Brilliance (36 page)

“Go ahead,” Millie said.

“You’re not coming?”

She shook her head, still staring at the floor. “Go to the end. There’s a door.”

Cooper looked at her, then down the hallway. Shrugged. “Thanks.” He stepped off the elevator.

“You should be careful,” Millie said behind him.

“Why?”

For a moment, he thought she wouldn’t answer. Then she raised her head, swatted a lock of green hair behind one ear. Took him in with those strange, sad eyes. “Everybody’s lying,” she said. “Everybody.”

The elevator door slid closed.

Cooper stared at it. Slowly, he turned back and faced the dim hallway. He flexed his fingers. Wondered how deep he was right now. At least as far underground as he’d been above it a moment before. Something nagged at his subconscious, that hint of a puzzle piece that hadn’t fallen into place yet, a pattern he could sense more than see. A hidden door. A private elevator. A child for an escort. A gifted, troubled child.

What was this place?

If this is the executive lounge, I’d sure hate to see the regular one.

He started down the hall. Thick carpet muted his footsteps. He could hear the rush and whoosh of air, ventilation systems of some sort. The walls were undecorated. He ran a hand down them; carbon fiber weave, very strong, very expensive.

At the end of the hall, a door swung open. There was no one standing there, and the room beyond it was dark.

With the feeling that he was entering some sort of a dream, he walked in.

Data. Constellations of numbers glowing like stars, neon swipes of sine-curves, charts and graphs in three dimensions, hovering everywhere he looked. It was like walking into a planetarium, that darkened silence and sense of wonder, only instead of the heavens, it was the world hanging in every direction, the world broken down into digits and sweeps and waves.

Cooper blinked, stared, turned slowly on his heel. The room was big, an underground cathedral, and in all directions, three hundred and sixty degrees, luminous figures hung in the air. Things cycled and changed as he watched, the light seemingly alive, the correlations bizarre: population figures graphed against water consumption and the average length of women’s skirts. Frequency of traffic accidents on non-rural roads between the hours of eight and eleven. Sunspot activity overlaid on homicide rates. A chronology of deaths in the 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union mapped to the price of crude oil. Explosions in post offices from 1901 to 2012.

In the center of this circus of light stood the silhouetted ringmaster. If he was aware of Cooper, he didn’t show it. He raised a hand, pointed at a graph, swiped sideways and zoomed to a micro level, red and green dots plotted like a map of the ocean floor.

The air was cold and smelled of…corn chips?

Cooper walked down the ramp in front of him. As he passed through a graph, the projections glowed in his peripheral vision, a neat line that swept across his body. “Ummm…hello?”

The figure turned. The ambient light was too dim to make out his features. He gestured to Cooper to come forward. When they were ten feet apart, the man said, “Lights to thirty percent,” and soft, shadowless illumination sprang from nowhere and everywhere at once.

The man was thick around the waist, the beginnings of a second chin sprouting off the bulwark of the first. His skin was pallid and vaguely shiny, hair a rat’s nest. He ran a hand through it with the jerky speed of a regular twitch. Cooper stared at him, the pattern beginning to come together, the truth of it huge and shattering and suddenly obvious.

“Hi,” the man said. “I’m Erik Epstein.”

Cooper opened his mouth, closed it. The truth slamming home, obvious. The structure of the face, the shape of the eyes, the breadth of the shoulders. It was like looking at the pudgy, nervous double of the handsome, assured billionaire he’d just left.

“The hologram,” Cooper said. “It’s a fake. It’s all you.”

“What? No. Huh-uh. Reasonable intuitional leap based on limited data, but incorrect. The hologram is real. I mean, the man is real. But he’s not me. He plays me. He’s been me for a long time now.”

“An…actor?”

“A doppelganger. My face and voice.”

“I—I don’t—”

“I don’t like people. I mean, I like people, people don’t like me. I’m not good at people. In person. They’re clearer as data.”

“But. Your…doppelganger, he’s been on the news. He eats dinner at the White House.”

Epstein stared at him as if waiting for him to say something else.

“Why?”

“For a while I could just be in the data, but we knew people would want to see me. People are funny that way, they want to see, even when seeing isn’t the point. Astronomy. The important information scientists get from telescopes isn’t visible. Radiation spectra, red-line shift, radio waves. Data. That’s what matters. That’s what tells us something. But people want to see pictures. Supernova in vivid color. Even though scientifically it’s useless.”

Cooper nodded, getting it. “He’s your color photo. What was he, someone who looked a lot like your high school yearbook?”

“My brother. Older.”

That couldn’t be. Epstein had had an older brother, a normal, but he’d died a dozen years ago in a car crash. “Wait. You faked his death?”

“Yes.”

“But that was before anyone knew about you. Before you made your fortune.”

“Yes.”

“Are you telling me you two planned this twelve years ago?”

“Together we are Erik Epstein. I live in the data. And he is what people want to see. Better at talking to them.” Epstein twitched his hands through his hair again. “Here.” He gestured, and a vivid image appeared. The office upstairs, but from a different angle. Shannon in the chair, saying something. The lawyer, Kobb, shaking his head. Millicent hunch-shouldered, lost in her game. A security camera?

No; the angle was wrong. It was the view from behind the desk. The room as viewed by the hologram. By the other Erik Epstein.

“Do you see? We share eyes.”

The enormity of it. For more than a decade, the world had watched one Erik Epstein, heard him talk on CNN, followed his political maneuverings to establish New Canaan, tracked his corporate takeovers, seen him board private jets. All the while, the real Erik Epstein had been out of sight. Living in this basement, this dark cave of wonders.

He wondered if anyone in the DAR knew it. If the
president
knew it.

“But…why? Why not just stay out of sight?”

“Too hard. Too many questions. People want to
see
.” He said it nervously. “I like people. I understand them. But it would have been too hard. I didn’t want press conferences. I wanted to work in the data. Do you know what Michelangelo said?”

Cooper blinked, thrown by the change in topic. “Umm.”

“‘In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it.’” The words running together. When he finished, again Epstein fell silent, waiting.

Whatever this is, it’s important. One of the most powerful men on the planet is showing you a secret that at best a handful of people know. There’s a reason.

Cooper paused and then said, “The way Michelangelo saw marble, that’s how you saw the stock market.”

“Yes. No. Not just that. Everything. Data.” He turned and waved his arms in an intricate series of gestures. The whole room reacted, shimmering and twisting, a psychedelic light show of charts and numbers and moving graphs. A new set of data appeared. “Here. You see?”

Cooper stared, tracked from chart to chart. Tried to make sense of what he was looking at.
Do what
you
do. Find the patterns the way you can assemble a picture of someone’s life from their apartment.

Population figures. Resource usage. A time-lapse of Wyoming from above, taken over years, the brown wasteland sprouting a neat geometric pattern of cities and roads. A three-dimensional chart of the incidents of violence in Northern Ireland mapped against the number of British pubs and the average attendance figures of churches. “New Canaan.”

“Obvious.” Impatient.

“Its growth. There,” Cooper said, pointing, “that’s about the external resources the Holdfast depends on. External resources are weak points, dependencies that could be used against you. And…” He stared, feeling that intuitional leap, almost tasting it, but not grasping it. He strained, knowing as he did that it didn’t work that way, any more than an artist could force a masterpiece.

New Canaan. This is about New Canaan.
Only, most of it wasn’t, at least not explicitly. The historical data. The Sicarii in Judea and the murder of priests in a crowd, the numbers rising, then the intersection of that line and the sudden plummet. Something called the Hashshashin plotted against Shia Muslims in the eleventh century. He didn’t know what the words meant, or knew only fragments.
Hashshashin. Wasn’t that the original term for “assassin”?
He thought so, but also thought he’d picked that up in a kung-fu movie. He simply didn’t know enough history.

Forget what you don’t know. Look at the patterns. What do they say?

“Violence. This is about violence.” The words came out before the thought had finished forming.

“Yes! More.”

“I don’t…” He turned to Epstein. “I’m sorry, Erik, I can’t see the way you see. What are you showing me? Why?”

“Because I want you to do something for me.”

Favors for favors, sure. He’d watched the meeting upstairs.
“You want me to do something in order to get your protection here, start a new life.”

“No,” the man said, his voice thick with scorn. “Not the lie. You don’t want a new life here. That’s not why you came.”

Careful. This could all be a trap. What if he wants you to reveal your real purpose so that he can…

What? This man, this gifted and odd and immensely powerful man, would he really share his secret just to uncover you? Ridiculous. If he cared, he could have had you thrown out of the NCH. Or buried in the desert.

“No,” Cooper said, “it’s not.”

“No. I know what you came for. It’s in the data.” Another whirl of his hands, and the room was suddenly filled with Cooper’s life. A scrolling timeline of every recorded date of importance in his life, from his hospitalization as a teenager to his divorce from Natalie. A geographical chart of the people he had killed. A table marking the frequency his ID had been used to access the DAR bathroom, and at what hours.

A case-file note about Katherine Sandra Cooper, age four: “Subject related details of teacher’s personal life suggesting strong abnorm tendencies. Recommend testing ahead of standard.”

Cooper’s stomach went cold. “You’re looking at my child?”

“The data. I look at the data. It tells me the truth. Now you tell me the truth. Why are you here?”

He turned from the screens. Fixed the man with a hard stare. The feeling he had, it was like getting e-mailed a porn video that turned out to be his wedding night, as if some shadowy freak had been hiding in the closet with a camera. Epstein looked at him, looked away, shot a hand through his hair again.

“I’m here,” Cooper said, slowly, “to find and kill John Smith.”

“Yes,” Epstein said. “Yes.”

“And you’re not trying to stop me.”

“No.” The man tried a smile, his lips wriggling like worms. “I’m trying to help you.”

Cooper walked down the hallway without seeing it. Trod the carpet without feeling it. Stepped into the elevator like a man asleep.

Tuned into Epstein’s dream.

“It was never money. It was art. The stock market was marble and the billions my sculpture.

“And then the world took it away. My art scared them. Upset the way things worked.

“But it was never the money. The data, you see? It’s the data. And so I needed a new project.”

“New Canaan.”

“Yes. A place for people like me. A place where artists could work together. Make new patterns and new data unlike anything ever. A place for freaks,” he’d said, trying that smile again. “But then that upset things, too. Real art does. So I brought that into the pattern. In this new project, integrating with the rest of the world is part of the design. I realized people thought I was taking from them. I never wanted to take. It’s not about the having, or the giving, it’s about the
making
.”

“What does this have to do with John Smith?”

“Look at the data. It’s all there. Look at the Sicarii.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

The man had snorted, a clever teacher with a dull student. “It means ‘dagger-men.’ In the first century, Judea was occupied by Romans. The Sicarii attacked people in public. Killed Romans, and also Herodians, those Jews who collaborated.”

“They were terrorists,” Cooper said, understanding beginning to dawn. “Early terrorists.”

“Yes. Here.” Erik had flicked his wrist and one graph expanded to fill the room in front of them. It was one Cooper had noticed before, a rising line marking murders. The line grew steadily…then intersected another line and plummeted. “You see?”