Brilliance (44 page)

It’s not just that you got used. It’s that
she
used you.

This morning, on the rock spire, he’d told Smith what he needed, and was unsurprised to find the guy had it standing by. “I’m sending Shannon with you.”

“No,” Cooper had said, “you’re not.”

“Listen, I’m sorry for your wounded feelings, but this is too important. You need her help. She goes.”

“Sorry, I don’t work for you. I’m doing this my way.”

“Cooper—”

“Just arrange the plane.” He scooted to the edge of the rock spire and hung his legs over. “I’ll get to the runway myself.”

“Talk to her, at least,” Smith had said.

Cooper had ignored him, spun to grip the edge, and begun to climb down.

From above, Smith had said, “She deserves that much.”

He’d paused, looking up. “Believe it or not, John, we’re not all pieces on your chessboard. Just arrange the plane.”

Just under three hours later he’d reached the airstrip Smith had told him about, a private field in the heart of the Holdfast, big enough to handle not only the gliders but an honest-to-God jet.

His was painted like a FedEx transport plane, flying commercial numbers. Clever; it was the aerial equivalent of a taxicab, a vehicle that could hide in plain sight. The pilot was waiting for him. “Hello, sir. I’ve got a change of clothes on board for you, and food if you’re hungry.”

“Thanks.” He’d climbed the stairs. “Get airborne and get me to DC as fast as you can.”

Fifteen minutes later he was back in civilian clothes—the sizes were perfect, of course—and the jet was racing down the runway. The pilot said it would take about four hours, longer if they had to circle when they arrived.

Which gave him four hours to figure out where Drew Peters would have hidden insurance against his sins.

Adding to the fun, DC was a risky place for Cooper. There were more cameras and more agents there than in any city in the country. If he were in Roger Dickinson’s place, if he were hunting a rogue agent whose children lived in DC, he’d make sure the city was on constant alert.

Normally even if a camera picked him up, by the time that image was found and processed, he’d have moved on. But things had changed when he talked to Peters last night. If Cooper had actually killed John Smith, he would have called the department to arrange his safe return home. And he’d considered doing that, lying to Peters, saying that Smith was dead. But what if the DAR knew otherwise? What if they intercepted a call, or saw a photo? More important, lying to Peters was equivalent to throwing his hand in with John Smith, and Cooper wasn’t ready to do that. Not until he saw the evidence. Better just to go quiet for now. The problem was that if Peters discovered him, he would assume that Cooper had been turned.

Have you? Been turned?

No. He didn’t work for Smith, and while he understood the soldier-on-the-losing-side rationale, a terrorist was still a terrorist.

But you’re definitely not a DAR agent anymore.

Which was all Peters would need to know. If the director suspected that Cooper was no longer his man, the gloves would come off. His picture would be flashed on every screen in America. John Smith had managed to hide from that, but Cooper didn’t imagine that he could. No, his best chance lay in moving fast. Get to DC, get to the video, and make his moves from there.

Four hours to figure out where a digital file that could be stored on a drive about the size of a stamp was hidden in an area of roughly 7,850 square miles.

He’d come to that number by figuring that if Peters ever needed it, he’d need it fast. No more than an hour or two from his home or office. Figure a fifty-mile radius. Pi times radius squared equaled 7,850.

Calling it a needle in a haystack was an insult to haystacks.

So think. You’ve got…three and a half hours left. And if you’re going to be playing against the entire DAR in their own backyard, it wouldn’t hurt if you could grab an hour’s sleep, too.

Obviously, the odds were better than the pure math suggested. He wasn’t going to be randomly searching the terrain. He would be patterning Drew Peters, the same way he had once patterned targets for the man.

So. What did he know?

If Smith was right—if he was telling the truth—the video was some sort of insurance policy. Something that could protect Peters if the facts about the Monocle ever came out. That narrowed the search immensely.

It wouldn’t be at DAR headquarters. Too exposed. Plus, if Peters were burned, the agency might be closed to him.

Which was a relief. If it had been at the office, there was no chance Cooper could reach it. Might as well have been on the moon. It was an odd synchronicity, but if Peters needed his insurance policy, he’d likely be in the same position Cooper was, a renegade hunted by all.

The same logic ruled out Peters’s house. Or any property in his name: his lake house, his car, any athletic clubs.

Of course, this was the director of Equitable Services. He could easily have false documents. But owning property under a false identity was a big risk. Property meant a paper trail, and a paper trail could be followed. Especially one that smelled like corruption.

Okay, what about registering a safety-deposit box under a fake identity? Minimal chance of discovery. On the other hand, banks were closed at night and on the weekend. That delay could mean the end.

One of the safest ways to hide something was in a hotel. Check into a room, bring a few minimal tools. Remove a baseboard or the cover to a heating vent, and hide gear there. As long as Peters kept half an eye on the hotel, made sure that it wasn’t about to undergo major renovations, it would be a perfectly anonymous hiding place.

Thing was, that presented the same difficulties in retrieval. Unless you rented the room in perpetuity, which negated the point, you couldn’t count on being able to get back to it at a moment’s notice. A hotel would happily book you in a specific room with a little notice, but if it was occupied, things got complicated. Yes, Peters could break in, but it would be clumsy, and Peters abhorred clumsy tactics.

A lawyer? Trusted family counsel, retained for years. That same person could be instructed to release it if Peters disappeared…

…only, this wasn’t a private eye movie. Peters didn’t want the threat of vengeance after his death; he wanted to protect himself. And no employee could be trusted, not with something this important.

Out the window, the clouds had broken into clumps, the gold-green quilt of Nebraska or Iowa below him, that boxy and startlingly regular geometry only visible from above. He wished he had someone to bounce this off of, Bobby Quinn, or Shann—

Put her out of your head.

Which was like telling himself not to think about elephants. Immediately he was flashing back to the previous night, the way she had tasted, that mental Polaroid of her rocking back, sweat-slick skin outlined against the Milky Way. Had that been part of her mission, too? Smith had planned everything else, had plucked him up from an El station in Chicago and brought him to Wyoming. Was it possible that he’d sent Shannon to seduce him? To plant the seed of a mission, and then comfort him, tie Cooper to them?

It was possible. He didn’t want to believe it, tended not to—he thought he knew Shannon, couldn’t see her going with that—but it was possible. She could have been step two after all.

“Even if there is a step two, step one was tell you the truth.”
Her words in his head. And if she had lied to him, well, he’d lied to her, too. The whole time they’d been together, it had been under false pretenses. But though he’d been lying to her about his mission, he hadn’t been lying about who he was. Maybe she hadn’t either. Maybe, like him, she was both a pro and a person, both a job and a life. Had it been a mistake not to include her? Until her, Cooper had never worked with anyone who could match him. And she would be a huge asset if he had to sneak into…

Enough. It was done.

So it wouldn’t be at a hotel, wouldn’t be with a lawyer. How about a friend, or a family member? Not his daughters, but a brother, say, or an old school friend. Someone who could be counted upon, who would never willingly betray him.

Problem was, willingly. If Peters was in trouble, then his friends and family were, too. If someone suspected a friend had what they were after…well, normal people didn’t resist torture.

Funny to be back on a private jet. It had started this way, the jet returning from San Antonio, where he’d followed Alex Vasquez. Alex Vasquez, who had told him a war was coming. He’d had no idea how right she’d been. He wondered, idly, if she had.

Cooper yawned. The seat was comfortable, and the last days had been long. The few hours of sleep he’d gotten had been on the cold ground, and not much good.

Okay, so figure it out. This is what you do.

Only, as always, his gift was something he couldn’t control. Sometimes it made a wild intuitive leap that he knew was true before he had proof. Sometimes it just lay coiled and quiet, processing at its own speed.

Still, he had a sense that he was close, that he had the data he needed, he just needed to look at it from the right vantage point.

Tell you what, self. Figure this out, and you can go to sleep.

Peters’s insurance would be geographically close. It would be somewhere he could get to it night or day. Somewhere that no one would stumble on it, ever; where the risk of that was essentially zero. It would not be in his name, or anywhere someone would think to look. Getting to it wouldn’t require the help of another person.

What kind of place was essentially unchanging, always available, perfectly secure, and close at hand?

Cooper smiled.

Two minutes later, he was sound asleep.

Full circle. Funny how life had a way of doing that.

He wasn’t just back in DC; he was back in Georgetown, a couple of blocks from his old apartment, on his old jogging route. Cooper could picture that version of himself, a faded army tee clinging to his soaked chest as he rounded this stretch of R Street. This had been his favorite part of the run, a particularly scenic corner of intensely scenic Georgetown. The black wrought-iron fence on his right, the thick shade of old trees, the tidy, expensive row-house mansions on the south side of the street…and the elegant grace of Oak Hill Cemetery along the north.

He’d wandered through it a few times back then, read the pamphlet. It was old, dating to something like 1850. A gorgeously landscaped spread of gentle hills and quiet paths along the Potomac, dotted with old marble, monuments, and headstones for the gentry of two centuries past. Congressmen, Civil War generals, captains of industry…and bankers.

It was perfect. A brief walk from Drew Peters’s house, completely unchanging, always accessible. The grounds might close, but Cooper doubted that meant more than an elderly watchman drawing a chain across the iron gate. Easiest thing in the world to find a patch of darkness and climb over. Kids probably did it all the time.

There was a map on a signpost near the entrance, with sections laid out in muted color: Joyce, Henry Crescent, Chapel Hill. The chapel was one of the cemetery’s main destinations, and he remembered it being lovely, draped in ivy like a Romantic daydream. The map also marked some of the more famous dead.

Including Edward Eaton, “financier and attorney, under-secretary of the treasury to Abraham Lincoln.”

Cooper started walking. The stonework and paths were marked by age, dignified like a worn patrician. He’d never really put much thought into where he’d be buried—had some loose notion of being cremated—but he could see the appeal in laying a loved one to rest here. It would be a pleasant place to imagine them.

Most of the grave sites were simple monuments, weathered stones with names and dates and often military rank. But here and there stone mausoleums nestled into the side of a hill or beneath a spread of branches. The one with E
ATON
carved across the top had a stolid, bunkerish look. No elaborate statues or intricate carvings, just a pair of pillars flanking the door and a couple of small stained-glass windows. It spoke of stability and eternity, no doubt what Edward Eaton had in mind when he bought this house for the bodies of great-grandchildren whose parents hadn’t even been conceived.

Cooper stood outside, his hands in his pockets. He wondered how often Drew Peters had come here, if he’d stood in the same place. Staring at the mausoleum where his wife lay.

Geographically proximate, unchanging, undisturbed, always accessible, and perfectly safe.

It fits. But would Peters really use it like that?

One way to find out.

The door was oak, dense and heavy, mounted on massive forged hinges that looked like they might date back to the founding of the cemetery. The lock was newer, a deadbolt that looked out of place. Cooper paused, glanced around. Some distance away, an elderly woman limped down the path, a bouquet of flowers dangling from one hand. There was the sound of a lawn mower, and, more distant, a siren.

He knelt in front of the door and took a closer look at the lock. A year ago, when Cooper had needed to get through locked doors, he used a ram. Lock picking was for thieves, not DAR agents.

Then he became a thief. It hadn’t taken long to learn; once you understood the fundamentals, the rest was just a matter of practice, and he’d had time. The lock was stiff, but he had it popped inside two minutes.

Cooper gripped the iron handle and pulled. With a rusty screech, the hinges gave. The door opened slowly. Sharp sunlight spilled into the crypt. The floor was stone, thick with dust, and the air smelled stale.

Here’s another first.

He stepped inside the crypt and tugged the door closed behind him.

The bright sun vanished, but watery light filtered through the stained glass. If the light had been a sound it would have been a requiem, slow and quiet and full of loss. Cooper stood still and let his eyes adjust. The mausoleum was one room, thirty feet on a side, a bench in the center, ledges carved like bunk beds in the wall. Four high and three across, on all but the entrance wall, where the door took up one of the columns. Forty-four stone berths, all but two of them filled. Forty-two coffins, laying in orderly rest, names and dates carved beneath each one. A house for the dead. He felt a chill to think it, a primal shiver down the lizard part of his brain.