Brilliance

by Marcus Sakey

  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 into 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 8

  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 they 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 went 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 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 one 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 each other. He could read the fear in Valerie’s eyes and the protectivenes
s 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 in 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. “Je-sus,” 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 9

  The Monocle on Capitol Hill was an institution. Located just a few blocks from the Senate offices, the place had hosted DC’s powerbrokers for fifty years. 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.