Brilliance (10 page)

“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.”

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

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 were 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 (A
BNORM
A
CTIVIST
S
LAYS
73; S
ENATOR
K
ILLED IN
DC B
LOODBATH
) to incendiary (A G
IFT FOR
S
AVAGERY
; M
ONSTERS IN
O
UR
M
IDST
). 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 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.”

“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.