Brilliance (29 page)

Shannon was barely holding back laughter.

Cooper looked at her, then at Lee Chen. “You’re busting my balls.”

“Yeah, a little bit. Sorry.” Lee smiled and turned back to Shannon. “Have you eaten?”

“A while ago. Why, is Lisa cooking?”

“Lisa is always cooking.” He gestured at a young man lounging by the bar and barked a short command. The man straightened, hurried over, and took the dealer’s place at the table. The play shifted again, an easy rhythm of long practice. Lee put his arm over Shannon’s shoulder and the two started away. “Alice will be happy to see you.”

“She’s still awake?”

“Her mother made an exception.” Lee released Shannon, opened a door marked with characters that even in another language clearly read D
O
N
OT
E
NTER
, and started up a set of stairs.

“Who’s Alice?” Cooper asked.

“My goddaughter.” She smiled over her shoulder as they climbed. “She’s eight and a beautiful genius.”

“And why did he call you Azzi?”

“My last name. My dad’s Lebanese.”

Shannon Azzi. From Chicago.
It sounded so much less dramatic than the Girl Who Walks Through Walls. One was a terrorist operative, a lethal agent of the most dangerous man in America. The other was, well, a woman. Smart, funny, and gifted in both senses of the word.
And damned attractive. You may as well admit that, Agent Cooper.
“Funny to think of you having a dad,” he said.

“Enough with that.”

Cooper smiled.

The sounds changed as they reached the top, and the smells. Sharp spices, garlic, and fish sauce. A burst of laughter came from down the hall, and a child’s happy shriek.

“You having a party?”

“A play date,” Lee said. “Friends with kids.”

Like most parties, everyone had clustered in the kitchen. A dozen or so men and women, all Chinese, were jammed together around a counter packed with bowls of food. A pot simmered on the stove, a sweet, sour smell rising on wisps of steam. Everyone glanced over as they entered, their smiles slipping only slightly when they saw Cooper, no hostility in it, just surprise.

“You all know Shannon,” Lee said. “This is her friend Nick Cooper.”

“Hello all.” He looked around the room, spotted a slender woman perched on a stool, stylishly dressed, delicately chic in that distinctly Asian-girl way. He read the comfort in her body, said, “You must be Lisa.”

She slid off the stool, held out her hand. “Welcome.”

“Thank you.”

“Are you hungry?”

He wasn’t but said, “Starving.”

“Good. We have way too much food.”

“I wonder how that happened,” Lee said dryly, plucking beer bottles from the fridge. He twisted the caps off, passed them to Shannon and Cooper, and kept one for himself.

Lisa ignored her husband, slid her arm into Cooper’s. “Let me introduce you.”

“Aunt Shannon!” A blur of dark hair and pale skin streaked past him, collided with Shannon, who laughed and wrapped her arms around the girl. The two began firing questions at one another, neither waiting for the answers.

Lisa piled rice on a plate and handed it to him, then began to point out the dishes, saying their names, explaining each as if he’d never eaten in a restaurant. Cooper said how good everything looked and scooped some of every dish, balancing his beer against the plate. Shannon brought the girl over, said, “Alice, this is my friend Nick.”

“Hi.”

“Hi. Can you do me a favor, Alice? Can you call me Cooper?”

“Okay.” The girl took Shannon’s hand and dragged her away. “Come on, come play with us.”

Cooper ate and drank and moved around the room. Most everyone spoke in Chinese until he joined, then shifted seamlessly to English. He spent half an hour making bland party conversation. Everyone was very nice, but he felt the same discomfort he always had at parties. Small talk wasn’t his thing, and he didn’t have the knack for storytelling. There was a skill to organizing your life into neatly bundled anecdotes, and he lacked it.

Besides, what are you going to say? “So this one time, I was tracking an abnorm who had played a loophole in Bank of America credit cards and racked up half a million in microtransactions before killing the bureaucrat who came to his door and fleeing into the backwoods of Montana on a snowmobile?”

A cluster of shrieks echoed down the hall where Alice had led Shannon. Cooper helped himself to a fresh beer and followed the noise. He found Shannon in the family room, standing on top of a sectional sofa, counting down with her eyes closed. “Three, two….one…go!”

Seven children, Alice among them, all shifted from foot to foot, ready to dart. Shannon opened her eyes, glanced around the room, then made a languorous fake to the left before leaping off the couch to the right. The boy she lunged at tried to dodge, but she tapped him with one hand, spun, saw two children running toward each other, held a half a beat, then tagged them both as they collided. The touched kids stood still as statues, while the remaining four dodged around the edges of the room, using the furniture and their frozen friends as cover. Shannon said, “I’m gonna get you,” then turned and tapped a boy who had been sneaking behind her. He giggled and froze.

Cooper watched the game with a broad smile. Shannon stalked the final three children, easing left and right, corralling them. The woman was the indisputable master of freeze tag.

“You have kids?”

“Huh?” He turned, saw Lee had come in behind him. “Two. A boy and a girl, nine and four.” He thought but did not say their names. Took a long swallow of beer.

“Greatest things in the world, aren’t they?”

“Yes. Yes they are.”

“Even when you want to kill them.”

“Even then.”

Shannon tagged out the final three in rapid succession, getting Alice last, then wrapping her in one arm and tickling her with the other. When Shannon finally let the girl breathe again, Alice said, “Me next!” She moved to the center of the room. But instead of beginning a new round of tag, she said, “Chicago places.”

“Navy Pier,” said a pig-tailed girl.

“600 East Grand Avenue.”

“The Zoo!”

“2200 North Cannon Drive.”

The other children began to yell out. “Tasty City!”

“My mom’s house!”

“The airport!”

“2022 South Archer Avenue, 337 West 24th Place, O’Hare Airport is 10000 West O’Hare and Midway Airport is 5700 South Cicero.”

Cooper’s belly tightened as he realized what was happening. As the children kept shouting places, he turned to Lee. “Your daughter is gifted?”

The man nodded. “We started on
Goodnight, Moon
, but she prefers the phone book. She’ll get on my d-pad and read listings for hours. Not just Chicago, either. She knows New York, Miami, Detroit, Los Angeles. Anytime we go on a trip she reads the phone book first.”

Lee’s pride radiated in every word and every muscle of his face. Smitten with his daughter, and delighted at her abilities. It stood in such sharp contrast to the typical parental reaction, to Cooper’s own reaction. This wasn’t a man worried about what the world would think, afraid that she might end up tested or labeled or living in an academy. This was pure joy in the wonder that was his daughter.

“Now you, Zhi.” Shannon pointed to the boy who had tried to sneak up on her.

“Okay.” He stood ready, a pupil confident before a teacher.

“Use the addresses. Add them.”

“34,967.”

“Multiply them.”

“1.209 times 10 to the 36th.”

“Add them with north and west positive and east and south negative.”

“Minus 243.”

Alice joined in. “The Zoo times Tasty City minus Andrea’s house.”

“4,448,063.”

“Navy Pier divided by the school.”

“2.42914979757085…”

The kids were having a ball, and Zhi stood in the center of it, giving every answer without hesitation. Cooper stared, realization dawning. “They’re
all
brilliants?”

“Yes,” Lee said. “As I said, this is a play date.”

“But—” He looked at the children, at Shannon, back at Lee. “Aren’t you…I mean…”

“Worried about hiding the fact that they’re gifted?” Lee smiled. “No. Chinese culture sees things differently. These children are special. They bring honor and success to a family. Why wouldn’t we love that?”

Because someone who works for my old agency could call you at any moment.
“The rest of the world doesn’t see it that way.”

“The world is changing,” Lee said softly. “It has to.”

“What about the academies?”

The man’s face darkened. “Someday, when this is all over, people are going to look back at those in shame. It will be like the internment camps in the Second World War.”

“I agree,” Cooper said. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m an abnorm, too.”

“I assumed. Most of Shannon’s friends are.”

“And my daughter…” He hesitated. Didn’t want to say it even now, even here.
Why? Are you ashamed of Kate?

That wasn’t it. It couldn’t be. It was fear, that was all. Fear of what would happen to her.

Right. But all that negative emotion, all that desire to have her hide her ability, isn’t there some part of you that wishes she were normal? If only so she wouldn’t face this risk?

It was an ugly thought. Cooper tilted his beer up again and found it empty. “Aren’t you afraid that someone will make them take the test?”

“That’s where being Chinatown Chinese has advantages. The government doesn’t know about these children.”

“How?”

“Some of us went abroad to have our babies. Others use local midwives who don’t record the births. It’s a risk, because they don’t have the resources of a hospital if things go wrong. A stupid, terrible way to do things. But right now it’s worth it.”

The DAR had long suspected that there was a significant population of unreported abnorms in immigrant communities. It was a loophole the agency meant to close, but like a squeaky staircase in a house on fire, other issues took precedence. These communities rarely made trouble and so had been left alone. But watching the children play—they’d moved to a new game, where a little girl spun once, then closed her eyes and answered detailed questions about everything in the room, down to the number of buttons on Alice’s dress—Cooper saw a whole generation of abnorms growing up right under the noses of the DAR, unreported, untested, untracked. The implications were enormous.

Want to call Director Peters, let him know?

“A lot to take in, huh?” Lee smiled. “I’m so used to it that I forget the rest of the world isn’t. Don’t you love watching them play together? Children who aren’t taught, from the earliest age, that they’re monsters. That they’re
abnormal
. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Cooper said. “Yes it is.”

Later, after the party had ended, after parents had collected their children and said their good-byes and left with Tupperware containers of leftovers, Lisa led him and Shannon to a small room off the hallway decorated in pastel shades and posters of Disney princesses. A lamp shaped like an elephant glowed on a night table beside a single bed.

“Alice’s,” Lisa said, apologetically. “She can sleep with us tonight. I’m sorry there’s not separate rooms.”

Cooper looked over at Shannon, but whatever she might have felt about the arrangement she didn’t telegraph beyond brushing a loose lock of hair behind her ear. “No problem,” he said.

“I’ll get some blankets.”

She returned with a sleeping bag, set it on the bed with a spare pillow, then said, “I hope you’ll be comfortable.”

“We’ll be fine. Thank you.” Cooper paused, said, “It means a lot to me that you let us into your home.”

“A friend of Shannon’s is a friend of ours. Come anytime.” Lisa looked around the room, hugged Shannon goodnight, and came to Cooper. He waited for her to calculate whether he was a hug or a handshake, but she didn’t hesitate, just gave him a quick hug. Then she stepped out of the room and closed the door.

Shannon tucked her hands in her pockets. The movement tightened the shirt across clavicles delicate as bird wings. “So.”

“I’ll take the floor.”

“Thanks.”

He made a point of facing the other direction as he kicked off his shoes and socks, unbuttoned his shirt. Decided to keep his pants and undershirt on. Behind him he heard the faint rustle of fabric, and his mind flashed an image of her pulling her shirt over her head, imagined a delicate cream bra over caramel skin.

Whoa there, Agent Cooper. Where did
that
come from?

He chalked it up to a long day of shared adrenaline, underscored by male chemistry, and left it at that. He slid into the sleeping bag, rubbed his eyes. A moment later, he heard the click of her turning off the elephant, and the room went dark. Pale green stars glowed on the walls and ceiling, swirling constellations of an idealized night sky, one where the stars had neat points and sharp edges and were only barely out of reach.

“G’night, Cooper.”

“Night.” He folded his hands behind his head. He was too old to be sleeping on the floor, but too tired to care. As he lay there, staring at the stars of that better sky, he found himself thinking back to the game, the looks on the faces of those kids as they played with toys barely imaginable to most of the world.

It had been six months since last he’d seen his children. Six months of pretending to be someone else, of burying the life he loved in order to fight for it.

When it came down to it, everything he had done was for his children. Even the things he had done before they were born, before he’d even met Natalie. It was a truth he never could have understood until he’d become a parent, and one he would never be able to forget.

The world is changing,
Lee had said.
It has to.

Cooper hoped he was right.

The man was waiting for them.

He was as big as Cooper remembered, broad-shouldered and muscular beneath pudge; a man who didn’t lift weights because he lifted heavy things for a living. He looked right at home in the loading dock.