A Better World (44 page)

Cooper yanked the fragment of glass down. His heart beat like a drunken drummer, heavy and out of whack. His palms were soaked, and blood dripped from a dozen small cuts.

No way to get to the rifles, not without facing Soren.

Options.

The back way might be clear. On the other hand, there could be a team of snipers back there who had been ordered to wait for their actual target. It made sense; Soren comes in the front and flushes them into fire.

Okay, a side window. They could climb out and haul ass, race into the woods. Only, same problem.

Plus, who are you kidding, Cooper? You can’t outrun Soren, not now. Ethan might be able to, but then he’s on his own, and that’s as good as killing him.

His hands shook, and he gasped a deep breath like swallowing straight razors. There were no options. They had to make a stand, and the best place to do that was in the cabin.

But how? The last time he’d faced this guy, he’d lost spectacularly. Now things were far worse.

Think! Everything you have is on the table, and that roulette wheel is slowing, the ball about to drop.

He couldn’t handle Soren, not in a fair fight. The man’s gift just made him too powerful. A T-naught of 11.2, my God. An eye blink would last a second, a footstep five. It was a strange and terrible gift, one that—

Wait. For most abnorms, their gift is just a part of them.

But Soren’s gift is different. In a very real way, he
is
his gift.

His perception of the world is entirely shaped by it.

He will depend on it utterly, and trust what it tells him.

—might be used against him.

Cooper scrambled across the floor, ignoring the pain. Unbelievable the risk. It wasn’t just his life on the table, it was Ethan’s, and the hope he offered the future. And it all depended on Cooper being right.

“Doc, I need you to trust me again.” Still carrying the shard of glass he’d used as a mirror, he glanced over his shoulder. Out of sight of the window. He rose quickly, took in the room. Measured
angles in his head. “You see that closet? When I say, crouch down, move to it, and get in. Whatever you do, don’t look back.”

Ethan laughed. “Are you serious?”

Cooper shared the urge to laugh, didn’t. There was an archway out of the living room into what looked like a kitchen, the back way Shannon had taken. “Do it now.”

Lionel Clay sat at the head of the table and stared around the Situation Room at a world gone mad. Men and women in uniform were yelling at each other, talking into phones, but all of them were looking at the same thing.

The wall of tri-d screens, where American troops were massacring each other.

A high-angle recon shot showed a line of vehicles burning. Those that could still move rolled into exposed positions and continued firing on one another.

A helicopter gunship hovered over a platoon of running soldiers, spitting bullets and bright tracers. Men staggered and fell as if shoved from behind.

A soldier missing an arm clawed his way across the broken ground.

The dead lay everywhere. Killed in groups and mowed down one by one.

Streaks of light hurtled down from tactical drones, each finger missile thumping into the ground with an explosion that tossed heavy trucks like toys, that tore bodies apart.

“What’s happening?”

No one responded, and he realized his voice had been a croak. Clay pounded the table with his fist, said, “What’s happening?”

General Yuval Raz, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was a forty-year veteran, a man whose uniform sagged with medals earned all over the world. He looked like he wanted to crawl under
the table. “It’s a virus. A Trojan horse. They must have had it waiting in all our hardware.”

“Can’t we shut everything down?”

“Nothing is responding. The virus has subverted manual control.”

“A computer program is massacring American soldiers by the thousands, and there’s nothing we can do but watch?”

“We’re working the problem, but so far—”

“General!” The interrupting soldier wore a lieutenant’s bar and held a phone to his ear. He needed a shave, though the scruff was patchy at best.
So young,
Clay thought.
So many of them, so young.
“We have an unauthorized missile launch, a BGM-117.”

“An Avenger?” Raz looked at Clay. “That will be out of Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne.” To the lieutenant, he said, “What’s the ETA to the Holdfast?”

“Sir,” the man said, eyes wide and face pale. “It wasn’t from Warren. Air command reports the missile was launched from the USS
Fortitude
, a
Luna
-class attack submarine at latitude 38.47, longitude -74.40.”

“North 38 west 74? But that’s . . .”

“Approximately one hundred miles east of Washington, DC.” The lieutenant swallowed hard.

General Raz laid his fingers on the table. “They’ve already tried the self-destruct?”

“No response, sir.”

“Activate all missile defense batteries.” Raz spun. “Sir, we need to get you out of here immediately.”

“It’s heading for the White House?”

Raz nodded.

“Can you destroy it?”

“We’ll try. Meanwhile, sir, you have to go. Right now.”

Lionel Clay stared. At the monitors, on which his soldiers burned and bled. At the officers surrounding the table. At the American flag hanging limp in the corner.

“Sir, the Avenger is our top-of-line technology. It’s capable of more than four thousand miles per hour, five times the speed of sound. You have to go.”

This was never what you wanted. Not the office, not division in America, not the war. You let others drive you here.

You knew better, and you let it happen anyway.

And now thousands are dying, and a missile is hurtling toward the seat of American democracy.

Where will you be when it lands?

“I ordered our troops to attack. I’m staying.”

“Sir—”

“That’s an order.”

The general gave him an appraising look, then a sharp nod. “Yes, sir.”

Clay stood up. Took his suit jacket from the back of his chair and slid it on. He’d been a history professor, not a mathematician, but the calculation wasn’t complicated. If the missile could cover four thousand miles in an hour, it could do a hundred miles in a minute and a half.

Which meant they had thirty seconds left.

“Sir, antimissile batteries on the Chesapeake Bay are firing now.” The lieutenant closed his eyes and bit his lip.

The White House was completed in 1800. It’s been occupied by every president but George Washington. For 213 years it has stood as a symbol of all that America is.

Everyone in the room stared at the lieutenant, the phone held to his ear with fingers clenched bloodless. There was nothing but the sound of breathing.

And then something in the young officer gave. His shoulders slumped, and his head fell.

It was over. They all knew it even before the man said, “Negative. No contact.”

Fifteen seconds.

Clay buttoned his jacket and straightened his posture. His eyes swept the room. Funny, only now did he realize who was missing.

You little shit-heel, Leahy. At the very least, you should be standing here too.

He wanted to say something. Wanted to find words that would make it all meaningful.

But what would they be?

Five seconds. He strained to hear a screaming, then remembered the missile traveled faster than its own sound waves.
We are never more clever than in the creation of ways to destroy ourselves.

“I’m sorry,” Lionel Clay said. And then, “God bless America.”

White erased the world.

Soren walked.

Past the red Porsche, his fingers trailing along the hood, the metal cool. Past the shattered pickup truck, the windshield glass crunching beneath his feet.

As usual, John had been right to be prepared. The tactical team had failed, and it was up to him to finish it. The rook, but no longer on the back row. Now stalking the board, forcing checkmate.

His nothingness had been shattered, his stores of carefully hoarded oblivion squandered.
It’s time to go away. But finish this for your friend.

The presence of Nick Cooper had been a surprise. The man was resilient. But Soren had spotted the bandage on his hand, had seen him stumble and fall. All that resilience had accomplished was to delay the inevitable.

He walked toward the cabin, calm, alert, in the moment. Through the shattered bay window, he could see the living room, a television on, no sign of the people inside . . . until, low but not
low enough, he saw Ethan Park hurry in a crouch to a door in the side wall. A closet, and in the leisure of his perception, Soren catalogued the items inside, the blankets and coats, fishing poles and board games. Park slid inside and shut the door behind him.

Soren paused, took thirty of his seconds to think. The doctor was intelligent, and hiding in a closet was the action of a child. Especially with Cooper inside the house. Which meant . . .

Of course. A trap. Soren was meant to see him go there. Cooper would be waiting somewhere he could cover the front door and the closet. He smiled, imagining John’s amusement at such a simple gambit.

Ignoring the front door, he moved in a jog around the side of the house. As he rounded the corner, he took in the world, the pond, the trees, the woman Shannon moving into the forest with Amy Park and the baby. Good. No need to deal with her now.

The back door was ajar, no doubt left that way when she fled. Soren moved to it, light on his feet. Though he knew what he would see, he still moved carefully, easing around the edge of the doorframe.

Nick Cooper stood at the edge of the kitchen by an arch that led to the living room. His back was to Soren, the pistol up and aimed at the front door. Soren was almost sad; the man had proven resourceful, and while he would fail here again, he had fought to the end.

Soren slipped in the door. Four steps would take him there.

He took the first, then the second. Raised the dagger, the flat black blade so light it was an extension of his arm.

The third. Cooper held the pistol in his left hand, braced against the wall, his aim unwavering on the door. All his attention on the trap he had laid. His back exposed and unarmored.

The fourth.

Soren cocked the dagger back, lined it up between Cooper’s vertebrae to the left of the spine, and lunged.

Cooper could feel the air moving in the room, could feel his blood pulsing in his veins. Could hear the tiny creaks of the cabin, smell the sweat and blood. His arm was tired, but he kept the revolver pointed at the door. Everything came down to this. He would have one shot, one, and if he failed, they were both dead. He had to be perfect. For his life, and Ethan’s, and his children, and his country. One shot.

And when, in the glass shard he’d propped against the counter he saw Soren raise the dagger and lunge, he spun. Everything coming down to one instant, his left hand whipping the heavy pistol around, praying that he’d been right, that what Todd had shown him in the restaurant was true, and as he saw Soren hurling forward, the blade out and his weight shifted, Cooper’s gift read his intention clear as neon, and he slid sideways and slammed the revolver into Soren’s neck with all his strength.