Brilliance (The Brilliance Trilogy Book 1)

by Marcus Sakey

  “Can we do it?”

  “Sure.” Quinn smiled. “We’re gas men.”

  “Never liked that nickname.”

  “You know where it’s from, right? Victorian era, the streetlights used to have to be extinguished by hand. The people that did it, they called—”

  “Yeah, I know, Professor. My point is, doesn’t it seem a tad bloodthirsty?”

  “Well, we terminate brilliants. We’re lifeguards at the gene pool.”

  “So that’s a no.”

  “That’s a no.”

  “May the lord forgive you your wicked ways.” Cooper made the sign of the cross. “All right, you’re my planner. How do you want to set it up?”

  “Teams there”—his partner gestured with the coffee cup—“and there. Put ’em in a FedEx truck and a phone company van. Plus a couple of agents dressed as civilians on the street. Women, preferably. If the bad guys are amateurs, they’ll be less likely to suspect women.”

  “Are Luisa and Valerie back?”

  “This afternoon, commercial flight. Luisa wanted to know, and I quote, ‘whose nutsack she needs to gargle’ to score a seat on the jet next time.”

  “Woman has a way with words.”

  “She’s a poet.” A bus pulled up to the corner, the brakes loud. Quinn gestured at it. “Check it.”

  The side of the bus had been tagged with graffiti. Letters six feet high, orange and purple. I AM JOHN SMITH.

  “Are you kidding me?” Cooper shook his head.

  “Been seeing that all over. Other night I was at a bar, somebody had put that on the wall above the urinal. And somebody else had added, AND I AM PEEING ON MY SHOES.”

  Cooper laughed. “When do we get the teams in place?”

  “We can get the phone company van here today, have the team sleep in it. The FedEx we’ll roll up half an hour before the meet. We’ll stuff it with packages, get an agent running in and out of the building. We should plant a tracker on Vasquez.”

  “Two.”

  “Two?”

  “One on him, and one in the drive he’s supposed to hand off. Just in case. Also, I want snipers with clean firing lines.”

  Quinn cocked his head. “I thought you wanted his contact alive.”

  “I do. But if something goes wrong, I’d rather take him down here than let him get away. And I want an airship above. Infrared, image-recognition package, the whole works.”

  “Why? Alex was the primary target, and we got her. That virus needs someone with high security clearance to activate it. What are the chances someone like that is going to come himself? It’ll be a lackey, someone disposable.” Quinn tossed his coffee cup, spread his hands. “I mean, you’re the boss. You want me to put this in play, I will. But isn’t this an awful lot of effort for one target?”

  “It would be, yeah. Except that it’s not just a target. It’s a target that might lead us to John Smith.”

  Quinn sucked air through his teeth. “Smith is going to know that we were onto Alex Vasquez. It took, what, nine days to catch her? She’d have gotten word to him.”

  “Maybe. But she was running for her life. And it’s not like he’s got a phone number. He’s got to stay mobile, every night a different place. He must suspect the search protocols we’ve had running for him since the Monocle. The new version of Echelon was written by academy coders. Tier one, as good with a console as Alex Vasquez. Anytime John Smith speaks into a phone, anytime he logs on to a computer, he’s playing hide-and-seek with about five thousand professionals who want him dead. He may have set this into motion and then stepped back specifically so that Vasquez couldn’t burn him.”

  His partner looked thoughtful. “I don’t know, man.”

  “I do. Set it up.” Cooper checked his watch. Ten a.m. The drive would take almost three hours. He could requisition a helicopter but didn’t feel like explaining why. Plus, tear-assing through the mountains of West Virginia sounded like fun. There was a reason he drove a 470-hp Charger that cost half a year’s salary. And it wasn’t like he’d get pulled over for speeding; the transponder in his car would ID him to police as Equitable Services. “Can you get a ride back?”

  “Sure. I’ll be here a while anyway. Where are you going?”

  “To watch John Smith grow up.”

  CHAPTER 6

  The boy was about nine, pale and bony, with full lips and a mop of black hair. There was something lush about him despite his scrawny build; it was in the brightness of his mouth, the curls in his hair. He held up his hands like a boxer from a previous century, thin forearms scant protection.

  The other’s punch was clumsy, more flailed than swung, but hard enough to snap the child’s head sideways. Stunned, the boy dropped his guard, and his opponent swung again, this time splitting a lip and bloodying his nose. The boy fell to the ground, struggling to cover his face with one hand, his crotch with the other. His opponent, a blond kid four inches taller than he, dropped on top of him and began throwing wild blows, the belly, the back, the thigh, whatever wasn’t defended.

  The ring of children surrounding them grew tighter, fists waving. The glass of the office window was double-paned, and Cooper could hear only the barest hint of the ragged yelling below, but it was enough to bring him back to a dozen schoolyards, to a memory of toilet porcelain cool against his battered face. “Why aren’t those teachers breaking it up?”

  “Our faculty is experienced.” Director Charles Norridge steepled his fingers. “They’ll step in at precisely the right moment.”

  Two floors below and forty yards away, in a white beam of West Virginia sun, the blond had moved to straddle the younger boy’s chest, knees digging into shoulders. The black-haired boy tried to buck, but his opponent had weight and leverage.

  Now comes the humiliation, Cooper thought. It’s never enough to win. Not for a bully. A bully has to dominate.

  A glistening ribbon of spit slid out of the blond kid’s mouth. The younger boy tried to turn his head, but the blond grabbed a handful of his hair and banged his head against the ground and then held him still so that when it snapped, the string of spit landed square across his bloody lips.

  You little shit.

  A whistle blew. A man and a woman hurried across the playground. The children scattered, retaking the monkey bars and resuming games of tag. The blond kid sprang to his feet, stuffed his hands in his pockets, and assumed a sudden interest in the western sky. The younger boy rolled onto his side.

  Cooper’s knuckles ached from clenching. “I don’t understand. Your ‘faculty’ just watched a ten-year-old beat another child senseless.”

  “That’s a bit of an exaggeration, Agent Cooper. Neither boy will suffer permanent damage,” the director of Davis Academy said mildly. “I understand that it’s startling to watch, but this kind of incident is central to our work.”

  Cooper thought of Todd the way he’d seen him last night, asleep in Spider-Man pj’s, skin warm and soft and unmarked. His son was nine, about the same age he guessed the black-haired boy to be. He imagined Todd on a playground like this one, pinned under an older kid, his head throbbing, rocks digging into his spine, a circle of faces surrounding him, faces that belonged to children he had been playing with only moments earlier, and who now jeered at every wound and shame done to him. He thought of four-year-old Kate, who alphabetized her toys and organized her picture books according to the color spectrum. Who had a gift that, despite what he’d said to Natalie, showed every early indication of being quite powerful.

  Maybe even tier one.

  Cooper wondered if he grabbed Norridge by his gray tweed lapels and hurled him into the window the director would break through in a rain of sparkling shards or just bounce off. And if he did bounce, whether a second throw might do the trick.

  Easy, Coop. You might never have seen it firsthand, but you knew these places wouldn’t be rainbows and unicorns. Maybe there’s more here than you understand.

  Try not to kill the director until you do.

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sp; He forced a neutral tone. “Central to your work? How? Is the older boy a plant?”

  “Heavens, no. That would defeat the purpose.” The director walked around his desk, pulled out a leather chair, gestured to one on the opposite side. “It’s crucial that all of the children here be gifted. Most are tier one, although there are a handful of twos who demonstrated significant aptitude in other areas. Unusually high intelligence, for example.”

  “So if they’re all abnorms and none of them are in on it—”

  “How do we incite incidents like this one?” Norridge leaned back in his chair and folded his hands in his lap. “Though these children all possess savant-level abilities, they remain children. They can be manipulated and trained just like any other. Disagreements can be fostered. Betrayals engineered. A confidence whispered to a trusted friend can suddenly be heard on everyone’s lips. A favorite toy can vanish only to reappear, broken, in the room of another child. A stolen kiss or the secret arrival of menstruation can become common knowledge. Essentially, we take the negative formative experiences that all children experience and manufacture them according to psychological profiles and at a dramatically higher rate.”

  Cooper imagined rows of cubicles with men in dark suits and thick glasses listening to late-night confessions, to the frantic sound of masturbation in a toilet stall, or to the sobs of homesickness. Analyzing it. Charting it. Calculating how each private shame could be exploited to maximum effect. “How? How do you know all these things?”

  Norridge smiled. “I’ll show you.” He activated the terminal on his desk and began to type. His fingers, Cooper noticed, were long and graceful. Piano-player fingers. “Here we are.”

  He pressed a button, and sound came out of the computer’s speaker, a woman’s voice.

  “…there. It’s not so bad.”

  “It hurts.” The child stretched the word out into three syllables.

  “I told you to be careful with that one. That boy is trouble. You can’t trust him.”

  A moan, and then a quiet sob. “They were all laughing at me. Why were they laughing? I thought they were my friends.”

  Something cold snaked through Cooper’s belly. The woman, he presumed the one he’d seen break up the fight, continued. “I saw them all laughing at you. Laughing and pointing. Is that what friends would do?”

  “No.” The voice was thin and forlorn.

  “No. You can’t trust them either. I’m your friend.” Her voice saccharine. “It’s okay, sweetie. I’ve got you. I won’t let anyone get you now.”

  “My head hurts.”

  “I know it does, baby. Do you want some medicine?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. I can make it all better. Here. Swallow this—”

  Norridge tapped a key, and the sound vanished. “Do you see?”

  Cooper said, “You have the whole place bugged?”

  “That was our solution for the first years. However, in a facility of this size, and given the outdoor spaces, the rough play, it’s impossible to assure coverage. Now we have a better way.” Norridge paused, the ghost of a smile playing on his lips.

  Why would that be? What would make the man so pleased with himself?

  “It’s not the school you wire,” Cooper said slowly. “It’s the children. Somehow you’re bugging the children.”

  The director beamed. “Very good. When subjects enter an academy, Davis or any other, they are given a thorough physical examination. This includes inoculation against hepatitis, PCV, chicken pox. One of those shots implants a biometric device. It’s a dazzling piece of work, not only recording physiological statistics—temperature, white blood cell levels, and so forth—but also relaying an audio broadcast to receivers placed all over the school. It’s quite something. Advanced nanotechnology, powered by the child’s own biological processes.”

  Cooper felt dizzy. His job didn’t really entail any overlap with the academies, and so while there had always been rumors about them, he hadn’t really imagined they might be true. Yeah, every few years some journalist tried to write an exposé on the places, but they were never granted access, so he’d chalked up the more outrageous claims to sensationalism. After all, there were rumors about Equitable Services, too.

  His first taste of the reality had come on his way in, when he’d passed a group of protesters on the road. Demonstrations had become a fact of everyday life, part of the background that people didn’t really notice anymore. There was always someone protesting something. Who could keep up?

  But this group had been different. Maybe it was the size of the police response. Or that cops were arresting people rather than just containing them. Or maybe it was the protesters themselves, sane-looking people in decent clothes rather than shaved-headed radicals. One in particular had caught his eye, a woman with pale, slack hair who looked as if she might once have been lovely but now was shrouded in sadness; sadness draped her shoulders, sadness hugged her chest. She held a placard, two pieces of poster board stapled across a wooden handle. The sign bore a blown-up photo of a grinning child with her cheekbones, and the markered text I MISS MY SON.

  As two cops had closed in on her, she’d locked eyes with Cooper through the windshield and made a tiny gesture with the sign, just raised it an inch. Visually underlining it. A plea, not a screech. But with his eyes, he could see the turmoil beneath.

  “Who’s the boy?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The boy who got beaten. What’s his name?”

  “I know them mostly by transponder number. His name is…” Norridge clicked at the keyboard. “William Smith.”

  “Another Smith. John Smith is the reason I’m here.”

  “There are many John Smiths.”

  “You know the one I mean.”

  “Yes. Well. He was before my time.” Norridge coughed, looked away, looked back. “We’ve thought about discontinuing use of the name, but that seemed a victory for terrorism. Anyway, I’m afraid there’s no relation between this one and the one you’re looking for. We reassign all of the children’s names when they arrive. Every boy here is Thomas, John, Robert, Michael, or William. Every girl is Mary, Patricia, Linda, Barbara, or Elizabeth. It’s part of their indoctrination. Once a child is admitted to an academy, they remain here until they graduate at eighteen. For our work, we find it’s best that they not be distracted by thoughts of the past.”

  “Their past. You mean their parents, right? Their family, their home.”

  “I understand that this is startling to witness. But everything we do here has a careful logic behind it. By renaming them, we emphasize their essential sameness. It’s a way of demonstrating that they have no value until they have finished the academy. At which point they are free to choose their own names, to return to their families if they choose. Though you might be surprised to learn that a large percentage do not.”

  “Why?”

  “Over their time here, they have built a new identity and prefer it.”

  “No,” Cooper said. “Why do this? I thought that the purpose of the academies was to provide specialized training in their gifts. To raise a generation that had mastered its potential.”

  The director leaned back in his chair, elbows on the armrests, fingertips touching in front of him. Anyone could read the cold defensiveness, the go-for-the-throat approach of the embattled academic. But Cooper saw more to it. Something in the easy way Norridge maintained eye contact, the steadiness of his speech as he said, “I would have thought that an agent of the Department of Analysis and Response wouldn’t need to be told.”

  “This isn’t really my area.”

  “Still, surely you could have gotten these answers without a trip—”

  “I like to see for myself.”

  “Why weren’t you academy trained, Agent Cooper?”

  The suddenness of the topic change wasn’t what surprised Cooper—he’d seen it coming in the fold of the man’s lips and the crinkle of his eyes—but the content threw him. I
never told him I was gifted, or that I was tier one. He could tell on his own. “I was born in 1981.”

  “You were in the first wave?”

  “Technically second.”

  “So you would have been thirteen the year the first academy opened. Back then we could barely manage fifteen percent of the tier-one population. With the opening of Mumford Academy next year, we expect to be able to train one hundred percent of them. That’s not public knowledge, of course, but imagine it. Every tier one born in America. A shame you were born so early.”

  “Not from my perspective.” Cooper smiled and imagined breaking the administrator’s nose.

  “Tell me, how did you grow up?”

  “Doctor, I asked a question, and I want an answer.”

  “I’m giving you one. Indulge me. Please, your childhood.”

  Cooper sighed. “My dad was army. My mother died when I was young. We moved around.”

  “Did you know a lot of children like you?”

  “Military brats?” The old snide side coming out, the part that didn’t handle authority figures well.

  But Norridge didn’t bite, just mildly said, “Abnorms.”

  “No.”

  “Were you close to your father?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was he a good officer?”

  “I never said he was an officer.”

  “But he was.”

  “Yes. And yes, a good one.”

  “Patriotic?”

  “Of course.”

  “But not a flag worshipper. He cared about the principles, not the symbol.”

  “That’s what patriotism means. The others are just fetishists.”

  “Did you have a lot of friends?”

  “Enough.”

  “Did you have a lot of fights?”

  “A few. And you’ve about hit the limit on my patience.”

  Norridge smiled. “Well, Agent Cooper, you were academy trained. Your childhood is essentially what we try to replicate. We turn up the intensity, of course, and we also provide access to programs to develop their gifts, resources your father couldn’t have dreamed of. But. You were lonely. Isolated. Often punished for being what you were. You never had the opportunity to learn to trust other abnorms, and because you so often had to defend yourself for being one, you were unlikely to seek them out. You didn’t have many friends and lived in a constantly shifting environment, which means you placed special value on the one rock in your world—your father. He was a military man, so concepts like duty and loyalty came easily to you. You grew up learning all the lessons we teach here. You even ended up working for the government, as the majority of our graduates do.”