Brilliance. Part 23

There didn't seem to be any response to that, or at least none that wouldn't lead to a fight, and he didn't want to fight. So they walked side by side, the sound of their footfalls m.u.f.fled by the carpet. She thumbed the b.u.t.ton for the elevator while he thought back over what he'd seen. He was missing something. It was like a sore in his mouth that he couldn't leave alone.

Her gift had made it impossible to pattern her. The constant chameleon shifting was clearly something she'd done all her life, and half an hour wasn't enough time to break through it. But maybe it was a clue in itself; here was a woman who drew her ident.i.ty from the wants of others, so much so that she had thrown herself at him just to confirm her own irresistibility. A woman delighted to receive the Shadow, a drug designed to scramble memories of pain.

It didn't make sense. What kind of a.s.sa.s.sin would a junkie with ego issues make? The pieces didn't add up to the sum.

That usually means that you've got the wrong sum.

The elevator arrived, and they climbed aboard. By the time it drew to a stop in the subterranean parking garage, he had the answer.

A junkie with ego issues that compelled her to fulfill anyone's fantasy would make a lousy a.s.sa.s.sin.

But a very successful prost.i.tute.

Cooper rubbed at his eyebrow. "I'm sorry," he said. The way Shannon looked over at him, it felt as if she understood that he meant on more than one level. She started to say something, changed her mind.

After the raid on the hospital they'd picked up his car, and now he beeped the locks and climbed into the driver's seat. Two concrete revolutions saw them to the surface. A heavy gate pulled aside, and then they were merging with Lake Sh.o.r.e Drive, Samantha's expensive high-rise in the rearview.

"It's not her fault," Shannon said, her eyes locked on the road ahead. "She didn't used to be like this. It's getting to her."

"She's a call girl, isn't she?"

"Yeah." The word exhaled slow. City lights danced on her features.

"I thought she was...well, an a.s.sa.s.sin."

"Samantha?" Shannon asked, startled. "No. I mean, she's got a lot of powerful clients, and I'm sure if John asked her, she'd do it. She'd do anything for him. But he'd never ask."

"Why does she do it?" He checked his mirror and changed lanes. "She's obviously tier one. A reader like that, she could..."

"What? Work for the DAR?"

He looked over, but she kept her eyes ahead. Cooper turned back to the road. An image of Samantha kept appearing to him, that first moment she'd started on him, her tiny step forward and change of posture. There had been such strength in it. But of course, that was all part of the act. He wondered if between her need and her addiction, there was anything left of the real woman.

"Sorry," Shannon said. Her hands were in her lap now, rubbing against one another. "It just gets to me, you know? Seeing her like that. You're right, she's tier one. And she's sensitive, emotionally sensitive. Always was. So that gift for reading others, it translated to empathy. True empathy, trying to imagine what the world was like for others. She wanted to be an artist, or an actress. And even though she was at an academy, she wasn't targeted the way some of them are, the way John was. She might have made it through okay. But then she turned thirteen."

Cooper's fingers tightened on the steering wheel. "Who was he?"

"Her mentor," Shannon said. "You know how academies work? Every kid has a mentor, always a normal, who is their, well, everything. The academies are all about setting us at each other's throats. The mentor is the one person you're supposed to be able to trust. Of course, they're the real monsters, but you don't understand that as a kid. They're just adults who are nice to you. And since you don't have a mom or a dad or brothers or sisters or even a name anymore..." She shrugged. "All children need to love a grown-up. Normal or twist, it's in the DNA."

Cooper had that helpless anger again, the feeling he'd experienced when he'd visited the academy, when he'd imagined throwing the director through the G.o.dd.a.m.n window. He was starting to wish he had.

"Anyway, around the time she turned thirteen, she started looking like she does now. And she had that gift, right? She knew what people wanted. What men wanted." She took a deep breath, then exhaled. "He convinced her it was love. Even promised to sneak her out of the academy as soon as he could arrange it. And until then, he gave her things to make it easier to bear. Vicodin at first, but he moved her up the ladder fast. By the time he did take her out, she was snorting heroin.

"He set her up in an apartment, but he didn't pretend to be in love anymore. Just let her get a taste of withdrawal. Then he introduced her to a 'friend' of his, and told her what she needed to do to for her next hit. She's been doing it ever since."

"Jesus," Cooper said. When he'd looked at her before, he'd seen raw need in the shape of a woman. Now he saw a teenage girl, strung out and sold by her father and lover. "Is she-the mentor, is he-"

"No. After John graduated the academy, he went looking for her." Shannon turned to him for the first time since they'd gotten in the car, and he saw that signature smile, lit brake-light red. "Funny thing, her mentor vanished. Never seen again."

Good for you, John. You may be a terrorist with hands b.l.o.o.d.y to the elbow. But you did that right, at least.

"She's independent now, no pimp or anything. But she never really left her mentor behind. She could have been an amazing artist, or a counselor, a healer, but that's not what the normal world wanted from her. It's not what the normal world had trained her to do.

"What the normal world wanted was b.l.o.w.j.o.bs on demand from an abnorm wh.o.r.e willing to be their daughter. They don't even have to feel bad about it. After all, they never said they wanted to screw their daughter; she sensed it. And as for the women, well," Shannon shrugged, "she's just a twist."

She went silent then, the story hanging between them like cigarette smoke as he navigated the darkened city streets. He wanted to argue with her, to tell her that the world didn't have to be that way, that not all normals fit the picture she was painting.

But then, enough did to keep Samantha in an expensive, well-decorated prison as long as she lived. Or until her beauty began to fade.

It was the world. The only one they had. No one said it was perfect.

"Anyway," Shannon said. "Even with that bit at the end, she'll do what she promised. We should be safe from my side, at least until we get to New Canaan. Speaking of which, that's going to take shiny new ident.i.ties."

"Yeah," he said. "I'm on it. There's just one thing we have to get first."

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO.

"I have to admit, I figured you were talking about, you know, a.s.sault rifles, or some secret newtech spy toy."

"Disappointed?"

"No," she said, reaching for another slice of pizza, "I was starving."

It was more bar than restaurant, a subterranean joint with brick walls and neon signs. Proper thin-crust pizza, not that thick c.r.a.p only the tourists ate, with pepperoni and hot peppers. The crowd was casual, baseball caps and jeans, and the tri-d was tuned to the Bears game, good old Barry Adams up there making everyone else look silly.

Cooper spun the lid off the shaker of red pepper flakes and dumped a handful in his hand, then coated his slice with them. Greasy, cheesy, spicy goodness, washed down by a long swallow of a hoppy IPA microbrew.

The crowd all erupted in yells at once; the Bears had scored. Chicago did love its home teams. The replay showed Adams stepping through defensive linemen as if he had a hall pa.s.s from the Almighty. Shannon gave a little whoop.

"Football fan?"

"No. A Barry Adams fan."

"I wondered," Cooper said. "The first time I saw you. Well, the second time, really. The first time I just noticed a pretty girl. It wasn't until we triangulated the cell signal that I realized you'd waltzed past my perimeter."

She dabbed at a bit of sauce on her lips. "I wasn't sure if I'd be able to pull it off, if you guys had a file on me."

"No. Nothing."

"I bet they do now."

He laughed. "Yeah, I'd say so. I think the target order probably goes John Smith, then me, then you." It was a strange thing to say, and stranger because it was true. Cover didn't get much deeper than this. He was an enemy of the state. In the last six months he'd raided, robbed, and survived three-no, four, after today-run-ins with agents coming for his life. Earlier tonight he'd stolen experimental narcotics and delivered them to an abnorm prost.i.tute who was a friend and possible lover of the most wanted terrorist in America, and now he was having dinner with one of that terrorist's best operatives, a shadow woman who had probably killed as many times as he had.

He heard Roger d.i.c.kinson's voice in his head. Tell me again. How is Cooper one of the good guys?

It was an unsettling thought, and he pushed it away. "So what's it like for people like you and Adams? How does it work?"

"My gift, you mean?"

"Yeah."

She picked up her pizza-he dug that she wasn't a knife-and-fork woman-and chewed while staring thoughtfully into some middle distance. "Imagine you're on one side of a freeway and you want to run to the other side. Cars are blurring by, and big trucks that would totally squash you, and motorcycles weaving in between. So what you do is you look in the direction they're coming from, right? You see the relative speeds and distance, and you decide when to run and when to stop based on that."

"Or you use an overpa.s.s."

"Or that. But imagine instead you pointed a camera at it, and you recorded the next fifteen or twenty seconds. You saw where everything went. How one car switching lanes forced the truck to slow down, which backed up the lane, which made the biker step on the gas."

"You mean twist the throttle. Motorcycles don't have a gas pedal."

"Whatever. The point is, you record all of that. Then imagine you could go back in time to the moment when you started recording, only now you know what's going to happen. You know that the girl on her cell phone is going to change lanes without signaling, and the truck is going to slam on his brakes, and the motorcycle is going around. So avoiding them is easy."

"You mean you see vectors?"

"Sort of. The cars, they're just a metaphor. I can't really do it with them; I can only shift around people. I need the cues from them. I don't really know how I do it, I just-I look at a room, or a street, and I can see where each person is moving and looking."

"Can you tell me what's going to happen in the next fifteen seconds?"

"I don't know what people are going to say, or if someone's going to spill their drink. You don't plan to spill your drink, so I can't antic.i.p.ate it. But I can see that the guy coming out of the bathroom is going to make it halfway down one row, then he and the waitress will be in each other's way, and he'll back around, only the guy sitting down right there is about to get up, so there will be a logjam. The waitress will stand still, because she's going to the table beyond them, and the others will move out of her way."

Cooper turned to watch. It played out exactly as she'd said. "That sounds exhausting."

She c.o.c.ked her head. "Most people launch straight into how cool it is, how they wish they could do it."

"Well, it is, and I do. But you must get tired of all of it, all of the time."

"Yours is on all the time."

"Yeah, and I get tired of it," he said. "It's the dissonance. Between what they say and what they mean. Thank G.o.d I'm less of a reader and more about pattern recognition and gauging intent. I mean, I can tell when people are blatantly lying to me, when they're bothered, that sort of thing, but I've met some readers who can tell you your deepest secrets after a two-minute conversation about the weather."

"I have too. Most of them are shut-ins."

"Wouldn't you be? If I were surrounded by the secrets and lies of every person I saw, I'd stay away from people, too."

"So your patterns. You can tell what people are about to do? Physically?"

"Yes," he said. "And please don't test it by tossing that fork at me."

"Sorry." She smiled and lifted her hand off the silverware. "No wonder John told us not to engage you."

The offhand comment hit like a slap. "John-Smith? He knows who I am? By name?"

"Of course." She was amused. "You thought it only worked one way? He knows all about you. I think he kind of respects you. He vetoed a hit plan on you last year, not too long before the thing at the Exchange. One of our guys wanted to plant a bomb in your car-what was it, a Charger?-to prove that even the DAR's best wasn't safe."

"So what-I don't understand. Why didn't he?"

"John said no."

"I mean, why didn't John? Kill me?"

"Oh. He said that it would only p.i.s.s the DAR off. That the cost was greater than the benefit."

"He was right."

"He also said that they couldn't be sure your kids wouldn't be in the car."

Cooper opened his mouth. Closed it. Thought about how many times he'd climbed in the Charger, and how he never once checked for explosives. How many times Kate and Todd had ridden with him. Thought about the car in pieces, flames licking through the windows, and two tiny burned shapes in the back.

Shannon said, "So you must be quite a dancer."

"What? No. No rhythm. I'd be a h.e.l.l of a partner if someone led, I guess."

"I'll bear that in mind," she said, "case we ever end up on the floor." She folded her napkin atop her half-finished slice of pizza. "So what's next?"

"We need papers that will get us into New Canaan. Driver's license, pa.s.sports, credit cards. I know a guy on the West Side, does great work."

She gazed at him appraisingly. "Why didn't you go to him instead of Zane?"

d.a.m.n it. Careful, man. "There's a difference between papers that can get me in the gate, and the power to erase my past, let me start again."

"This guy a friend of yours?"

"No."

Some of the neighborhoods and suburbs west of downtown Chicago were lovely, thriving places, tree-shaded and filled with families.

This wasn't one of those parts.

Cooper, a military brat before he became military himself, had never really put down roots-at least not geographical ones-and so looked at every place fifteen-degrees askew as a perpetual outsider. He had a theory going about cities, that the dominant industry of the town filtered into every level of the place, from the architecture to the discourse. Thus in LA, a city built on entertainment and fantasy, there were houses in the clouds and dinner conversation about cosmetic labioplasty. In Manhattan, the business of finance reduced everything, at some level, to money; the skyline was a stock chart and the streets pulsed with currency.

Chicago had been born as a working town, a meatpacking town, and no matter how many chic restaurants opened, no matter the lakefront harbors and the green s.p.a.ces, its most honest parts would always be covered in rust. They would crowd the banks of the sludge-brown river and huddle in the windowless warehouses of industrial districts.

The building he was looking for was three stories of grim cinderblock. A loading dock ran the length of the face; above it, someone had painted the words VALENTINO AND SONS, LAUNDRY AND DRY CLEANING in five-foot letters. Years of Chicago winters had faded and peeled the paint. Cooper parked the car under a streetlight, though there wasn't much point; no one lived nearby. He popped the trunk and pulled out the duffel bag.

"Dirty laundry?" Shannon asked.

"About six months worth."

The machinery was audible as they approached the loading dock. A faint sweet humidity radiated from the place. Inside, the room was huge and hot and noisy. Beneath humming fluorescent lights, ma.s.sive washing machines spun and clanked, men and women moving between them to load the drums or collect clean clothes. The air was soupy and chemical. Although the perchlorethylene used in dry cleaning was supposed to be locked in a contained system, the machines here were old, the fittings bad, and traces of the toxic cleanser were venting into the air. All of the workers had a smallness to them, the mark of people who had spent decades maneuvering narrow aisles and bending beneath heavy loads. Cooper started down the row, pausing to make room for a withered woman pushing a basket piled with suits. It had been chilly outside, but now he could feel sweat gathering in his armpits and the small of his back.

No one paid any attention as he led Shannon to a narrow staircase at the back. The second floor was hotter than the first, and noisier; here were the ma.s.sive washing machines and enormous presses used for laundry on an industrial scale, napkins and sheets and towels from a hundred hotels and restaurants. There was a brief s.n.a.t.c.hed glimpse of heavy machinery moving with insectile precision, a trace of music, something Mexican and discordantly upbeat, and then they were heading upward.