Written in Fire (The Brilliance Trilogy Book 3) (18 page)

CHAPTER 22

When Natalie opened the door, her eyes, red and sunken, brightened with relief. “Oh thank God,” she said, and then, “Come here,” even as she opened her arms and came to him.

Cooper clutched at her, the familiar scent of her hair mingling with a faintly humid whiff of tears. Natalie always smelled different when she’d been crying. There was a permission in it, and he felt tears of his own close to the surface. When was the last time he’d cried? When Dad died?

“I was watching the news,” she said into his shoulder. “I knew you weren’t there, but I couldn’t help it, when I saw that building, the same complex you went to work in every day, I just lost it.”

“I’m okay,” he said.

She heard the things he couldn’t say, and stiffened. Leaned back without breaking the contact of their bodies, her eyes widening. “Bobby?”

“And Val, and Luisa.”

Both her hands went to her open mouth, as if to contain the sound. But the cry made it through anyway. “Are they—are you sure?”

“I was talking to them when it happened. I . . . I saw . . .” He closed his eyes, sucked air in.

“Oh God, baby. Oh, Nick.” She pressed herself against him, hands tightening around his back, strong fingers digging in. He heaved a gasping exhale that felt like it tore something. She held him, rocking slightly. “Come with me.”

Cooper let her lead him into the apartment, through the kitchen, and down the hall to the bedroom. He was strangely aware that they’d made love the last time he’d been here, and then he realized he’d never get the chance to tell Bobby about that, to share his confusion and hear his old friend make an inappropriate joke, something funny and wrong that would get them laughing, and that was when he did start crying. Natalie climbed onto the bed and leaned against the wall and gestured him into her arms, and he crawled up after her and put his head in her lap and clutched her legs while she stroked his hair and knew better than to tell him it was all right.

It hadn’t been all right for a very long time, and he was starting to doubt it ever would be again.

The tears didn’t last long—he’d never had a problem with crying, he just didn’t very much—but after they ceased he stayed where he was, head on her thighs, staring at her feet and the gauzy curtains beyond which the day died slowly. She ran her hands through his hair and waited, infinitely patient and present.

“It’s wrong,” he said at last. “It’s just wrong. You know how many times Bobby and I were in danger? How many doors we kicked in, how many suspects we took down? Hell, the day of the stock exchange, he took a shotgun blast to the chest, broke two ribs. I was there, I knocked him down and . . .” He trailed off.

Natalie just ran her hands through his hair. After a moment, he said, “We were agents. We knew the risks. But . . . not like this. Not a bomb in the middle of the workday. No warning, no fighting back. Just boom, dead. He deserved better than that. A better death.”

“There’s no such thing as a better death, baby. There’s just death.”

“Yeah, but for Bobby Quinn it should have meant something. He should have been doing something that mattered.”

“He was,” Natalie said. “He was at work, trying to protect the country.”

“It’s not the same. He wasn’t prepared.”

“Who is?” She shrugged. “Bobby was a hero, and so were Luisa and Val and all the rest of them. But it’s only in movies that heroes get to count on the big moment of glorious sacrifice. Real life is messier than that.”

“I know, but . . . In a second. I mean, we were joking around when it happened. He said that beer was on me. Those were his last words. ‘Just remember, the beer is on you.’”

Natalie made a sound that was almost a laugh. “Sorry, I just . . .” She paused, and this time she did laugh, though it was thick with sorrow. “If you asked Bobby, he’d have said those were pretty good last words.”

The sentiment caught him off guard, and he found he could picture it, could picture his partner sitting at a bar, spinning a cigarette he didn’t intend to light, and saying,
Hey, man, top that.

“I don’t mean to laugh.”

“No, you’re right. He’d have liked that.” They lay quietly for a moment, his face mashed against her leg, his own pulse echoing in his ear.

“God,” Natalie said. “His daughter.”

“Shit.” Bobby had been divorced, and not on the same terms with his ex that he and Natalie maintained. His daughter lived with her mom, and Cooper hadn’t seen her in a while. “Maggie must be . . . eleven now?”

“Twelve,” Natalie said. “Her birthday’s in June.”

“How do you remember that?”

“I loved him too, Nick. So do the kids.”

Worse and worse. He’d have to tell them that Uncle Bobby was dead. Like they hadn’t been through enough. “Kate and the academy. Todd in a coma. Maggie without her dad. All the way back to the kids in the Monocle restaurant. Why is it always children that suffer?” A thought struck him, and he turned his head. “Wait, where are—”

“Playing with friends. They’re fine.” She paused. “Was it John Smith?”

“Yes.”

“He’s never going to stop, is he?”

The words hit him with physical force. Something in his chest, not his biological heart but his metaphorical one, seemed to grow brittle and hard as cooling lava. “Yes,” he said, and pushed himself up. “Yes he is.”

“Nick—”

“I have to get going.”

“Stay. There’s no rush. I wasn’t trying to . . .”

“No, I . . .” He wiped snot with the back of his hand. “Thank you. It’s nothing you said.”

“It’s okay to let someone help, baby. To let me help.”

“You have.” He looked at her, the kind of long and naked stare that came with knowing someone so well it was hard to say where the boundaries between you lay. “Now it’s my turn.”

“To do what?”

Cooper thought about the preparations Epstein was making right this moment, about Samantha being kidnapped—a sudden motion and a hood over her head and the smell of chemicals before she lost consciousness. About a fist of smoke smashing a window and killing his friends and a thousand others. About a teenage corpse spinning at the end of a rope while Soren counted the holes of his cell. “What I have to.”

She gazed back at him, her expression darkening. “You don’t want to tell me.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“I’m not proud of it.”

“Will it get you John Smith?”

“It has to.”

“Then do it.” Natalie’s voice was steady. “Whatever it is.”

For a long moment they stared at each other in the twilight room. Then he cupped her cheek and nodded.

NEW SONS OF LIBERTY NEARING TESLA

President Ramirez condemns NSOL, but “hands are tied.”

Since breaching the New Canaan fence line on December 17th, the NSOL forces have traveled almost 80 miles, and are now nearing the capital city of Tesla. The civilian militia, which numbers approximately 17,000, suffered heavy casualties in a drone bombardment but has otherwise advanced without resistance. Under the direction of Erik Epstein, citizens of the Holdfast have been falling back to Tesla, long reputed to be protected by technological defenses.

In a brief prepared statement today, President Ramirez condemned the civilian militia, but said that due to the ongoing rollback of computer technology in US armed forces, the government could not directly intervene . . .

CHAPTER 23

The old man sat on the porch, fingerless gloves gripping the shotgun in his lap. He held it comfortably, like someone who considered it a tool. The kind of guy who would refer to it as a loaded burglar alarm.

Best Luke could tell, he was all that was left of the town of Cloud Ridge, the last outpost before Tesla.

Over the last days, the New Sons had traveled almost seventy miles, each one of them earned. Epstein may have run out of bombs, but he continued to harry the New Sons. Snipers dogged them at a distance, too far away and too poorly trained to score many kills, but every time there was the crack of distant gunfire, the whole army jumped. All day long, gliders kited silently above, their pilots dropping everything from bowling balls to Molotov cocktails. All night long, the abnorms used their audio projection trick, blaring taunts and sirens and loud music. None of it did much real damage, but it was wearing the men out. They were tired and radiated twitchy violence.

The horses, at least, had turned out to be a stroke of genius. Since the EMP disabled the vehicles, they pulled the bulk of the supplies. Miller had ordered hundreds of vans and SUVs gutted, the engines removed and seats discarded to transform them into makeshift wagons. The symbolism of the situation didn’t escape Luke. A ragtag army leading a horse train against a small minority capable of projecting their voices from the heavens. It was the norm-abnorm conflict made a metaphor and underlined in blood.

Cloud Ridge was more a town than a city, with just over two thousand inhabitants. It was unlike any place Luke had ever seen. Instead of growing organically over decades, as most places did, it had been designed by urban planners and laid down as a unified whole in a matter of months. Everything was organized for function and efficiency, from the broad avenues surrounding the town park to the solar farm, hundreds of automated panels moving in perfect sync.

And all abandoned. Luke wasn’t surprised, but he was disappointed. After the ass-kicking Epstein’s drones had laid down and the constant harassment since, it would have been gratifying to face a battle. Even if every man, woman, and child in town had lined up against them, the New Sons could have smashed them. Which, of course, was why the place was empty. Their enemies weren’t fools.

“Put it down, old man!” The militiaman was one of a dozen surrounding the porch, all clearly hoping for a fight. But the geezer just turned and spat.

Luke said, “Howdy.”

“You the guy in charge?”

“One of them.”

“Well, screw you, then.”

“Why didn’t you go on to Tesla yesterday with everybody else?” The timing was a guess, but one he was confident in. No doubt Epstein had tracked the militia’s progress with drones, plotted it on radar, used computer simulations to project their progress. The order to clear out would have been given with exactly the right amount of time.

“This is my home.”

“Son or daughter?”

“Huh?”

“You’re too old to be an abnorm. Plenty of sympathizers came here, but I’m guessing at your age, it’s something else.”

“Aren’t you the clever one.” The man shifted, and a dozen fingers touched a dozen triggers. “Granddaughter.”

“Your whole family came here?”

“My son, his wife, their kids. The youngest, Melissa, she’s gifted, and none of us were gonna let her end up in an academy.”

Luke nodded. He’d never put much thought into the academies before—they were only for the most powerful abnorms—but after the other night, he had a new appreciation of the dread they inspired.

“Your boys can relax, I’m not gonna fight. I don’t have much food, but if you want to fill your canteens, be my guest.”

Luke smiled. “Poisoned the supply, huh?”

“Worth a shot.” The old man grinned back, fillings glinting in his teeth. “So now what?”

“Well, if you lay down that weapon and surrender, we’ll let you go.”

“Yeah? While you chase after my boy and his family?”

“You know,” Luke said, “I had sons too. Your people burned them alive two weeks ago.”

“Sorry for your loss,” the guy said. The wind picked up off the high desert, whistling between the spindles of the porch rail. There was a gunshot from somewhere in the mid-distance. Another resident of Cloud Ridge, Luke supposed. “Last chance. Why don’t you put the gun down and start walking?”

“Why don’t you come on up here, unzip me, and—”

Luke pulled his sidearm and made a clean shot through the man’s skull. The blast echoed off the gray belly of the sky. For a moment the grandfather remained sitting. Then as his muscles relaxed, his body slumped, slipping off the chair and thumping the boards of the porch. The shotgun clattered beside him.

One of the New Sons started to laugh. It was high-pitched and ragged, an edge of the hysterical in it.

“Pass it down that Miller’s order not to drink the water stands,” Luke said to no one in particular. “Check the houses as you move. No fresh food, just canned goods, ammunition, blankets.”

The laughing soldier kept going, hinged at the knees and looking miserable. Luke glanced at him, then at the man standing beside him, a young guy with a patchy beard. “Then burn it.”

“His house?”

“The town. Burn it to the ground.”

CHAPTER 24

Soren woke.

Hips aching and back stiff from the metal bunk, he began the slow process of sitting up. As ever, his mind ranged ahead of his muscles, processing the sound that had awakened him. It was the door to his cage opening. Normally his captors just flooded the room with gas and did with his unconscious body as they liked.

So little changed in his tiny kingdom. Whatever this was, it would not be pleasant. He focused on calm, centering himself in nothingness.

The men who came had the broad shoulders and beefy necks of wrestlers. They wore dull uniforms marked with the rising blue sun of Epstein Industries, and leveled Tasers. In the leisure of his perception, Soren watched one squeeze the trigger, saw the pop of gas as the metal probes flew, cable looping through the air like a striking snake, and then the fangs hit his naked chest and tens of thousands of volts surged through him, washing away conscious thought and control. His muscles spasmed and a guttural sound wrenched from his throat.

The guards moved forward and wrestled his twitching body into a garment he was too scrambled to recognize at first. It wasn’t until one of them used a length of steel chain to lash him to the wall that Soren realized he wore a straitjacket.

Torture, then. They evidently didn’t understand him after all. He supposed they imagined his lingering perceptions of the agony would make it worse. From a certain perspective, they were right, but the results wouldn’t be what they wished. He would simply retreat into nothingness and let them destroy him. Better than an eternity spent counting.

There was even room for victory of a sort, he realized. Simply not revealing the things they wanted to know would be the foundation. But the triumph would be in rising above. He would not scream. He had spent his whole life in pain. There was nothing they could do that he could not endure.

Once the guards had him bound to their satisfaction, they left. A stranger entered. Slender and unremarkable, with dark eyes and prominent cheekbones. He carried a chair in one hand and pushed a rolling tray laden with shiny instruments. Soren almost laughed at the theatricality of it.

Until Nick Cooper walked in, dragging a woman behind him, his fingers clenched around her arm. Pale and perfect. Samantha. She gasped when she saw him, then jerked free and ran to him, and he watched her come, slow, so slow, her brown eyes broad with horror, golden hair drifting behind, arms flung wide, and then she was on him, hugging him, her lips on his, the warmth and scent of her filling his world. Samantha was trembling, her mouth forming sounds more like whimpers than words.

“That’s enough.” Cooper yanked her away.

Soren lunged, but the straitjacket held his arms uselessly to his sides, and the chain snapped taut when he’d gone no more than an inch. He strained, the muscles of his legs knotting and locking fruitlessly as the only woman he’d ever loved, the only one who understood him, was forced into a chair, her arms and legs cuffed to it, a belt lashed around her narrow waist and duct tape stretched across her perfect mouth.

Cooper said, “I offered you a better way.”

Soren stared, his nothingness shredding like a spiderweb in a hurricane. “I’ll tell you. Everything.”

“See, that’s the problem.” Cooper shrugged. “You’re still negotiating. If you had just started telling me everything, maybe I’d feel different. But right now, I can’t believe what you say.”

Soren stared at him. Opened his mouth to share the things he knew. John wouldn’t want Samantha hurt any more than he did. Besides, what could it matter? His friend planned for every contingency. He must have planned for this one.

But he might not have.

Then,
Cooper isn’t the type to do this. It’s a bluff.

Soren hesitated.

“Yeah. What I thought.” Cooper grimaced. “I wish I didn’t have to do this, I really do. But today your friend killed two thousand of mine. And he’s got worse planned for tomorrow.” He nodded to the other man. “Go ahead, Rickard.”

The dark-eyed torturer made a show of bending over the tray, fingering instruments. He lifted a scalpel to the light, brushed a bit of dust from the tip, then replaced it on the tray and chose another, a short, jagged blade curved like a grapefruit knife. Even from here, Soren could see the silver flicker of the edge.

Rickard stepped behind Samantha and trailed the point up her cheek, not quite touching. She moaned against the tape and strained at the handcuffs. Inside the straitjacket, Soren clenched his hands so hard his nails broke the skin of the palms, thinking,
A bluff, it’s a bluff, they won’t—

With a smooth motion, the slim man pushed the blade through the lower lid of Samantha’s left eye, slid it sideways to open a broad red ribbon, and then, with a deft scoop, popped the eyeball out of the socket, the optic nerve trailing behind, a mess of blood and fluid spattering her cheek as the gory thing dangled.

Soren screamed.

But Rickard wasn’t finished.

Not even close.

Cooper clenched his fists, fought a rising in his stomach.

This has to be done.

He looked at the hologram, saw Soren twitch and jerk. The man’s eyes were closed but moving frantically behind the lids as he lay on his bunk, the cable running up from the wall and to the interface in the back of his neck.

Beside him, Rickard typed frenetically. The terminal was layered with windows and wireframes that reacted as the programmer tweaked the controls. It was strangely chilling to stand in the control room outside Soren’s cell, this bland computerized space, watching the holo of the man sweat and convulse.

“Pretty impressive, right?” Rickard’s fingers danced. “No display as high-res as the one in our skull.”

The audio of the virtual reality was turned low. The effect was like listening to a slasher film in the next room. Soren’s screams were high-pitched and raw, skating on the edge of sanity. Samantha—
no, not her, just a digital construct, a program, nothing more—
moaned strangled sounds through the duct tape.

“Gotta hand it to you, never thought of this application. I designed the system as a game, you know, run around shooting aliens, get to feel the adrenaline and see the blood and stuff. We developed the personal scans so that people could do it together, save the universe with a buddy.” Rickard smiled. “Not that I minded scanning her. I mean, damn, but that chick is
something.
”

One of the display windows showed Samantha the way Soren saw her, and when Cooper looked at it, he fought a gag, bile burning the back of his mouth.

“What?” Rickard looked up, his bland expression changing when he saw Cooper’s. “We didn’t actually hurt her. Just a multi-angle camera scan, skin scrapings, hair samples. Exactly like before your little trip to Rome. The subconscious does the heavy lifting. Same as when you have a dream, and you know someone is your wife, even when they look like your mom. It’s not real. We’re not torturing anybody.”

“We’re not torturing
her
. But look at that”—Cooper pointed at the quadrant of the display showing Soren’s vitals, the indicators deep in the red line on heart rate, respiration, hormones—“and tell me we’re not torturing him.”

“Sure, but it’s not real.”

“He’s still living it. As far as he knows, someone is cutting her up in front of him.”

“Hold on,” Rickard said, and tapped a command to trigger a subroutine. In another window, a digital version of Cooper said, “Are you ready to tell me where Smith is?”

In response, Soren wept and whimpered.

Digital Cooper said, “Rickard. Continue.”

Cooper made himself watch as he said, “Why use yourself as the torturer?”

“Just easier. I’ve got myself thoroughly scanned.” He took one hand off the keyboard, brushed back his hair to show the interface implant in his neck. “Did it when I was developing this.”

“And you’re okay with it? Being a torturer?”

“Well, I mean . . . it’s not real.”

“So you keep saying.”

The programmer looked up. “Didn’t this guy kill you?”

“He also put my son in a coma and tried to murder an innocent family, including a baby. And those are just the ones I was around for.” Cooper paused. “If a dog is rabid, you have to put him down. But you shouldn’t enjoy it.”

Rickard was about to reply when something on the display caught his attention. “His betas are shifting.”

“Huh?”

“This monitors his brainwave activity. He’s been high beta, which makes sense given the stress. But the pattern is shifting.”

“Which means?”

“He’s about to talk.”

In his private virtual hell, Soren yelled, “Stop!” He hung his head.

Then, in a halting voice, he began to tell them what Smith planned.

Cooper said, “Holy shit.” He leaned forward and thumbed a button. “Epstein. Are you watching?”

“Yes.” Erik’s voice came from the speaker. “Readying a strike team now.”

“I’ll lead them.”

“The NCH tactical division—”

“Isn’t as good as I am,” Cooper said.

“Negative. Two previous opportunities. Both failures.”

“That’s why it has to be me. This is John Smith we’re talking about. I’ve been chasing him for almost a decade. No one knows his tactics the way I do.”

For long seconds there was only silence. Cooper could picture Epstein in his cave, his face lit by a mass of data.
That’s the answer.
“Erik. Put aside personal concerns. What course offers the statistically highest probability of success?”

More silence. For a moment, Cooper wondered if the abnorm had already broken the line. Then the speaker sounded again. “What do you need?”

“Your best people. Transportation. Weapons. And schematics, not only for the building, but for the surrounding blocks, as well as all civic and maintenance structure diagrams.”

“Yes.”

“One more thing.” Cooper paused, smiled. “Shannon is in Newton. How fast can you get her here?”