by Marcus Sakey
Cooper headed for the stairs. Behind him, a woman called his name. He ignored her and started up the stairs. Valerie West hurried after him. “Cooper!”
He turned his head but didn’t stop. “I’m busy.”
“No, listen, one of the taps turned something up. You’ve got to hear—”
“Later.”
“But—”
He whirled. “I said later, okay? I don’t know how much simpler I can make it.”
Valerie reacted as if slapped. “Yes, sir.”
Cooper hurried up the stairs, one hand trailing the railing. A balcony ringed the command center, executive offices, and conference rooms. Director Drew Peters’s office was mostly glass, allowing him to keep an eye on the video wall and the activity below. Now, however, the blinds were closed. His assistant, Maggie, a stylish woman in her early fifties with a pleasant smile and ice water in her veins, looked up as Cooper approached. She’d been with Peters for two decades, and her experience and security clearance made her more executive officer than secretary.
“I need to see him.”
“He’s on a call. Have a seat.”
“Now, Maggie. Please.” He let some of the turmoil show on his face.
She examined him calmly, then turned to her keyboard, typed something. A moment later there was a ding of the returned instant message. “Go ahead, Agent Cooper.”
The office was tidy and tastefully lit, small for a man of Peters’s standing. There was a couch in one corner under the de rigueur framed portrait of President Henry Walker. But it was the other photographs that always caught Cooper. Instead of the predictable dick-measuring images of Peters with world leaders, the walls were decorated with shots of active targets. Pride of place was given to a black-and-white photo of John Smith holding a microphone and addressing a crowd on the Mall, leaning into the microphone like an evangelist.
From behind the desk, Peters gestured at a chair and continued speaking into the phone. “I understand that, Senator.” A pause. “It means just that. I understand you.” Peters rolled his eyes. “Well, perhaps you shouldn’t have sold him half the state, should you?” Another pause. “Yes, well, you’re certainly welcome to do that. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have an appointment.” He hung up, pulled off the slender earpiece, and dropped it on his desk. “Our distinguished senator from Wyoming. Erik Epstein bought twenty-three thousand miles of his state, an area the size of West Virginia, and the good senator didn’t trouble himself to wonder why.” The director shook his head. “The world would be a better place if people stopped voting for folksy candidates they could have a beer with and started voting for people smarter than they are.” Peters leaned back in his chair and looked at Cooper quizzically. “What’s on your mind?”
“I need help, Drew.” In public it was always Director or sir, but the intensity of their job had taken things beyond the merely professional. Peters was a cool one, maintained decorum, but it wasn’t every agent he referred to as son.
“What’s going on?”
“It’s personal.”
“All right.”
“You’ve met my children.”
“Of course. Todd must be…eight now?”
“Nine. But it’s Kate that I need to talk to you about. Her mother got a call this morning from someone in Analysis. Apparently there was some sort of incident at school. They want to schedule a TDSA.”
Peters winced. “Ah, Nick. I’m sorry. I’m sure it’s nothing, just a precaution.”
“That’s the problem.” Cooper took a deep breath, blew it out. “It’s not nothing.”
“She’s gifted?”
“Yes.”
“You’re certain?”
“Yes.”
The director sighed. He took off his rimless glasses, pinched at his nose. “That’s hard.”
“I’m asking you for a favor.”
Peters replaced his glasses. Looked sideways, at the photos, the Wall of Shame, where John Smith leaned into a microphone. “It’s strange, isn’t it? There was a time, not so long ago, when every parent hoped their child would be born gifted. And now…”
“Sir, I know what I’m asking, and I’m sorry to do it. But she’s only four years old.”
“Nick.” A hint of reproach in the tone.
Cooper met his gaze, didn’t waver. “I need this, sir.”
“You know I can’t.”
“You know how much I do here. How many times I’ve killed for you.”
The director’s eyes hardened. “For me?”
“For Equitable Services. For,” he said, spreading his hands, “God and country. And in all that time, I’ve never asked for a thing, not one personal favor.”
“I know that. You believe in what we do here. That’s what makes you so good at your job.”
“My children are what make me good at my job,” Cooper said. “Everything I’ve ever done here, it’s to make the world better for them. Because I believe that what this agency does is the only way to get there. And now that agency wants to take my daughter.”
“First,” Peters said, “that’s an overstatement. Don’t lose your head. This test is given to every child in America—”
“At age eight. She’s four.”
“—and 98.91% of the time, it comes up negative.”
“I’m telling you, she’s gifted.”
“And only 4.91% are ranked as tier one.” Peters took a deep breath, then leaned into the desk. Sympathy radiated from every muscle in his body. “There are times I hate this job, you know. You’re not the first agent to have a child be scheduled for an early TDSA. I have to do this about once a year. But you’ve heard of Caesar’s wife? Well, we’re Caesar’s palace guard. Being beyond reproach isn’t just a noble idea. It’s mandatory. We cannot put ourselves above the law. If we do, we become the Gestapo.”
Cooper understood the principle, understood the need for it. Yesterday, if he’d been in the director’s shoes and Quinn had come to him for the same favor, he would have made the same argument. But this time it’s my child. “But—”
“I’m sorry, Nick. I truly am. I wish there was something I could do. It’s not that I don’t want to help you. It’s that I can’t. I literally can’t.”
Cooper said, “Were your children tested?”
Peters’s eyes narrowed. For a moment, raw emotion slipped past the cool gray wall of the man, and Cooper was surprised by the intensity of it, the anger. Then the director said, “You know I lost my wife.”
Cooper had never met Elizabeth; she’d died the year before Peters recruited him. In the photos he’d seen, she had that inner glow that made her seem much prettier than she objectively was. One shot in particular had caught him, Elizabeth in the midst of a laugh, her head thrown back, eyes shut, given over entirely to the moment.
“Forty-one years old, and one Wednesday morning she found a lump. Eighteen months later, she was gone, and I was raising three daughters. She’s buried in her family mausoleum in Oak Hill. They’re wealthy from way back; her however-many-times-great-grandfather was in Abe Lincoln’s cabinet. Her father, Teddy Eaton, handled the private fortunes of half of Capitol Hill. God, he was a bastard.” Peters’s usually quiet voice hit the word with inflection. “As his daughter was dying, the old man begged her to let him bury her with them. ‘You’re an Eaton, not a Peters. You should be with us.’” Peters stared out at the middle distance.
“I’m sorry, Drew.”
“The day we buried her in Oak Hill, I thought that was the worst day of my life.” Peters’s eyes focused. He locked them on Cooper’s with an almost audible click. “Were my children tested? Of course. And I was wrong. The day I buried the woman I loved in a place where I won’t get to lie next to her, that wasn’t as bad as it gets. When my daughters got tested, that was the worst day of my life. Both times. And when Charlotte turns eight this spring, that will be the worst day of my life.”
A numb feeling crept up Cooper’s body. He had a flash of a sleepless night years
ago, when Kate was a newborn, seven pounds of tiny helplessness, crying by Christmas lights as he tried to soothe her. All that time. All those hours. All the pain and pleasure of fatherhood.
There has to be a way.
“I know this is difficult, Nick. But you’re Equitable Services. Focus on that.”
“You think I don’t—”
“I think,” Peters said, “that when family comes up against duty, it’s hard to choose. But never forget that there are people who believe a war is coming. Some of them want it to. And we’re all that’s standing against that.”
Cooper drew a deep breath. “I know.”
“There’s one thing you can do to help Kate.” The director’s eyes were pale blue and sharp edged. “Your job. Do your job, son.”
CHAPTER 12
Lacking any better ideas, Cooper did just that. There was still an attack imminent, still lives on the line.
Besides. You have a chance to catch John Smith. You want leeway? Catch the most dangerous man in America. Then see if the answer is the same.
He went looking for Valerie West—there’d been no need to snap at her that way, especially when it sounded like she had something—and found his whole team together and frenetic. The monitor in front of Valerie had a live satellite image, a rectangle maybe half a mile by a mile of tightly packed houses and narrow streets. Luisa Abrahams leaned over her shoulder, talking fast into the phone. Bobby Quinn, bulky with a vest, was checking the load on his weapon. As Cooper approached, all three turned to look at him. Then all three started talking at the same time.
Twenty minutes later he was in the back of a helicopter, the rotors thumping as the pilot flew over fields and forest, suburbs and golf courses. To the east the Chesapeake was a thin blue ribbon nicked by diamond sparkles of sunlight.
“It’s thin,” Cooper shouted over the noise. He’d unfolded his datapad from his pocket and snapped the display fabric taut. On the screen was a transcript of a conversation recorded three hours earlier between a man named Dusty Evans and an unknown caller.
DE: “Hello?”
UNK: “Good morning. How are you?”
DE: “Great. Looking forward to the fishing trip.”
UNK: “Everything ready?”
DE: “Got all our gear packed. Everything you asked for.”
UNK: “How’s the water?”
DE: “Clear as glass.”
UNK: “Glad to hear it. We’re going after the big one today.”
DE: “Yes, sir. It’s going to be a thing of beauty.”
UNK: “Yes. Yes, it will. Good work.”
DE: “Thank you. It’s an honor.”
UNK: “The honor’s mine. We’ll talk again later.”
“You said you wanted anything off the taps,” Quinn yelled back. “We got two dozen hits; this is the only one the analysts cleared.”
“It’s obviously coded, but what else? Who’s Dusty Evans?”
“Electrician, unmarried, twenty-four. Tested tier four in ’92—mathematical—joined the army in 2004, washed out of basic. Punched his sergeant, apparently. A couple of speeding tickets, an assault charge for a bar fight.”
“He was in one of the Vasquezes’ cell phones?”
“No. About three months ago he called a woman named Mona Appismo, who was in Alex’s cell phone.”
“That’s it?” Cooper felt a sinking inside him. For a moment he’d thought he had conjured a miracle by sheer force of will. But now he felt himself drifting back to questions for which he had no answers. “This is a waste of time. He’s probably a nobody talking to his pot dealer.”
“Only if he’s got a thing for ditch weed.” Quinn grinned. “Unknown number turned out to be a cell phone in Wyoming. It’s from inside New Canaan. Belongs to a guy named Joseph Stiglitz.”
“And you’re thinking Joseph Stiglitz, JS, John Smith?”
“I’m not thinking it, boss. The analysts are.”
“The voice doesn’t match, does it?” For the last five years, they’d been running the most sophisticated computer search algorithms ever devised to find John Smith. Either the man had never once picked up the phone, or, more likely, he was disguising his voice. Easy enough to do on digital lines.
“No,” Quinn said, “but the phone was bought last month and never used. So who buys a phone but doesn’t even turn it on for a month?”
“Someone who plans ahead. Good thinking. Local cops on alert?”
“Yeah. They know to stay back, too. Luisa is coordinating, and I think they’re afraid of her.”
“Good.” Cooper slid his fingers across the face of the datapad, scanning the hurriedly assembled file on Dusty Evans. An arrest record from the assault 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 pissed-off young man, his glare at the camera pure contempt.
There was an address in Elizabeth, New Jersey, a working-class 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 analyze 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 pissed-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 seem
ed exotic rather than cheap. She was slender enough that 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.”