Brilliance (18 page)

On the bright expanse of Columbus Park, a mile from the explosion, three large buses parked on the green of the soccer field. Red Cross mobile donation units. A mob of volunteers, hundreds of people rolling up their sleeves.

Just north of Houston, the building was exploding again.

The tri-d billboard was mounted on the second story of an office tower. Instead of the usual advertisements and spinning corporate logos, an image of the Exchange hovered in the air, the Exchange as it had been hours before, a massive American flag dangling above the stage. The image shuddering and bouncing, the camera swerving vertiginously, and not just the camera, the building, suddenly consumed in thick smoke. There were blurry objects flying through the air, growing chunky and pixelated as they reached the edge of the projection field.

“My God,” whispered the woman standing beside Cooper.

The image changed, the smoke suddenly lessening, the angle different. The building was shown ripped open. Firemen sprayed water. Paper and insulation drifted on the eddies. Police guarded the scene as emergency workers looked for survivors. A ribbon at the bottom of the screen declared, L
IVE FROM
S
TOCK
E
XCHANGE
E
XPLOSION
.

“Hadda be the twists,” said a rough voice behind him. Cooper fought the urge to deck the bigot. After all, he was right.

“Maybe,” said another voice.

“Who else would it be?”

“Who knows? All I’m saying, I don’t think they’ll know for a while.”

“Why not?”

“Look at it, man. Mess like that, how you gonna tell the good guys from the bad guys?”

The video had flashed back to the explosion. They’d probably run that loop for three straight months. But as the eyes of everyone in the crowd watched the building blow up, again, Cooper turned and stared at the men behind him. They looked like guys who bet on sports. As he stared at them, first one and then the other turned their attention to look at him. “What?” The bigger one. “Help you with something, buddy?”

How you gonna tell the good guys from the bad guys?

“Thank you.”

“Huh?”

But by then Cooper was already gone, sprinting at full speed.

“It’s easy. Everybody else on the field, they look where the opposing line is. I look where they’re
going
to be. Then I just head somewhere else.”

—Barry Adams, running back for the Chicago Bears, on how he was able to rush 2,437 yards in a single season, shattering the previous record (2,105, by Eric Dickerson in 1984)

Located west of DC’s Naval Observatory, Massachusetts Avenue Heights was a charming neighborhood of redbrick row houses whose proximity and small yards belied the affluence within. While not quite equaling the mansions and political swing of Sheridan-Kalorama, it was a wealthy neighborhood, the kind of place people said was great to raise kids, and home to numerous politicians, doctors, and lawyers.

The house on 39th Street NW was quaint and carefully maintained, with a pretty porch, manicured hedges, and an American flag. What wasn’t quite as evident were the security cameras mounted not only on the house but along the walk-way and in the tree, the steel-reinforced doorframe, and the discreet gray sedan that passed the house at random intervals twice an hour.

Cooper had been here many times. He’d sat on the picture-perfect back patio and sipped beer while the kids played. He’d helped design the security, and for several months, even served as a driver. During a mousetrap operation in which they’d leaked supposed weaknesses to terrorist elements, he’d run a team out of the place, sleeping in the spare room and hoping that John Smith might take the bait. He wasn’t a stranger to the house on 39th Street.

Still, showing up unannounced after dark, wearing torn clothes and smelling of sweat and diesel, well, it wasn’t something he’d normally do.

He rang the doorbell. Opened and closed his hands as he waited for what seemed a long time, conscious of the security measures trained on him.

When he opened the door, Drew Peters looked at Cooper for a long moment. His accountant’s eyes took in every detail and gave nothing back. Cooper didn’t say anything, just let his very presence speak for him.

Finally the director of Equitable Services glanced at his watch. “You’d better come in.”

Cooper had interrupted dinner, so Peters brought him through the kitchen to say hello. The space was bright and homey, with hardwood countertops and glass-fronted cabinets. It had always struck Cooper as out of character with the cool gray he associated with Director Peters.

Of course, at home, he wasn’t the director; he was Dad, and Cooper was sometimes Uncle Nick. The girls usually squealed when he came in. Maggie harbored a tweenage crush, while Charlotte often begged helicopter rides.

Tonight, though, Charlotte pushed broccoli listlessly around her plate, and Maggie stared at her hands. Finally, Alana, the eldest, rose. “Hi, Cooper. Are you okay?” She’d been eleven when her mother died, and since then she’d become the de facto lady of the house, watching over the others and taking care of meals. Cooper had often felt sorry for Alana—nineteen years old and forced to act forty. He wondered who she would have turned out to be if Elizabeth had lived. Imagined she wondered that, too.

“Sure,” he said. “I’m as okay as everybody else.”

“It’s awful,” she said, and immediately looked as if she wanted to amend that, find a stronger term, a word that could encompass the bodies and the smoke and the pink shock of a child’s stuffed animal in the middle of Broadway.

“Yes.” If there was such a word, Cooper didn’t know it. “I’m sorry to interrupt dinner.”

“It’s okay. Want something?”

“No, thanks.” With that, the small talk sputtered and died.

Peters said, “Let’s talk in the study” and then led Cooper through the house, past school photographs and framed macaroni art.

The “study” was a windowless room off the back of the house, with a desk and a couch, a sidebar, two muted tri-ds running the news. There was a silver-framed photograph of Elizabeth, the director’s wife, gone eight years now and buried in Oak Hill Cemetery. Was it only this morning Drew had told him that story?

The room sported a few less-traditional features, as well: inch-thick plating beneath the drywall, hydraulic steel door, buried hard-lines running to the DAR and the White House, a panic button that would seal the place like a vault and summon an assault team. The director poured two scotches, sat down, and looked at Cooper expectantly.

So Cooper took a breath and a sip of scotch and told him everything that had happened that day, every moment of the pursuit, how close he’d been to the bomber, how he had almost stopped things. And then he shared the idea that had struck him on a NoHo street—
How you gonna tell the good guys from the bad guys?
—the proposal that had driven him back here despite the distance and the impropriety and especially the magnitude of sacrifice it would involve.

Drew Peters said, “That’s a preposterous notion. Absolutely not.”

“It’s not preposterous. It’s perfectly feasible.”

“I can think of a dozen ways it could fail.”

“I can think of a hundred. But it gives us a chance, a real honest-to-Christ chance to get close to him.”

“He’d see through it. See you coming.”

“Not if we went all the way with it.”

“All the way.”

“Yes. That’s the only way to get him,” Cooper said. “We’ve been doing this wrong for years.”

Peters picked up his silver pen, spun it between long fingers. If he was offended, it didn’t show in his off hand, “Oh?”

“The way we’re working now, we have to bat a thousand just to tie. Say I’d been able to get to the bombs today. If I disarmed four of them and the fifth went off, it’s a win for Smith. If I disarmed them all, but if the press found out they’d been planted, it’s
still
a win. He can hit us anywhere, anytime, and any hit is a victory. We have to protect everywhere, all the time, and the best we can do is tie. A perfect defense alone never wins.

“If we want to end this, if we want to keep things from escalating, if we want to
win
, we have to neutralize John Smith. And this is a way to do it.”

“Not a way,” Peters said. “A chance.”

“That’s better than no chance.” Cooper took a swallow of scotch. He was exhausted, and the drink smoothed some of the rough edges. Cooper waited. The director gave nothing away, but the tiny muscles of his nose, his ears, the miniscule tensing of his shoulders, all said he was considering it.

“You understand what would be entailed? Just naming you rogue wouldn’t be enough,” Peters said. “I’d have to designate you a target.”

“Yes.”

“I won’t be able to hold back. The preliminary reports I’ve seen put the dead at more than a thousand. And this attack was in the heart of Manhattan. There will be no half measures. I’d have to cast you down like Lucifer. I can keep you off the news—probably—but within the agency, there’d be nothing I could do for you.”

“I know.”

“You’ll be more hated than John Smith ever was. Because you were one of us, and you betrayed us. Every resource in the department’s power will be aimed at you. There will be thousands of people hunting you. Literally thousands. If you’re captured, I can reveal the truth. But—”

“But no one is going to try to capture me. If they have a shot, they’ll take it.”

“That’s right. And meanwhile, you’re going to be on your own. No resources. No requisitioned helicopters, no phone taps, no surveillance teams. No backup. Nothing.”

Cooper just sipped his scotch. Nothing Peters was saying was a surprise to him. He’d had time to think it out on the flight down.

All commercial flights had been grounded, so he’d badged his way onto a Marine Corps C-130 and ridden in with a squad of jarheads. The boys were extra gung ho under the circumstances, but he could see the hurt under the oo-rah. America wasn’t used to being hit this way, to an attack in the heart of its strength.

The response would be devastating. There would need to be a blood payment. The country would demand it.

It wouldn’t be long before it got out that the bombing was John Smith’s work. And in America’s overwrought state, most people wouldn’t make the distinction between abnorms and abnorm terrorists.

After all, it was abnorms who had forced the stock market to close in the first place. Abnorms who were taking the lead in every field. Abnorms who were making the rest of humanity feel small and secondary.

You can’t stop the future. All you can do is pick a side.
Alex Vasquez’s voice in his head.

Not an easy choice. And more complicated than she would have admitted. Was he a government agent hunting terrorists, or a father whose daughter was in danger? Was he a soldier or a civilian? If he believed in America, did that mean he had to accept the academies?

All right, Alex. I’ve made my choice. But right now, this hour in the sky, this hour is for me.
He’d leaned against the metal skin of the airplane, felt the thrum of the turboprops, the cold of the air rushing past, and he let himself think of what he was about to risk. All that he might lose. The staggering costs of the plan he was proposing.