Brilliance. Part 12

"Good." Cooper slid his fingers across the face of the datapad, scanning the hurriedly a.s.sembled file on Dusty Evans. An arrest record from the a.s.sault 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 p.i.s.sed-off young man, his glare at the camera pure contempt.

There was an address in Elizabeth, New Jersey, a working-cla.s.s 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 a.n.a.lyze 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 p.i.s.sed-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 d.i.c.kinson 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. h.e.l.l, 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 unb.u.t.toned 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, 's.e.x 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.' h.e.l.l, 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 m.u.f.fled 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 gla.s.s 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, spa.r.s.ely 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 sh.e.l.ls. 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 s.p.a.ce 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 G.o.dd.a.m.n 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 p.i.s.sed-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, s.h.i.t."

"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. "s.h.i.t, 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 s.h.i.t.

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 pa.s.senger 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 bulls.h.i.t. This is what we're fighting against."