Brilliance (2 page)

Vasquez shook her head, a tight, controlled gesture. “You’re awfully pleased with yourself.”

Cooper shrugged. “Pleased would have been catching you in Boston. But keeping you from releasing your virus counts as a win. How close were you?”

“A couple of days.” She sighed, lifted the beer bottle, and tilted it to her lips. “Maybe a week.”

“You know how many innocent people that could have killed?”

“It only targeted guidance systems on
military
aircraft. No civilian casualties. Just soldiers.” Vasquez turned to look at him. “There’s a war, remember?”

“Not yet there isn’t.”

“Fuck you.” Vasquez spat the words. The bartender, Sheila, glanced over, and so did a couple of people at nearby tables. “Tell that to the people you’ve murdered.”

“I’ve never murdered anybody,” Cooper said. “I’ve killed them.”

“It isn’t murder because they were different?”

“It isn’t murder because they were terrorists. They hurt innocent people.”

“They
were
innocent people. They could just do things you couldn’t imagine. I can see code, do you get it? Algorithms that confound straights are just patterns to me. They come in my dreams. I dream the most beautiful programs never written.”

“Come in with me. Do your dreaming for us. It’s not too late.”

She spun on her stool, clutching the beer bottle by its neck. “I bet. Pay my debt to society, right? Stay alive, but as a slave, betraying my own people.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Cooper smiled. “Are you sure?”

Her eyes sparked and then narrowed. She drew a shallow breath. Her lips moved as if she were whispering, but no words came out. Finally, she said, “You’re a gifted?”

“Yes.”

“But you—”

“Yes.”

“Hey. You all right, ma’am?”

Cooper broke the gaze for the split second he needed to take the man in. Six one, two twenty, fat over hard muscle that came from working, not the gym. His hands in front of him, half raised, knees slightly bent, balance good. Ready to fight if it came to that, but not anticipating it would. Cowboy boots.

Then he turned back to Alex Vasquez and saw what he had expected when he noticed the way she was holding the beer bottle. She had taken advantage of the distraction to swing at him backhanded. Her elbow was up and she put her back into it, and the bottle was whistling around to shatter on his skull.

But he was no longer there.

All right, then.
No way to know for sure how the cowboy would react. Better to be safe. Cooper slipped sideways and snapped a left hook into the cowboy’s jaw. The man took it well, rolling with the impact, then lashed out himself. It wasn’t a bad punch, probably would have laid a normal man out. But Cooper saw the flicker of motion at the man’s eye, the tightening of the deltoid, the twist of the obliques, caught it all in an instant the way a straight might recognize a stop sign, and the meaning was as clear to him. The punch was a jackhammer, but for Cooper, who could see where it would be, avoiding it was the easiest thing in the world. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Vasquez slide off the stool and sprint for a door on the far wall.

Enough of this.
He stepped in close, cocked his elbow and slammed it into the cowboy’s throat. All the fight went out of the man in an instant. Both hands flew to his neck, the fingers clawing at the skin, carving blood trails. His knees wobbled and gave.

Cooper thought about telling the man he’d be all right, that he hadn’t crushed the trachea, but Vasquez was already vanishing through the far door. The cowboy would have to figure it out for himself. Cooper pushed past and wove through the crowd, most of them frozen and staring, a few starting to move but too slowly. A stool was toppling as a man leaped off, and he read the pattern of the man’s muscles and the arc of the falling stool and split the difference, jumping the metal legs without engaging the guy. The jukebox had switched to Skynyrd, Ronnie Van Zant asking for three steps, mister, gimme three steps toward the door, which would have made him laugh if he could’ve spared the time.

The door had a sign that read H
OTEL
G
UESTS
O
NLY
. Cooper caught it just before it closed, yanked it all the way open to be sure Vasquez wasn’t waiting on the other side—he would have noticed a weapon on her, but she could have stowed it before she came into the bar—and then, seeing it was clear, spun around the frame. The hallway continued forward to another door, probably the lobby. A staircase carpeted in a bland pattern of orange and gray went up. He took the stairs, the music and bar sound fading, leaving the sound of his breathing echoing off the cinderblock walls. Another door led to a hallway, hotel rooms lined up on both sides.

He raised his right foot to take a step down the—

Four possibilities.

One: An unplanned panic sprint. But she’s a programmer; programmers deal in logic and anticipated possibility.

Two: She’s thinking of taking a hostage. Unlikely; she wouldn’t have time to try more than one room, and no guarantee she could handle the occupant.

Three: Going for a hidden weapon. But that doesn’t change the equation; if you can see her, she won’t be able to hit you.

Four: Escape. Of course, the building was surrounded, but she would have known that. Which means an alternate route.

Got it.

—hall. Eleven doors, ten of them identical except for the room number. The door at the end was plainer and unmarked. Janitor’s closet. Cooper ran to it, tried the handle, found it unlocked. The room was a dingy five by five. Inside was a cart of cleaning supplies and mini-toiletries, a vacuum, a steel rack of folded towels, a deep sink, and bolted to the near wall, an iron ladder to a roof hatch. The hatch was open, and through the square he could see the night sky.

She must have set this up after checking in. The hatch had probably been locked; Vasquez must have cut it or broken it, leaving herself a neat little escape. Clever. The hotel was a squat two-story in a row of similar buildings, and it wouldn’t be hard to move from one to the next, then climb down a fire escape and stroll away.

He reached for one of the slender rungs and hauled himself up. Spared a moment to be sure she wasn’t waiting at the top to brain him with a rock, then grabbed the lip and crawled onto the roof. Sludgy tar clung to his feet. Even through the wash of city lights, stars spilled across the horizon. He could hear traffic from the street below, and yelling as his team moved into the bar. Staying low, he glanced left and then right, saw a slender figure with her back to him, hands planted on a three-foot abutment that marked the edge of the roof. Vasquez pushed herself up, hooked a knee on the ledge, then rose to stand.

“Alex!” Cooper drew his sidearm as he stood but kept it low. “Stop.”

The programmer froze. Cooper took a few careful steps closer as she turned slowly, her posture conveying a mix of frustration and resignation. “Goddamn DAR.”

“Get off the ledge, then put your hands behind your head.”

Light from the street revealed her face, eyes hard, lips set in a sneer. “So you’re gifted, huh?” Another glint of gold from her necklace, a delicately wrought bird. “What is it for you?”

“Pattern recognition, especially body language.” He moved up until only half a dozen paces separated them. Kept the Beretta lowered.

“That’s how you moved so fast.”

“I don’t move any faster than you. I just know where you’re going to hit.”

“Isn’t that sweet. And you use that to hunt your own kind. Do you like it?” She put her hands on her hips. “Does it make you feel powerful? I bet it does. Do your masters pat you on the head for every one of us you catch?”

“Get down, Alex.”

“Or you’ll shoot me?” She glanced across the narrow alley at the building opposite. The leap was far but doable, maybe six feet.

“It doesn’t have to go this way. You haven’t hurt anyone yet.” He read the hesitation in her body, the tremble in her calf and the tension in her shoulders. “Get down and let’s talk.”

“Talk.” She snorted. “I know how you DAR boys talk. What’s that term the politicians like? ‘Enhanced interrogation.’ Very pretty. It sounds so much nicer than torture. Just like the Department of Analysis and Response sounds so much nicer than the Bureau of Abnorm Control.” Her body told him she was making up her mind.

“It doesn’t have to go this way,” he repeated.

“What’s your first name?” Her voice soft.

“Nick.”

“The man on the radio was right, Nick. About a war. That’s our future.” A strange resolve came over her, and she slipped her hands into her pockets. “You can’t stop the future. All you can do is pick a side.” She turned, glancing back at the alley.

Cooper saw what she intended and started forward, but before he’d taken two steps, Alex Vasquez, hands tucked deep in her pockets, dove off the roof.

Head first.

Cooper spent all night and most of the following day cleaning up.

The broken body of Alex Vasquez was the least of it. The medical examiners took care of that, joking about cause of death as they loaded her onto a gurney. He and Quinn had watched, the other agent holding an unlit cigarette, spinning it, sliding it between his lips, tucking it behind his ears. It wasn’t that he was trying to quit. He just savored the tension between holding the cigarette and the moment he lit it. Cooper watched facial muscles as Quinn finally took a deep drag and was pretty sure that the smoke itself was a letdown.

“I always wondered if someone would be able to do that.” Quinn looked up at the roof of the hotel thirty feet above. “Must be hard to fight the survival reflexes, keep her skull leading the way.”

“She put her hands in her pockets before she jumped.”

Bobby Quinn whistled. “Shit, Cooper. What did you do to her up there?”

They’d found her missing datapad in her hotel room and a stamp drive in her pocket. He’d given both to Luisa and Valerie, told them to hit the San Antonio field office and check them out. Vasquez had claimed the virus needed another week of coding. If she was telling the truth, the thing was far too complex for another programmer to easily finish.

I dream the most beautiful programs never written
.

About two in the morning he’d put in a call to Drew Peters, director of Equitable Services. Despite the hour, his boss sounded wide awake. “Nick, good. What’s the word?”

“Alex Vasquez is dead.”

There was a pause. “Was that necessary?”

“She killed herself.” Cooper hated talking on the phone. He felt handicapped when he couldn’t see the other person, the play of their muscles and the change in their pores and the widening of their pupils. When he couldn’t see someone, he had to take their words for what they were instead of reading the meaning beneath them. He’d heard that some readers actually preferred the phone because it stripped away the wild dissonance between what people said and what they were thinking, but for him, that was akin to cutting out his tongue because he didn’t like the way something tasted. “I couldn’t stop her.”

“Too bad. I’d have liked to have talked to her.”

“I think that’s why she killed herself. We spoke before she jumped, and she mentioned interrogation. It scared her. Not the process, but what she might tell us.”

Another long pause. “Hard to see an upside to that.”

“Yes, sir.”

“All right. Well, still a success, even if not total. Nice work, son. Get everything settled and come home.”

After the call, there had been cops to deal with, and jurisdiction issues. The department wielded broad powers no local dared question, but government work always had a CYA factor, and there had been forms to fill out, authorization codes to pass, after-incident reports to write. His team had questioned the other patrons, making sure that Vasquez didn’t have a partner among them. He’d arranged to have the body shipped back to DC—thirty years since the first brilliants, and the scalpel crew still liked to take their brains apart—and put in calls for regional law enforcement to deliver the bad news to next of kin. Vasquez had a mother in Boston and a father in Flint, both normals. One brother, Bryan, also normal, a once-promising engineer turned dropout, last seen peddling weed in Berkeley.

The previous days had been a long run, and Cooper felt raw and exhausted with the forms and the procedure, all the trappings of civilized law enforcement. Patience for bureaucracy wasn’t his strong suit even when he wasn’t worn out. When he finally got on the charter jet back to DC, the reclining seat felt like a featherbed. He glanced at his watch, figured a three-hour flight with an hour time difference, plus a ride from Dulles to Del Ray, call it ten o’clock. Late but not too late. He leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. Found a vision of Alex Vasquez waiting for him, that quarter turn she made when he had realized her intention, the way she had thrust her hands deep in the pockets of her jeans. The way she had planted herself off her right foot as she bent into her leap.

I dream the most beautiful programs never written.

Cooper was asleep before wheels up. If he dreamed of anything, he didn’t remember it.

A hand on his shoulder woke him. He blinked, looked up, saw the flight attendant smiling down at him. “Sorry. We’re landing.”

“Thanks.”

“No problem.” The woman held the smile. It was a coquettish look, but he could see that it was practiced. “You need anything?”

“I’m okay.” He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and glanced out the window. DC was smeared with rain.

From the seat across the aisle, Quinn said, “I think she’s sweet on you.”

“That’s because she doesn’t realize I work for the government.” He stretched, the joints in his shoulders and elbows popping. The jet was a commercial charter, nicer than the military gear they often used. He and Quinn were the only passengers. Luisa Abrahams and Valerie West, the other two members of his team, would be catching flights home tomorrow, after they’d finished wrapping up in San Antonio.
Speaking of…