Brilliance (13 page)

“I need help, Drew.” In public it was always
Director
or
sir
, but the intensity of their job had taken things beyond the merely professional. Peters was a cool one, maintained decorum, but it wasn’t every agent he referred to as
son
.

“What’s going on?”

“It’s personal.”

“All right.”

“You’ve met my children.”

“Of course. Todd must be…eight now?”

“Nine. But it’s Kate that I need to talk to you about. Her mother got a call this morning from someone in Analysis. Apparently there was some sort of incident at school. They want to schedule a TDSA.”

Peters winced. “Ah, Nick. I’m sorry. I’m sure it’s nothing, just a precaution.”

“That’s the problem.” Cooper took a deep breath, blew it out. “It’s not nothing.”

“She’s gifted?”

“Yes.”

“You’re certain?”

“Yes.”

The director sighed. He took off his rimless glasses, pinched at his nose. “That’s hard.”

“I’m asking you for a favor.”

Peters replaced his glasses. Looked sideways, at the photos, the Wall of Shame, where John Smith leaned into a microphone. “It’s strange, isn’t it? There was a time, not so long ago, when every parent hoped their child would be born gifted. And now…”

“Sir, I know what I’m asking, and I’m sorry to do it. But she’s only four years old.”

“Nick.” A hint of reproach in the tone.

Cooper met his gaze, didn’t waver. “I need this, sir.”

“You
know
I can’t.”

“
You
know how much I do here. How many times I’ve killed for you.”

The director’s eyes hardened. “For me?”

“For Equitable Services. For,” he said, spreading his hands, “God and country. And in all that time, I’ve never asked for a thing, not one personal favor.”

“I know that. You believe in what we do here. That’s what makes you so good at your job.”

“My children are what make me good at my job,” Cooper said. “Everything I’ve ever done here, it’s to make the world better for them. Because I believe that what this agency does is the only way to get there. And now that agency wants to take my daughter.”

“First,” Peters said, “that’s an overstatement. Don’t lose your head. This test is given to every child in America—”

“At age eight. She’s four.”

“—and 98.91% of the time, it comes up negative.”

“I’m telling you, she’s gifted.”

“And only 4.91% are ranked as tier one.” Peters took a deep breath, then leaned into the desk. Sympathy radiated from every muscle in his body. “There are times I hate this job, you know. You’re not the first agent to have a child be scheduled for an early TDSA. I have to do this about once a year. But you’ve heard of Caesar’s wife? Well, we’re Caesar’s palace guard. Being beyond reproach isn’t just a noble idea. It’s mandatory. We cannot put ourselves above the law. If we do, we become the Gestapo.”

Cooper understood the principle, understood the need for it. Yesterday, if he’d been in the director’s shoes and Quinn had come to him for the same favor, he would have made the same argument.
But this time it’s
my
child.
“But—”

“I’m sorry, Nick. I truly am. I wish there was something I could do. It’s not that I don’t want to help you. It’s that I can’t. I literally can’t.”

Cooper said, “Were your children tested?”

Peters’s eyes narrowed. For a moment, raw emotion slipped past the cool gray wall of the man, and Cooper was surprised by the intensity of it, the anger. Then the director said, “You know I lost my wife.”

Cooper had never met Elizabeth; she’d died the year before Peters recruited him. In the photos he’d seen, she had that inner glow that made her seem much prettier than she objectively was. One shot in particular had caught him, Elizabeth in the midst of a laugh, her head thrown back, eyes shut; given over entirely to the moment.

“Forty-one years old, and one Wednesday morning she found a lump. Eighteen months later, she was gone, and I was raising three daughters. She’s buried in her family mausoleum in Oak Hill. They’re wealthy from way back; her however-many-times great-grandfather was in Abe Lincoln’s cabinet. Her father, Teddy Eaton, handled the private fortunes of half of Capitol Hill. God, he was a bastard.” Peters’s usually quiet voice hit the word with inflection. “As his daughter was dying, the old man begged her to let him bury her with them. ‘You’re an Eaton, not a Peters. You should be with us.’” Peters stared out at the middle distance.

“I’m sorry, Drew.”

“The day we buried her in Oak Hill, I thought that was the worst day of my life.” Peters’s eyes focused. He locked them on Cooper’s with an almost audible click. “Were my children were tested? Of
course
. And I was wrong. The day I buried the woman I loved in a place where I won’t get to lie next to her, that wasn’t as bad as it gets. When my daughters got tested, that was the worst day of my life. Both times. And when Charlotte turns eight this spring,
that
will be the worst day of my life.”

A numb feeling crept up Cooper’s body. He had a flash of a sleepless night years ago, when Kate was a newborn, seven pounds of tiny helplessness, crying by Christmas lights as he tried to soothe her. All that time. All those hours. All the pain and pleasure of fatherhood.

There has to be a way.

“I know this is difficult, Nick. But you’re Equitable Services. Focus on that.”

“You think I don’t—”

“I think,” Peters said, “that when family comes up against duty, it’s hard to choose. But never forget that there are people who believe a war is coming. Some of them want it to. And we’re all that’s standing against that.”

Cooper drew a deep breath. “I know.”

“There’s one thing you can do to help Kate.” The director’s eyes were pale blue and sharp edged. “Your job. Do your job, son.”

Lacking any better ideas, Cooper did just that. There was still an attack imminent, still lives on the line.

Besides. You have a chance to catch John Smith. You want leeway? Catch the most dangerous man in America. Then see if the answer is the same.

He went looking for Valerie West—there’d been no need to snap at her that way, especially when it sounded like she had something—and found his whole team together and frenetic. The monitor in front of Valerie had a live satellite image, a rectangle maybe half a mile by a mile of tightly packed houses and narrow streets. Luisa Abrahams leaned over her shoulder, talking fast into the phone. Bobby Quinn, bulky with a vest, was checking the load on his weapon. As Cooper approached, all three turned to look at him. Then all three started talking at the same time.

Twenty minutes later he was in the back of a helicopter, the rotors thumping as the pilot flew over fields and forest, suburbs and golf courses. To the east the Chesapeake was a thin blue ribbon nicked by diamond sparkles of sunlight.

“It’s thin,” Cooper shouted over the noise. He’d unfolded his datapad from his pocket and snapped the display fabric taut. On the screen was a transcript of a conversation recorded three hours earlier between a man named Dusty Evans and an unknown caller.

“You said you wanted anything off the taps,” Quinn yelled back. “We got two dozen hits; this is the only one the analysts cleared.”

“It’s obviously coded, but what else? Who’s Dusty Evans?”

“Electrician, unmarried, twenty-four. Tested tier four in ninety-two—mathematical—joined the army in 2004, washed out of basic. Punched his sergeant, apparently. A couple of speeding tickets, an assault charge for a bar fight.”

“He was in one of the Vasquezes’ cell phones?”

“No. About three months ago he called a woman named Mona Appismo, who was in Alex’s cell phone.”

“That’s it?” Cooper felt a sinking inside him. For a moment he’d thought he conjured a miracle by sheer force of will. But now he felt himself drifting back to questions for which he had no answers. “This is a waste of time. He’s probably a nobody talking to his pot dealer.”

“Only if he’s got a thing for ditch weed.” Quinn grinned. “Unknown number turned out to be a cell phone in Wyoming. It’s from inside New Canaan. Belongs to a guy named Joseph Stiglitz.”

“And you’re thinking Joseph Stiglitz, JS, John Smith?”

“I’m not thinking it, boss. The analysts are.”

“The voice doesn’t match, does it?” For the last five years, they’d been running the most sophisticated computer search algorithms ever devised to find John Smith. Either the man had never once picked up the phone, or, more likely, he was disguising his voice. Easy enough to do on digital lines.

“No,” Quinn said, “but the phone was bought last month and never used. So who buys a phone but doesn’t even turn it on for a month?”

“Someone who plans ahead. Good thinking. Local cops on alert?”

“Yeah. They know to stay back, too. Luisa is coordinating, and I think they’re afraid of her.”

“Good.” Cooper slid his fingers across the face of the datapad, scanning the hurriedly assembled file on Dusty Evans. An arrest record from the assault charge listed him as six two and 230, hair black, eyes brown, no scars, a skull-and-snake tattoo on his right bicep. In the mug shot Evans looked like a pissed-off young man, his glare at the camera pure contempt.

There was an address in Elizabeth, New Jersey, a working-class burg forty-five minutes west of Manhattan. Vehicle registration for an older Ford pickup. His brief military service record: a fine shot, good fitness, but discipline problems. The helicopter banked, shifting Cooper against the frame. On the horizon he could see a low industrial city, Philadelphia, he thought. City of brotherly love. He remembered talking to Alex Vasquez by bar light, the sour taste of the coffee as he told her that there had been a bombing in Philadelphia that day. It had been a post office, after hours. A silly, pointless target.

Two thoughts rang in his head. First, if Joseph Stiglitz really was John Smith, then Cooper was closer than anyone had ever been to catching the man. And second, there was going to be a major terrorist attack on America today. Or at least starting today; it could be a multiphase strike. For all they knew, Smith could be about to march on the White House. Cooper didn’t have the information to say.

Trying to analyze a situation without enough data was like looking at a photograph of a ball in flight and trying to gauge its direction. Is it going up, down, sideways? Is it about to collide with a baseball bat? Is it moving at all, or is something on the blind side holding it in place? A single frame didn’t mean a thing. Patterns were based on data. With enough datapoints, you could predict just about anything.

It was no different with Cooper’s gift. It often felt like intuition: he could go through a subject’s apartment, look at their photographs, the way they organized their closet, whether there were dishes in the sink, and from that he could make a leap, oftentimes a leap that banks of computers and teams of researchers could not. But it wasn’t a matter of visions from the Almighty, and it couldn’t be forced. Without data, he was just as clueless as anybody else looking at the photograph of the ball.

All he had right now was one Dusty Evans, a man he’d never even heard of yesterday. A loser with no prospects, no special skills, no connections that made him valuable. He seemed an unlikely conspirator for someone like John Smith. On the other hand, he was a pissed-off young man—young
abnorm
man—which was a demographic Smith fared well with.

Philadelphia had grown large out the window. Cooper checked his watch; about half an hour till they landed. They’d know soon enough if Evans had anything to offer them. He turned, saw his partner looking at him. “What?”

“There’s something else.” Quinn scratched at a temple. Uncomfortable, Cooper could see, and stalling.

“Am I supposed to guess?”

“Right. Let me send it to you.” Quinn tapped at his own datapad, and then a notification box appeared on Cooper’s, asking if he would accept a file. He clicked yes, and a photograph filled the screen.

It didn’t capture the fluidity with which she moved, the graceful transfer of weight in each step, the elegance of her posture. But the girl talking on the cell phone was still very, very pretty. Probably about twenty-seven, full lips, brown hair in a chic cut that highlighted a dancer’s shoulders. Skin color said Mediterranean, or Jewish, maybe. Her mascara was thick, but as she wore no other makeup it seemed exotic rather than cheap. She was slender enough he could mark her clavicles beneath her fitted T-shirt.

Very, very pretty indeed.

“That’s our bomber,” Quinn said. “The photo is from an ATM security camera. Thankfully, all the major banks use newtech lenses these days to discourage fraud, so the quality is good. Five years ago she would have been a black-and-white blur. Anyway, Val checked the time stamp against the cell tower logs and the GPS coordinates. It’s her.”