Written in Fire

CHAPTER 5

Natalie’s face filled the screen. “Shoot,” she said. “I was really hoping to get you. Umm. Well, there’s someone who wants to say hi.”

Cooper had watched the video message three times already, but even so, his chest hollowed out with joy as the image twisted in a flash of colors that resolved itself into Todd’s grinning face. “Hi, Dad!”

His boy, his beautiful ten-year-old son, not only alive, but awake, in a hospital bed, with a bad haircut from the surgery.

“I’m doing okay,” Todd said. “It doesn’t hurt much. And the doctors say I can run and even play soccer—”

“They said soon, honey—”

“And Mom told me you got him, you got the guy! That’s awesome, Dad.” His son bit his lip. “I’m sorry I got in your way. I know I screwed it up for you.”

No, Todd, buddy, you didn’t screw anything up. You were a ten-year-old trying to protect his father against a monster. The last thing you did was screw up—

“Everybody is really nice, but I miss home. I hope we can go back soon. I love you!”

The screen shifted back to Natalie. His ex looked tired. “Things here are okay. Erik is being good to us. He arranged this call—I guess the lines are . . . Well. We’re safe.” She took a breath, and he saw all of the things she wanted to say but couldn’t. It was partly a matter of privacy; his family was still in the New Canaan Holdfast, and communications would be monitored. But there was more to it than that, he knew. The last time he’d seen her had been just after a killer named Soren Johansen had buried a dagger in his heart and put his son in a coma, the same day Erik Epstein destroyed the White House and killed seventy-five thousand soldiers. America had tumbled over the edge of a precipice that day, and he knew that Natalie was wondering what that meant. For him, and for them, and for their children.

In the end, she settled on, “Be careful, Nick,” and then the video froze on a distorted image of her hand as she turned off the recording.

The call had come in while he chased Abe Couzen through Grand Central. One more reason to backhand the good doctor. It had been two weeks since Cooper had spoken to his family, and though he’d tried every day, he’d never been able to get through. The news blamed the NCH, said that Epstein had severed communication with the rest of America, but Cooper suspected it was the other way around. If the government planned to attack the Holdfast, isolating them would be an important step in the hearts-and-minds campaign.

Just in case, he tried calling them back. “We’re sorry,” the recording announced, “the network is experiencing technical difficulties. Your call cannot be connected at this time. Please try again later.”

Redial.

“We’re sorry, the network—”

Redial.

“We’re sorry—”

Cooper hung up, pocketed the phone, and pictured Abe Couzen dying in a fire. It was a soothing image.

“That your ex?” Ethan asked around a mouthful of gyro.

“Yeah. Natalie.”

“She and Shannon get along?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know, ex-wife, current girlfriend.”

Current girlfriend. Cooper pictured the last time he’d seen Shannon, two weeks ago. He’d been about to lose a gunfight, one of John Smith’s soldiers had him cold, and when Cooper heard shots, he’d expected to feel the bullets. Instead, he’d turned to find that Shannon had appeared out of nowhere, a submachine gun braced at her shoulder. She’d flashed him that one-sided grin and said, “Hi.”

Problem is, half an hour later, you were saying good-bye. That was the way it was with them. They were soldiers in a shadow war, both living on the ragged edge of life. In theory that sounded romantic, but in reality it was hell on relationships. She was smart and sexy and incredibly capable, and together they made a formidable team. But they hadn’t actually spent much time together. There was always some reason one of them had to go, some secret mission or desperate struggle. And the way things were going, it was hard to imagine that changing.

“It’s complicated,” he said.

“I bet.”

Wanting to change the subject, he said, “You hear from Amy?”

Ethan wiped his lips, nodded, a weary sadness in the motion. “She’s still with her mom in Chicago. Says that things are weird there too, but that they’re okay. Sent a picture of Violet.” He held out his phone, and Cooper took it. The little girl was cute in that shapeless way of young babies, and he had a sense memory of his own daughter at that age, Kate so small and light he could drape her across his forearm, and often did, chattering at her while he made breakfast in the sunlit kitchen he’d once shared with Natalie. A “surprise,” they’d called Kate, never an accident. Her arrival had made them try extra hard for a while, but things had started to wear out between them, and it had been around Kate’s first birthday that he and Nat had agreed it was better to part warmly than stay together and ruin it.

“She’s beautiful.” Cooper returned the phone and flexed his fingers. His joints had that bruised feeling, coupled with a line of fire where his hand had been split to the palm. It had been tissue-melded in the same underground clinic that had repaired his heart after Soren killed him, and while it hurt like a mother right now, and his heart still slip-skipped an occasional beat, his recovery had been near miraculous. Gotta give Erik Epstein that much.

“How you feeling?”

“Good enough for government work.”

“Funny.” Ethan crumpled the tinfoil from his sandwich, winged it at a trash can. “You were pretty rough on them. The guys in Vincent’s apartment.”

“They beat him, smashed everything he owned, and then pissed on him, all because he’s an abnorm.” Cooper shook his head. “I don’t like bullies, Doc.”

The cold of the stoop was creeping through his jacket, and his coffee was weak and acrid. In the window of a greystone opposite them, Christmas lights blinked in sequence, making paper snowflakes glow red and green. It was funny to think that someone had made the effort, had dug out decorations from a hall closet, found Scotch tape and push pins. The world kept turning even as it fell apart.

“How do you do this?” Ethan’s question had the sound of words he’d debated not speaking.

“Do what?”

“This.” Ethan made an everything sort of gesture. “I’ve been away from Amy and Vi for two weeks, and I’m going crazy I miss them so much. I want to hug my girls. I want to get back to work, I want to cook an awesome meal, I want to sleep in my own bed. How do you live this way?”

“Somebody has to save the world.”

“You keep saying that.” Ethan paused. “What if we can’t find Abe?”

“We have to.”

“Yeah, but, it can’t all be on us, right? Things will work out. Like always.”

Cooper understood. A year ago, he would have said the same. That while there were tensions and concerns, there was hope, too—systems in place, and civilization itself, which had a mass and momentum, an inertia that would protect it. That while the world needed defending, it wasn’t so fragile that it might shatter.

A year ago he would have said all those things. Now, he just met Ethan’s gaze and said nothing at all.

“All right,” Ethan said. “So. We know Abe is here. And that he’s tier zero. And that the DAR is after him.”

“That last is the rub.” Cooper sipped his lousy coffee. “There’s a reason the logo for the DAR is an eye. Even with resources stretched thin, Bobby Quinn will be able to tap into surveillance cameras, news drones, traffic cams. There are hundreds of lenses in every square block. Manhattan is a hard place to hide from the DAR.”

“Can we use that? Reach out to your friend, the one who told you about Abe this morning?”

“No. Valerie kept us in the game, but I can’t ask her to play against her own team. Besides, even if she did, that would put us on the same footing as the DAR. We need to get ahead of them.”

“How?”

“The personal angle. You know Abe, they don’t. They won’t know about Vincent. We find him.”

Ethan considered it, as cloud shadows slid across high-rises and the rattle of the subway rose a block away and beneath them. “I don’t see him going back to his apartment. Would he try to leave the city?”

“Maybe. It wouldn’t be easy, though.” Commercial flights had been shut down since Epstein demonstrated he could crash anything with a computer. That was part of the reason there had been such a rush on the trains. That, and the looming sense that an open conflict was coming, and that when it did, cities would be a dangerous place to be.

“He could have a car—”

“Nah,” Cooper said. “Professional piano players, even brilliants, don’t make enough to keep a car in this city.” It felt good to work the problem. Though it seemed a lifetime ago, it had been less than a year since he’d hunted his own kind for the DAR’s most clandestine division. Slipping back into that way of thinking was easy.

Vincent’s racist asshole neighbors wouldn’t have let him pack a bag, or maybe even grab a wallet. He might well be on the streets with nothing.

A friend? Possibly. But right now, Vincent won’t be in a trusting frame of mind.

He’s scared, broke, and trapped. Looking for . . .

Sanctuary.

Cooper stood, finished the last of his coffee, then crumpled the cup and dropped it in the trash. “Let’s go.”

He’d been to Madison Square Garden only once, for a Knicks game a few years ago, and had come in through the bright glass lobby, along with about twenty thousand other people. This time they headed for a side entrance, what had once probably been for employees, a set of grungy metal doors on the undecorated side of the massive building. A mobile sign on a parked trailer read, MADISON SQUARE GARDEN REFUGEE HAVEN, and below that, ALL GIFTED WELCOME. Two soldiers in active camouflage chatted by the door, the digital patterns of their BDUs flexing and shifting as they gestured.

“Gentlemen,” one of them said as he opened the door. “Please have your identification ready.”

The room was a cramped security antechamber. Cameras monitored every angle, and more soldiers manned a walkthrough scanner and an X-ray conveyor. A weary mother carried a girl of six while her husband argued with a pretty woman in civilian clothes.

“But I don’t understand,” he said. “I thought families could come.”

“They can,” the woman said. “But for your safety, we’re quartering the gifted members of the family separately.”

“I’m not leaving my wife and daughter.”

“It’s just a matter of bunk assignment. You’ll still be together.”

“If we’re staying separately, then how are we—”

“Honey.” The man’s wife touched his shoulder. “We don’t have a choice. Unless you want to wait for someone to break down our door and drag you away?”

The little girl startled at that, said, “Who’s taking Daddy?”

“Nobody, baby,” the man said. “Nobody.” He stroked her hair. To Cooper’s eyes, the man’s rage and helplessness burned a dangerous shade of red, but he said, “Okay.”

“Please step this way.” The pretty woman turned to Cooper. “Welcome to Haven. Are you requesting admission?”

“No.” He flipped open his wallet. The picture was of a wildly different man. A man filled with certainty, who didn’t hope he was doing the right thing, he knew it. Fighting the good fight. Making hard choices for the greater good. Embodying the tropes that made him tear up at the heroic moments of movies—the swell of music, the bold self-sacrifice, the faith that the cause was worth dying for—all the soldierly clichés he’d bought into since he was a kid, they had belonged to:

COOPER, NICHOLAS J.

SPECIAL AGENT

DEPARTMENT OF ANALYSIS AND RESPONSE

EQUITABLE SERVICES DIVISION

Beside the ID was a badge, the logo in the center the all-seeing eye of the DAR. While he wasn’t on active duty, technically, he was still a government agent on extended leave. He’d thought about formally resigning from the department when he’d accepted the job as special advisor to President Clay, but he’d been uncertain he’d stay in politics.

There’s a wild understatement for you

The woman examined the identification. “Welcome, sir.” She handed them plastic badges. “Please keep these on your person at all time; they grant full access to Haven. If you’re armed, we’ll need you to leave your weapons here.”

“Why?”

“Just a precaution. We have several thousand residents and can’t risk an incident.”

Cooper wondered what that meant. “We’re not armed. But maybe you can help me find a . . . resident. Vincent Luce.”

She typed on hidden keys. “Section C, row six, room eight. Elevator to the fifth floor and follow the hallway out to the midcourt entrance.”

Badges in hand, they bypassed the security station, where soldiers waved wands over the family’s three sad bags. Packing them must have been hard. How did you decide which parts of your life to abandon? The father stared at him, and Cooper nodded. The man didn’t.

They stepped into the waiting elevator. When the doors closed, Ethan said, “I do not get it.”

“What?”

“No way I’d bring my family here.”

“No?” Cooper pressed the button for five. “You tried to sneak out of Cleveland in the middle of the night past a military quarantine. You telling me that if there’d been a warm, safe place to go to, you wouldn’t have considered it?”

“We didn’t ‘try.’ We did it. And all prisons start out warm and safe.”

“Prison? Come on.”

“Look how quickly this came together. Just days after the attack they had sleeping arrangements, security, even an ad campaign. Someone planned it in advance.”

“So?”

“So what are the odds they did it out of the goodness of their hearts?”

The elevator doors opened, and they stepped out into a bare concrete hallway. Soldiers and civilians moved through the unpolished guts of the arena: electrical conduit above, forklifts parked in alcoves, a faint tang of stale urine to the air.

“Speaking of residents and best interests,” Cooper said. “Vincent is literally our only lead, and we’re going to be asking him to betray Abe. Depending what your old boss means to him, he may not want to do that.”

“I got ya,” Ethan hammed in a bad film noir accent, “you’re saying we might needs to get rough, show him the wrong end of a pair a pliers.”

“I’m saying that he is going to help us, period.”

“Wait. You’re not kidding?” Ethan stopped walking. “Come on, man. That’s Gestapo crap.”

Maybe it was the leftover frustration from this morning, or the way the world seemed desperate to destroy itself, or the urine smell of the corridor. Maybe he was just tired and sore and hadn’t seen his kids in too damn long. Whatever the reason, the rage surged snake-quick, and without consciously planning the move, he spun and put Ethan up against the wall. The scientist yelped in surprise.

“I am sick,” Cooper enunciated carefully, “of being compared to the Gestapo.” A voice in his head said, Easy, easy, but another pointed out that he’d had two chances to kill John Smith, that he had brought down one president and failed another, that hard as he had tried to make a better world for his children, all that had happened was that he’d hastened the end of it. “America is at war because I didn’t act like the Gestapo. Seventy-five thousand soldiers died because I didn’t act like the Gestapo. That boy was lynched because I didn’t act like the Gestapo.”

It was only as he said it that he realized that was what was haunting him. A dead teenager missing a shoe. That was the real reason he’d beaten three men senseless this morning. And why just now his muscles had moved ahead of his mind. He made himself take a deep breath, and saw the fear in Ethan’s eyes, and his own rage drained away as swiftly as it had arrived.

“I’m sorry.” He let go of the doc. “I’m just tired of people who never have to make these decisions telling me that I’m a monster.”

Ethan stared at him. Opened his mouth, closed it. “Soren would have killed my whole family. You saved my wife and daughter. We may not always agree, but I will never think you’re a monster.”

Cooper nodded. Started away.

“A wee bit temperamental, maybe.”

Cooper had anticipated a crowd of milling thousands, had envisioned loud conversations and the yells of children and maybe even some laughter. Instead, there were about a hundred people listlessly wandering the floor of the arena, speaking in whispers, their eyes carefully downcast. Dozens of armed soldiers watched them. The feeling was of a prison yard, or a zoo.

Beyond the floor, the seats had been removed, and the slope built out in tiers of prefab rooms like LEGO blocks, row upon row rising into darkness. The cavernous stadium was hauntingly quiet, the murmur of voices from the floor faint against the weight of all that space.

Someone planned it in advance. Cooper heard Ethan’s voice in his head. What are the odds they did it out of the goodness of their hearts?

The soldier at the base of the Section C stairwell had a spray of pimples across his chin. He scanned their badges, then said, “Need me to unlock one, sir?”

“They’re kept locked?”

“Yes, sir. For safety.”

Cooper stared at him, said, “C-6-8.”

The guard started up, and Cooper followed, one hand tracing the rail, smelling old beer and counting. Seven to a row, twenty rows to a section, twenty sections, just shy of three thousand of them. Three thousand cages.

Cages for people like you.

When they reached Vincent’s, the guard swiped his ID card, then readied his rifle and said, “C-6-8! Coming in.” He reached for the handle. Cooper stopped him. “I’ve got it.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.” He waited for the guard to walk away, then opened the door.

The prefab was maybe eight feet by four, the size of a walk-in closet or a sheet of plywood. A windowless box with just enough room for a bunk and a chemical toilet, the reek of which filled the air. The man lying down had the fine features of actors in scotch ads, although the black eye and broken nose diminished the impact of his good looks. Without shifting his gaze from the fluorescent, Vincent Luce said, “You’re not a guard.”

“My name is Nick Cooper. We need to talk.”

“About?”

Cooper gestured at the door. “Want to get some air?”

The quietest space they’d been able to find was the old press box, where tri-d cameras would once have recorded Knicks games. Vincent leaned against the exterior wall, his eyes staring out at the arena-turned-prison, battered face reflected in the glass. “Is this where you do the waterboarding? I should tell you, I don’t know any secret abnorm plans.”

“I want to talk about Dr. Abraham Couzen.”

“Are you kidding me?” The abnorm spun, fire in his eyes. “Unbelievable.”

Cooper had been about to explain, but stopped himself. That’s not defensiveness.

“First he outs me to my fascist asshole neighbors, who . . .” He caught himself, bit off the sentence. “And when I make the scared, stupid decision to come here, he wants to save the day? Screw Abe. I’d rather stay than have him be the one who gets me out.”

“I thought . . .” Cooper paused. There was something he was missing here, something obvious.

“What, is this his idea of a romantic gesture?”

Oh. Cooper glanced sideways at Ethan, who gave a hey, news to me shrug. “So you and Abe are a couple?”

“We broke up a year ago. If you could call us a couple anyway. To be together you have to respect each other. He never saw me as a person. More like a fetish.”

“What do you mean?” Cooper pulled out a rolling chair and sat down.

“He likes twists,” Vincent said. “It was never me that turned him on, it was my gift. Look at his work. He could’ve cured cancer, and he spends all his energy figuring out how to make normal people brilliant.”

“Wait,” Ethan interjected. “He told you about our research?”

Vincent cocked his head. His fingers, long and slender, tapped out a rhythm on the glass. “You’re Ethan Park.”

“Umm. Yeah.”

“I’ve heard a lot about you. So much that I almost used to be jealous.”

“I . . . me too. You.”

Vincent smiled coldly. “I doubt that. Abe didn’t talk about things he didn’t care about. But you were his bright boy. He said your work on telomere sequences was crucial. Part of the reason he now knew what God felt like. Asshole.”

“When was this?”

“The day before yesterday, when he was showing me around his lab.”

“What?” Cooper said at the same time Ethan said, “His lab?”

“Huh.” Vincent looked back and forth between them. “I just figured it out. Abe didn’t send you. You’re chasing him.”

Cooper thought about lying, decided against it. “Can you tell me about his lab?”

“That’s why you’re after him? Because of his work?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to hurt him?”

“No.”

“If I tell you,” the man said, slowly, “will you get me out of here?”

“You got my word.”

Vincent turned to Ethan. “Can I trust him?”

“Yes,” the scientist said without hesitation, and despite everything, Cooper had to admit that made him feel good.

A buzzer sounded, dull through the glass. The people wandering the arena floor reacted as if they’d been kicked, hurriedly forming lines, their eyes down and hands at their sides as they filed back to their cages. Staring out the glass, Vincent said, “My music is too advanced for most listeners, but Abe loved to watch me play. He’d always ask me to dual-solo. Play a separate solo with each hand, at the same time.” The man shook his head. “I thought he liked the sound. But that wasn’t it. He just wanted to watch my gift.”

He turned to face them. “His lab’s in the South Bronx, on Bay Avenue. He made a big deal out of what a secret it was, how he’d funneled money to build it, how even Ethan didn’t know about it. I don’t remember the address, but it’s a one-story brick building, no windows, across from a salvage yard.”

Cooper took his d-pad from his pocket, uncrumpled it with a flick, then called up a map. The street was near the river, and only half a mile long. He felt that old flush of certainty, the sense that he was right behind a target.

“What are you going to do to him?”

Still looking at the map, Cooper said, “You’ve seen how bad things are getting. We’re headed toward a war or worse. Abe’s work could prevent that.”

“How?”

“By leveling the playing field.”

“You’re not concerned about the side effects?”

Cooper looked at Ethan, then back again. “Side effects?”