Brilliance (6 page)

Orange hate radiated in waves off Bryan Vasquez’s face. Cooper could see him trying to decide if he was the kind of man who would jump a table and attack a government agent. See him knowing that he wasn’t that man, that he never had been, and that fury didn’t change facts. Finally, Vasquez steepled his hands in front of his face and blew a long exhale into his palms. “Okay.”

“Good. We’ll be back in a minute with your document.”

The interview rooms were kept stuffy on purpose—warm, thick air made people sleepy, which led to slips—and the air-conditioning in the hallway felt great. He waited till he heard the door of the interview room click shut before he turned around.

“Are you out of your mind?” Dickinson’s eyes were bugged. “Letting a terrorist—”

“Get that document drafted,” Cooper said. “Make it simple and clear. If Bryan does what we want, we won’t charge his sister, period.”

“I don’t work for you.”

“You do now. You got proactive, remember?” Cooper stretched, popped his neck. Tired. “And when you’re done with that, go downstairs and get a necklace from Alex Vasquez’s personal effects. It’s gold, a songbird. Bring that back up for Bryan, to prove we have his sister.”

Dickinson looked confused. “Downstairs?”

“Yeah. In the morgue.” He turned and started to walk away, then spun back. “And Roger, make sure there’s no blood on it, would you?”

“You let him think his sister is alive?” Bobby Quinn smiled over the lip of his coffee. “You, my friend, are a bad, bad person.”

“Whatever. I don’t disagree with what he said about abnorm rights, but blowing shit up isn’t the way to fix it. He and his sister would have killed hundreds of soldiers, and I’m supposed to be weepy about lying to him?” Cooper shrugged. “Not feeling it.”

Last night’s rain had given way to one of those pale, chilly DC days. A patchwork of clouds pressed down on the city, shading the daylight a tarnished silver. The wind was cold, but Cooper finally had a coat on. That and the half-dozen hours of sleep he’d snatched had done wonders for his mood.

12th and G, Northwest. Bland office buildings loomed on all four corners, the windows reflecting back the cold sky. Between them was a public square of concrete and stone. Escalators ran up from the open mouth of Metro Center Station, vomiting men and women in business attire, all of them checking watches and talking on cell phones. According to Bryan Vasquez, all he was supposed to do was show up and stand on the corner. His mysterious contact would do the rest.

“It’s a mess,” Quinn said. “High visibility, multiple escape options, way too many civilians.”

“And whoever is meeting Vasquez could watch from any one of these buildings.” Cooper leaned back, spun in a slow circle. “Perfect position to make sure he’s not being followed.”

“It could be a team, too. Spotters in the buildings, maybe security on the ground. An extraction crew. Decoys. Plus, we won’t know who we’re looking for until they make contact. Tactically, they have every advantage.”

“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
J
OHN
S
MITH
.

“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 them down here than let them 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 onto 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.”

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 pocket, 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 PJs, 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 which, 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.

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.”