by Marcus Sakey
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 was 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 had 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.�
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“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 10
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 schoo
l. 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!”