luisa Abrahams and Valerie West, the other two members of his team, would be catching flights home tomorrow, after they’d finished wrapping up in San Antonio. Speaking of…

“Any word on the virus?”

“Good news, bad news. Luisa says the virus is, and I quote, ‘one vicious cunt of a piece of code.’ Good news is it’s not finished, and Valerie doesn’t think another programmer would be able to pick up where it leaves off. Says she definitely couldn’t.”

“What’s the bad news?”

“Vasquez wouldn’t have been able to use it. It would have to get past military security protocols. Those are designed by our best twists.”

Cooper shot him a look.

“No offense. Anyway, Luisa said that to work, it would have to be introduced inside the firewall.”

“So Alex Vasquez had a contact. Someone inside the military.”

“It would need to be someone with serious juice. Think that’s why she took her final bow? So she wouldn’t give up the name?”

“Maybe.” The fear of betraying a friend or lover might have given her the strength. Cooper wasn’t the suicidal type, but he imagined that if you were going to go by jumping, you’d want somewhere high and certain, a place where the ground was an abstraction. Vasquez would have been able to see every mark on the concrete, every piece of gum trod black, every bit of broken bottle sparkling up. It must have taken tremendous will to tuck her hands in her pockets and hurl her head at the concrete.

The jet touched the runway, bounced once, and then settled in, the roar of air and engine growing as they braked to a taxi.

“Got word from the office, too. Something’s brewing.”

“What?”

“No specifics yet. Just a lot of chatter at this point. But it’s got everybody keyed up.”

What a surprise. Everybody’s been keyed up since 1986.

That was the year Dr. Eugene Bryce had published a study in the science journal Nature formally identifying the brilliants, the oldest of whom were six. At that point, they were a curiosity, a weird phenomenon that people expected would likely be linked to pesticides or vaccinations or the deterioration of the ozone layer. An evolutionary blip.

It had been twenty-seven years since that study, and though thousands more had followed, the world was no closer to understanding the causes.

What was known was that slightly under one percent of children were born brilliant. The vast majority had fourth- and fifth-tier gifts: calendar identification, speed-reading, eidetic memory, high-digit calculation. Incredible abilities, but not problematic ones.

Then there were tier ones like Erik Epstein.

To Epstein, the movements of the stock market were as obvious as code had been to Vasquez. He’d racked up a net worth of $300 billion before the government had shut down the New York Stock Exchange in 2011. Most nations had followed suit. Global markets remained shuttered to this day. Debt holders had gone crazy. Property rights lawsuits were on the docket in every country. Entrepreneurialism had vanished overnight; small caps had folded; the Third World had gotten even more screwed up than usual.

All because of one man.

Normal humanity could see the writing on the wall. What had once been a curiosity was now a threat. Whatever you called them—brilliants, gifted, abnorms, twists—they changed everything.

Hence the Department of Analysis and Response, an attempt to deal with a radically shifting world. Though only fifteen years old, the DAR already had unspecified funding greater than the NSA. The agency handled testing, monitoring, research; it advised lawmakers and occupied a cabinet post. And every time a gifted engineer jumped technology forward a decade, the DAR got another half a billion. Still, as long as abnorms were productive members of society, good citizens who obeyed the laws, they were afforded the same rights and protections as everyone else.

It was the ones who didn’t play nice that Equitable Services was concerned with.

“Anyway, sounds like it’s all hands on deck to find the signal in the noise. No rest for the virtuous.” Bobby Quinn spoke through a yawn. “You drive here, or should I call for a ride?”

“Call a ride.” He pulled his bag down and then dug out his keys.

“Umm, Cooper?”

“Yeah?”

“Aren’t those car keys?”

“Looks like.”

Quinn rolled his eyes. “Must be nice to be Drew Peters’s fair-haired boy.”

“Let me know if you find anything.” Cooper walked down the aisle, toward the open door. The flight attendant smiled as he passed. He smiled back, then walked down the stairs to the runway.

The weather had driven DC indoors, and he made good time. Del Ray was at the north end of Alexandria, a cozy neighborhood of single-family homes nuzzling close against one another. The houses were well maintained and solidly middle class, with a sodden flag dangling from every fourth porch.

Natalie’s was a tidy Folk Victorian, two stories, bright blue, and dotted with windows. A picket fence framed a postage-stamp yard, within which a black dirt bike lay on its side under a maple. Cooper pulled into the drive and killed the engine. He slid the Beretta and holster off his belt and locked both in the case beneath the passenger seat. The downstairs lights were on; he might not be too late after all.

The rain had picked up, and Cooper hurried up the walk-way, still wishing for a jacket. As he approached the front door, he heard footsteps behind it. There was the click of a deadbolt, and then the door swung inward. His ex-wife wore striped pajama bottoms and a worn T-shirt with a Greenpeace logo. Natalie’s feet were bare, her hair pulled into a ponytail. She smiled at him. “Nick.”

“Hey,” he said as he stepped inside. He gave her a hug and was briefly enveloped in her familiar smell. “I’m sorry it’s late. I wanted to see them.”

“They’re asleep.”

“Can I pop in anyway?”

“Sure,” she said. “I just opened some red. Want a glass?”

“Bless you. Yes.” He bent over to untie his shoes, left them on the mat next to a jumble of sneakers. “I won’t be long.”

The hall light was off, but Cooper had climbed these stairs ten thousand times. He padded up, skipping the squeaky step at the top. Gently, he opened the door to their room and stepped in. Pale light filtered in the windows, and he paused to let his eyes adjust.

The room smelled of children, that sunlight smell over socks and sweat. The left side had posters of dinosaurs and nebulae, a big framed image of the earth rising from the moon. There were toys in heaps, robots and knights and cowboys.

His son was curled on his side, hair in disarray, mouth open. A thin trail of spit ran from his lips to the pillow. His comforter was a bundle at his feet. Cooper eased the blanket up to cover Todd’s Spider-Man pajamas. The boy stirred, made a soft sound, and then rolled to his other side. Cooper bent over to kiss his forehead. Nine years old already. Won’t be long before he’ll stop letting me kiss him. The thought was a bittersweet spike through his chest.

Kate’s side of the room was neater. Even in sleep she looked composed, lying on her back, her features calm. He sat on the edge of her bed and stroked her hair, feeling the warmth of her, the unbelievable softness of her four-year-old forehead. Skin as fresh and new as a May morning. She slept with the zombie depth of a child, and he watched the easy rhythm of her inhales and exhales. Something in him was refreshed at the sight, as if she slept for them both. He lifted Fuzzy Bear from the floor and tucked him against her side.

Walking back downstairs, he heard music playing softly, one of the obscure female folk groups Natalie liked. He followed it to the living room, found her on the couch, feet tucked girlishly beneath her, a magazine on her lap. She looked up as he walked in and gestured to a syrah on the coffee table. “The kids good?”

He nodded, poured, sat down at the other end of the couch. “Sometimes I can’t believe we made them.”

“Our best work.” She held up her glass, and he clinked it. The wine was full and rich. He sighed, rolled his head back, and closed his eyes.

“Long day?”

“I started in San Antonio.”

“Someone you were chasing?”

He nodded. “A woman. Programmer.”

“Did you have to kill her?” Natalie looked at him steadily. She’d always been blunt, to the point that people sometimes mistook her for cold. In truth, she was one of the warmest people he had ever met. It was just that she had the honesty of someone with nothing to prove. That was part of what had drawn him to her, all those years ago. He rarely met people whose thoughts and words and actions so closely synced.

“She killed herself.”

“And you feel bad.”

“No,” he said. “I feel fine. She was a terrorist. The computer virus she was working on could have killed hundreds—maybe thousands—of people. Crippled the military. Only thing that bugs me is…” He trailed off. “Sorry. Do you really want to know?”

She shrugged, the ripple of her trapezii graceful beneath her thin T-shirt. “I’ll listen if you need.”

He wanted to tell her, not because he was troubled by Vasquez’s death or because he needed Natalie’s benediction, but simply because it felt good to talk, to share his days with someone. But it wasn’t fair anymore. They’d always love each other, but it had been three years since the divorce. “No, I’m okay.” He sipped the wine. “This is good. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

The room was warm and comfortable, scented with cinnamon from a candle on the coffee table. Outside, the rain fell soft and steady. A gust of wind stirred the trees. He wouldn’t stay long—they were good about boundaries—but it felt nice to sit in this sanctuary with his children asleep above him.

Until Natalie took a tiny sip of wine and then leaned forward to set the glass on the table, swinging her legs to the floor. She took a breath and folded her hands in her lap.

Ahh, shit. “What is it?”

Nat glanced at him sideways. “You know, that used to drive me crazy. Just because you can tell I’ve got something on my mind doesn’t mean you shouldn’t shut up and wait for me to get to it.”

“As I recall, there was an upside to me being able to read your body language.”

“Yes, Nick. You were very good in bed. Better?”

He smiled. “What’s on your mind?”

“It’s Kate.”

He stiffened, immediate paternal protectiveness leaping, the part that would always fill in the worst possible ending to any statement that began, It’s Kate. “What is it?”

“She arranged her toys today.”

It was such an innocuous statement that he almost laughed, his head full of all the sentences he’d imagined: It’s Kate, she fell down and hit her head. It’s Kate, the neighbor has been touching her. It’s Kate, she has meningitis. “So? She likes things neat. Lots of girls do.”

“I know.”

“You like things neat. Look at this place.” He gestured to the framed photos, dustless and aligned, to the square edges of the rug and the couch, to the basket on the coffee table that organized remote controls. “She’s just trying to be like Mom.”

Natalie stared at him for a long moment. “Come with me.” She stood and started for the arch into the kitchen.

“Where—”

“Come on.”

Reluctantly, Cooper rose, bringing the wineglass. He followed her through the kitchen to the sunroom that doubled as the playroom. Three walls were glass; on the fourth Natalie had painted a mural, a scene from The Jungle Book, the big bear Baloo floating on his back in a river, Mowgli lying on his chest. She was a capable artist; she had once filled notebooks with sketches, back when they had been teenagers who thought love was a noun, a thing you could possess. Natalie flipped on the overhead light. Todd’s side of the room was chaotic, the lids of toy bins open, a train under attack from a stuffed panda, an unfinished Lego creation that might one day be a castle.

Kate’s side was neat as a surgery. Her toy box was closed, and the spines of her picture books looked as if they’d been aligned with a ruler. A low shelf held dolls and stuffed animals—Raggedy Ann, a brontosaurus, a plastic crocodile, a boxy fire truck, a stuffed Goofy missing an eye, a parrot, Tinkerbell, a pudgy unicorn—all in line like a Marine formation.

“I get it,” he said. “It’s neat.”

Natalie made a short, sharp sound. “Sometimes I don’t understand you, Cooper.”

It was never a good sign when she called him by his last name. “What?”

“You have these amazing abilities. You can look at someone’s credit card statements, what books they’ve read, their family photo album, and from that know where they’ll run, what they’ll do. You can track terrorists across the whole country. Can you really not see this?”

“It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Doesn’t mean—aren’t you the one who says that if you want to understand how abnorms think, all you need to know is that the whole world is patterns? That all the rest of it—whether a gift is emotional or spatial or musical or mathematical—is secondary to the fact that brilliants are more tuned in to patterns than everybody else?”

“Let’s just give her some time. There’s a reason testing isn’t mandatory till age eight.”

“I don’t want to get her tested, Nick. I want to deal with this. I want to figure out what she needs.”

“Nat, she’s four. She’s imitating. It doesn’t—”

“Look at her stuffed animals.” Natalie walked over and pointed, but her eyes stayed on him. “They’re not neat. They’re alphabetical.”

He’d known that, of course, had spotted it the moment the lights flickered on. But his little girl, tested and labeled? There were rumors about the academies, the things that happened there. No way would he let Kate end up in one.

“Look at the spines of her books,” Natalie continued, relentless. “They’re arranged by color. And in the spectrum, from red to violet.”

“I don’t—”

“Kate’s an abnorm.” Her tone was matter-of-fact, a simple statement. “You know that. Probably for longer than I have. And we have to deal with that fact.”

“Maybe you’re right. Maybe she is a twist—”

“Not funny—”

“—but maybe she’s just a little girl whose father is one. Maybe it’s not you she’s imitating. Maybe it’s me. Or maybe she does have a gift. What do you want to do? Test her? What if she’s tier one?”

“Don’t be cruel.”

“But what if she is? You know that means an academy.”

“Over my dead—”

“So then—”

“I’m saying that we need to deal with this. Figure out what her gift is and help her explore it. She might need help, tutoring. She can learn to control it.”

“Or maybe we could leave her alone and just let her be a little girl.”

Natalie squared her pelvis and put her hands on her hips. It was a pose he knew, his ex-wife digging in her heels. Before she could speak, his phone rang. Cooper gave her a what can I do? shrug and pulled the phone out. The display read QUINN—MOBILE. He hit talk, said, “Not a good time. Can this—”

“Sorry, no.” Bobby Quinn’s voice was all business. “Are you alone?”

“No.”

“Call when you are.” His friend hung up.

Cooper slipped the phone back in his pocket and rubbed at his eyes. “That was work. Something’s going on. Can we talk later?”

“Saved by the bell.” Natalie’s eyes still had fire in them.

“I was always lucky.”

“Cooper—”

“I’m not saying we can’t talk about it. But I’ve got to go. And there’s no need to decide tonight.” He smiled. “The academies don’t accept entrants at this hour.”

“Don’t joke,” she said, but she wrinkled her nose, and he knew the topic was safe for the moment.

She walked him to the door, the hardwood floors creaking with each step. The wind gusted outside, the storm picking up.

“I’ll tell them you came by,” Natalie said.

“Thanks.” He took her hands. “And don’t worry about Kate. It will be okay.”

“It has to be. She’s our baby.”

In that moment, he remembered Alex Vasquez just before she’d gone off the roof. The way the light had caught her from below, throwing her features into contrast. The determination in her pose. The way her voice had softened as she spoke.

You can’t stop the future. All you can do is pick a side.

“What is it?” Natalie asked.

“Nothing. Just the weather.” He smiled at her. “Thanks for the drink.” He opened the front door. The rain was louder, and the wind cold. He gave his ex-wife a final wave, then jogged down the path. It was one of those soaking storms, and his shirt was plastered to his shoulders by the time he reached his car. Cooper yanked open the door and slid inside, shutting out the storm. I really need to invest in a jacket.

His phone was DAR issue, and he activated the scrambler before he dialed, then tucked it between ear and shoulder as he pulled the case from beneath the passenger seat. “Okay.” The case was brushed aluminum, locked with a combination. He popped the latches. The Beretta was nestled in the clip-lock holster atop black foam. Funny, all the ways the gifted had jumped the world forward, and firearms technology remained fundamentally the same. But then, it hadn’t changed all that much since the Second World War. Guns could be faster, lighter, more accurate, but a bullet was essentially a bullet. “What’s going on?”

“Are you secure?”

“Sure.”

“Coop—”

“The scrambler’s on, and I’m sitting alone in a car in the middle of a hurricane outside my ex-wife’s house. What do you want me to say?”

“Yeah, all right. Sorry to interrupt, but get here. Someone you’re going to want to talk to.”

“Who?”

“Bryan Vasquez.”

Alex Vasquez’s older brother. The burnout with no last-known address. “Stuff him in an interview room for the night. I’ll get to him tomorrow.”

“No can do. Dickinson is already with him.”

“What? What is he doing with my target’s brother?”

“I don’t know. But you know how our records showed that Bryan was a loser? Turns out, not so much. He’s actually a big shot at a company called Pole Star. His sister must have hacked their records, and ours. Pole Star is a defense contractor. Know what they specialize in?”

Cooper switched the phone to his other ear. “Guidance systems for military aircraft.”

“You’ve heard of them?” Quinn sounded surprised.

“Nope.”

“Then how—”

“Alex needed someone to plant her virus. They were working together?”

“Yeah,” Quinn said. “Not only that. He claims they were working with John Smith directly.”

“Bullshit.” Cooper picked up the Beretta, checked the load, then leaned forward and attached the holster to his belt.

“I don’t know. You should see the light in this guy’s eyes. And there’s more.” Quinn took a deep breath, and when he spoke again, his voice sounded muffled, as though he were cupping a hand around the receiver. “Cooper, he says there’s going to be an attack. A big one. Something that makes his sister’s virus look tame.”

The air in the car had grown cold, and Cooper’s flesh goose-bumped under the wet shirt. “Her virus would have killed hundreds of people.”

Bobby Quinn said, “Yeah.”

CHAPTER THREE

Like most institutions of its kind, the Department of Analysis and Response wasn’t much to look at from the street. There was a granite sign fronted by a neatly tended flowerbed, and half a dozen security gatehouses. A dense line of trees screened everything beyond.

The guards who stepped out were trim and serious looking, dressed in tactical blacks with submachine guns slung on shoulder straps. One of them circled the car, a heavy flashlight in one hand; the other moved to the driver’s side window.

“Evening, sir.”

“Hey, Matt. I told you, it’s Cooper.”

The man smiled, looked down at the ID Cooper held, then back up at his face. His partner shone the flashlight into the backseat of the car, the fingers of his right hand resting lightly on the grip of his weapon. “Hell of a night, huh?”

“Yeah.”

The flashlight spearing through his rear windows snapped off. The guard glanced over the car roof, then said, “Have a good one, sir.”

Cooper nodded, rolled the window up, and pulled through the gate.

To a casual eye, the road might have seemed designed for aesthetic reasons, winding as it did around nothing in particular. But the design concealed the protective measures. The curves limited speed, reducing the chance a car bomb could reach the complex. The manicured grounds assured excellent sight lines for sniper towers not quite hidden by clusters of very precisely pruned trees. Half a dozen times the steady hum of his tires hiccupped as he rolled over retracted spike strips. From the parking lot, Cooper could just make out the tips of the antiaircraft clusters mounted on the roof of the building.

Hell of a long way from the beginning. Had it really been seven years ago that he’d followed Drew Peters into the old paper plant? Cooper could still taste that faded fart stink, could see the slanting shafts of sunlight through high factory windows. The building had been shuttered for a decade, cheap, clean space hidden back in a Virginia industrial park. The director had led the way, followed by Cooper and eighteen others, all handpicked, all nervous, and all trying not to show it. Twenty highly skilled individuals who comprised the newest division of the DAR, the razor tip of a unique spear. Equitable Services. “The believers,” Peters had called them.

And for eighteen months, belief was about all they had. They worked on card tables in that drafty warehouse. Funding was so tight that there’d been a couple of months when they’d gone without pay. After the first terminations, the justice department launched an investigation to shut them down. Half the believers quit. Drew Peters remained steadfast, but circles began to form beneath his eyes. There were rumors of a pending congressional subcommittee, of a public excoriation. What they were doing was extreme, a privilege never granted to an agency—the right to hunt and execute civilians. Peters had assured them that he had support at the highest levels, that what they did was outside the traditional legal system. But if he was wrong, they’d face jail and possibly the death penalty.

Then an abnorm terrorist named John Smith walked into the Monocle, a Capitol Hill restaurant, and butchered seventy-three people, among them a US senator and six children. Suddenly, Drew Peters’s vision didn’t seem so extreme. Within a year, the paper plant hummed with activity; within two, Equitable Services had earned a reputation as the most prestigious subgroup of the DAR.

The rain had downshifted to a drizzle as Cooper parked and jogged to the front door. The internal security measures were just as stringent: a two-stage entrance, each requiring an ID scan and a video capture, a metal detector that his ID allowed him to bypass, an explosive-trace detection system that it did not, all overseen by men with body armor and automatic weapons. He went through it on autopilot, mind replaying the conversation with Quinn, running the angles. Wondering if it was possible that Alex and Bryan Vasquez really did work for John Smith. Wondering what it would mean if they did.

The vast portion of the department was given over to the analysis side of the job, which employed thousands of scientists and bureaucrats. They funded research and explored theory and advised politicians. They designed and redesigned and forever refined the Treffert-Down Scale, the test administered to children at age eight. They maintained the files on tier-one and tier-two gifted, tracking and collating every piece of data in the system from medical records to credit history. They facilitated budgets and logistics and questions of jurisdiction. It was work done in cubicles and conference rooms, over the phone and the net, and the offices looked pretty much like any corporate headquarters.

Equitable Services, not so much.

The command center was dominated by a wall-size tri-d map of the United States. Actions and interventions were highlighted across the country. Analysts constantly fed data into the system, tracking the movements of targets. Cooper paused to scan the board, taking in the shifting colors, green to yellow to orange: the Unrest Index, a visual representation of the mood of the country that aggregated everything from frequency of graffiti tags to information on tapped phone lines, from protest marches to target terminations, mixed it all up and laid it over the map like weather patterns. A red pinpoint in San Antonio marked yesterday’s takedown of Alex Vasquez. Not a terribly public action, but even so, the people in the bar, on the street, they’d been affected. No matter how smoothly you tossed a stone into water, there were always ripples.

Alongside the tri-d, monitors and digital crawls ran news from every major source. There was a low hum of muffled phone conversation; direct lines ran to the Pentagon, the FBI, the NSA, and the White House. The air had a faintly ionized taste, like biting a fork.

The command center was the hub of the wheel, with hallways spoking off. He ran his ID through a reader and yanked open a heavy door. The clerk glanced up from behind a desk, his expression changing from boredom to sycophancy as he recognized Cooper. “Hello, sir. What can I—”

“Dickinson. Which interview room?”

“He’s in four, along with his suspect.”

“My suspect.” Cooper unclipped the holster from his belt, dropped it on the man’s desk.

“Yes, sir. But…”

“Yes?”

“Well, Agent Dickinson asked not to be disturbed.”

“I’ll be sure to apologize.” Cooper walked down the hall, shoes squeaking on the polished tile floor. He passed wooden doors with—

Dickinson knows Alex Vasquez is my case. He’s risking a beat down for meddling above his pay grade. Possible reasons:

One: Bryan Vasquez turned up in a separate investigation. Unlikely.

Two: Dickinson heard about the John Smith connection and is risking pissing me off for a chance to catch the big fish.

Three: Dickinson is trying to find evidence that I mishandled Vasquez.

Four: Both two and three. Asshole.

—reinforced glass windows centered in them. Two of the first three were occupied by nervous men and women sitting at plain tables under bright light. There was a rumor—a joke? Hard to tell at the DAR—that the fluorescent bulbs were the result of a multimillion-dollar program specially engineered to offer the most hopeless light possible. Cooper didn’t know about that, but they did make everyone look two-weeks dead. Even Roger Dickinson, who had the kind of strong-jawed good looks of quarterbacks in football movies.

The heavy door of interview room four muffled the shouting within, rendering the words indistinct. But through the window Cooper could see Dickinson leaning over the table, one hand planted knuckles down, the other up and pointing, inches from the face of a man with the same cheekbones and brow line as Alex Vasquez. Dickinson was stabbing the air with his finger, jamming it back and forth as if he were pushing a button.

Using the shouting as cover, Cooper gently opened the door and slipped inside, catching it with one hand as it closed and easing it shut.

“—had better come clean with me, do you hear? Because this isn’t some speeding ticket. It’s not an eight ball of blow. You’re looking at terrorism charges, my friend. I will vanish you. Just,” Dickinson straightened, held his hands out in front of him and stared at them in mock bewilderment, “where’d he go? Wasn’t there a guy here a minute ago? Some twist lover? Poof, he’s gone, no one knows where, never seen again.” He leaned forward again. “Do you hear me?”

“I hear you,” Cooper said.

The agent whirled, one hand blurring to his empty holster. Man, he’s fast. When he saw Cooper, he looked briefly sheepish, but that faded quickly, buried by naked dislike. “I’m in the middle of something.”

“Yeah? What?” Cooper spared a glance at Bryan Vasquez, saw no sign he’d try something stupid, so turned his attention back to Dickinson. “What exactly are you in the middle of? Which case? Who’s the target?”

Dickinson gave a wolfish smile. “Just following a lead. Never know where it’s going to go.” The other agent squared up to him. “Until I get there.”

Cooper flashed to a schoolyard brawl, one of a hundred. Military brats were always the new kids in town, the outsiders. They always had to fight for their place. But being an abnorm in a world that had only just begun to acknowledge the phenomenon took it to a different level. Seemed like every time he landed in a different school some bigger kid wanted to play Pound the Freak.

One time he’d tried to submit, see if that made things easier. His father had just been posted to Fort Irwin, a couple of hours outside Los Angeles. Cooper was twelve at the time, and the bully was fifteen, a big-toothed kid with red hair. Red seemed no more dangerous than any other bully, so Cooper decided to let him get a few hits in. Maybe if the kid got to show off for his posse, exert his male dominance, then he’d move on with no real damage done.

It might have worked if Cooper had been a normal kid, one in a line of victims. But he was different. And difference, as he learned that day, inspired a particular kind of savagery.

His algebra teacher had found in him a bathroom stall, curled at the base of a toilet, the porcelain bowl drenched with his blood. His eyes had been swollen shut, nose broken, testicles bruised, two fingers crushed. The kicks he’d taken on the ground cost him his spleen.

Dad had asked who’d done it, and so had the doctors and the teacher who found him, but Cooper never said a word. He just gritted his teeth and bore up for the three months it took to heal.

Then he went looking for the bully and his posse. And that time, Cooper didn’t submit.

“Something on your mind, Roger?” He met the man’s posture and gaze. The ritual was stupid and primitive, and he didn’t enjoy it, but it was a dance that needed dancing. “Something you want to say?”

“I said it.” Dickinson didn’t blink or flinch. “Want to let me work?”

He’s not a coward. An insubordinate bigot with boundless ambition, but at least not a coward. So what do you say, Coop? How far do you want to take this?

“Gentlemen.” The voice behind them was cotton padding over hardened steel. It snapped the schoolyard moment like a twig. Cooper and Dickinson turned as one.

With his conservative suit, rimless glasses, and impeccable shave, Drew Peters looked like a clerk or a pediatrician, not a man who routinely ordered the murder of American citizens. “Join me in the hall.”

The moment the heavy wooden door slammed shut, Peters turned. “What was that?” His voice quiet and firm.

Cooper said, “Agent Dickinson and I were just conferring about the best way to handle Bryan Vasquez.”

“I see.” Peters looked back and forth. “Perhaps that kind of discussion should be had in private?”

“Yes, sir,” Dickinson said. Cooper nodded.

“And how is it, Agent Dickinson, that you happen to be interviewing Vasquez at all?”

“My team discovered that the files on Bryan Vasquez had been altered. The current file lists him as a loser with no last-known address. But the original file showed he lived and worked in DC.”

“Someone hacked our system?” For the first time, Peters sounded genuinely annoyed.

“Yes, sir. Either that, or…” Dickinson shrugged.

“Or?”

“Well, it could have been done by someone inside the agency.”

Cooper laughed. “You think I was covering for Bryan Vasquez? All us twists hang out together on Friday nights?”

Dickinson shot him a glare. “I’m just pointing out that it would have been easy to alter the files from inside the department. Under the circumstances, I thought it best to detain Vasquez immediately. Since Agent Cooper wasn’t present, I began the interview myself.”

“Very proactive,” Peters said dryly. He turned to Cooper. “Take over as primary.”

Dickinson said, “But, sir—”

“Vasquez is his target, not yours.”

“Yes, but—”

The director cocked one eyebrow, and Dickinson swallowed whatever he had been about to say. After a moment, Peters said, “Grab a coffee.”

Dickinson hesitated, then said, “Yes, sir,” and started away. To Cooper’s eyes, the tension and fury radiating from every muscle made the man seem almost wreathed in flame.

Cooper said, “He’s a problem.”

“I don’t think so. He’s a good agent, almost as good as you. And he’s hungry.”

“Hunger I appreciate. It’s running a one-man witch hunt that I don’t like.”

“The man who burns a witch—does he do it because he likes seeing people on fire, or because he believes he’s fighting the devil?”

“Does it matter?”

“Enormously. Both men are doing a terrible thing. But the first is entertaining himself, while the second is protecting the world.” The director took off his glasses and polished them with a handkerchief. “You and Dickinson are a lot alike. You’re both true believers.”

“The only thing Dickinson believes is that I’m in his way. You can’t honestly think that someone inside the department altered those files.”

Peters waved the idea away as he put his glasses back on. “I don’t doubt Alex Vasquez had the skill to hack our systems.”

“And Dickinson knows that. But he’s throwing accusations anyway.”

“Of course. And I’m sure he does want your job. More than that, he probably genuinely doubts you. Remember, many people haven’t really accepted that abnorms aren’t the enemy. Oh, they’ll hold forth on it at a cocktail party, how it’s not norms versus abnorms, it’s civilization versus anarchy. But in their hearts…”

“I’m a big boy, Drew. I don’t need Roger Dickinson’s love. There are plenty of people here who don’t like me. I’m an abnorm hunting abnorms, and that makes people nervous.”

“It’s not just that. It’s also the power you have. Everyone else at Equitable Services operates within much stricter latitudes than you. Know why that is?”

“I’ve been here since the beginning. And my record is better.”

“No, son,” the director said gently. “It’s because I trust you.”

Cooper opened his mouth, closed it. After a moment, he nodded. “Thanks.”

“You’ve earned it. Now. Can you and Dickinson cooperate on the interview?”

“Sure. Of course.” He had a flash of Dickinson leaning over the table, red-faced and yelling. “Though I guess I’ll be playing good cop.”

“In that case,” Peters deadpanned, “God help Bryan Vasquez.”

CHAPTER FOUR

“What’s the attack?”

“I already told you, I don’t know.” Vasquez’s voice was at once exhausted, frightened, and eager to please. “All I know is that there’s going to be one.”

“Yeah, so you keep saying.” Dickinson tapped his fingers on the metal table. “Thing is, you’re not giving me any reason to believe you.”

They’d been at it half an hour, and Cooper had spent most of that time letting Dickinson run through the preliminaries. Interrogation was a dance, and while the early steps were important, they weren’t delicate, so he’d used the time to size up Bryan Vasquez, to note his tells and ticks, to read the energy coming off him. One of the peculiarities of his gift was that he sometimes saw people almost as colors. Not literally—he didn’t have optical manifestations—but connotatively. The combined effect of a hundred subtle muscle movements—the level of dissonance between what someone was sharing versus what they held back—took on shades in his mind the way hot soup tasted red or a forest smelled green. Natalie was the cornflower blue of a clear winter morning, honest and cool. Director Peters was the heather gray of an expensive suit.

In Cooper’s mind, Bryan Vasquez was an awkward orange, simmering with tension, angry but unfocused, withholding but not doing it well.

“Haven’t you read a history book? This is a revolution. It’s set up in discrete cells so that we can’t betray one another. I can’t tell you what the attack will be because I don’t know. He set it up that way on purpose.”

“‘He’ being John Smith,” Dickinson said.

“Yeah.”

“You spoke to him?”

“Alex did.”

Cooper said, “Personally?”

“No.” The hesitation was almost imperceptible. “Over the phone.”

You lying little shit. Your sister met with John Smith personally. No wonder she went off the roof. But what he said was, “How do you know she was telling you the truth?”

“She’s my sister.”

“Did you help her code the virus?”

Vasquez looked stunned.

“We know about it, Bryan. We know she was working on a virus to incapacitate the guidance of military aircraft.” He leaned into the table. “Were you the one who was going to execute it?”

“No.” His voice came out weak, and he started again. “No. I helped with the technical specs. Alex knows everything there is to know about computers. But airplanes,” he laughed, “I’m not sure she’d know how to buckle her seatbelt. But the virus needed to be released inside military firewalls, at root level. It would take someone with clearance way, way higher than mine.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know.” His eyes were steady, his pulse elevated but no higher than it had been. He was telling the truth. Cooper said, “So how would it work?”

“I’m supposed to deliver it to someone the day after tomorrow.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. I just show up and he’ll approach me.”

“How do you know it’s a man?”

“That’s what Alex said.”

“Where?”

Bryan Vasquez crossed his arms. “You think I’m an idiot? I won’t tell you for nothing. I don’t even know for sure that you have Alex.”

Dickinson leaned in, his face hard. “Do you have any idea the world of shit you’re in? I wasn’t kidding about vanishing you.” He turned to Cooper. “Was I?”

“No,” Cooper said, watching for the reaction. Saw it, the bob of the Adam’s apple, a bead of sweat on the cheekbone. But Bryan held himself together, said, “I’m not the only one in trouble. You are, too.”

“How do you figure?” Dickinson with that wolfish grin again, the dangerous one.

“Because whatever the attack is, it’s coming soon, and it’s big. Big enough that what we were doing was only a corollary to it. Do you understand?” Bryan leaned in. “Alex and I were crippling the ability of the military to respond to the real attack. So you tell me, who’s in a world of shit?”

Cooper thought back to his conversation on the plane with Bobby Quinn, how Quinn had said there was a lot of chatter, that everyone was keyed up. Equitable Services routinely monitored phone and digital communications on a national basis. If an attack of significant scale was planned, it would be preceded by all kinds of coded communication. Cooper saw Alex Vasquez again, just before she jumped off the building. The turn of her head, the golden glint of her pendant. The way she tucked her hands in her pockets.

“I don’t get it,” Dickinson said. “You’re normal. Why help her?”

Bryan looked as if he’d bitten something foul. “That’s like asking why a white man would march with Martin Luther King. I’m helping because it’s the right thing to do. Gifteds are people. They’re our children, our brothers and sisters, our neighbors. You want to label them and track them and exploit them. And those you can’t control, you kill. That’s why.”

Cooper kept his face bland, but his mind was racing. He was getting a read on Vasquez. Helping his sister was only part of the agenda. He also thought he was David, taking on Goliath. The undiscovered hero with the potential for immortality. It was precisely the kind of personality a revolutionary leader would exploit. Could he really be just one level of contact away from John Smith?

The idea was staggering.

Seventy-three people dead at the Monocle alone. Hundreds at his orders since then, and God knows how many to come. The most dangerous terrorist in the country, and this man might lead you to him.

Dickinson let the silence linger just long enough for Vasquez’s righteousness to cool. “That’s nice. It’s kind of moving, even.” His tone was metered. “Thing is, you aren’t marching beside Dr. King, asshole. You’re making planes fall out of the sky.”

Vasquez looked away. Finally he murmured, “She’s my sister.”

The fluorescent lights hummed. Cooper weighed a play in his mind, turning it over. Decided to try for it. “Bryan, here’s the thing. Thus far, you aren’t really guilty of much. But your sister is in serious trouble. She’ll go to prison for the rest of her life for that virus. That’s if she’s lucky.”

“What?” Vasquez straightened. “No. She didn’t execute it. Legally, you can’t charge her just for planning—”

“It’s a terrorist attack against the military,” Cooper said, “by an abnorm. Trust me when I say that we can, and we will.”

Bryan Vasquez opened his mouth, closed it. “What would I have to do?”

“Lead us to the meeting.”

“That’s all?”

Cooper nodded. “Assuming your contact shows, of course. If he doesn’t, or if you warn him, deal’s off.”

“And in return—”

“I’ll personally guarantee that we won’t charge your sister.”

Dickinson’s head jerked sideways to stare at Cooper.

“That’s not good enough,” Vasquez said. “I want it in writing.”

“Fine.”

“Cooper, are you—”

“Be quiet, Roger.” He locked eyes with the other agent, saw the man wrestling with himself, remembering that Peters had named him primary, weighing that against a deal to free a known terrorist. Saw Dickinson wondering if it was a twist thing, if he was showing sympathy to one of his own kind.

Vasquez looked from one to the other, then said, “And I want to see her.”

“No.”

“How do I even know that you have her?”

“I’ll prove it,” Cooper said. “But you’re not going to see her until after. And if you mess with me, you’ll never see her again.”

Orange hate radiated in waves off Bryan Vasquez’s face. Cooper could see him trying to decide if he was the kind of man who would jump a table and attack a government agent. See him knowing that he wasn’t that man, that he never had been, and that fury didn’t change facts. Finally, Vasquez steepled his hands in front of his face and blew a long exhale into his palms. “Okay.”

“Good. We’ll be back in a minute with your document.”

The interview rooms were kept stuffy on purpose—warm, thick air made people sleepy, which led to slips—and the air-conditioning in the hallway felt great. He waited till he heard the door of the interview room click shut before he turned around.

“Are you out of your mind?” Dickinson’s eyes were bugged. “Letting a terrorist—”

“Get that document drafted,” Cooper said. “Make it simple and clear. If Bryan does what we want, we won’t charge his sister, period.”

“I don’t work for you.”

“You do now. You got proactive, remember?” Cooper stretched, popped his neck. Tired. “And when you’re done with that, go downstairs and get a necklace from Alex Vasquez’s personal effects. It’s gold, a songbird. Bring that back up for Bryan, to prove we have his sister.”

Dickinson looked confused. “Downstairs?”

“Yeah. In the morgue.” He turned and started to walk away, then spun back. “And Roger, make sure there’s no blood on it, would you?”

CHAPTER FIVE

“You let him think his sister is alive?” Bobby Quinn smiled over the lip of his coffee. “You, my friend, are a bad, bad person.”

“Whatever. I don’t disagree with what he said about abnorm rights, but blowing shit up isn’t the way to fix it. He and his sister would have killed hundreds of soldiers, and I’m supposed to be weepy about lying to him?” Cooper shrugged. “Not feeling it.”

Last night’s rain had given way to one of those pale, chilly DC days. A patchwork of clouds pressed down on the city, shading the daylight a tarnished silver. The wind was cold, but Cooper finally had a coat on. That and the half-dozen hours of sleep he’d snatched had done wonders for his mood.

12th and G, Northwest. Bland office buildings loomed on all four corners, the windows reflecting back the cold sky. Between them was a public square of concrete and stone. Escalators ran up from the open mouth of Metro Center Station, vomiting men and women in business attire, all of them checking watches and talking on cell phones. According to Bryan Vasquez, all he was supposed to do was show up and stand on the corner. His mysterious contact would do the rest.

“It’s a mess,” Quinn said. “High visibility, multiple escape options, way too many civilians.”

“And whoever is meeting Vasquez could watch from any one of these buildings.” Cooper leaned back, spun in a slow circle. “Perfect position to make sure he’s not being followed.”

“It could be a team, too. Spotters in the buildings, maybe security on the ground. An extraction crew. Decoys. Plus, we won’t know who we’re looking for until they make contact. Tactically, they have every advantage.”

“Can we do it?”

“Sure.” Quinn smiled. “We’re gas men.”

“Never liked that nickname.”

“You know where it’s from, right? Victorian era, the streetlights used to have to be extinguished by hand. The people that did it they called—”

“Yeah, I know, professor. My point is, doesn’t it seem a tad bloodthirsty?”

“Well, we terminate brilliants. We’re lifeguards at the gene pool.”

“So that’s a no.”

“That’s a no.”

“May the lord forgive you your wicked ways.” Cooper made the sign of the cross. “All right, you’re my planner. How do you want to set it up?”

“Teams there,” his partner gestured with the coffee cup, “and there. Put ’em in a FedEx truck and a phone company van. Plus a couple of agents dressed as civilians on the street. Women, preferably. If the bad guys are amateurs, they’ll be less likely to suspect women.”

“Are Luisa and Valerie back?”

“This afternoon, commercial flight. Luisa wanted to know, and I quote, ‘whose nutsack she needs to gargle’ to score a seat on the jet next time.”

“Woman has a way with words.”

“She’s a poet.” A bus pulled up to the corner, the brakes loud. Quinn gestured at it. “Check it.”

The side of the bus had been tagged with graffiti. Letters six-feet high, orange and purple. I AM JOHN SMITH.

“Are you kidding me?” Cooper shook his head.

“Been seeing that all over. Other night I was at a bar, somebody had put that on the wall above the urinal. And somebody else had added, ‘AND I AM PEEING ON MY SHOES.’”

Cooper laughed. “When do we get the teams in place?”

“We can get the phone company van here today, have the team sleep in it. The FedEx we’ll roll up half an hour before the meet. We’ll stuff it with packages, get an agent running in and out of the building. We should plant a tracker on Vasquez.”

“Two.”

“Two?”

“One on him, and one in the drive he’s supposed to hand off. Just in case. Also, I want snipers with clean firing lines.”

Quinn cocked his head. “I thought you wanted his contact alive.”

“I do. But if something goes wrong, I’d rather take them down here than let them get away. And I want an airship above. Infrared, image-recognition package, the whole works.”

“Why? Alex was the primary target, and we got her. That virus needs someone with high security clearance to activate it. What are the chances someone like that is going to come himself? It’ll be a lackey, someone disposable.” Quinn tossed his coffee cup, spread his hands. “I mean, you’re the boss. You want me to put this in play, I will. But isn’t this an awful lot of effort for one target?”

“It would be, yeah. Except that it’s not just a target. It’s a target that might lead us to John Smith.”

Quinn sucked air through his teeth. “Smith is going to know that we were onto Alex Vasquez. It took, what, nine days to catch her? She’d have gotten word to him.”

“Maybe. But she was running for her life. And it’s not like he’s got a phone number. He’s got to stay mobile, every night a different place. He must suspect the search protocols we’ve had running for him since the Monocle. The new version of Echelon was written by academy coders. Tier one, as good with a console as Alex Vasquez. Anytime John Smith speaks into a phone, anytime he logs onto a computer, he’s playing hide-and-seek with about five thousand professionals who want him dead. He may have set this into motion and then stepped back specifically so that Vasquez couldn’t burn him.”

His partner looked thoughtful. “I don’t know, man.”

“I do. Set it up.” Cooper checked his watch. Ten a.m. The drive would take almost three hours. He could requisition a helicopter but didn’t feel like explaining why. Plus, tear-assing through the mountains of West Virginia sounded like fun. There was a reason he drove a 470 HP Charger that cost half a year’s salary. And it wasn’t like he’d get pulled over for speeding; the transponder in his car would ID him to police as Equitable Services. “Can you get a ride back?”

“Sure. I’ll be here a while anyway. Where are you going?”

“To watch John Smith grow up.”

CHAPTER SIX

The boy was about nine, pale and bony with full lips and a mop of black hair. There was something lush about him despite his scrawny build; it was in the brightness of his mouth, the curls in his hair. He held up his hands like a boxer from a previous century, thin forearms scant protection.

The other’s punch was clumsy, more flailed than swung, but hard enough to snap the child’s head sideways. Stunned, the boy dropped his guard, and his opponent swung again, this time splitting a lip and bloodying his nose. The boy fell to the ground, struggling to cover his face with one hand, his crotch with the other. His opponent, a blond kid four inches taller than he, dropped on top of him and began throwing wild blows, the belly, the back, the thigh, whatever wasn’t defended.

The ring of children surrounding them grew tighter, fists waving. The glass of the office window was double-paned, and Cooper could hear only the barest hint of the ragged yelling below, but it was enough to bring him back to a dozen schoolyards, to a memory of toilet porcelain cool against his battered face. “Why aren’t those teachers breaking it up?”

“Our faculty is experienced.” Director Charles Norridge steepled his fingers. “They’ll step in at precisely the right moment.”

Two floors below and forty yards away, in a white beam of West Virginia sun, the blond had moved to straddle the younger boy’s chest, knees digging into shoulders. The black-haired boy tried to buck, but his opponent had weight and leverage.

Now comes the humiliation, Cooper thought. It’s never enough to win. Not for a bully. A bully has to dominate.

A glistening ribbon of spit slid out of the blond kid’s mouth. The younger boy tried to turn his head, but the blond grabbed a handful of his hair and banged his head against the ground and then held him still so that when it snapped, the string of spit landed square across his bloody lips.

You little shit.

A whistle blew. A man and a woman hurried across the playground. The children scattered, retaking the monkey bars and resuming games of tag. The blond kid sprang to his feet, stuffed his hands in his pocket, and assumed a sudden interest in the western sky. The younger boy rolled onto his side.

Cooper’s knuckles ached from clenching. “I don’t understand. Your ‘faculty’ just watched a ten-year-old beat another child senseless.”

“That’s a bit of an exaggeration, Agent Cooper. Neither boy will suffer permanent damage,” the director of Davis Academy said mildly. “I understand that it’s startling to watch, but this kind of incident is central to our work.”

Cooper thought of Todd the way he’d seen him last night, asleep in Spider-Man PJs, skin warm and soft and unmarked. His son was nine, about the same age he guessed the black-haired boy to be. He imagined Todd on a playground like this one, pinned under an older kid, his head throbbing, rocks digging into his spine, a circle of faces surrounding him, faces that belonged to children he had been playing with only moments earlier, and who now jeered at every wound and shame done to him. He thought of four-year-old Kate, who alphabetized her toys and organized her picture books according to the color spectrum. Who had a gift which, despite what he’d said to Natalie, showed every early indication of being quite powerful.

Maybe even tier one.

Cooper wondered if he grabbed Norridge by his gray tweed lapels and hurled him into the window the director would break through in a rain of sparkling shards or just bounce off. And if he did bounce, whether a second throw might do the trick.

Easy, Coop. You might never have seen it firsthand, but you knew these places wouldn’t be rainbows and unicorns. Maybe there’s more here than you understand.

Try not to kill the director until you do.

He forced a neutral tone. “Central to your work? How? Is the older boy a plant?”

“Heavens, no. That would defeat the purpose.” The director walked around his desk, pulled out a leather chair, gestured to one on the opposite side. “It’s crucial that all of the children here be gifted. Most are tier one, although there are a handful of twos who demonstrated significant aptitude in other areas. Unusually high intelligence, for example.”

“So if they’re all abnorms and none of them are in on it—”

“How do we incite incidents like this one?” Norridge leaned back in his chair and folded his hands in his lap. “Though these children all possess savant-level abilities, they remain children. They can be manipulated and trained just like any other. Disagreements can be fostered. Betrayals engineered. A confidence whispered to a trusted friend can suddenly be heard on everyone’s lips. A favorite toy can vanish only to reappear, broken, in the room of another child. A stolen kiss or the secret arrival of menstruation can become common knowledge. Essentially, we take the negative formative experiences that all children experience and manufacture them according to psychological profiles and at a dramatically higher rate.”

Cooper imagined rows of cubicles with men in dark suits and thick glasses listening to late-night confessions, to the frantic sound of masturbation in a toilet stall, or to the sobs of homesickness. Analyzing it. Charting it. Calculating how each private shame could be exploited to maximum effect. “How? How do you know all these things?”

Norridge smiled. “I’ll show you.” He activated the terminal on his desk and began to type. His fingers, Cooper noticed, were long and graceful. Piano player fingers. “Here we are.”

He pressed a button, and sound came out of the computer’s speaker, a woman’s voice.

“—there. It’s not so bad.”

“It hurts.” The child stretched the word out into three syllables.

“I told you to be careful with that one. That boy is trouble. You can’t trust him.”

A moan, and then a quiet sob. “They were all laughing at me. Why were they laughing? I thought they were my friends.”

Something cold snaked through Cooper’s belly. The woman, he presumed the one he’d seen break up the fight, continued. “I saw them all laughing at you. Laughing and pointing. Is that what friends would do?”

“No.” The voice was thin and forlorn.

“No. You can’t trust them either. I’m your friend.” Her voice saccharine. “It’s okay, sweetie. I’ve got you. I won’t let anyone get you now.”

“My head hurts.”

“I know it does, baby. Do you want some medicine?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. I can make it all better. Here. Swallow this—”

Norridge tapped a key, and the sound vanished. “Do you see?”

Cooper said, “You have the whole place bugged?”

“That was our solution for the first years. However, in a facility of this size, and given the outdoor spaces, the rough play, it’s impossible to assure coverage. Now we have a better way.” Norridge paused, the ghost of a smile playing on his lips.

Why would that be? What would make the man so pleased with himself?

“It’s not the school you wire,” Cooper said slowly. “It’s the children. Somehow you’re bugging the children.”

The director beamed. “Very good. When subjects enter an academy, Davis or any other, they are given a thorough physical examination. This includes inoculation against hepatitis, PCV, chicken pox. One of those shots implants a biometric device. It’s a dazzling piece of work, recording not only physiological statistics—temperature, white blood cell levels, and so forth—but also relaying an audio broadcast to receivers placed all over the school. It’s quite something. Advanced nano-technology, powered by the child’s own biological processes.”

Cooper felt dizzy. His job didn’t really entail any overlap with the academies, and so while there had always been rumors about them, he hadn’t really imagined they might be true. Yeah, every few years some journalist tried to write an exposé on the places, but they were never granted access, so he’d chalked up the more outrageous claims to sensationalism. After all, there were rumors about Equitable Services, too.

His first taste of the reality had come on his way in, when he’d passed a group of protesters on the road. Demonstrations had become a fact of everyday life, part of the background that people didn’t really notice anymore. There was always someone protesting something. Who could keep up?

But this group had been different. Maybe it was the size of the police response. Or that cops were arresting people rather than just containing them. Or maybe it was the protesters themselves, sane-looking people in decent clothes rather than shaved-headed radicals. One in particular had caught his eye, a woman with pale, slack hair who looked as if she might once have been lovely but now was shrouded in sadness; sadness draped her shoulders, sadness hugged her chest. She held a placard, two pieces of poster board stapled across a wooden handle. The sign bore a blown-up photo of a grinning child with her cheekbones and the markered text, I MISS MY SON.

As two cops closed in on her, she’d locked eyes with Cooper through the windshield and made a tiny gesture with the sign, just raised it an inch. Visually underlining it. A plea, not a screech. But with his eyes, he could see the turmoil beneath.

“Who’s the boy?”

“I’m sorry?”

“The boy who got beaten. What’s his name?”

“I know them mostly by transponder number. His name is…” Norridge clicked at the keyboard. “William Smith.”

“Another Smith. John Smith is the reason I’m here.”

“There are many John Smiths.”

“You know the one I mean.”

“Yes. Well. He was before my time.” Norridge coughed, looked away, looked back. “We’ve thought about discontinuing use of the name, but that seemed a victory for terrorism. Anyway, I’m afraid there’s no relation between this one and the one you’re looking for. We reassign all of the children’s names when they arrive. Every boy here is Thomas, John, Robert, Michael, or William. Every girl is Mary, Patricia, Linda, Barbara, or Elizabeth. It’s part of their indoctrination. Once a child is admitted to an academy, they remain here until they graduate at eighteen. For our work, we find it’s best that they not be distracted by thoughts of the past.”

“Their past. You mean their parents, right? Their family, their home.”

“I understand that this is startling to witness. But everything we do here has a careful logic behind it. By renaming them, we emphasize their essential sameness. It’s a way of demonstrating that they have no value until they have finished the academy. At which point they are free to choose their own names, to return to their families if they choose. Though you might be surprised to learn that a large percentage do not.”

“Why?”

“Over their time here, they have built a new identity and prefer it.”

“No,” Cooper said. “Why do this? I thought that the purpose of the academies was to provide specialized training in their gifts. To raise a generation that had mastered its potential.”

The director leaned back in his chair, elbows on the armrests, fingertips touching in front of him. Anyone could read the cold defensiveness, the go-for-the-throat approach of the embattled academic. But Cooper saw more to it. Something in the easy way Norridge maintained eye contact, the steadiness of his speech as he said, “I would have thought that an agent of the Department of Analysis and Response wouldn’t need to be told.”

“This isn’t really my area.”

“Still, surely you could have gotten these answers without a trip—”

“I like to see for myself.”

“Why weren’t you academy trained, Agent Cooper?”

The suddenness of the topic change wasn’t what surprised Cooper—he’d seen it coming in the fold of the man’s lips and the crinkle of his eyes—but the content threw him. I never told him I was gifted, or that I was tier one. He could tell on his own. “I was born in 1981.”

“You were in the first wave?”

“Technically second.”

“So you would have been thirteen the year the first academy opened. Back then we could barely manage fifteen percent of the tier-one population. With the opening of Mumford Academy next year, we expect to be able to train one hundred percent of them. That’s not public knowledge, of course, but imagine it. Every tier one born in America. A shame you were born so early.”

“Not from my perspective.” Cooper smiled and imagined breaking the administrator’s nose.

“Tell me, how did you grow up?”

“Doctor, I asked a question, and I want an answer.”

“I’m giving you one. Indulge me. Please, your childhood.”

Cooper sighed. “My dad was army. My mother died when I was young. We moved around.”

“Did you know a lot of children like you?”

“Military brats?” The old snide side coming out, the part that didn’t handle authority figures well.

But Norridge didn’t bite, just mildly said, “Abnorms.”

“No.”

“Were you close to your father?”

“Yes.”

“Was he a good officer?”

“I never said he was an officer.”

“But he was.”

“Yes. And yes, a good one.”

“Patriotic?”

“Of course.”

“But not a flag worshipper. He cared about the principles, not the symbol.”

“That’s what patriotism means. The others are just fetishists.”

“Did you have a lot of friends?”

“Enough.”

“Did you have a lot of fights?”

“A few. And you’ve about hit the limit on my patience.”

Norridge smiled. “Well, Agent Cooper, you were academy trained. Your childhood is essentially what we try to replicate. We turn up the intensity, of course, and we also provide access to programs to develop their gifts, resources your father couldn’t have dreamed of. But. You were lonely. Isolated. Often punished for being what you were. You never had the opportunity to learn to trust other abnorms, and because you so often had to defend yourself for being one, you were unlikely to seek them out. You didn’t have many friends and lived in a constantly shifting environment, which means you placed special value on the one rock in your world—your father. He was a military man, so concepts like duty and loyalty came easily to you. You grew up learning all the lessons we teach here. You even ended up working for the government, as the majority of our graduates do.”

Cooper fought an urge to lean over and bang Director Norridge’s face into the desk three or four times. It wasn’t the things he was saying about Cooper’s life, all of which were true, and none of which had stung him for years. It was the condescension, and worse, the bullying gleefulness of the man. Norridge didn’t just want to make his point. Like the blond boy on the playground, he wanted to dominate.

“You still haven’t answered my question. Why?”

“Surely you know.”

“Indulge me,” he said.

Norridge gave a tip of his head to acknowledge the returned volley. “The gifts of the vast majority of abnorms have no significant value. However, a rare handful have abilities that make them equivalent to the greatest geniuses of our history. Individually, that is reason enough to harness their power. However, the real concern is not the individual. It is the group. You, for example. What would happen if I were to attack you?”

Cooper smiled. “I wouldn’t recommend it.”

“What about someone more skilled? A boxer, or a martial artist?”

“Training can teach you how to defend yourself. But unless you were very, very good, your body would still reveal what you were about to do. That makes it easy for me to avoid.”

“I see. And what about, say, three martial artists?”

“They’d win.” Cooper shrugged. “Too many attacks to track.”

Norridge nodded. Then he said, quietly, “And what about twenty totally average, out-of-shape, slightly overweight adults?”

Cooper narrowed his eyes—

He said “our history” and “their power.” He doesn’t see abnorms as human.

Despite that, he knows us so well he could identify your gift. That knowledge has been applied to every facet of life here.

He dissected your past and the sensitive spots in it based just on this conversation.

He could have illustrated this current point a hundred different ways. But he chose combat as a metaphor.

—and said, “I’d lose.”

“Precisely. And we must always hold that advantage. It’s the only way. The gifted cannot be allowed to band together. So from their youth we teach them that they cannot trust one another. That other abnorms are weak, cruel, and small. Their only comfort comes from a single normal figure, a mentor like the woman you heard earlier. And they learn core values like obedience and patriotism. In that way, we protect humanity.” Norridge paused, then smiled toothily. It was a strange expression, knowing. It looked like given the chance, the man might take a bite out of him. “Does that make sense?”

“Yes,” Cooper said. “I understand you now.”

Norridge cocked his head. Whether he caught the real meaning or not, he’d at least caught the tone. “Forgive me. Getting me started can be dangerous.”

No kidding.

“I should mention the tangible benefits, too. Academy graduates have made enormous breakthroughs in chemistry, mathematics, engineering, medicine—all of it government controlled. That recording device I mentioned? The nano-technology is the work of a former pupil. All the latest military equipment is designed by abnorms. The computer systems that connect us. Even the new stock market, which is, ironically, immune to abnorm manipulation.

“All these things come from academy graduates. And thanks to our work, all are managed and controlled by the US government. Surely you can agree that as a nation—as a people—we can’t afford another Erik Epstein?”

Which people, doc? Cooper could feel a scream boiling inside of him, a rage that he very much wanted to give in to. Everything here was worse than he had imagined.

No. Be honest. You never let yourself imagine it. Not really.

Still, now that he knew, what could he do about it? Kill the director, then the staff? Tear down the walls and blow up the dormitories? Lead the children like Moses out of Egypt?

It was either that or get the hell out of here. He stood.

Norridge looked surprised. “Are you satisfied, then?”

“Not even close.” But if he stayed another minute he was going to explode, so he stalked out of the office, down the polished halls, past the narrow windows with their rocky evergreen vistas. Thinking, This cannot be the way.

And, John Smith was raised in an academy. Not this one, but they’ll all be the same, and there will be a Norridge heading all of them. An administrator who holds all the power, a skilled manipulator who understands and hates his pupils.

John Smith was raised in an academy.

John Smith was at war from his earliest days.

CHAPTER SEVEN

“Ground one?”

“We’re go.”

“Ground two?”

“Go.”

“Three?”

“Freezing my tits off, but go.” Luisa, bringing her usual flair.

“Crow’s nest?”

“Two positions, overlapping sight lines. Go.”

“God?”

“The view from on high is divine, my son.” Behind the voice came the buzz of rotors. At the elevation the airship was flying, it was nothing but a darker gray spot against a bright gray sky. “God is good.”

Cooper smiled and pressed the transmit button. “Peace be with you.”

“And also with you. But woe betide the sorry shitbird who tries to run, lest we hurl a thunderbolt.”

“Amen.” He clicked off and gazed down through the double-thick glass at the meet site.

Today looked pretty much like yesterday, which was one of those things you could say about a lot of DC days between November and March. The sunlight was weak tea, and gusts of winds tugged at the coats of powerbrokers, the scarves of businesswomen.

Ground two was the FedEx truck. It was parked on G Street, on the northwest corner. The back door was up, and an undercover agent was loading boxes on a dolly, checking each one against a manifest. Behind a makeshift shelf, four more agents were jammed together out of sight. It was a tight, uncomfortable space, but even so, they had it better than ground one; the utility van had been parked on 12th all night.

Cooper had done recon in those things before. They were dark and uncomfortable, boiling in the summer and frigid in the winter. Movement had to be restricted to the absolute minimum, and the air always reeked of urine from the quart jars they used. One time a junior agent had broken a jar, and after six scorching hours, the team had been ready to forget the target and beat the hell out of him.

11:30. The meet was set for noon. Good planning on the bad guys’ part: lunchtime, and the corner below would be even busier as everyone in the surrounding buildings scurried from their cubicles.

“Camera feed good?”

“Better than.” Bobby Quinn sat at a polished wood table twenty feet long. He’d co-opted the law firm’s presentation system for his mobile headquarters, and the air in front of him shimmered with ghost images, video feeds from various angles. “The intersection is wired like a tri-d studio.”

“Show me the transmitter.”

Quinn gestured, and a map of the city streets glowed. “Green dot is this.” Quinn tossed him the stamp drive. It looked perfectly normal, down to the half-rubbed-out logo on the side. Cooper pocketed it. His partner continued. “The red dot is Vasquez, the man himself.”

“How’d you wire him?”

“His colon,” Quinn deadpanned. Cooper glanced over sharply, but his partner continued. “Shiny newtech, just in from R&D. Some academy bright boy came up with a tracker in a gelcap. Enzyme-bonds to the lining of the large intestine.”

“Wow. Is he—is it—”

“No. Bonds dissolve in about a week, and out it goes with the rest of the junk mail.”

“Wow,” Cooper repeated.

“Gives new meaning to the phrase ‘stay on his ass.’”

“Been waiting to use that?”

“Since the moment they handed me the gelcap.” Quinn looked up and smiled. “Learn anything useful yesterday?”

“Yeah. I learned Smith has a right to be pissed off.”

“Hey, hey, whoa.” Quinn dropped his voice. “Dickinson would flip if he heard you say that.”

“Screw Roger Dickinson.”

“Yeah, well, you know he’d be happy to screw you. So be careful.” Quinn leaned back. “What’s really going on?”

Cooper thought of yesterday afternoon, the relief he’d felt as he hit the road. The Monongahela National Forest blurring around him, huddled trees and ragged mountains, prefab housing dropped at random.

I MISS MY SON, the pale woman’s placard had read.

“They aren’t schools, Bobby. They’re brainwashing centers.”

“Come on—”

“I’m not being poetic. That’s literally what they are. I mean, I’d heard things, we all have, but I didn’t believe it. Who could treat children this way?” Cooper shook his head. “Turns out the answer is, we can.”

“We?”

“They’re government facilities. DAR facilities.”

“But not Equitable Services.”

“Close enough.”

“It’s not ‘close enough.’” Quinn’s voice sharp. “You are not personally responsible for the actions of an entire agency.”

“See, that’s where you’re wrong. We all—”

“Do you believe that Alex Vasquez was trying to make the world a better place?”

“What?”

“Do you believe that Alex Vasquez—”

“No.”

“Do you believe that John Smith is trying to make the world a better place?”

“No.”

“Do you believe that he is responsible for killing a whole bunch of people?”

“Yes.”

“Innocent people?”

“Yes.”

“Children?”

“Yes.”

“Then let’s go get him. That is what we do. We take down bad people who hurt good people. Preferably before they hurt the good people. That’s our responsibility. After that,” Quinn said, “we go out for beer. Which you buy. That’s your responsibility.”

Cooper chuckled despite himself. “Yeah, all right, Bobby. I hear you.”

“Good.”

“That was something.” Cooper stood. “Getting all righteous on me. Didn’t know you had it in you.”

“I am multilayered. Like an onion.”

“That part I’ll buy.” Cooper clapped his friend on the shoulder. “I’m going to check on Vasquez.”

“Calm him down, will you? He’s sweating so bad I’m afraid he might somehow shake that tracker loose after all.”

“And thank you for that image.”

“Here for you, boss.” Quinn yawned and put his feet up on the polished wood table.

Cooper strolled down the hall, passing a gold logo with the names of three white guys followed by LLC. The law office was in a building overlooking the Metro station where the meet was to take place. Quinn had reached out to them yesterday, and the partners had been delighted to help Equitable Services. Cooper had met one of them earlier, a trim guy with a halo of white hair who had wished him good hunting.

Good hunting. Shit.

Two guards stood outside the corner office, their tactical blacks today replaced by bland business suits. The submachine guns were still ready-slung. He nodded at them. One said, “Sir,” and opened the office door.

Inside, Bryan Vasquez stood by the window, his hands against the glass. At the sound, he jumped, turning with an expression that was part guilt and part nerves.

Fever Orange, Cooper decided to name the color. He thanked the guard, then stepped inside.

“You startled me,” Bryan said. He had one hand pressed against the glass, the other to his chest. Ghostly white dots of condensation marked where the pads of his fingers had rested on the window. There were sweat stains at his armpits, and his chest rose and fell swiftly. He licked his lips as he shifted his weight from right to left.

Cooper slid his hands into his pockets and—

He’s dedicated to his sister, but he’s also a believer. He’s worried about his own safety but would never admit it. He’s attracted to the idea of plots and secret worlds, to comrades in arms.

He needs a strong hand, but not so strong he shatters. He needs to be pumped up and sent out to do his piece for a better world.

—stepped into the room. “Sorry about that. I always get jumpy before these things, too.” He pulled out the chair, spun it around, then sat with his arms on the back. “This part drives me crazy.”

“What part?”

“The waiting. Too much time in your head. Once things start, it gets better. You know what you have to do, and you just do it. It’s easier. Don’t you think?”

Bryan Vasquez cocked his head and turned to lean against the window with his arms crossed. “I don’t know. I’ve never had to betray something I believe in to save my sister before.”

“Fair point.” He let the silence hang. Bryan looked like a man who expected to be punched; slowly he realized the blow wasn’t in the air. A faint wind howled along the edge of the glass, and somewhere far away, a car horn. Finally, he moved to the desk and slumped awkwardly in the chair on the other side, all angles and elbows.

“I know this is hard,” Cooper said. “But you’re doing the right thing.”

“Sure.” The word drifting across the table.

“Can I tell you something?” He waited until the other man looked up. “Everything you said the other day about the way gifted are treated? I agree.”

“Right.”

“I’m an abnorm.”

Bryan’s face crinkled in conflicting directions: surprise and disbelief and anger. Finally the guy said, “What is it for you?”

“Pattern recognition, a sort of souped-up intuition. I read intention. That can be really specific, like knowing where someone is going to throw a punch. But personal patterns work, too; I get to know somebody, my gift forms a picture of them, helps me guess what they’ll do.”

“So if you’re gifted, what are you doing—”

“—working for the DAR?” Cooper shrugged. “Actually, pretty much the same reasons you helped your sister.”

“Bullshit.”

“It’s not. I want my children to live in a world where abnorms and straights coexist. The difference is, I don’t think you get there by blowing things up. Especially when one group vastly outnumbers the other. See, normal people, like you,” he gestured with palms together, “if you decided to, you could wipe out all the people like me. Every one of us, or close enough it wouldn’t matter. It’s a numbers game. You have ninety-nine to every one of us.”

“But that’s exactly why—” Bryan Vasquez stopped. “I mean.”

“I know how you feel about the way Alex is treated. But you’re an engineer. Think logically. The relationship between norms and brilliants, it’s gunpowder. You really want to strike sparks?”

He pulled the stamp drive from his pocket, set it on the desk, halfway between them. “Don’t forget,” Cooper said, “you’re not doing this for me. You’re doing it for Alex.”

It was a calculated play, backing up the philosophical get-out-of-jail-free card with a personal imperative. And it was far from the first time he had lied to a suspect.

So why am I feeling guilty about it?

The academy. Seeing that place had stirred up issues he thought he’d made peace with. Cooper pushed away thoughts of the playground, of the woman with the placard, and locked down his expression.

Bryan Vasquez took the stamp drive.

Cooper said, “Let’s go.”

“This is Quarterback. The ball is in play; repeat, Delivery Boy is moving. Headquarters, confirm.”

“Confirmed,” Bobby Quinn’s voice crackled in his ear. “Both signals are strong.”

The square across the street looked as planned and uninviting as ever, the black branches of manicured trees tossing in the wind. A couple of hardy souls huddled around the entrance to the nearest building, rocking from foot to foot as they sucked on cigarettes. The entrance to Metro Center Station had a steady stream of traffic. A row of newspaper dispensers, bright red and orange and yellow, ran along a low wall; at the end of it a man in a wheelchair shook a paper cup at passersby.

Cooper kept his stance casual, pitched his voice low. “God, what have you got?”

“Delivery Boy is heading north on 13th.”

“Clear view?”

“God sees all, my son.”

Everything is in place. You’re about to be a step closer to catching the most dangerous man in America.

Across the street, the agent at the FedEx truck finished loading his dolly and started for the near building. In a bench on the square, two women in business casual chatted as they picked at salads. One looked like the assistant principal of a middle school; the other was petite and lithe as a soccer player.

“How you doing, Luisa?”

“Never thought I’d say this,” dabbing at her lips with a napkin to cover the motion of her lips, “but I actually wish I was back in that cow-humping Texas backwater we just left.”

Luisa Abrahams was barely over five feet, pretty but not beautiful, famous for talking like a trucker, and perhaps the most stubborn person he knew. He’d picked her for his team after a mess of an op where her agent in charge had lost communication with her. The AIC hadn’t realized that her cover was blown and she needed support, so Luisa had chased a target two miles on foot, finally run him down, finished the job, and then called the AIC using her target’s cell phone. The insults she’d hurled at him circulated the agency for weeks.

Now she sat on a bench alongside Valerie West, the two of them pretending to be on their lunch. Val was a whiz with data analysis, but nervous in the field. Cooper was watching her shred her napkin, and weighing whether it was worth it to say something when Luisa touched the other woman’s knee, said something off-mic. Valerie nodded, shrugged her shoulders back, and tucked the napkin in her pocket. Good. Normally Cooper would have discouraged a romantic relationship between teammates, but the two often seemed better agents because of it.

Half a block away, Bryan Vasquez appeared in the crowd, walking behind a pair of tourists draped in cameras.

“All eyes,” he said. “Delivery Boy is here.”

Cooper ran through a mental checklist, making sure that everything was in place. Between the tracker, the cameras, the airship, and the agents, they had the corner locked down tight. Whoever came to meet Bryan Vasquez was going to be sitting in an interview room within an hour, bathing in that hopeless light and wondering just how true the rumors about Equitable Services’ “enhanced interrogation” privileges were.

Too bad we can’t let them walk and follow them to others. The payoff could be sweet, but the risk was simply too great; with an attack imminent, if their only lead got away, it could cost God knew how many lives.

Through the earpiece Cooper could hear the calls and confirmations of his team tracking Bryan Vasquez. The man was walking on the other side of the street, and Cooper carefully didn’t look quite at him. Just loosened his stance and opened up his senses, trying to take in the whole scene, to parse it, filter for the pattern beneath. The faded yellow blur of a taxi. The texture of a tweed coat. The smells of auto exhaust and cooking grease from a fast-food restaurant. The dull platinum glow of the sky and the shadowless noon it created. The determined set of Bryan Vasquez’s shoulders as he stepped onto the sidewalk and turned to look around. The clanging of a flagpole halyard driven to dance by the wind. The bright red and yellow newspaper dispensers behind Vasquez. The muted rumble of the Metro and the rot smell of the sewer grate and the squeal of brakes two blocks down and the very, very pretty girl talking on the cell phone.

A man in an oxblood leather jacket crossed the street toward Vasquez. There was purpose in his stride, a vector Cooper could see as if it was drawn with an arrow.

“Possible ID, leather jacket.”

In his ear, the team confirmed the sighting. On the bench, Luisa set down her salad and put a hand on her purse.

Vasquez turned to face the guy, his eyes a question.

The man in the leather jacket slipped his hand in his right front pocket.

Vasquez’s eyes darted from side to side.

Cooper forced himself to hold. He had to be sure.

The man stepped up to Vasquez… and then past him. He pulled a handful of change from his pocket and began to feed the newspaper dispenser.

Cooper let out his breath. He turned back to Vasquez, wanting to send him strength with a look, to let him know it was all right, it was under control.

Which is what he was doing when Bryan Vasquez exploded.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The flames blew outward like the spray from a sunset ocean, orange and yellow and blue, ripples of fire spilling and sloshing. In slow motion it had an ethereal beauty. The fire roiled and twisted. In front of the blast dark shapes surfed, indistinct and spinning. It was really quite lovely.

Until the torn metal slivers riding the shockwave struck Bryan Vasquez like a thousand whirling razor blades.

“That’s precision work,” Quinn said. “See the way the explosion is shaped? Boom, straight out of the newspaper box. Whoever set it up designed their charges with care. All the force was projected forward through packed metal shavings. Result is a cone wide enough to guarantee they got their target, but not much else.”

From Cooper’s perspective, the thousands of metal shavings had looked like a swarm of locusts tearing Vasquez apart. The explosion had stunned his ears, and even now Quinn’s voice seemed to be coming through a thick bath towel. He had a throbbing headache and burns on his hands from the metal trash can that he’d touched dragging a shrieking woman away from the fire.

For a short moment after the bomb had gone off, the world hovered in surreal balance. Thick smoke billowed from the wreckage. The limbs of a tree burned with pale orange fire like autumn leaves. Sound was disjointed, disassociated, effect not seeming to follow from cause. A woman wiped at her face, smearing blood and hair that had once been Bryan Vasquez.

It was as if, Cooper had thought, the bomb had been inside of Bryan, as if he himself had been an explosive device.

People stared at one another, unsure what to do, what this disturbance to their daily lives meant. But bombings had grown more frequent in the last years, and if it had never happened to them, they had at least seen it on TV and assembled their reaction from that. Some ran away; some ran to help. A few screamed. Sirens began to fill the noon air. Agents poured out of the FedEx truck and the phone company van. Then the real chaos started, cops and firemen and EMS and news crews converging from every direction.

A nightmare. What should have been a quiet little operation was now looping on CNN. Drew Peters had immediately played the national security card, shutting down any connection to the DAR. There had been a half a dozen bombings this year alone, mostly by abnorm-rights fringe groups, and for now, it was easy enough to pass this off as just another one. But a bomb going off in Washington DC, half a mile from the White House? That would get more attention. Chances were someone would dig up the DAR’s involvement.

That wasn’t Cooper’s problem. He stayed out of politics. What bothered him was that John Smith had beaten them. He’d taken away the only lead they had on a major attack. “Who triggered it? The guy in the leather jacket?”

Quinn shook his head. They’d finally made it back to DAR headquarters, and he had the explosion footage up on one of the big monitors. He pressed a few keys, and the crimson slag heap sucked inward and upward to become Bryan Vasquez. The flames retreated, waving like banners. The door of the newspaper dispenser shut the explosion behind it. A man in a leather jacket put a copy of the New York Times back in the neighboring machine. “See? He’s beside the blast. He lost an ear—which doesn’t matter, because he damn sure lost the hearing in it—and the docs are working now to see if they can save his left arm.”

“Could have been a suicide run,” Luisa said, way too loud. She’d been closer to the bomb than any of them.

“Maybe, but why? Besides, if he was doing the martyr dance, why not wire him instead of setting up a fake newspaper machine?”

“Maybe because it was supposed to be a secure area? Maybe because that should have been the only way to get a bomb in at all?” She was small but fearless, and Cooper had seen her leap into fights with men twice her size. “I thought you had the whole scene under control.”

“I did,” Quinn said too fast, his hands up. He looked from Luisa to Valerie, saw no support there either. Neither had been in the path of the shrapnel, but the shockwave had tossed them both like rag dolls, and neither looked inclined to forget it. Quinn turned to him. “Nick, shit, I was there all day yesterday, and the team in the van spent the night. We’ve got twenty hours of footage from a stack of cameras. Nobody planted the bomb.”

Cooper coughed. His partner reddened. “I mean, no one planted it while we were there. They must have put it there in advance.”

“And you didn’t check.” Luisa’s voice had a dangerous edge to it. “I got an idea, Bobby. How about next time I secure the scene, and you sit on the park bench in a skirt?”

“Weezy, I’m sorry, but—”

“Don’t you dare, you piece of—”

“Enough,” Cooper said. He rubbed at his eyes and listened to the sounds surrounding them, the clacking of keys, the quiet voices of analysts and operators speaking into microphones. Even in the face of this, and of the looming attack, there were still thousands of tier-one abnorms to track, dozens of active targets. “Enough. Two days we lost here. Two days and nothing to show for it.” He straightened, looking from one to the other. “You all need to get it through your heads. John Smith is not just a twist with a grudge. He may be a sociopath, but he’s a chess master, the strategic equivalent of Einstein. I’ll bet he had that bomb in place weeks ago. You hear me? Weeks ago. Probably before Alex Vasquez even left Boston.”

Luisa and Valerie looked at one another. He could read the fear in Valerie’s eyes and the protectiveness that elicited in Luisa’s. Quinn opened his mouth as if he was waiting for the words to come on their own. Finally he said, “You’re right. I’m sorry. I should have checked everything inside a hundred yards of the meet.”

“Yeah, you should have. You screwed up, Bobby.”

Quinn lowered his head.

“And I should have told you to check. So we both screwed up.” Cooper took a deep breath, blew it out hard. “Okay. Let’s start with who triggered the bomb. Val, you’re our analysis expert.”

“I haven’t had time to review—”

“Gimme your gut.”

“Well, if it was me, I’d do it remotely. All you need is a detonator and a clear view.”

“How would you trigger it?”

“A cell phone, probably,” she continued. “Cheap, dependable, won’t arouse suspicion if you’re caught with it. Just dial the—” She broke off, her eyes going wide. “Bobby, move.”

“Huh?”

“Move.” She pushed the man out of his chair, then took it herself. Her fingers flew over the keyboard. The big screen flickered, and the frozen video of the explosion vanished, replaced by columns of numbers.

Cooper said, “If you can access the local cell towers and isolate calls made within a few seconds of the explosion—”

“I’m on it, boss.”

A voice from behind said, “We need to talk.”

Dickinson. Damn, but he walks softly for a big man. Cooper turned, met the agent’s eyes. Saw the anger crackling there. Not rage, nothing so out of control. More like anger was the fuel his engine burned.

To his team Cooper said, “Keep on it. This won’t take long.” He started away, jerking his head for Dickinson to follow without waiting to see if the man would. Alpha dog posturing, stupid but necessary. He led the way to a dead space beside the stairs, put on a smile because he just couldn’t resist, and said, “What’s on your mind?”

“What’s on my mind? How about what’s on your collar?” Dickinson gestured. “That wouldn’t be a little Bryan Vasquez, would it?”

Cooper glanced down. “No. That blood belonged to a woman I pulled away from the fire.”

“Are you actually proud of yourself?”

“That’s not the word I’d choose, no. You got a point?”

“I found Bryan Vasquez. I brought him in. We had one lead, one, and I brought him in. And you just let him get blown up.”

“Yeah, none of us really liked him. We took a vote, decided what the hell—”

“Is this a joke to you?”

“Tell me, Roger. What would you have done differently?”

“I wouldn’t have put him on that street corner in the first place.”

“Oh yeah? Just lock up his twist-loving ass and throw away the key?”

“No. Handcuff his twist-loving ass to a chair and go to work.”

“A little recreational enhanced interrogation?” Cooper snorted, shook his head. “You could waterboard him till he grew gills, and it wouldn’t change the fact that he didn’t know anything.”

“You don’t know that. And now we never will.”

“We’re agents of the United States government, not some Third-World dictator’s private security force. That is not the way we work. We don’t have a torture chamber in the basement.”

“Yeah, well.” Dickinson stared at him, his gaze level, eyes unblinking. “Maybe we should.”

Yikes.

“Roger, I don’t know what your problem is. I don’t know if it’s a personal grudge, or ambition, or if you just need to get laid. But we have a fundamental difference of opinion on what our mission is. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go do my actual, legal job.” He started away.

“You want to know what my problem with you is? Seriously, do you want to know?”

“I already do.” Cooper turned. “I’m an abnorm.”

“No. It’s got nothing to do with that. I’m not a bigot. The problem,” Dickinson said, stepping forward, “is that you’re weak. You’re in charge, and you’re weak. And Equitable Services needs strong people. Believers.” He held the glare for a moment longer, and then he brushed past.

Cooper watched him go. Shook his head. I’m going to go with needs to get laid.

“Everything copacetic?” Bobby Quinn asked as he returned to the workstation.

“Sure. What have we got?”

Valerie West said, “The nearest cell tower reports a dozen calls within ten seconds. Eight of them local. When you triangulate the location, only one set of GPS coordinates makes sense: 38.898327 by -77.027775.”

“Which is…”

“Right about…” She zoomed on the map. As she did, Cooper felt that intuitive tingle, like a tickle in his brain, his gift jumping ahead to tell him what he was about to see. “There.” The screen showed G Street, half a block east of 12th. The entryway to a bank. He recognized it.

He’d been standing right beside it.

Cooper closed his eyes, thought back. The movement of the moment, so many things he’d been taking in. The faded yellow blur of a taxi. The smell of auto exhaust, cooking grease from a fast-food restaurant. The muted rumble of the Metro and the rot smell of the sewer grate and the squeal of brakes two blocks down and the very, very pretty girl talking on the cell phone.

You gotta be kidding me. He turned to Quinn. “Do we have video of that spot?”

“My cams were all pointing across the street.” His partner looked at the screen, pinched his lips, then snapped his fingers. “The bank. It would have security cameras.”

“Get in touch. See if you can find a picture of our bomber.”

Quinn snatched his suit coat from the back of the chair. “On it.”

Cooper turned back to the two women. “We need to get out ahead of this thing. Valerie, we have Alex’s and Bryan’s cell phones, right?”

She nodded. “SOP would be to dupe his when we arrested him. And analysts are probably already working her phone, pattern building based on the contact info.”

“Good. Initiate a search. I want digital taps on every number in their cell phone. To two degrees of separation.”

Luisa’s mouth fell open. “Jesus,” she whispered.

Valerie was doing that thing with her hands again, only without the napkin to shred this time. “Two degrees?”

“Yeah. I want taps on every contact in both phones. Then, any number that has connected with any of those contacts? I want them tapped too. Going back…six months.”

“Christ on a chorus line.” Luisa stared. “That’ll be hundreds of people.”

“Probably more like fifteen or twenty thousand.” Cooper glanced at his watch. “Get the academy coders on board. Pull them off the Echelon II scans we’re running for John Smith if you have to. If anyone out there says anything, anything that sounds related to this attack, I want analysts digging in fifteen seconds later. You get me?”

“I get you.” Valerie’s face showed the early traces of excitement. It was a dream for someone like her. The keys to the kingdom. He had essentially made this the single biggest investigative priority in the country and then put her in charge of it.

“Boss,” Luisa said. “I don’t mean to second-guess. But twenty thousand NatSec taps, all initiated without a judge? Not to mention pulling the resources, what a monster bitch of a bill this will come with? Are you sure? I mean, you know what they’ll do to you if it doesn’t work, right?”

“I’ll be sent to bed without supper.” Cooper shrugged. “Make sure it works out. If it doesn’t, we have bigger things to worry about than my career.”

CHAPTER NINE

The Monocle on Capitol Hill was an institution. Located just a few blocks from the Senate offices, for fifty years the place had hosted DC’s powerbrokers. The walls were covered with autographed eight by tens of every politician of influence for five decades, every president since Kennedy. It was busy even on a Monday evening.

A Monday evening like the one when John Smith strolled in.

He was broad shouldered but lithe, a quarterback’s body wrapped in a decent suit, with a white shirt open-collared beneath. Three men followed him, their movements almost synchronized, as though they had practiced the act of stepping into a restaurant.

Smith ignored them. He paused in the entrance, looking around as if to memorize the scene. When a pretty hostess touched his arm and asked if he was meeting someone, he smiled as he nodded, and she smiled back.

The restaurant was split between bar and dining area. The former was boisterous, a deluge of laughter and conversation. Half a dozen flatscreens ran the Wizards game; three minutes to the end, and they were down ten points. The patrons were mostly men, ties tucked between the third and fourth buttons of their shirts. Smith walked through, past the stools holding lawyers and tourists and clerks and strategists. The three men followed.

The restaurant portion was mood lighting and high-backed booths, patrician, with the feel of a previous era. An appellate judge clinked cocktail glasses with a woman not his daughter. A family from Indiana took in the scene, mom and dad chatting around mouthfuls of steak while junior used the scraps of his hamburger to buttress the walls of Fort French Fry. A corporate headhunter put the recruitment moves on a twentysomething in nerd glasses.

John Smith walked past them all to a booth on the right-hand side. The upholstery was dimpled and worn with use, and the table had the polish of decades. On the wall, Jimmy Carter beamed down, the words “Best crab cakes around!” slanting above his signature.

The man in the booth wore hair gel and pinstripes. His moustache was more salt than pepper, and the nose that had delighted caricaturists was crisscrossed with broken capillaries. But when he turned to look at John Smith, his eyes were bright and alert, and there was in that movement more than an echo of the figure he had cut, the once-feared and still-respected senator from Ohio, onetime chair of Finance, former presidential hopeful with a strong chance until the Panamanian thing.

For a moment the two men looked at one another. Senator Hemner smiled.

John Smith shot him in the face.

The three bodyguards shrugged out of their coats, revealing cross-slung Heckler & Koch tactical submachine guns. Each took the time to extend the retractable metal stock and brace the weapon against his shoulder. The red light of an exit sign fell like blood against their backs. Their shots were precise and clustered. There was no spraying, no wide sweeps. They double-tapped a target and moved to the next. Most of the victims hadn’t even risen from their chairs. A few tried to run. A man made it halfway to the entry before his throat exploded. A woman in a dress rose, cocktail glass shattering in her hand as the bullet passed through it to her heart. Screaming and more shots came from the bar, where a second team had entered. A third team had broken through the back door and were shooting immigrants in chef whites. The mother from Indiana slid beneath the table and yanked her son with her, clutching him in her arms.

When the guns were empty, the men reloaded and began firing again.

Cooper touched the screen of his datapad, and the image froze. The security camera had been mounted near the stairs to the conference rooms, and the angle was at once disjointed and horrifying, the violence more real because of the lack of Hollywood techniques. The pause had caught a teardrop of white fire exploding from a submachine gun barrel. Behind the three, John Smith stood with his pistol at his side, his face attentive but not involved, a man watching a play. The body of Senator Max “Hammer” Hemner had fallen back against the booth, a neat hole punched in his forehead.

Cooper sighed, rubbed at his eyes. Almost two in the morning, but though he was tired and sore, sleep hadn’t come. After lying in bed for forty-five useless minutes, he’d decided if he was just going to stare at something, better it was the case file than the ceiling.

He put a finger on the touchscreen and moved it slowly. The video scrubbed in response. Forward: A shooter released the magazine on his gun, let it fall to the ground as he slotted a replacement and aimed again. Backward: A shooter pulled the magazine from his gun as another leaped up from the floor and inserted itself into the weapon. The whole thing was Zen, smooth and clean and practiced. Almost the same forward or reverse.

Cooper used two fingers to zoom, then panned until Smith’s face filled the screen. His features were balanced and even, strong jaw, good eyelashes. The kind of face a woman might find handsome rather than hot, the kind that belonged to a golf pro or a trial lawyer. There was nothing that hinted at barbarism or rage, no hint of giggling madness. As his soldiers killed everyone in the restaurant—every single man, woman, and child, busboy, tourist, and senator, seventy-three in all, seventy-three KIA and not one wounded—John Smith simply watched. Calm and unaffected. When it was done, he walked out. Strolled, really. Cooper had watched the video hundreds of times in the last four years, had grown inured to the obvious horrors, to the spray of blood and the lethal calm of the soldiers. But one thing chilled him still, a thing perhaps especially frightening to a man with his eyes. It was the total lack of impact the massacre had on the man who started it. His shoulders were down, his neck was relaxed, his steps light, his fingers loose.

John Smith strolled out of the Monocle as if he’d just popped in for a quiet drink.

Cooper dumped out of the video, tossed the datapad on the table, and took a long swallow of water. Vodka sounded better, but it would make tomorrow morning’s jog less pleasant. The ice had mostly melted, and the glass was slick with cold sweat. He rocked his neck from side to side, then picked the pad back up and began punching through the rest of the file, not looking for anything in particular. The headlines, ranging from dispassionate (ABNORM ACTIVIST SLAYS 73; SENATOR KILLED IN DC BLOODBATH) to incendiary (A GIFT FOR SAVAGERY; MONSTERS IN OUR MIDST). The stories that accompanied them, and the ones that ran in the weeks to follow. Reports of abnorm children beaten at their schools, a tier two lynched in Alabama. Columnists who appealed for calm and decency, who pointed out that the actions of a single individual should not be held against the group; other pundits who spewed smoke and ash, who whipped the baser demons to howl. The event had dominated headlines. But when John Smith hadn’t been caught in months, and then years, the story faded from the foreground of public consciousness.

There was more. Text and video of speeches Smith had made for abnorm rights before the massacre. He’d been a terrific speaker, actually, at once inspiring and intimate. Detailed logs of the Echelon II protocols running to find him. Incident reports from half a dozen near-misses. Biographic details, genetic profile, personal data. Lengthy analyses of his gift, a logistical and strategic sense that had made him a chess grand master at eleven. Transcriptions of every ranked chess match he had played. Terabytes of data, and Cooper had read every word, watched every frame.

And still, today.

A few more stabs at the datapad, and the headlines were replaced by the VCS. Virtual Crime Scenes, there was a piece of newtech he wasn’t sure he was glad of. A photorealistic, completely manipulatable model of the inside of the Monocle as John Smith had left it, down to every smear of blood and spatter of brain matter. Cooper could pan and twist and tilt to any angle, could view the mess from the height of the ceiling or the intimacy of inches. It was an incredibly useful forensic tool that had been instrumental in solving many cases, but that didn’t make it any easier to take when he scrolled down beneath the table where Juliet Lynch had dragged her son Kevin. Being able to see the angle of her body, the star-shaped hole in her face, that was forensically handy. But the ability to see her expression, the remnants of the face of a woman who had without warning watched her husband’s head explode, who had in an incomprehensible instant gone from the simple happiness of a family vacation to howling chaos and the abyss, that Cooper didn’t need or want. It was one thing to understand she had died knowing—not fearing, knowing—her son would die, too; it was another to see the holes in the hand she had stretched out to protect him, as if a mother’s palm could stop bullets.

Screw the jog. Cooper pushed himself up from the couch and walked to the kitchen. The fluorescent light seemed surreal at this hour, and the standard-issue black-and-white floor tile was grim. He dumped the rest of his water in the sink, dropped a couple of ice cubes into the glass, and poured chilled vodka over them.

Back in the living room, he picked up his phone and dialed. Took a sip, savored the icy bite.

“Hey, Cooper,” Quinn said, his voice thick with sleep. “You okay?”

“I was just watching the Monocle.”

“Again?”

“Yeah. What are we doing, Bobby?”

“Well, we’re not sleeping.”

“Sorry about that.”

“S’okay. Just busting your balls. So. The Monocle.”

“The VCS. That woman under the table.”

“Juliet Lynch.”

“Right. I was looking at that again, and it hit me, that could have been Natalie. And the kid, it could have been Todd.”

“Shit. Yeah.”

“What are we doing? All of us, I mean. Ever since I visited the academy, I haven’t been able to shake it.”

“Shake what?”

“The feeling that things are about to get a lot worse. That we’re on the brink, and nobody seems to want to step away from it. All these horrors we’re creating. The academies, the Monocle, they’re the same. Flip sides of the same horror. And meanwhile, I’ve got two kids.”

“And mentally you’re putting Kate in an academy and Todd at the Monocle.”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t.”

“I know.”

“All of this stuff, it’s a mess. I know. We all know. Not just DAR. The whole country, the whole world knows it. We’ve been on this collision course for thirty years.”

“So why aren’t we swerving?”

“Got me, boss. That’s above my pay grade.”

Cooper made a sound that wasn’t a laugh. “Yeah.”

“You know what I do, these thoughts hit me?”

“What?”

“I pour myself a stiff drink.”

“Check.”

“Good. Listen, I know you want to take this on. But all we can do is our job, one day at a time. I mean, at least we’re in the game. We’re trying. The rest of the world is just hoping things work out okay.”

“He’s out there right now. Somewhere. John Smith. He’s out there, and he’s planning an attack.”

“You know what he’s not doing?”

“Huh?”

“He’s not calling his best friend to agonize over whether the world is going to shit. That’s how I know we’re the good guys.”

“Yeah.”

“Get some sleep. For all we know, Smith’s attack is coming tomorrow.”

“You’re right. Thanks. Sorry for the hour.”

“No worries. And Coop?”

“Yeah?”

“Finish that drink.”

He made himself jog the next morning as planned. Cooper did five miles twice a week, hit the gym opposite days, and sometimes enjoyed it, though not today. The weather was nice enough, warmish and bright for a change, and last night’s insomnia cocktails didn’t affect him as much as he’d feared. But part of the pleasure of exercise was losing himself in the physical, offlining the analytical side of his brain for a while and just concentrating on his breathing and the rhythm of his muscles and the beat through his headphones. This morning, unfortunately, John Smith jogged with him. The length of the run, all Cooper could think about was something he had said yesterday. He may be a sociopath, but he’s also a chess master. The strategic equivalent of Einstein.

The trick was to figure out how to beat a man like that. Cooper was the top agent at arguably the most powerful organization in the country. He had enormous resources at his disposal; he could access secret data, tap phone lines, command police and federal agencies alike, deploy black-ops teams on American soil. If an abnorm had been designated a target, Cooper could kill without legal consequence—and had, on thirteen occasions. He could, in short, bring incredible force to bear…but only if he knew where to focus it.

His opponent, meanwhile, could attack wherever he wanted, whenever he wanted. Not only that, but even a partial success was a victory for him, where for Cooper, anything less than complete triumph was a failure. Prevent half the casualties of a suicide bomber, and you still had a suicide bomber and a lot of dead bodies.

Brooding on it made a five-mile run seem like ten. And in one of those charming little ironic moments, when he passed the convenience store at the end of his block, he saw that the locked security roll-door had been freshly graffitied: I AM JOHN SMITH.

What you are, pal, is an asshole with a can of spray paint. And man, do I wish I’d rounded the corner as you were finishing up.

Inside his apartment, he peeled off the sweaty T-shirt, caught a whiff—yow, laundry time—and headed for the shower. When he was done he flipped on CNN as he toweled his hair.

“—a significant increase in the so-called Unrest Index, to 7.7, the highest level since the measurement’s introduction. The jump is largely attributed to yesterday’s bombing in Washington, DC, which claimed—”

In the closet he chose a soft gray suit with a pale blue shirt, open collared. He checked the load on the Beretta—it was full, of course, but army habits died hard—and then clipped the holster to his hip.

“—controversial billionaire Erik Epstein, whose New Canaan Holdfast in Wyoming has grown to seventy-five thousand residents, most of them gifted and their families. The twenty-three-thousand-square-mile area, purchased by Epstein through numerous holding companies, has become a polarizing factor not only in the state, where New Canaan’s occupants comprise nearly fifteen percent of Wyoming’s total population, but in the country at large with the introduction of House Joint Resolution 93, a measure to allow the region to secede as a sovereign nation—”

Breakfast. Cooper broke three eggs in a bowl, beat them frothy, and dumped them in a nonstick pan. He toasted a couple of slices of sourdough, poured a coffee big enough to dock a yacht, slid the scrambled eggs on the toast, and squirted sriracha on top of that.

“—culminating in an opening ceremony at two o’clock this afternoon. Developed to be impregnable to individuals like Mr. Epstein, the new Leon Walras Exchange will function as an auction house. Instead of the former NYSE’s real-time trading of every stock, company shares will be offered in daily auctions with descending bid prices. Final prices will be locked in according to the average at which they are purchased, thus removing the possibility—”

He’d overcooked the eggs a little, but the hot sauce made up for it. Hot sauce made up for most everything. Cooper finished the last bites, licked his fingers, and glanced at the clock. Just after seven in the morning. Even with traffic, he’d be at headquarters early enough to review the highlights of the phone taps before the weekly target status review meeting.

Cooper set his plate in the sink, dusted off his hands, and headed out. He skipped the elevator and took the three flights to the ground. It really was a lovely morning. The air was warm and rich with that ionized smell he usually associated with thunderstorms, but the horizon was clear and bright. As he reached the car, his phone rang. Natalie. Huh. His ex-wife was many things—sincere, clever, a wonderful mother—but “morning person” was not on that list. “Hey, I didn’t know you could manage to dial a phone at this hour.”

“Nick,” she said, and at the sound of her voice and the sob that cut her off, all light vanished from the morning sky.

And that was before he heard what came next.

CHAPTER TEN

Cooper’s apartment in Georgetown was eight miles from the house he and Natalie had shared in Del Ray. Like most DC drives, it had moments of grandeur set among long stretches of drab ugliness, all divided into agonizingly short blocks with lights at every damn one. Add city traffic, and the eight miles usually took twenty-five minutes, thirty if you skipped 395 and stuck to surface streets.

Cooper made it in twelve.

He opted for the Jefferson Davis, a distinctly unpretty street, but four lanes each direction. The transponder in his Charger broadcast a signal that marked him as a gas man to every cop within a mile, and so he treated speed limits as jokes and red lights as suggestions. When a cascade of brake lights bloomed before him, he downshifted to third and bumped the car up on the median.

He slowed when he pulled down her street—lot of kids on the block—parked, flipped off the car, and climbed out all in one motion.

Natalie was already coming out to meet him. She was dressed for work, in boots, a gray skirt to the knee, and a soft white sweater. But even though her eyes were dry and her mascara unsmudged, to his eyes she was bawling. He opened his arms and she came into them hard, threw her own around his back and squeezed. There was a humid sense to her, as though tears were coming out her pores. Her breath smelled of coffee.

Cooper held her for a moment, then stepped back and took her hands in his. “Tell me.”

“I told you—”

“Tell me again.”

“They’re going to test her. Kate. They’re going to test her. She’s only four, and the test isn’t mandatory until she’s eight—”

“Shhh.” He ran his thumbs across her palms, squeezed in the center, an old gesture. “It’s okay. Tell me what happened.”

Natalie took a deep breath, then exhaled noisily. “They called. This morning.”

“Who?”

“The Department of Analysis and Response.” She put a hand to the side of her head as though to brush her hair back, although none had fallen. “You.”

His belly was cold stone. He opened his mouth but found no words eager to come out.

“I’m sorry,” she said, glancing away. “That was shitty.”

“It’s okay.” He huffed a breath of his own. “Tell me—”

“Something happened. At school. There was ‘an incident.’” She made the air quotes audible. “A week ago. A teacher witnessed Kate doing something and reported it to the DAR.”

Gifts were amorphous in children, often indistinguishable from simply being bright, which is why the test wasn’t mandatory until age eight. But people in certain roles—teachers, preachers, full-time nannies—were supposed to report behavior they found particularly compelling evidence of a tier-one gift. One of many things Cooper hated about the way things were going; for his money, the world didn’t need more snitches. “What incident? What happened?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. The gutless bureaucrat wouldn’t tell me.”

“And so—”

“And so he asked whether it would be more convenient to test my daughter next Thursday or Friday. I told him that she was only four, that you worked for the DAR. He just kept saying the same thing. ‘I’m sorry, ma’am, but this is policy.’ Like he was the phone company and I had a complaint about my fucking bill.”

Natalie doesn’t swear. The thought drifted pointlessly through his mind. “Have you talked to her about it?”

“No,” she said. Then a pause. “I’ll—we’ll—have to. Nick, she’s gifted. We know she’s gifted. What if she’s tier one?” She turned away, eyes finally wet, the tears he had seen the moment he arrived now there for the world. “They’ll take her from us, send her to an academy.”

“Stop.” Cooper reached out, took her chin in his hand, turned it back to face him. “That’s not going to happen.”

“But—”

“Listen to me. That is not going to happen. I’m not going to let that happen. Our daughter is not going to an academy.” I miss my son, her sign had read. “Period. I don’t care if she’s tier one. I don’t care if she’s the first tier zero in history and can manipulate space-time while shooting lasers from her belly button. She is not going to an academy. And she’s not getting tested next week.”

“Dad!”

Natalie and he exchanged a look. A look older by far than either of them, a look that had bounced between women and men as long as they’d been mothers and fathers. And then they broke apart to face the children sprinting toward them, Todd in the lead, Kate right behind letting the screen door bang behind her.

He dropped to a squat and opened his arms. His children flew into them, warm and alive and oblivious. Cooper squeezed them both until they nearly popped and then made sure his face was innocent as he leaned back. “Uh-oh. Uh-oh!”

Kate looked up, concerned; Todd smiled, knowing what was coming.

“Uh-oh, I gotta go! I gotta go, who’s coming with me?”

“Me!” Kate, all glee.

“Me too.” Todd, caught between childish joy and the first hints of self-consciousness.

“Okay then.” He stretched out his arms. “Take your seats. In the event of a sudden loss of cabin pressure, oxygen masks will drop from the ceiling. Please swing from them like monkeys. Ready?”

Kate was on his left arm, body wrapped around it like, well, a monkey. Todd had his right locked, their fingers gripping one another’s forearms.

“Okay. Prepare for liftoff. Three.” He rocked up, then back down. “Two.” Again. “One!” Cooper lunged from a squat, using the force of his legs to send them into a spin and then half hurling, half falling into it. Todd was really getting too heavy, but screw that, he just cranked harder and planted his heels and then they were going. The world was the faces of his children, Katie giggle-screaming and Todd smiling pure and wide, and beyond them a blur of green lawn and brown tree and gray car. He pushed harder, feet moving like a dancer’s, arms rising wide, the kids floating now, momentum doing the work for him. “Liftoff!”

Later, he would remember the moment. Would take it out and examine it like the faded photograph of a war veteran, the last relic of a life from which he was adrift. An anchor or a star to navigate by. The faces of his children, smiling, trusting, and the world beyond a whirl of green.

Then Todd said, “I want to fly!”

“Yeah?”

“I waaaannaa flyyyiyiyiyyy!”

“Oh-kay,” he said, and gritted his teeth and spun faster, one more revolution, two, and then as he came around on the third he forced his right arm up, and Todd let go of it and he let go of Todd, and he had a stutter-second view of his son in midflight, arms up and back, hair wild around his face, and then momentum spun him out of sight. Katie clutched his arm as he slowed, one rev, Todd coming to the ground, two, Todd on his back laughing, three, touchdown, Cooper’s world a little wobbly as the revolution brought Katie down to bump gently against him. When he stopped he let go of her arm but kept close, waited for her to catch her balance, the endless parental quest to make sure his baby girl didn’t fall and crack her skull, didn’t run into sharp things, didn’t feel the rough edges of the world.

What if she’s tier one? They’ll take her from us. Send her to an academy…

Cooper shook his head and straightened his smile. He bent down, elbows to knees. His daughter stared at him with solemn eyes. His son lay on his back on the ground. “Toddster? You good?”

His son’s arm shot skyward, thumb up. Cooper smiled. He glanced up at Natalie, saw her look, the happiness a veneer on the fear. She caught him, touched her hair again, said, “We were about to eat. Have you?”

“Nope,” he lied. “Whatcha say, guys? Breakfast? Some of Mom’s famous brontosaurus eggs?”

“Dad.” Todd scrambled up and brushed grass off his pants legs. “They’re just regular eggs.”

Cooper started on the old routine—You ever seen brontosaurus eggs? No? Then how…and found he couldn’t do it. “You’re right, buddy. How about some regular eggs?”

“Okay.”

“Okay.” He gave Natalie a look no one else would have noticed. “Help your mom get started, would you? I’ll be right in.”

His ex reached down and took her son’s hand. “Come on, flyboy. Let’s make breakfast.”

Todd looked briefly baffled but followed Natalie as she led him inside. Cooper turned back to Kate, said, “You want to fly again?”

She shook her head.

“Phew. You’re getting so big, pretty soon you’re going to be doing that to me.” His shoelace had come undone, and he knotted it quickly.

Kate said, “Daddy? Why is Mommy scared of me?”

“What? What do you mean, honey?”

“She looks at me, and she’s scared.”

Cooper stared at his daughter. Her brother had been a restless baby, and many, many times Cooper had spent the ghostly hours of night rocking his son, soothing him, talking to him. Often he wouldn’t want to move once Todd had finally fallen asleep, certain that any shift, no matter how gentle, might wake his infant boy. And so he had played a game with himself, looking at his son’s thick dark hair—now faded to sandy brown—and the broad forehead and lips that looked like they’d been taken directly off Natalie’s face, and the ears that belonged to Cooper’s grandfather, big outward-facing things, and he had tried to find himself there. Other people said they could see it, but he never really could, at least not until Todd got older, started making expressions identical to his own.

Kate, though. He’d seen himself in his daughter since the day she’d arrived. And not just in her features. It was in the way she held herself, the way she observed things. It’s like the world is a system, he’d said to Natalie, years ago, and she’s trying to break it but knows she doesn’t have all the data yet. Kate had mostly been calm, but when she wanted something, boob or bed or fresh diaper, she had made it goddamn clear.

“What makes you think she’s scared, baby?”

“Her eyes are bigger. And her skin is more white. It looks like she’s crying but she’s not crying.”

Cooper put a hand on—

Dilated pupils.

Blood diverted from the skin to the muscles to facilitate fight-or-flight.

Enhanced tone in the orbicularis oculi.

Physiological responses to fear and worry. The kind of stimulus you can read like a billboard.

—his daughter’s shoulder. “First of all, your mom isn’t scared of you. Don’t you ever believe that. Your mom loves you more than anything. So do I.”

“But she was.”

“No, sweetheart. She wasn’t scared of you. You’re right, she was upset. But not because of you or anything you did.”

Kate stared at him, the corner of her lip sucked between her teeth. He could see that she was wrestling with the dissonance between what he had said and what she had seen. He understood that. It had been part of his life growing up, too.

Actually, it was still pretty much SOP.

Cooper dropped from his squat to sit cross-legged on the ground, his face a bit below his daughter’s. “You’re getting to be a big girl, so I’m going to tell you some things, things that you may not understand all the way right now. Okay?” When she nodded solemnly, he said, “You know people are all different, right? Some are tall and some are short and some have blond hair and some like ice cream. And none of that is right or wrong or better or worse. But some people are very good at things that other people aren’t. Things like understanding music, or adding really big numbers together, or being able to tell if someone is sad or angry or scared even if they don’t say so. Everybody can do that a little, but some people can do it really, really well. Like me. And I think like you.”

“So it’s good?”

“It’s not good or bad. It’s just part of us.”

“And not other people.”

“Some of them. Not a lot.”

“So am I…” She sucked her lip back in. “Am I a freak?”

“What? No. Where’d you hear that?”

“Billy Parker said that Jeff Stone was a freak and everyone laughed and then no one would play with Jeff.”

And thus are human relations boiled down to their essence. “Billy Parker sounds like a bully. And don’t use that word, it’s mean.”

“But I don’t want to be weird.”

“Sweetheart, you’re not weird. You’re perfect.” He stroked her cheek. “Listen. This is just like having brown hair or being smart. It’s just a part of you. It doesn’t tell you who you are. You do that. You do it by deciding who you want to be, one choice at a time.”

“But why was Mommy scared?”

And you thought you might dodge that one. Sharp girl. What do you say, Coop?

When Natalie had been pregnant, they’d had lots of conversations about the way they would talk to their children. Which truths they would tell, and when. Whether they would say that Santa Claus was a real person or just a game people played, how to answer questions about dead goldfish and God and drug use. They had decided that the thing to do was to be essentially honest, but that there was no need to dwell on things; that obfuscation was preferable to outright lying; and that there was an age when saying, Well, where do you think babies come from? was preferable to charts and diagrams.

Funny thing, though, they’d never imagined what it would be like if their child could see right through them. Dozens of studies had shown that a gifted parent wasn’t any more likely to have a gifted child, and that if they did, there was little connection between the parent’s gift and the child’s. In fact, young gifted children rarely exhibited a specific savant profile. At Kate’s age, it was usually more an uncanny facility with patterns that could manifest itself mathematically one day and musically the next.

And yet his daughter could read and interpret miniscule movements of interior eye muscles.

She’s tier one.

“There are some people,” Cooper said, choosing his words carefully and controlling his expression, “who like to know about people like us. People who can do the things you can do, and the things I can do.”

“Why?”

“That’s complicated, munchkin. What you need to know is that Mommy wasn’t scared of you. She was just…surprised. One of those people called her this morning, and it surprised her.”

Kate considered that. “Are they bullies?”

He thought of Roger Dickinson. “Some of them are. Some of them are nice.”

“Was the one who called Mom a bully?”

He nodded.

“Are you going to beat him up?”

Cooper laughed. “Only if I have to.” He stood, then reached down to hoist her to his hip. She was getting too old for it, but right then he didn’t care, and she didn’t seem to either. “Don’t worry about anything, okay? Your mom and I will take care of everything. No one is going to—”

If the test says she’s tier one, they’ll send her to an academy.

She will be given a new name.

Implanted with a microphone.

Raised to mistrust and fear.

And you will never see her again.

“—hurt you. Everything is going to be fine. I promise.” He stared into her eyes. “You believe me?”

Kate nodded, chewing her lip again.

“Okay. Now let’s go have some eggs.” He started for the door.

“Daddy?”

“Yes?”

“Are you scared?”

“Do I look scared?” He smiled at her.

Kate shook her head no, then stopped, nodded yes. Her lips pinched. Finally, she said, “I can’t tell.”

“No, baby. I’m not scared. I promise.”

It’s not fear I’m feeling.

No, not fear.

Rage.

MAX VIVID IS TRYING TO OFFEND YOU Entertainment Weekly, March 12, 2013

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Cooper used the drive to work to run scenarios. He got no small amount of grim pleasure from the one in which he tracked down the gutless bureaucrat who had called Natalie this morning and beat him bloody with the handset of his desk phone. Unbelievable. What kind of a job was that? Sit in a cubicle cold-calling families to tell them that something had happened, you couldn’t say what, but that their son or daughter needed to take the Treffert-Down Scale Assessment the following day. Hiding behind a call sheet and a flowchart of responses. Sorry, sir, sorry, ma’am, it’s just policy.

Drew Peters will be able to help. There had to be some advantage to being the best that the best of the DAR had to offer. Seven years of dedication, of brutal hours and relentless travel and blood on his hands. It had to count for something.

He remembered a conversation he’d had with Natalie back when Peters first recruited him. He’d already been with the department, first as a military liaison, then, when his term with the army was up, full-time. But Equitable Services was a whole new world. Instead of just tracking and analyzing brilliants, he would be actively pursuing some of them.

“Our task,” said the neat, calm man with steel in his eyes, “will be to preserve balance. To ensure that those who would upset the order of things are held in check. In certain cases, preemptively.”

“Preemptively? You mean—”

“I mean that when the evidence is clear and the danger is real, we will act before they do. I mean that instead of waiting for terrorists to attack our way of life, instead of allowing them to push this country toward a war against its own children, we will act to prevent one.”

To the average person, it might have been a stunning statement. But Cooper was a soldier, and to a soldier it was simple logic. Turning the other cheek was a lovely sentiment, but in the real world, it mostly resulted in matching bruises. Better still, why wait until after you’re hit to hit back? Neutralize the threat before it hurt you. “Will we have authorization to do that? Terminate citizens?”

“We have support at the highest levels. Our team will be protected. But what we will do will require the sharpest mind, the clearest moral sense. I need men and women who understand that. Who have the strength and intelligence and conviction to do difficult things in service of their country. I need,” Director Drew Peters had said, “believers.”

“He needs,” Natalie had said, when he recounted the conversation later, “killers.”

“Sometimes,” Cooper had said. “Yes. But it’s more than that. This isn’t some evil CIA spinoff group whacking political rivals. We’ll be protecting people.”

“By killing gifteds.”

“By hunting terrorists and murderers. Some—okay, most—of which will be brilliants, yes. But that’s not the point.”

“What is?”

He’d paused a long moment. A beam of dusty sun tracked across the scuffed hardwood of their apartment. “You know that moment in a movie when the good guys stand together? Against incredible odds, and for something important, and with total faith that their brothers will stand with them?”

“You mean like at the end of a rom-com, when the best friend rushes the guy to the airport to catch the girl?”

He’d mock-pushed her, and she’d laughed. “Yeah, I know the scenes. You get all teary. You play it off, but I can always tell. It’s cute.”

“I get teary because I believe in it. In heroism and duty, in sacrifice for justice and equality. All that good stuff. That’s why I became a soldier in the first place.”

“But now you’ll be fighting against other gifteds. People like you.”

“I realize it’s weird.” He’d taken her hands. “Twists—”

“Would you stop it with that word?”

“Okay, abnorms, they’ll think I’m a traitor, and some of my new straight colleagues won’t trust me. I get it.”

“So why—”

“Because we have a son.”

Natalie had been about to respond, but his answer threw her. She looked down at her hands in his. “I just—I don’t want you to end up hating yourself.”

“I won’t. I’ll be fighting for a world where it doesn’t matter if my son is gifted or not. That’s a cause I can kill for.” As if on cue, Todd had stirred in his crib. They had both held their breath. When he settled, Cooper continued. “Besides, I want to be able to protect you both if things do get worse. There’s no better place to be able to do that.”

Time to test that theory.

The Equitable Services command center was as busy as ever. Shifts ran twenty-four hours, and day or night analysts keyed in their data, argued over meaning and relevance, and updated the video wall that showed every action in the country. There were more oranges and reds overlaid today than yesterday, measurements of the nation’s growing tension. The bank of monitors played cable news, two channels dedicated to that evening’s reopening of the stock market, a third showed a conservative pundit drawing on a chalkboard, the fourth running an earlier press conference in which a reporter buttonholed President Walker about the New Canaan Holdfast in Wyoming. The president looked tired but handled himself well, reminding the world that the gifted were also American citizens, and that the NCH was legally purchased corporate land.

Cooper headed for the stairs. Behind him, a woman called his name. He ignored her and started up the stairs. Valerie West hurried after him. “Cooper!”

He turned his head but didn’t stop. “I’m busy.”

“No, listen, one of the taps turned something up. You’ve got to hear—”

“Later.”

“But—”

He whirled. “I said later, okay? I don’t know how much simpler I can make it.”

Valerie reacted as if slapped. “Yes, sir.”

Cooper hurried up the stairs, one hand trailing the railing. A balcony ringed the command center, executive offices, and conference rooms. Director Drew Peters’s office was mostly glass, allowing him to keep an eye on the video wall and the activity below. Now, however, the blinds were closed. His assistant, Maggie, a stylish woman in her early fifties with a pleasant smile and ice water in her veins, looked up as Cooper approached. She’d been with Peters for two decades, and her experience and security clearance made her more executive officer than secretary.

“I need to see him.”

“He’s on a call. Have a seat.”

“Now, Maggie. Please.” He let some of the turmoil show on his face.

She examined him calmly, then turned to her keyboard, typed something. A moment later there was a ding of the returned instant message. “Go ahead, Agent Cooper.”

The office was tidy and tastefully lit, small for a man of Peters’s standing. There was a couch in one corner under the de rigueur framed portrait of President Henry Walker. But it was the other photographs that always caught Cooper. Instead of the predictable dick-measuring images of Peters with world leaders, the walls were decorated with shots of active targets. Pride of place was given to a black-and-white photo of John Smith holding a microphone and addressing a crowd on the Mall, leaning into the microphone like an evangelist.

From behind the desk, Peters gestured at a chair and continued speaking into the phone. “I understand that, Senator.” A pause. “It means just that. I understand you.” Peters rolled his eyes. “Well, perhaps you shouldn’t have sold him half the state, should you?” Another pause. “Yes, well, you’re certainly welcome to do that. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have an appointment.” He hung up, pulled off the slender earpiece, and dropped it on his desk. “Our distinguished senator from Wyoming. Erik Epstein bought twenty-three thousand miles of his state, an area the size of West Virginia, and the good senator didn’t trouble himself to wonder why.” The director shook his head. “The world would be a better place if people stopped voting for folksy candidates they could have a beer with and started voting for people smarter than them.” Peters leaned back in his chair and looked at Cooper quizzically. “What’s on your mind?”

“I need help, Drew.” In public it was always Director or sir, but the intensity of their job had taken things beyond the merely professional. Peters was a cool one, maintained decorum, but it wasn’t every agent he referred to as son.

“What’s going on?”

“It’s personal.”

“All right.”

“You’ve met my children.”

“Of course. Todd must be…eight now?”

“Nine. But it’s Kate that I need to talk to you about. Her mother got a call this morning from someone in Analysis. Apparently there was some sort of incident at school. They want to schedule a TDSA.”

Peters winced. “Ah, Nick. I’m sorry. I’m sure it’s nothing, just a precaution.”

“That’s the problem.” Cooper took a deep breath, blew it out. “It’s not nothing.”

“She’s gifted?”

“Yes.”

“You’re certain?”

“Yes.”

The director sighed. He took off his rimless glasses, pinched at his nose. “That’s hard.”

“I’m asking you for a favor.”

Peters replaced his glasses. Looked sideways, at the photos, the Wall of Shame, where John Smith leaned into a microphone. “It’s strange, isn’t it? There was a time, not so long ago, when every parent hoped their child would be born gifted. And now…”

“Sir, I know what I’m asking, and I’m sorry to do it. But she’s only four years old.”

“Nick.” A hint of reproach in the tone.

Cooper met his gaze, didn’t waver. “I need this, sir.”

“You know I can’t.”

“You know how much I do here. How many times I’ve killed for you.”

The director’s eyes hardened. “For me?”

“For Equitable Services. For,” he said, spreading his hands, “God and country. And in all that time, I’ve never asked for a thing, not one personal favor.”

“I know that. You believe in what we do here. That’s what makes you so good at your job.”

“My children are what make me good at my job,” Cooper said. “Everything I’ve ever done here, it’s to make the world better for them. Because I believe that what this agency does is the only way to get there. And now that agency wants to take my daughter.”

“First,” Peters said, “that’s an overstatement. Don’t lose your head. This test is given to every child in America—”

“At age eight. She’s four.”

“—and 98.91% of the time, it comes up negative.”

“I’m telling you, she’s gifted.”

“And only 4.91% are ranked as tier one.” Peters took a deep breath, then leaned into the desk. Sympathy radiated from every muscle in his body. “There are times I hate this job, you know. You’re not the first agent to have a child be scheduled for an early TDSA. I have to do this about once a year. But you’ve heard of Caesar’s wife? Well, we’re Caesar’s palace guard. Being beyond reproach isn’t just a noble idea. It’s mandatory. We cannot put ourselves above the law. If we do, we become the Gestapo.”

Cooper understood the principle, understood the need for it. Yesterday, if he’d been in the director’s shoes and Quinn had come to him for the same favor, he would have made the same argument. But this time it’s my child. “But—”

“I’m sorry, Nick. I truly am. I wish there was something I could do. It’s not that I don’t want to help you. It’s that I can’t. I literally can’t.”

Cooper said, “Were your children tested?”

Peters’s eyes narrowed. For a moment, raw emotion slipped past the cool gray wall of the man, and Cooper was surprised by the intensity of it, the anger. Then the director said, “You know I lost my wife.”

Cooper had never met Elizabeth; she’d died the year before Peters recruited him. In the photos he’d seen, she had that inner glow that made her seem much prettier than she objectively was. One shot in particular had caught him, Elizabeth in the midst of a laugh, her head thrown back, eyes shut; given over entirely to the moment.

“Forty-one years old, and one Wednesday morning she found a lump. Eighteen months later, she was gone, and I was raising three daughters. She’s buried in her family mausoleum in Oak Hill. They’re wealthy from way back; her however-many-times great-grandfather was in Abe Lincoln’s cabinet. Her father, Teddy Eaton, handled the private fortunes of half of Capitol Hill. God, he was a bastard.” Peters’s usually quiet voice hit the word with inflection. “As his daughter was dying, the old man begged her to let him bury her with them. ‘You’re an Eaton, not a Peters. You should be with us.’” Peters stared out at the middle distance.

“I’m sorry, Drew.”

“The day we buried her in Oak Hill, I thought that was the worst day of my life.” Peters’s eyes focused. He locked them on Cooper’s with an almost audible click. “Were my children were tested? Of course. And I was wrong. The day I buried the woman I loved in a place where I won’t get to lie next to her, that wasn’t as bad as it gets. When my daughters got tested, that was the worst day of my life. Both times. And when Charlotte turns eight this spring, that will be the worst day of my life.”

A numb feeling crept up Cooper’s body. He had a flash of a sleepless night years ago, when Kate was a newborn, seven pounds of tiny helplessness, crying by Christmas lights as he tried to soothe her. All that time. All those hours. All the pain and pleasure of fatherhood.

There has to be a way.

“I know this is difficult, Nick. But you’re Equitable Services. Focus on that.”

“You think I don’t—”

“I think,” Peters said, “that when family comes up against duty, it’s hard to choose. But never forget that there are people who believe a war is coming. Some of them want it to. And we’re all that’s standing against that.”

Cooper drew a deep breath. “I know.”

“There’s one thing you can do to help Kate.” The director’s eyes were pale blue and sharp edged. “Your job. Do your job, son.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

Lacking any better ideas, Cooper did just that. There was still an attack imminent, still lives on the line.

Besides. You have a chance to catch John Smith. You want leeway? Catch the most dangerous man in America. Then see if the answer is the same.

He went looking for Valerie West—there’d been no need to snap at her that way, especially when it sounded like she had something—and found his whole team together and frenetic. The monitor in front of Valerie had a live satellite image, a rectangle maybe half a mile by a mile of tightly packed houses and narrow streets. Luisa Abrahams leaned over her shoulder, talking fast into the phone. Bobby Quinn, bulky with a vest, was checking the load on his weapon. As Cooper approached, all three turned to look at him. Then all three started talking at the same time.

Twenty minutes later he was in the back of a helicopter, the rotors thumping as the pilot flew over fields and forest, suburbs and golf courses. To the east the Chesapeake was a thin blue ribbon nicked by diamond sparkles of sunlight.

“It’s thin,” Cooper shouted over the noise. He’d unfolded his datapad from his pocket and snapped the display fabric taut. On the screen was a transcript of a conversation recorded three hours earlier between a man named Dusty Evans and an unknown caller.

DE: “Hello?”

UNK: “Good morning. How are you?”

DE: “Great. Looking forward to the fishing trip.”

UNK: “Everything ready?”

DE: “Got all our gear packed. Everything you asked for.”

UNK: “How’s the water?”

DE: “Clear as glass.”

UNK: “Glad to hear it. We’re going after the big one today.”

DE: “Yes, sir. It’s going to be a thing of beauty.”

UNK: “Yes. Yes, it will. Good work.”

DE: “Thank you. It’s an honor.”

UNK: “The honor’s mine. We’ll talk again later.”

“You said you wanted anything off the taps,” Quinn yelled back. “We got two dozen hits; this is the only one the analysts cleared.”

“It’s obviously coded, but what else? Who’s Dusty Evans?”

“Electrician, unmarried, twenty-four. Tested tier four in ninety-two—mathematical—joined the army in 2004, washed out of basic. Punched his sergeant, apparently. A couple of speeding tickets, an assault charge for a bar fight.”

“He was in one of the Vasquezes’ cell phones?”

“No. About three months ago he called a woman named Mona Appismo, who was in Alex’s cell phone.”

“That’s it?” Cooper felt a sinking inside him. For a moment he’d thought he conjured a miracle by sheer force of will. But now he felt himself drifting back to questions for which he had no answers. “This is a waste of time. He’s probably a nobody talking to his pot dealer.”

“Only if he’s got a thing for ditch weed.” Quinn grinned. “Unknown number turned out to be a cell phone in Wyoming. It’s from inside New Canaan. Belongs to a guy named Joseph Stiglitz.”

“And you’re thinking Joseph Stiglitz, JS, John Smith?”

“I’m not thinking it, boss. The analysts are.”

“The voice doesn’t match, does it?” For the last five years, they’d been running the most sophisticated computer search algorithms ever devised to find John Smith. Either the man had never once picked up the phone, or, more likely, he was disguising his voice. Easy enough to do on digital lines.

“No,” Quinn said, “but the phone was bought last month and never used. So who buys a phone but doesn’t even turn it on for a month?”

“Someone who plans ahead. Good thinking. Local cops on alert?”

“Yeah. They know to stay back, too. Luisa is coordinating, and I think they’re afraid of her.”

“Good.” Cooper slid his fingers across the face of the datapad, scanning the hurriedly assembled file on Dusty Evans. An arrest record from the assault charge listed him as six two and 230, hair black, eyes brown, no scars, a skull-and-snake tattoo on his right bicep. In the mug shot Evans looked like a pissed-off young man, his glare at the camera pure contempt.

There was an address in Elizabeth, New Jersey, a working-class burg forty-five minutes west of Manhattan. Vehicle registration for an older Ford pickup. His brief military service record: a fine shot, good fitness, but discipline problems. The helicopter banked, shifting Cooper against the frame. On the horizon he could see a low industrial city, Philadelphia, he thought. City of brotherly love. He remembered talking to Alex Vasquez by bar light, the sour taste of the coffee as he told her that there had been a bombing in Philadelphia that day. It had been a post office, after hours. A silly, pointless target.

Two thoughts rang in his head. First, if Joseph Stiglitz really was John Smith, then Cooper was closer than anyone had ever been to catching the man. And second, there was going to be a major terrorist attack on America today. Or at least starting today; it could be a multiphase strike. For all they knew, Smith could be about to march on the White House. Cooper didn’t have the information to say.

Trying to analyze a situation without enough data was like looking at a photograph of a ball in flight and trying to gauge its direction. Is it going up, down, sideways? Is it about to collide with a baseball bat? Is it moving at all, or is something on the blind side holding it in place? A single frame didn’t mean a thing. Patterns were based on data. With enough datapoints, you could predict just about anything.

It was no different with Cooper’s gift. It often felt like intuition: he could go through a subject’s apartment, look at their photographs, the way they organized their closet, whether there were dishes in the sink, and from that he could make a leap, oftentimes a leap that banks of computers and teams of researchers could not. But it wasn’t a matter of visions from the Almighty, and it couldn’t be forced. Without data, he was just as clueless as anybody else looking at the photograph of the ball.

All he had right now was one Dusty Evans, a man he’d never even heard of yesterday. A loser with no prospects, no special skills, no connections that made him valuable. He seemed an unlikely conspirator for someone like John Smith. On the other hand, he was a pissed-off young man—young abnorm man—which was a demographic Smith fared well with.

Philadelphia had grown large out the window. Cooper checked his watch; about half an hour till they landed. They’d know soon enough if Evans had anything to offer them. He turned, saw his partner looking at him. “What?”

“There’s something else.” Quinn scratched at a temple. Uncomfortable, Cooper could see, and stalling.

“Am I supposed to guess?”

“Right. Let me send it to you.” Quinn tapped at his own datapad, and then a notification box appeared on Cooper’s, asking if he would accept a file. He clicked yes, and a photograph filled the screen.

It didn’t capture the fluidity with which she moved, the graceful transfer of weight in each step, the elegance of her posture. But the girl talking on the cell phone was still very, very pretty. Probably about twenty-seven, full lips, brown hair in a chic cut that highlighted a dancer’s shoulders. Skin color said Mediterranean, or Jewish, maybe. Her mascara was thick, but as she wore no other makeup it seemed exotic rather than cheap. She was slender enough he could mark her clavicles beneath her fitted T-shirt.

Very, very pretty indeed.

“That’s our bomber,” Quinn said. “The photo is from an ATM security camera. Thankfully, all the major banks use newtech lenses these days to discourage fraud, so the quality is good. Five years ago she would have been a black-and-white blur. Anyway, Val checked the time stamp against the cell tower logs and the GPS coordinates. It’s her.”

Cooper said nothing, just looked at the woman. She had the hint of a smile on her lips, like she knew a secret.

“Thing is…” Quinn hesitated.

“I was right beside her.”

“Yeah.”

Cooper laughed through his nose, then took a deep breath. “I was afraid of that.” He caught Quinn’s look and said, “Yesterday, when we found out where the call came from, I was thinking back, and I thought I might have been.”

“Did you notice her at the time?”

“Look at her.”

“But you didn’t…”

Cooper shook his head. “Not a clue.” He laughed again and saved the photo to his desktop. “We got anything on her?”

“Nothing.”

“What about the phone she used?”

“It belonged to a woman, dental hygienist, named Leslie—” Quinn checked, “—Anders. We talked to her; she noticed her phone was missing last night, thought she’d left it somewhere. We’re confirming, but I think she’s clean. My guess is Foxy Brown there lifted it from her purse.”

“We recover it?”

“Nah. Probably in the sewers.” Quinn shook his head. “She whupped us good, boss. Twenty agents, an airship, cameras all over the place, snipers, and she strolled right in and blew up our witness.” His partner didn’t explicitly mention that the girl had stood beside Cooper while she triggered the bomb, but that was only because the words were in parentheses.

Cooper sighed. Crushed his d-pad into a square and jammed it in his pocket. “Well, one thing’s for sure.”

“What’s that?”

“Roger Dickinson is having a better day than I am.”

By one o’clock they were rolling through Elizabeth in a black Escalade commandeered from a DAR tactical response team. Bobby Quinn was expanding on one of his theories, and Cooper was driving and trying not to listen. The truck had been rebored and given twin turbochargers, and the result was a roar of muscle Cooper was digging on.

“So I finally figured out those anti-Wyoming people,” Quinn said. “I used to think, you know, why not? I mean, who needs Wyoming? You ever been there? Of course not. No one has. And maybe it would take some of the pressure off things if abnorms had a place they knew was safe. No big surprise Erik Epstein named the place New Canaan, right? Tap into the Jewish sympathy, parallel the situations.”

“Mmm,” Cooper said. He glanced at the map on the Escalade’s GPS. Outside the window Elizabeth looked exactly the way he had imagined. The houses were mostly two stories, small but tidy, nestled close. Older domestic cars were parked in squat driveways beneath crisscrossing power lines. The kind of neighborhood where a nurse and a plumber could own a home, raise a family.

“But then I figured it out. It’s like Risk.”

“Like risk?” Cooper asked, drawn in despite himself. “Who likes risk?”

“No, Risk. You know, Risk, that board game, the one with all the little plastic pieces and the map of the world? Risk.”

“Oh. Okay.” Cooper paused. “Yeah, still not getting it, Bobby. What’s like Risk?”

“You ever play it?”

“I don’t know. A long time ago.”

“My nephews were in town, we’d done the zoo already, the Mall, and I was going crazy for something to entertain them. See, the goal of the game is to take over the world—”

“That’s your revelatory realpolitik understanding of New Canaan and norm-abnorm relations? ‘The goal is to take over the world’?”

“Just listen. You start with a certain number of pieces in different countries, and you attack the countries next to them. You get more armies every turn depending on what countries you hold. Well, continents, really, you get armies for continents, but anyway, the point is, you get different amounts for different continents.”

“Okay.” Cooper turned onto Elm Street. Evans was at 104 Elm. He checked his mirror; no sign of police cars, nothing to startle the man. The sky was white.

“So say you own Australia. And you feel pretty good about yourself, right? You took it over a bit at a time, and the rewards are coming in now, a few armies every turn. And you’ve got all that water between you and the rest of the world. You’re rolling.”

“Right.”

“Wrong. Because someone out there has Asia. And they get like three times the armies you do. Every single turn, bam, you get two armies, they get six or seven. Over one turn, it’s not a big deal, right? You started out equal, so the few extra armies make a difference, but not a crucial one. Australia is still in the game. But after a few turns, things get dicier. Asia has a lot more power already. And Australia can see that it’s going to get worse. Given ten or twenty turns? Forget it. There’s no comparison between the two. They may have started at the same place, but now one is totally at the other’s mercy.”

98, 100, 102, 104. A single-story house of no discernible architectural style, painted the color of old cream cheese. A Ford pickup was parked in the driveway. The license plate matched. Cooper drove past, then pulled the Escalade to the curb half a block down and killed the engine. “So brilliants are Asia in this. We do all the growing and advancing.”

“Yeah. Thirty years ago, humans were all basically the same. I mean, sure, try telling that to a kid in Liberia, but you take my point. Then for whatever reason, vaccinations or livestock hormones or the ozone layer, you guys come along. And wham. I mean, it’s not an opinion that you’re better than us. You empirically are.” Quinn shrugged. “Better at everything. All the technology, the software, engineering, medicine, business. Hell, music. Sports. No straight can compete. The absolute best normal computer programmer in the world, could he match Alex Vasquez?”

Cooper shook his head as he checked his Beretta. Habit; the load hadn’t changed since this morning.

“And it’s only going to get worse. Right now we’re only a few turns into the game. But in another decade? Two?” Quinn shrugged. “And the problem is, it’s hard for Australia not to do the math. Not to see that if things go on, they will become totally irrelevant. We, normal humans, will become totally irrelevant.”

“Ready to go?”

“Yeah.”

The opened the doors and climbed out. Cooper took the lead, giving the streets a quick glance as they walked east. Bobby unbuttoned his suit jacket, took out a cigarette, spun it between his fingers. The air was cool but pleasant, more fall than winter. Not far away someone was playing basketball.

“Here’s the problem with your theory,” Cooper said.

“Hit me.”

“You said Australia and Asia, right? But there are only, what, forty thousand gifted born every year in the US. So across the last thirty years we’re looking at 1.2 million, give or take. Two-thirds of those are under twenty. Call it four hundred thousand adult abnorms.”

“Right.”

“Meanwhile, there are three hundred million straights.” They came to Evans’s house and started up the walk. Cooper kept his stride calm and his eyes on the windows. “We’re not Asia, my friend. We’re not even Australia. We’re a tiny minority surrounded by a very freaked-out majority. A majority that’s desperate to own a newtech TV so they can watch Barry Adams stroll through a defensive line in tri-d, but wouldn’t want their daughter to marry him.”

“You kidding? Adams’s contract with the Bears is a hundred sixty-three million dollars. When my ex and I have the Talk with my daughter, it’s going to be, ‘Sex is only for when two people are really in love, or when one of those two people is Barry Adams, in which case remember what we said about always giving your very best effort.’ Hell, I pray my little girl will marry him.” Quinn spread his arms like a television preacher. “Lord, please, I say puh-lease, bestow upon your faithful servant a rich twist son-in-law.”

Cooper turned, laughing, and that was when a hole blew through the front door in a hail of splinters and a boom that muffled the world, and Quinn staggered back, the front of his suit shredded and a look of childish confusion on his face. Another hole punched beside the first and somewhere behind them glass shattered, and then Cooper clotheslined his partner across the sternum while kicking out the back of his knee, Bobby not falling so much as dropping and Cooper still spinning, his right hand pulling the Beretta and leveling it at the door and taking three shots and then two more, best-guess suppressive fire. The first crack was the loudest, the others seemed farther away. He didn’t give the man on the inside a chance to collect himself, just took two quick steps, yanked open the door, and spun in, adrenaline driving him forward. His nerves screamed at the move, but fight was better than flight, and he needed to see the shooter; he couldn’t read him if he couldn’t see him.

A living room, sparsely decorated, couch and coffee table. A man was standing next to an arch that looked like it might lead to a dining room. About six foot, long hair, and a black T-shirt, a shotgun in his hand, the barrel swinging and—

Shotguns are bad news; the wide spread of buckshot cuts down your edge.

But the holes in the door were small, fist-sized.

He’s firing double- or even triple-ought shells. Call it six nine-millimeter pellets in each. Incredibly lethal, but intended for tactical operations, which means a full choke in the barrel for precision. The lead will only spread about eighteen inches over fifty yards.

And he’s not even ten feet away.

—his finger tightening on the trigger, and Cooper stepped sideways ten inches as a blast of fire bloomed from the barrel of the shotgun and metal shards hurtled through the space he had been standing in. He raised the Beretta and sighted down it. The man in the T-shirt leaped back into the dining room, taking cover around the corner. Cooper tracked the motion, lowered his aim about two inches, and fired. The bullet tore through drywall like Kleenex. The man screamed and collapsed. The shotgun clattered on the hardwood floor.

Cooper moved fast, came around the corner with his weapon up. The man was on the ground weeping and moaning and squeezing his thigh. Thick streams of blood pulsed between his fingers. The room had a card table and two chairs; there was another archway through which he could see the kitchen. No other targets. He picked up the shotgun, locked the safety, tossed it back toward the front door. “Where’s Dusty Evans?”

“My goddamn leg!” His face was pale and sweaty as he rocked back and forth. “Jesus, oh Jesus Christ, it hurts.”

“Evans. Where is—”

A sound from the other room, a squeak and then a bang. Cooper jumped over the man’s extended legs and the growing pool of blood and sprinted into the kitchen. A wooden door stood open; the sound had been the storm door slamming. He shouldered his way through into a small backyard. A tangle of rosebushes, all thorns and no flowers; a small toolshed; a grill beside a picnic table. The whole thing was framed by wooden privacy fencing eight feet high, which Dusty Evans was in the middle of hauling himself over. Cooper grabbed his leg and yanked.

The man landed on his feet, came up ready to fight, six foot two inches of pissed-off bar brawler. Cooper still had the gun in his hand, but the thing with guns, they had unpredictable consequences. Bullets didn’t necessarily stop in flesh, and in this neighborhood, that flesh could belong to a kid. He waited until Evans made his move, a feinted cross that concealed a jab, then stepped where the punch wasn’t and brought his gun hand into the side of the man’s neck in a brutal chop. Evans collapsed like his bones had vanished. By the time he could move again, Cooper had patted him down and cuffed his hands behind his back.

“Hi,” Cooper said, then jerked the man to his feet by his bound wrists.

“Ow, shit.”

“Yes.” He pushed the man forward. “Walk.”

The inside of the kitchen had the burned smell of gunfire. Cooper pushed Evans ahead of him. “Bobby?”

“Yeah.” The reply sounded heavy, forced. “Here.”

He marched his prisoner into the dining room. The wounded shooter flopped on the floor, pushing down against his thigh with cuffed hands. “Jesus Christ, oh Christ.”

Cooper ignored him, looked at his partner, who leaned against a wall, one hand holding his sidearm, the other hugging his chest. “The vest catch everything?”

“Yeah.” Quinn forced the word through clenched teeth. “Broke at least one rib, though.”

“Messed up your suit, too.”

His partner barked a laugh and then winced in pain. “Shit, Coop, don’t.”

The adrenaline was beginning to fade, leaving Cooper with that rubbery-limbed feeling. He holstered the Beretta, then flexed his fingers, took a deep breath. “You check the house?”

Quinn nodded. “Clear.”

Cooper took another deep breath and a look around. The place had a dorm room feel, everything cheap and secondhand. The couch was Salvation Army. There were no pictures on the wall. Shelves of cinderblocks and boards were packed with books, mostly politics, some memoirs, a row of electronics manuals. The tri-d was the only expensive thing in the place; a recent model, its hologram field was sharp and unwavering, the colors vivid. It was tuned to CNN, tickers and ribbons hanging in midair, the head and shoulders of an anchor ghostly as she talked about the grand opening of the new stock exchange. An open bag of Doritos sat on the coffee table, along with half a dozen beer bottles.

Cooper turned to his prisoners. “You guys having a party?”

“You have a warrant?” Evans glared. “Some ID?”

“We’re not cops, Dusty. We’re gas men. We don’t need warrants. We don’t need a judge or jury, either.”

Evans tried to lock down his expression, but fear flashed across it like a spotlight.

Quinn said, “Still think this lead is thin, boss?”

Cooper laughed and pulled out his phone. They’d need to let the cops know what the gunfire was about before some local got twitchy and rolled in. And Director Peters would want to know that they had their targets. Not only that, but the first credible recording of John Smith’s voice in three years.

Of course, the bad news was that meant an attack was likely to happen today—

Wait a second.

The beer. The Doritos. The tri-d tuned to CNN.

Oh shit.

A horn blared. Cooper yanked the Escalade hard right, the tires popping up the curb shoulder, gravel spitting behind them, clearing the pole of a streetlight by inches. The man in the passenger seat screamed. They’d tied a kitchen towel around his thigh, but the blue-checked terrycloth was crimson now. He was trying to keep pressure on it, his hands still bound, fingers and handcuffs covered in gore. In the backseat, Quinn grunted, but said nothing. Beside him, Dusty Evans had recovered his screw-you face.

Cooper jammed down on the gas, cleared the van in front of them, and then bounced back into his lane. He had both the siren and the flashers going, but he also had the accelerator nearly to the floor, and it seemed like they were outrunning the sound.

The clock on the dashboard read 1:32. He glanced at the GPS. A thirty-minute drive, and they didn’t have thirty minutes. He pushed the accelerator a little farther down, the speedometer breaking a hundred now, Highway 1 a blur of concrete barriers and low warehouses. Airplanes bound for Newark International cut crosses from gray skies.

“Hey,” Cooper said. “What’s your name?”

“I need a doctor, man, I need a doctor bad.”

“We’ll get you a doctor soon. I promise. What’s your name?”

“Gary Nie—”

“Don’t tell them nothing,” Dusty Evans said from the backseat. “This is Gestapo bullshit. This is what we’re fighting against.”

“Listen, Gary,” Cooper said, ignoring the outburst, “we don’t have a lot of time.” The back of a semi loomed, brake lights flaring as the trucker tried to pull over, but Cooper was going too fast, had to skim between the lanes, the left mirror inches from the concrete barrier, the right almost touching the truck panels. He was good at driving fast, enjoyed the dance of hurtling steel, but the circumstances were making it tricky, the chaos of sirens and lights and horns and screams and blood, not to mention the stakes, a vision of what he feared was about to happen. “I need you to answer some questions. First, where exactly is the bomb?”

“How do you know about the—”

“Don’t say anything, you hear?” Evans again. “You hear me?”

There was the snick of metal against leather. Cooper spared a quarter second to glance in the rearview. Evans had turned into a statue, his eyes rolling but muscles locked. Bobby Quinn didn’t look away from the pistol he held to the man’s temple. “Go ahead, Coop. I think the backseat is out of opinions.”

“Thank you.” Cooper put on his best mild grin. “Now. We know you planted the bomb.” They hadn’t, of course, until Gary confirmed it a moment ago, but there was no point saying that. He pulled past a sedan, saw a patch of blessedly empty straightaway and floored it. “These are the things I need to know. Where exactly is it? What kind of bomb? How powerful? How is it detonated? When?”

Gary moaned and rocked forward, his hands clenched over his left thigh. The backs of his hands were caked in dried blood. His features were pale. “Jesusgod this hurts. I need a doctor.”

“Elevate it.”

The man looked at him, and Cooper nodded. “Go ahead.”

Gary fumbled to undo his seatbelt, then spun so that he was leaning against the side door. He raised the leg awkwardly, bracing a boot against the console and moaning as he did.

“Better? Good. Now listen. Where exactly is the bomb? What kind is it? How powerful? How is it detonated? When?”

“I don’t.” He gasped as the Escalade hit a pothole at 112 miles an hour, bouncing on the heavy shocks as they blew past a tour bus. “Goddamn it! Take me to a hospital.”

Cooper glanced over. Gary Nie-whatever’s long hair was scraggly and matted with sweat. His body was broadcasting agony, all of his muscles tensed, and trying to read the subtleties beneath that was dicey at best. One thing was for sure, though, the man looked smaller when he wasn’t holding a shotgun.

Slowly and carefully, he asked again. “Where is the bomb? What kind is it? How powerful? How is it detonated? When?”

Gary looked over, his eyes glossy with tears. His lips quivered, and then he whispered something.

“What?”

“I said.” The man fought a breath in. “Screw you, Gas Man. I am John Smith.”

The road was two lanes of blacktop in each direction under steel-gray skies. Half a mile ahead a bridge stretched across the listless brown of the Passaic River. Cooper checked the side mirror. Clear.

He leaned across Gary Nie-whatever’s chest and yanked the door handle at the same time as he jerked the steering wheel left. Centripetal force and the weight of the man’s body threw the door open.

For a fraction of a second, Gary hung weightless as a balloon, his mouth open, arms in front of him, the chain of the handcuffs still swinging between them as a roar of wind filled the world.

Then Cooper jerked the wheel to the right, narrowly dodging the lane divider. The door slammed shut. In the rearview mirror Gary’s body hit the pavement at a hundred miles an hour, smearing and bouncing. There was a squeal of air brakes as the tour bus behind them fought to stop, and then his body vanished beneath its wheels.

Quinn said, “Jesus Christ! Cooper—”

“Shut up.” Cooper looked in the rearview. Dusty Evans had both hands to his mouth, the muscles of his throat twitching. His eyes stared, unbelieving. Cooper waited until he turned back to the front, locked gazes. “Now. Where exactly is the bomb? What kind is it? How powerful? How is it detonated? When?”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

In a very real sense, the south end of Manhattan is the center of the universe. The concrete canyons of Broad and Wall, of Nassau and Exchange and Maiden, have for a century served as the financial epicenter of the world. The largest of the Federal Reserve Banks is located there. AIG, Morgan Stanley, Deloitte, Merrill Lynch. And until abnorms like Erik Epstein forced the government to shut it down, $153 billion flowed through the New York Stock Exchange every single day.

It is a landscape of marble and glass, of cobblestone streets thronged with tourists and traders, of the rumble of delivery trucks on Broadway and blasts of warm air from the subway, of enormous American flags and somber statues. During the workday the population swells 600 percent. Under the very best of circumstances, it is not easy to navigate quickly.

Cooper was not finding today to be the best of circumstances.

The new Leon Walras Exchange was located in the grand old building that used to house the NYSE. Though popular opinion focused on Erik Epstein, the twenty-four-year-old billionaire had in truth been only the most successful of a number of abnorms whose gifts broke the global financial system. For two hundred years, the market had existed on the myth that all people were equal. It was a nonsensical statement, but an easy one for most people to swallow when the prospect of financial gain was involved.

It was a myth that couldn’t survive the gifted. Epstein and others like him had pillaged the market with as much ease as Cooper could have dodged a slap.

Two years ago, the United States had bowed to the inevitable and dissolved the stock market. It was a nuclear option, and while it had worked, the side effects were disastrous. Without the free market to support it, American industry had to pay for itself—and found it often couldn’t. Small-cap companies became endangered species. Entrepreneurship plummeted. Protests on Wall Street raged to this day. Meanwhile, fortunes were wiped away, and the grandmother who stored cash in her mattress suddenly had the right savings plan.

If it was to survive, America had to develop a new system of exchange, one which would be impervious to the games-manship of gifted individuals. By functioning as an auction house and averaging the bids to arrive at a final price, the Leon Walras Exchange had in one stroke stripped out the volatility, excitement, and emotion of investing, while still offering the potential for businesses to raise capital. It was a step backward to a more archaic age that had taken two painful years to move through the political process.

And today, March 12, 2013, at 2:00 p.m. General Electric would become the first public offering of the new financial reality. At 2:00 p.m., history would be made.

Which meant that now, at 1:51 p.m., lower Manhattan was a nightmare. Wall Street had been cordoned off for blocks in each direction. Foot police redirected traffic on Broadway, blowing whistles and gesturing impatiently. Half a dozen school buses had been parked along Liberty, and harried teachers fought to corral children hyped up on the excitement of an afternoon out of class. A line of protesters shoved against a police barricade, raising placards and shouting slogans. A marching band played in Trinity Churchyard, the brass mostly lost in the noise but the bass thumping uneasily through every stomach. Media helicopters circled above. Bobby Quinn’s datapad showed a live feed of a podium on the steps where the former CEO of the NYSE chatted with the new CEO of the LWE and the first deputy mayor of New York, the three of them surrounded by men in dark suits and sunglasses.

If there was a worse place for a bomb to go off, Cooper couldn’t think where it would be.

“I don’t know nothing about how to make bombs, man. I’m an electrician.” All the hard-guy attitude had vanished from Dusty Evans in the instant his friend skidded across the concrete. “I just did what I was told. The company I work for did some of the wiring on the new Exchange. Mr. Smith had me steal a key and then use it to plant the bombs.”

“Bombs? More than one?”

“Five of them.”

Ahead of them two cops were walking a police barrier into place. Cooper burped the siren, pointed at his chest, then at the street beyond. The nearer cop nodded and rotated the barrier out of their way. Cooper tossed them a salute as he steered the Escalade through the gap. Every nerve in his body was screaming for speed, but in the crowd of tourists and sightseers they had to creep forward at five miles an hour. Someone banged on the back window of the truck. A blonde stopped right in front of him to pose for her pimply-faced boyfriend. Cooper laid on the horn.

1:53.

“What did they look like?”

“Like in the movies. Blocks of gray putty. They weighed about fifteen pounds.”

“Total?”

“Each.”

It had gone on like that the whole ride in, every question leading to an unhappy answer. Eventually Evans had started repeating himself. When it was obvious they’d gotten out of him all they were going to, Quinn had used a second pair of cuffs to secure his hands to his opposite ankles. It was an awkward, uncomfortable position, and the big man was bent nearly in half, weeping softly.

“Shut it,” Quinn said. He’d climbed up to the passenger seat, and when he saw Cooper looking at him, he cocked his head and took a breath, his nostrils flaring. It was a look that read, Well, we’re in it now. “We could evacuate.”

“The politicians, maybe.” Cooper rode up on the curb to pass a cop on a horse. “Not all these people.”

“Some of them. Use the cops, SWAT—”

“It’d be panic, people trampling each other. Besides, we don’t know it’s on a timer. If Smith sees everyone running, he’ll blow it early.” Ahead a row of fast-food vendors had parked right in the middle of Broadway. He grimaced, thought about plowing through the falafel truck, threw the truck into park instead. 1:56. “I’m going to have to try to stop this myself.”

“Yourself? Bullshit. I’m coming—”

“You have at least one cracked rib.”

“I can take the pain.”

“I know you can. But you’ll slow me down. Besides, all I know about disarming bombs comes from old cop shows. Unless I just pull the red wire, I’m going to need help.” He popped the magazine on the Beretta. Eight rounds left. “I need you to get me a bomb squad.”

“They’ll never make it. Not in this crowd.”

“Then get them ready to talk me through it. I’ll be on the earpiece. And call Peters, let him know what’s going on.” He took a deep breath, then opened the car door. The crowd noise enveloped him. “And, Bobby, just in case—”

“—arrange ambulances and emergency services, I know. But make sure it doesn’t come to that, okay?” The fear in his partner’s eyes wasn’t for his own safety or for Cooper’s. It ran deeper than that, and broader. Cooper recognized it because the same thoughts had been running through his head. It was a fear of what would be unleashed if he failed. A fear of the cracking of the world.

Cooper slammed the door and began to push through the crowd. 1:57.

The ceremony won’t start on time. These things never do. And John Smith likes theater. He’ll wait until every camera is watching.

But then he will blow it. Unless you stop him.

He ran, trying to move between the bodies that mobbed the street. Cooper hated crowds, felt assaulted by them. All those intentions crossing and crisscrossing, it was like trying to listen to a thousand conversations at once. But where his mind would turn the noise of a thousand conversations into gray noise he could ignore, he couldn’t tune out body language and physical cues. They came at him all at once and from every direction. All he could do was try to focus, to put his attention on the woman right in front of him and the angle of her shoulder that meant she was about to shift her bag. To the man about to speak to his friend. To the little girl who looked a lot like Kate—no, push that away, no time now to think about Kate—reaching up for her mother’s hand.

When he couldn’t find a hole, he made one, barreling through with one elbow up like the prow of a ship. Yells rose behind him, and curses. Someone shoved at his shoulder.

“Cooper.” Quinn’s voice in his ear. “Peters is trying to reach the officer in charge on the scene, but it’s madness right now.”

“No kidding.” He surged past a cluster of schoolgirls. “What about my bomb squad?”

“Scrambling now. ETA fifteen minutes.”

Fifteen minutes. Damn, damn, damn. There was a bank on the corner, and he raced through the revolving door. The lobby was sweet relief. Velvet ropes, bland colors, stale air, a manageable number of people. He sprinted across. A manager rose from his desk. The security guard yelled something. Cooper ignored it all, focused on making it to the opposite door.

And then he was on the corner of Wall and Broad, where history was about to be made, and the whole world was noise and howling chaos.

People were packed shoulder to shoulder. He winced at the tangled skein of vectors in front of him, at the collective motion of the crowd, the herd, something he could never read or understand, his talents all aimed at the individual, the person, the pattern.

Focus. There’s no time.

To the south was the magnificent façade that had once belonged to the NYSE, with its six massive columns supporting an intricate sculpture above. Beneath was a stage and podium, dignitaries milling nearby, security orbiting them like planets around a star.

He started pushing south, gently where he could, roughly where he couldn’t. Somehow he had to get to the Broad Street entrance. In a door off the lobby he would find a janitor’s hallway and a freight elevator that would take him to the basement, where he could access the wiring tunnels where Dusty Evans had placed his bombs.

Sure, Coop. Just get through the crowd, past the security, through the lobby, down to the basement, into the tunnels, and then all you have to do is figure out how to disarm five separate bombs placed at strategic structural locations.

1:59.

Body odor and thrown elbows, hairspray and curses. He pushed forward one agonizing step at a time. Everyone seemed to be yelling, even when their mouths were closed. A wave of frustration washed over him, and he fought the urge to pull his gun, fire into the air. This was pointless. It would take too long to get to the front, and even if he made it, security would be too tight. He needed a better plan. Cooper pushed over to a newspaper dispenser—quick flash of Bryan Vasquez disintegrating—and climbed up on top of it.

The Broad Street entrance was too tight. But maybe back on Wall Street? There must be side entrances. They’d be guarded too, but security would be lighter, and if his rank didn’t get him in fast enough, then he’d find another way. He scanned the crowd, planning his move, eyes falling across businesspeople in business suits, parents with cameras and weary expressions, locals here for the free theater, a homeless man shaking a Dunkin’ Donuts cup, a group of protesters holding signs, a very, very pretty girl heading west—

Holy shit.

He leaped off the dispenser, tumbling into a burly dude holding a giant soda. Man and drink flew in opposite directions. Cooper kept the inertia going, went through the hole the falling man had made, heading away from the ceremony. “Bobby, I’ve got our bomber in sight, the woman in the photograph. She’s on Wall Street heading west.”

“Roger. I’ll alert the police—”

“Negative. Say again, negative. If she spots someone coming after her, she’ll blow the bombs.”

“Cooper—”

“Negative.” He pushed forward, forcing himself not to sprint. It was just like John Smith to have her on scene, gauging the exact moment to trigger the bomb. Timing it for maximum damage.

But that planning was going to work against Smith this time. Bombs Cooper knew nothing about, but a bomber he could handle.

He shoved through the crowd, throwing elbows and stomping on feet. He found her, lost her, found her again. The farther he went from the podium, the more things opened up, until he was able to read individual body language again. He went as fast as he dared, and yet though she was walking at a calm pace, she seemed to be getting farther ahead of him with every step. Somehow people seemed to be always moving out of her way. Two singing drunks in soccer jerseys swayed into a crowd of people, clearing a hole just in front of her. A father hoisted his son onto his shoulders, and she slid behind them. Two cops pushed through the crowd, opening a lane she followed for half the length of a building. It was like watching Barry Adams strut across a football field untouched by an entire defensive line. As if she was looking at things not as they were, but as they would be when she reached them.

She’s an abnorm.

No surprise, really; most of Smith’s top operatives would be. But it explained how she’d beaten them so handily in DC. If she had a gift for patterning anything like Barry Adams’s, then the whole world would be moving vectors to her. Walking through the security perimeter would simple. She’d probably even pegged Cooper as the leader. Blowing the bomb while standing ten feet from him was her way of giving the bird.

That made his belly burn, and he quickened his pace. He was twenty yards behind her and moving fast. She hadn’t looked back, not once. Concentrating on the terrain in front of her. Which suggested that she was near her goal. He looked ahead and saw it. A side entrance to the Exchange.

Two cops stood nearby, their postures relaxed. She walked past them, overshot the entrance by a few steps, and then paused to look at her watch. One of the cops hitched up his belt and said something that made the other laugh, and she pivoted lightly and slid around behind them. Cooper couldn’t believe it. If she’d raised one slender arm she could have tapped the cops on the shoulder, and yet they were completely unaware of her. It was the strangest thing, a virtuoso display of ability that practically rendered her invisible, and it would have been gorgeous to watch—except that she pushed open the door of the Exchange and slipped inside.

“Shit. She made it into the building. I’m going after her.”

“Do you want—”

“Hold on.” Cooper walked toward the police. The girl had somehow been able to slip right through their blind spot, but he didn’t know how to do that. Sorry, fellas. “Excuse me, Officer, do you know where the stage is?”

“Round the corner, buddy.” The cop pointed. “Follow the—”

Cooper bobbed down and hammered a left hook into the man’s exposed kidney, placing it in the fabric portion of the bulletproof vest. The cop gasped and staggered. As he did, Cooper grabbed the front of his shirt and shoved him at his partner as hard as he could. The two collided and went down in a tangle. Cooper followed them, driving his knee into the solar plexus of the second cop, then scrambled to his feet and through the door.

A marble entrance, broad and bright. Sunlight poured in the windows. People milled about, holding champagne glasses and chatting. A string quartet played in the corner, the notes bouncing off marble and glass. Stepping out of the crowd was like surfacing for air. He glanced around, saw the woman vanish around a corner to the right, and hurried after her. Figure thirty seconds, tops, before the cops had caught their breath, radioed in, and come after him.

Ten steps took him to the corner. He rounded it, blood singing in his veins. The woman stood halfway down the corridor, in front of a painted metal door. In one hand she held a ring of keys. In the other, a cell phone.

No.

Cooper abandoned all attempts at subtlety for a headlong sprint. Time drew out like a blade. His eyes caught details: the smell of fresh paint, the buzz of the lights. At the sound of his footfalls, the woman looked up. Her eyes, already huge with mascara, widened further. She dropped the keys but raised the phone. Cooper pushed as hard as he could. Everything came down to his hurtling progress, that against-the-wall feeling that he simply could not go any faster, his mind replaying yesterday and the explosion in DC, the slow-motion spill of fire, the way Bryan Vasquez had melted into a red mist; she was doing it again, only this time it wasn’t one man she was executing, it was hundreds of people on national television, and the phone had reached her face and her eyes locked on him and her lips parted to speak just as Cooper’s arm lashed out in a forehand slap that knocked the cell phone from her fingers. The device hit the floor and broke on the bounce, plastic pieces skittering across the marble.

She said, “Wait, you don’t—” and then his fist slammed into her belly and doubled her over. He didn’t like punching women, but damned if he was going to take a chance with this one.

“I got her,” he said. “Target in custody.” Bobby Quinn hooted in the earpiece.

A wave of relief washed over Cooper. Jesus, but that had been close. He spun the woman around, pulled one arm behind her back, and dug for his cuffs with the other.

“Listen,” she said, gasping between the words. “You have… to let… me go.”

He ignored her, snapped the cuff on one wrist, reached for the other. Spoke for his partner’s benefit. “Bobby, I had to take out a couple of cops on the way in. Can you reach out to NYPD and calm them down real fast? I don’t want to—”

But before he could finish the sentence there was a crack of planets colliding, and the ground vanished beneath him, he was flying, his arms out and twisting, and everything—

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The noise came first. An overlapping mishmash of sound. Cries of pain. Urgent, indecipherable yells. Rasping, scraping. Solemn voices counting. Sirens farthercloserfarther.

He wasn’t aware of it, really. It was the water he floated through.

Then, slowly, the formless syllables began to shape themselves into words. The words had taste and heft. Hemorrhaging. Amputate. Crushed. Concussed.

The scraping became the wooden legs of a chair or table dragged across concrete.

The men counting backward punctuated the arrival of zero with an exhalation of effort, as though they were heaving something.

The sirens stayed the same. He just came to realize how many he was hearing, some moving, some still, some nearby, some a good distance away.

Cooper opened his eyes.

Canvas stretched above him. The pattern was indistinct, and the colors moved and swirled. For a moment he faulted his vision, then realized it was active camo; smart fabric that chameleoned to match the environment. Military issue. He blinked eyes dry and swollen. The noises around him took no notice, just kept insistently on, each cutting across the other.

“…need more O over here…”

“…breathe, just breathe…”

“…my husband, where is…”

“…it hurts, God, it hurts…”

Cooper took a deep inhale, felt tings and stabs of pain as his chest swelled. Nothing too bad. He raised his right hand and gingerly patted the back of his head. The flesh was hot and swollen and sore, the hair sticky. He must have hit it. How?

Slowly, he rolled onto one side, then swung his legs off the edge of the cot. Also military, he noticed. This was an army triage tent. For a moment the world swam. He clamped down on the edge of the cot with both hands. The pain came now, a whirling thumping, dull and looming.

“Go slow.”

Cooper raised his head and opened his eyes. A trim man in scrubs spattered with blood stood beside him. Where had he come from?

“How did I get here?”

“Someone must have brought you. What hurts?”

“My—” He coughed. His throat was full of dust. “My head.”

“Look at this?” The doctor had a penlight out. Cooper obediently stared into it, followed as the man moved it back and forth. A triage center, he was in a triage center of some sort. But how? He remembered fighting through the crowd, the surging, roiling chaos of all those people. Stalked by two o’clock when…the bombs. He had been trying to stop bombs from going off. He had seen—

“Where is she?” Cooper whipped his head around, felt the pain as a promissory note, ignored it for now. He was in a large field tent packed with rows of cots, the beds nearly touching. Men and women in scrubs pushed across the rows, speaking insistently to one another as they tended the wounded. Maybe twenty racks in here, he couldn’t see all of them, she could be in one.

“Hey.” The doctor’s voice was firm. “Look at me.”

The pain paid what it owed, a crushing feeling like there was a vise in the middle of his skull. Cooper groaned, looked back at the doctor. “Where is she?”

“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” the man said, fitting a stethoscope to his ears, “but I’m sure she’s fine. Right now I need you to relax so I can see how badly hurt you are.”

It all clicked together, finally, the scattered pieces coalescing into a whole. He had been chasing John Smith’s agent, the woman who could walk through walls, the cell phone bomber with the big eyes. He had caught up with her inside the Exchange. But not in time.

“How bad is it?” Cooper felt like something was falling through his chest.

“That’s what I’m checking. Deep breath.”

Cooper did as he was told, the air rattling in his lungs. “Not me. I mean. How bad is it?”

“Oh. Deep breath.” The doctor stared into the distance as he listened to Cooper’s chest. Whatever he heard seemed to satisfy him. “I don’t know how to answer that.”

“How many people…”

“I’m focused on the ones in front of me.” The doctor looped the scope around his neck and glanced at his watch. “You have a mild concussion. There was a lot of smoke and dust inhalation, but nothing I’m worried about long-term. You’re very lucky. You should avoid sleep for a while, eight, ten hours maybe. If you start to feel dizzy or nauseous, go to the hospital immediately.” He started away.

“Wait. That’s it?”

“You can stay if you feel weak, but if you think you can walk, we could really use the space.”

“I can walk.” Cooper took a deep breath and a look around. “Can I help you?”

“Do you have medical training?”

“Basic first aid.”

The doctor shook his head. “Too many people trying to help already. Best thing you can do right now is get out of the way.” And then he was gone, on to the next cot.

Cooper sat on the edge of the rack for a moment, letting his whirling thoughts slowly die down. Collecting himself, rebuilding the memories. He’d had her, hadn’t he? Slapped her cell phone away, had cuffs in hand. He’d won. He’d caught the bad guy. Girl.

And yet, this.

He took a long breath that made him cough until he tasted dust on the back of his tongue. Then he stood up. If the bombs had gone off, there would be victims far worse off than he seemed to be. Best to clear the cot.

He looked in the other beds before he left, but she wasn’t there.

Moving slowly to keep the pain from splashing around his skull, Cooper walked to the exit, pushed the canvas door flap aside, and stepped outside.

Into a graveyard.

For a moment he thought he was hallucinating.

The sky had been replaced by a thick gray scrim of whirling dust. The air tasted charred. In the dim light, trees were skeleton-limbed silhouettes, pointing like Charon across the river to the underworld. And all around him were tombstones. Marble tombstones inscribed with names and dates.

Cooper reached out to touch the tent, pinching the material between fingers scraped and sore. It was covered in a thin layer of dust, but had the tight, satisfyingly tactile touch of canvas. This was real. It was happening. So then, the graves…

Trinity Church. This is the churchyard. Alexander Hamilton is buried here somewhere.

It made sense. In crowded Manhattan, space for triage tents would be in short supply. Still. There was an ugly symbolism. He had fallen asleep in one world and awakened in another. The first had been sunlight and fanfare; this one was dust and ash.

There were people all around. Some of them seemed to be part of the organized rescue effort. They carried stretchers and shuttled medical supplies and directed ambulances in a busy dance. But many others seemed dazed. They stood and stared, looked up at the towering spire of the church, or back toward Wall Street, where the smoke thickened.

Wall Street. The Exchange. Maybe she was still there.

Cooper started through the cemetery. His head hurt and his body was sore, but more than anything he just felt thick, altered. Like a guy driving home, singing along with the radio right up until the semi T-boned him and sent the car end over horrifying end, the world spinning, flashes of colors, sky, ground, sky, ground, and then the impact, the sickening crunch, and in that instant, when the world had shifted completely, when everything that had mattered a moment before no longer even rated, the radio would still be playing the same song.

He felt like the song.

Slowly, he picked his way through the churchyard. He climbed the low fence to Broadway, crossed the street where food trucks had blocked his path. Someone bumped him, their shoulder hitting hard, and the novelty of that struck him. He hadn’t been bumped like that in a long time. The world was water; nothing was permanent, all was shift and change. A cop started to wave him back, but Cooper felt through his pockets, found his badge. The man let him pass. The smoke was thicker, and he couldn’t see more than ten, fifteen feet. Beyond that the best he could do was make out flashing colors, police lights. He moved toward them. People staggered the other way, their faces dirty, clothes torn, expressions shocked. They leaned on one another. Soldiers carried stretchers.

Cooper walked, slow and steady, four-four time in a world gone off measure.

Every step stranger. The bones of buildings had torn through their stone skin and lay exposed. Collapsed walls buried the cobblestones. Shattered glass dusted the scene with razor-edged glitter. The dust clouds were lit brighter by a dozen fires burning out of sight. He reached the corner where he had spotted the woman who could walk through walls. Firemen dug through the rubble, masks on their faces and reflective stripes on their uniforms.

To the south, he could see the New York Stock Exchange, a building that had stood for a hundred years, weathered depressions and wars and unimaginable social change, been a symbol for the unstoppable power of capitalism until that power was, indeed, stopped by the arrival of his kind; a building that had, ever so briefly, represented the hopes of a world struggling for a new balance when every conviction had been upended, every fact proved unstable, every belief turned fragile; a building of stone and steel that by its simple presence declared that the engines that powered the world were running fine. It was in ruins.

Of the six massive columns that fronted the building, only one was still in place. The others had cracked and sheared; one of them had fallen outright, the huge stone smashing into the street. The glass wall behind must have blown out as well, four stories of lethal shards surfing the roar of air and fire. Through the open space that had been a wall, he could see the building, naked and raw. Offices exposed, bathrooms torn open, a stairwell lost and sad.

And everywhere, the dead. Bodies.

Bodies in the street, bodies in the building. Bodies beneath fallen columns, bodies dangling in a spiderweb of cabling.

Torn and broken, the colors of their clothes a mockery in this bleak new world.

Hundreds of them. Thousands.

This wasn’t supposed to happen.

You were supposed to stop it.

It was a nonsense thought. He couldn’t hold himself responsible for everything that went wrong in the world. But he’d been so close. It had been he who ran down Alex Vasquez, who used her brother as bait, who implemented the phone taps that led them to Dusty Evans. It had been he playing against John Smith, again, and he’d lost, again, and all of these people had died.

Cooper spun on his heel and walked away. He walked without direction or purpose, without thought or plan. His companions were Frustration and Rage, and together the three of them stalked Manhattan.

A pair of strappy heels on a pair of shapely legs flung akimbo inside a stylish black pencil skirt that ended, along with the body, at the waist.

A sidewalk peddler of cheap purses and flimsy umbrellas shoving all of his wares off the folding table that comprised his livelihood to make a cot for a screaming man carried between two firefighters.

Gray air moving like fabric, like lint, over swirling gray ash. Gray-faced people in gray-smudged clothes. The world gone monochrome.

And then the pink shock of a child’s stuffed animal in the middle of Broadway.

A bank of payphones surrounded by a mob of people waiting in line. A true New York mix, a skinhead next to a broker, two men in blue jumpsuits, a fashion model, a hotdog vendor, a boy and girl holding hands. Everyone patient. No one pushing.

A woman in a business suit walking down the middle of the sidewalk. An expensive leather briefcase slung over one shoulder. Blood trickling down the side of her face. Her arms cradling a potted plant three feet tall.

At the corner of two minor streets, a taxi with open doors, the radio playing at maximum volume. New Yorkers standing near, listening to a stammering news reporter.

“…again, an explosion at the Leon Walras Stock Exchange. I…I’ve never seen anything like it. The entire east side of the building has been destroyed. There are bodies everywhere. The death toll will be in the hundreds, maybe thousands. No one is saying what caused this, but it had to be a bomb, or bombs. I can’t…it’s something I never thought I would see…”

On the bright expanse of Columbus Park, a mile from the explosion, three large buses parked on the green of the soccer field. Red Cross mobile donation units. A mob of volunteers, hundreds of people rolling up their sleeves.

Just north of Houston, the building was exploding again.

The tri-d billboard was mounted on the second story of an office tower. Instead of the usual advertisements and spinning corporate logos, an image of the Exchange hovered in the air, the Exchange as it had been hours before, a massive American flag dangling above the stage. The image shuddering and bouncing, the camera swerving vertiginously, and not just the camera, the building, suddenly consumed in thick smoke. There were blurry objects flying through the air, growing chunky and pixelated as they reached the edge of the projection field.

“My God,” whispered the woman standing beside Cooper.

The image changed, the smoke suddenly lessening, the angle different. The building was shown ripped open. Firemen sprayed water. Paper and insulation drifted on the eddies. Police guarded the scene as emergency workers looked for survivors. A ribbon at the bottom of the screen declared, LIVE FROM STOCK EXCHANGE EXPLOSION.

“Hadda be the twists,” said a rough voice behind him. Cooper fought the urge to deck the bigot. After all, he was right.

“Maybe,” said another voice.

“Who else would it be?”

“Who knows? All I’m saying, I don’t think they’ll know for a while.”

“Why not?”

“Look at it, man. Mess like that, how you gonna tell the good guys from the bad guys?”

The video had flashed back to the explosion. They’d probably run that loop for three straight months. But as the eyes of everyone in the crowd watched the building blow up, again, Cooper turned and stared at the men behind him. They looked like guys who bet on sports. As he stared at them, first one and then the other turned their attention to look at him. “What?” The bigger one. “Help you with something, buddy?”

How you gonna tell the good guys from the bad guys?

“Thank you.”

“Huh?”

But by then Cooper was already gone, sprinting at full speed.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Located west of DC’s Naval Observatory, Massachusetts Avenue Heights was a charming neighborhood of redbrick row houses whose proximity and small yards belied the affluence within. While not quite equaling the mansions and political swing of Sheridan-Kalorama, it was a wealthy neighborhood, the kind of place people said was great to raise kids, and home to numerous politicians, doctors, and lawyers.

The house on 39th Street NW was quaint and carefully maintained, with a pretty porch, manicured hedges, and an American flag. What wasn’t quite as evident were the security cameras mounted not only on the house but along the walk-way and in the tree, the steel-reinforced doorframe, and the discreet gray sedan that passed the house at random intervals twice an hour.

Cooper had been here many times. He’d sat on the picture-perfect back patio and sipped beer while the kids played. He’d helped design the security, and for several months, even served as a driver. During a mousetrap operation in which they’d leaked supposed weaknesses to terrorist elements, he’d run a team out of the place, sleeping in the spare room and hoping that John Smith might take the bait. He wasn’t a stranger to the house on 39th Street.

Still, showing up unannounced after dark, wearing torn clothes and smelling of sweat and diesel, well, it wasn’t something he’d normally do.

He rang the doorbell. Opened and closed his hands as he waited for what seemed a long time, conscious of the security measures trained on him.

When he opened the door, Drew Peters looked at Cooper for a long moment. His accountant’s eyes took in every detail and gave nothing back. Cooper didn’t say anything, just let his very presence speak for him.

Finally the director of Equitable Services glanced at his watch. “You’d better come in.”

Cooper had interrupted dinner, so Peters brought him through the kitchen to say hello. The space was bright and homey, with hardwood countertops and glass-fronted cabinets. It had always struck Cooper as out of character with the cool gray he associated with Director Peters.

Of course, at home, he wasn’t the director; he was Dad, and Cooper was sometimes Uncle Nick. The girls usually squealed when he came in. Maggie harbored a tweenage crush, while Charlotte often begged helicopter rides.

Tonight, though, Charlotte pushed broccoli listlessly around her plate, and Maggie stared at her hands. Finally, Alana, the eldest, rose. “Hi, Cooper. Are you okay?” She’d been eleven when her mother died, and since then she’d become the de facto lady of the house, watching over the others and taking care of meals. Cooper had often felt sorry for Alana—nineteen years old and forced to act forty. He wondered who she would have turned out to be if Elizabeth had lived. Imagined she wondered that, too.

“Sure,” he said. “I’m as okay as everybody else.”

“It’s awful,” she said, and immediately looked as if she wanted to amend that, find a stronger term, a word that could encompass the bodies and the smoke and the pink shock of a child’s stuffed animal in the middle of Broadway.

“Yes.” If there was such a word, Cooper didn’t know it. “I’m sorry to interrupt dinner.”

“It’s okay. Want something?”

“No, thanks.” With that, the small talk sputtered and died.

Peters said, “Let’s talk in the study” and then led Cooper through the house, past school photographs and framed macaroni art.

The “study” was a windowless room off the back of the house, with a desk and a couch, a sidebar, two muted tri-ds running the news. There was a silver-framed photograph of Elizabeth, the director’s wife, gone eight years now and buried in Oak Hill Cemetery. Was it only this morning Drew had told him that story?

The room sported a few less-traditional features, as well: inch-thick plating beneath the drywall, hydraulic steel door, buried hard-lines running to the DAR and the White House, a panic button that would seal the place like a vault and summon an assault team. The director poured two scotches, sat down, and looked at Cooper expectantly.

So Cooper took a breath and a sip of scotch and told him everything that had happened that day, every moment of the pursuit, how close he’d been to the bomber, how he had almost stopped things. And then he shared the idea that had struck him on a NoHo street—How you gonna tell the good guys from the bad guys?—the proposal that had driven him back here despite the distance and the impropriety and especially the magnitude of sacrifice it would involve.

Drew Peters said, “That’s a preposterous notion. Absolutely not.”

“It’s not preposterous. It’s perfectly feasible.”

“I can think of a dozen ways it could fail.”

“I can think of a hundred. But it gives us a chance, a real honest-to-Christ chance to get close to him.”

“He’d see through it. See you coming.”

“Not if we went all the way with it.”

“All the way.”

“Yes. That’s the only way to get him,” Cooper said. “We’ve been doing this wrong for years.”

Peters picked up his silver pen, spun it between long fingers. If he was offended, it didn’t show in his off hand, “Oh?”

“The way we’re working now, we have to bat a thousand just to tie. Say I’d been able to get to the bombs today. If I disarmed four of them and the fifth went off, it’s a win for Smith. If I disarmed them all, but if the press found out they’d been planted, it’s still a win. He can hit us anywhere, anytime, and any hit is a victory. We have to protect everywhere, all the time, and the best we can do is tie. A perfect defense alone never wins.

“If we want to end this, if we want to keep things from escalating, if we want to win, we have to neutralize John Smith. And this is a way to do it.”

“Not a way,” Peters said. “A chance.”

“That’s better than no chance.” Cooper took a swallow of scotch. He was exhausted, and the drink smoothed some of the rough edges. Cooper waited. The director gave nothing away, but the tiny muscles of his nose, his ears, the miniscule tensing of his shoulders, all said he was considering it.

“You understand what would be entailed? Just naming you rogue wouldn’t be enough,” Peters said. “I’d have to designate you a target.”

“Yes.”

“I won’t be able to hold back. The preliminary reports I’ve seen put the dead at more than a thousand. And this attack was in the heart of Manhattan. There will be no half measures. I’d have to cast you down like Lucifer. I can keep you off the news—probably—but within the agency, there’d be nothing I could do for you.”

“I know.”

“You’ll be more hated than John Smith ever was. Because you were one of us, and you betrayed us. Every resource in the department’s power will be aimed at you. There will be thousands of people hunting you. Literally thousands. If you’re captured, I can reveal the truth. But—”

“But no one is going to try to capture me. If they have a shot, they’ll take it.”

“That’s right. And meanwhile, you’re going to be on your own. No resources. No requisitioned helicopters, no phone taps, no surveillance teams. No backup. Nothing.”

Cooper just sipped his scotch. Nothing Peters was saying was a surprise to him. He’d had time to think it out on the flight down.

All commercial flights had been grounded, so he’d badged his way onto a Marine Corps C-130 and ridden in with a squad of jarheads. The boys were extra gung ho under the circumstances, but he could see the hurt under the oo-rah. America wasn’t used to being hit this way, to an attack in the heart of its strength.

The response would be devastating. There would need to be a blood payment. The country would demand it.

It wouldn’t be long before it got out that the bombing was John Smith’s work. And in America’s overwrought state, most people wouldn’t make the distinction between abnorms and abnorm terrorists.

After all, it was abnorms who had forced the stock market to close in the first place. Abnorms who were taking the lead in every field. Abnorms who were making the rest of humanity feel small and secondary.

You can’t stop the future. All you can do is pick a side. Alex Vasquez’s voice in his head.

Not an easy choice. And more complicated than she would have admitted. Was he a government agent hunting terrorists, or a father whose daughter was in danger? Was he a soldier or a civilian? If he believed in America, did that mean he had to accept the academies?

All right, Alex. I’ve made my choice. But right now, this hour in the sky, this hour is for me. He’d leaned against the metal skin of the airplane, felt the thrum of the turboprops, the cold of the air rushing past, and he let himself think of what he was about to risk. All that he might lose. The staggering costs of the plan he was proposing.

And when he landed, he’d pushed that kind of thinking aside and begun to act. Now he stared across the table at the director, at the man’s pale, calm eyes, and he said, “I can do this.”

“There will be no going back. None. You succeed or you die.”

“I know.”

“Even a chance to get rid of John Smith is worth a gamble. If we don’t, he may well tip this country into outright civil war.” Peters looked away and tapped his fingers lightly on his desk. The news channels were playing footage of the explosion, and reflected in his rimless glasses, the Exchange fell again and again.

Finally, he said, “Last chance, son. Are you sure you want to do this?”

“Yes. I’ll kill John Smith for you.” Cooper set his glass on the desk and leaned forward. “But there’s one condition.”

Natalie’s house.

A tantalizing hint of silhouette flickered across one of the curtains. The lights were on, and the windows glowed buttery warm. Del Ray was too much part of the city for the sky to be truly black, but the queasy purple of light pollution was lonelier than night. It made those windows, and the life within them, all the more attractive.

Cooper stared out of the windshield. Took a deep breath, blew it out. There was an emptiness in his stomach, a hollowness he hadn’t felt in years. A childish sort of yearning pain, the way he’d felt when he was twelve and all the rewards he’d ascribed to adulthood—love, freedom, certainty—seemed a million years away. The emptiness of the morning bed after a glittering dream of girls and adventure.

Now that things were in motion, he wanted more than anything to stop it all. To beg the director to call it off. It was too much. The costs were too high.

But then he remembered what this was really about, and he put childish fantasy away.

He climbed out of the Charger—something else he’d have to abandon soon, his beloved car and its even more beloved license-to-speed transponder—and crossed the street. The night air nipped but didn’t bite. Everything smelled clean. He was sore and tired, but he tried to record every detail, to move with heightened awareness. It would be a long time before he could walk this path again.

At the front window, he paused just out of the spill of light. The curtains were parted a couple of inches, and through them he could see his children. Todd was staging an elaborate action-figure battle, the pantheons all mixed up, armored knights fighting alongside World War II soldiers and space monsters. The tip of his tongue protruded from the corner of his mouth as he mounted a robot on a horse. Kate sat on the sofa with a picture book in her lap, turning the pages backward and talking softly to herself. Through the open archway he could see Natalie in the kitchen, washing dishes. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and her hips swayed as she scrubbed, semidancing to music he couldn’t hear. The quiet peace of the scene, the warmth and safety and domesticity, was a jagged knife through his belly. Cooper closed his eyes. You’ve already chosen sides.

He took out his phone and dialed. Through the window he saw his ex-wife dry her hands on a towel and pull her phone from her pocket. “Nick. Are you okay? I called you a bunch of times and left messages—”

“I know. I’m okay. But I need to talk to you.”

Even at this distance, he could see her stiffen. “Is it about Kate?”

“No. Yes. Sort of. Listen, I’m outside. Can you come out?”

“You’re outside? Why didn’t you knock?”

“We need to talk first. Before the kids know I’m here.”

“Okay. Give me a minute.”

Cooper pocketed his phone. Took one last look through the window, felt his stomach slip and his heart squeeze, and then stepped away. He moved over to the lone tree, a maple down to a last handful of leaves. Quick flash of memory, the tree as it had been when he and Natalie had bought the house, a runty little thing held in place by wires.

Natalie came out a few minutes later. She paused on the step, screening her eyes from the porch light, then spotted him leaning. The subtle shifts of expression on her face might have barely registered with a stranger, but each emotion was as distinct to him as if the words had been projected on her forehead. Happiness that he was alive. Guarded concern about the way he’d asked to meet her. Fear of what he had to say about Kate. A quickly overcome desire to run back inside and slam the door. “Hey,” she said.

“Hey.”

She tucked her hands in her pocket and looked him in the face. Knowing him well enough to recognize that he had something to say, and waiting for him to start. That cool, levelheaded forthrightness that he had always loved. A siren sounded nearby, and it quickened his heart. He glanced at his watch. Tick-tock.

“Am I keeping you?”

“No, I—” He took a breath. “I have to tell you something.” He glanced at her, at the yard, at the window. Had that been motion in the curtain?

“For Christ’s sake, spit it out.”

“I’m going to be going away for a while.”

“‘A while’? What does that mean?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe a long time.”

“Something for your job.”

“Yes.”

“Something to do with today.”

“Yes. I was there. Manhattan.”

“My God, are you—”

“I’m fine,” he said, then shook his head. “No, that’s not true. I’m pissed and I’m frustrated and I’m hurting. I was trying to stop it, Nat. I almost did stop it. But I didn’t, not quite, and all those people…”

“Did you try as hard as you could?”

“Yeah. I think so. Yeah.”

“Then it’s not your fault. Nick, what is this? What’s going on?” A miniscule widening of her eyes flashed her fear up at him.

“The explosion today. It was John Smith.”

“You can’t know that yet. Maybe it was—”

“It was John Smith. The worst terrorist attack on America in history, and it was an abnorm who did it.”

“But…that’s going to…things are going to…my God, it’s going to get worse. They’re going to come after abnorms. Really come after you.”

“Yes.” He stepped forward and took her hands in his. “So I’m going after him. John Smith. Not the same as before. Something different.”

“What?”

“The only way to get close is if he thinks I’m on his side. So I’m going to be. I’m going to leave the agency and go on the run.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The bombing. They’re going to blame it on me.”

She stared at him. He could practically hear her mind working. “Wait, no, it doesn’t make sense. He’ll know. John Smith, he’ll know you weren’t in on it.”

“Right. But he’ll also know that all of the DAR thinks I was. That I’m on the run, and that I’m being chased. That the agency I’ve served for years, the one I’ve killed for, has betrayed me. That’s enough to make someone start thinking differently. And what a coup for him if I came over to his side! Think how much I could help him. Not only what I can do, but what I know.”

“But for that to work—”

“Yeah. They’re going to have to chase me. Really, truly chase me. I’ll be designated a target. No one but Drew Peters will know the truth. Everyone will think I really went over.”

“No!” Natalie yanked her hands from his. “No, are you crazy? They’ll kill you.”

“Only if they catch me.” He tried a grin, aborted it quickly. “It’s dangerous, I know, but I can do it. And it gives us a chance to get—”

“No. Take it back. Go to the director right now and tell him you changed your mind.”

“I can’t do that, Nat.”

“Why not? Don’t you understand? You have children. I hate John Smith as much as you do, but if I had the choice between him being dead or Kate and Todd having a father, I wouldn’t hesitate.”

“It’s not that simple,” Cooper said, and held her gaze. It only took a handful of seconds. He watched the revelation hit. Her mouth fell open and her eyes widened.

“Kate.”

“Yes,” he said. “Kate. If I do this, she won’t be tested. Ever. That was my price. She gets to grow up and live a normal life. She won’t be taken from us. She’ll never see the inside of an academy.”

Natalie steepled her hands over her nose and mouth. Her fingers were shaking. She stared at his chest. Cooper knew enough to wait her out.

“She’s tier one, isn’t she?”

“Yes.”

She rolled her shoulders and straightened her back. “There’s no choice?”

Cooper shook his head.

“The things we do for our children.” Natalie managed a thin, tight smile. “When do you have to go?”

“Soon. I want to see the kids first.”

“Do you want to…you could stay. The night.”

A warm feeling bloomed in his chest. When they’d split up, they’d both agreed that sleeping together was a bad idea, that it would confuse the kids and maybe risk complicating the friendly relationship they had. It had been a mutual decision and a good one; much as they loved each other, neither wanted to be involved romantically, and so it had been years since they’d shared a bed. For her to offer that, now, tonight, it touched him. “That’s a tempting offer. I really wish I could. But they’re going to be looking for me.”

“Already?”

“Soon.”

“All right. You’d better come in, then. What are you going to tell them?”

“Nothing. Just that I love them.”

She blew another breath, wiped at her eyes, then started across the yard. Her shoulders slumped and the muscles of her neck were coiled cables. Cooper caught up with her, took her hand, and spun her around.

“Listen,” he said, then realized he had no idea what to say next. Tell her that there was nothing to be scared of? There was. Even as they stood here, Director Peters was designating him a target. The most powerful agency in the country would be hunting him, thousands of people with billions of dollars. And even if he could manage to escape them, he was walking into the monster’s den and begging for an audience.

“I’ll be okay,” he said.

And for just a second, a tiny moment, he could see that she believed him.

It was enough.