Brilliance (8 page)

Today looked pretty much like yesterday, which was one of those things you could say about a lot of DC days between November and March. The sunlight was weak tea, and gusts of winds tugged at the coats of powerbrokers, the scarves of businesswomen.

Ground two was the FedEx truck. It was parked on G Street, on the northwest corner. The back door was up, and an undercover agent was loading boxes on a dolly, checking each one against a manifest. Behind a makeshift shelf, four more agents were jammed together out of sight. It was a tight, uncomfortable space, but even so, they had it better than ground one; the utility van had been parked on 12th all night.

Cooper had done recon in those things before. They were dark and uncomfortable, boiling in the summer and frigid in the winter. Movement had to be restricted to the absolute minimum, and the air always reeked of urine from the quart jars they used. One time a junior agent had broken a jar, and after six scorching hours, the team had been ready to forget the target and beat the hell out of him.

11:30. The meet was set for noon. Good planning on the bad guys’ part: lunchtime, and the corner below would be even busier as everyone in the surrounding buildings scurried from their cubicles.

“Camera feed good?”

“Better than.” Bobby Quinn sat at a polished wood table twenty feet long. He’d co-opted the law firm’s presentation system for his mobile headquarters, and the air in front of him shimmered with ghost images, video feeds from various angles. “The intersection is wired like a tri-d studio.”

“Show me the transmitter.”

Quinn gestured, and a map of the city streets glowed. “Green dot is this.” Quinn tossed him the stamp drive. It looked perfectly normal, down to the half-rubbed-out logo on the side. Cooper pocketed it. His partner continued. “The red dot is Vasquez, the man himself.”

“How’d you wire him?”

“His colon,” Quinn deadpanned. Cooper glanced over sharply, but his partner continued. “Shiny newtech, just in from R&D. Some academy bright boy came up with a tracker in a gelcap. Enzyme-bonds to the lining of the large intestine.”

“Wow. Is he—is it—”

“No. Bonds dissolve in about a week, and out it goes with the rest of the junk mail.”

“Wow,” Cooper repeated.

“Gives new meaning to the phrase ‘stay on his ass.’”

“Been waiting to use that?”

“Since the moment they handed me the gelcap.” Quinn looked up and smiled. “Learn anything useful yesterday?”

“Yeah. I learned Smith has a right to be pissed off.”

“Hey, hey, whoa.” Quinn dropped his voice. “Dickinson would flip if he heard you say that.”

“
Screw
Roger Dickinson.”

“Yeah, well, you know he’d be happy to screw you. So be careful.” Quinn leaned back. “What’s really going on?”

Cooper thought of yesterday afternoon, the relief he’d felt as he hit the road. The Monongahela National Forest blurring around him, huddled trees and ragged mountains, prefab housing dropped at random.

I
MISS MY SON
, the pale woman’s placard had read.

“They aren’t schools, Bobby. They’re brainwashing centers.”

“Come on—”

“I’m not being poetic. That’s literally what they are. I mean, I’d heard things, we all have, but I didn’t believe it. Who could treat children this way?” Cooper shook his head. “Turns out the answer is, we can.”

“We?”

“They’re government facilities. DAR facilities.”

“But not Equitable Services.”

“Close enough.”

“It’s not ‘close enough.’” Quinn’s voice sharp. “You are not personally responsible for the actions of an entire agency.”

“See, that’s where you’re wrong. We all—”

“Do you believe that Alex Vasquez was trying to make the world a better place?”

“What?”

“Do you believe that Alex Vasquez—”

“No.”

“Do you believe that John Smith is trying to make the world a better place?”

“No.”

“Do you believe that he is responsible for killing a whole bunch of people?”

“Yes.”

“Innocent people?”

“Yes.”

“Children?”

“Yes.”

“Then let’s go get him. That is what we do. We take down bad people who hurt good people. Preferably
before
they hurt the good people. That’s our responsibility. After that,” Quinn said, “we go out for beer. Which you buy. That’s your responsibility.”

Cooper chuckled despite himself. “Yeah, all right, Bobby. I hear you.”

“Good.”

“That was something.” Cooper stood. “Getting all
righteous
on me. Didn’t know you had it in you.”

“I am multilayered. Like an onion.”

“That part I’ll buy.” Cooper clapped his friend on the shoulder. “I’m going to check on Vasquez.”

“Calm him down, will you? He’s sweating so bad I’m afraid he might somehow shake that tracker loose after all.”

“And thank you for that image.”

“Here for you, boss.” Quinn yawned and put his feet up on the polished wood table.

Cooper strolled down the hall, passing a gold logo with the names of three white guys followed by LLC. The law office was in a building overlooking the Metro station where the meet was to take place. Quinn had reached out to them yesterday, and the partners had been delighted to help Equitable Services. Cooper had met one of them earlier, a trim guy with a halo of white hair who had wished him good hunting.

Good hunting. Shit.

Two guards stood outside the corner office, their tactical blacks today replaced by bland business suits. The submachine guns were still ready-slung. He nodded at them. One said, “Sir,” and opened the office door.

Inside, Bryan Vasquez stood by the window, his hands against the glass. At the sound, he jumped, turning with an expression that was part guilt and part nerves.

Fever Orange,
Cooper decided to name the color. He thanked the guard, then stepped inside.

“You startled me,” Bryan said. He had one hand pressed against the glass, the other to his chest. Ghostly white dots of condensation marked where the pads of his fingers had rested on the window. There were sweat stains at his armpits, and his chest rose and fell swiftly. He licked his lips as he shifted his weight from right to left.

Cooper slid his hands into his pockets and—

He’s dedicated to his sister, but he’s also a believer. He’s worried about his own safety but would never admit it. He’s attracted to the idea of plots and secret worlds, to comrades in arms.

He needs a strong hand, but not so strong he shatters. He needs to be pumped up and sent out to do his piece for a better world.

—stepped into the room. “Sorry about that. I always get jumpy before these things, too.” He pulled out the chair, spun it around, then sat with his arms on the back. “This part drives me crazy.”

“What part?”

“The waiting. Too much time in your head. Once things start, it gets better. You know what you have to do, and you just do it. It’s easier. Don’t you think?”

Bryan Vasquez cocked his head and turned to lean against the window with his arms crossed. “I don’t know. I’ve never had to betray something I believe in to save my sister before.”

“Fair point.” He let the silence hang. Bryan looked like a man who expected to be punched; slowly he realized the blow wasn’t in the air. A faint wind howled along the edge of the glass, and somewhere far away, a car horn. Finally, he moved to the desk and slumped awkwardly in the chair on the other side, all angles and elbows.

“I know this is hard,” Cooper said. “But you’re doing the right thing.”

“Sure.” The word drifting across the table.

“Can I tell you something?” He waited until the other man looked up. “Everything you said the other day about the way gifted are treated? I agree.”

“Right.”

“I’m an abnorm.”

Bryan’s face crinkled in conflicting directions: surprise and disbelief and anger. Finally the guy said, “What is it for you?”

“Pattern recognition, a sort of souped-up intuition. I read intention. That can be really specific, like knowing where someone is going to throw a punch. But personal patterns work, too; I get to know somebody, my gift forms a picture of them, helps me guess what they’ll do.”

“So if you’re gifted, what are you doing—”

“—working for the DAR?” Cooper shrugged. “Actually, pretty much the same reasons you helped your sister.”

“Bullshit.”

“It’s not. I want my children to live in a world where abnorms and straights coexist. The difference is, I don’t think you get there by blowing things up. Especially when one group vastly outnumbers the other. See, normal people, like
you
,” he gestured with palms together, “if you decided to, you could wipe out all the people like
me
. Every one of us, or close enough it wouldn’t matter. It’s a numbers game. You have ninety-nine to every one of us.”

“But that’s exactly why—” Bryan Vasquez stopped. “I mean.”

“I know how you feel about the way Alex is treated. But you’re an engineer. Think logically. The relationship between norms and brilliants, it’s gunpowder. You really want to strike sparks?”

He pulled the stamp drive from his pocket, set it on the desk, halfway between them. “Don’t forget,” Cooper said, “you’re not doing this for me. You’re doing it for Alex.”

It was a calculated play, backing up the philosophical get-out-of-jail-free card with a personal imperative. And it was far from the first time he had lied to a suspect.

So why am I feeling guilty about it?

The academy. Seeing that place had stirred up issues he thought he’d made peace with. Cooper pushed away thoughts of the playground, of the woman with the placard, and locked down his expression.

Bryan Vasquez took the stamp drive.

Cooper said, “Let’s go.”

“This is Quarterback. The ball is in play; repeat, Delivery Boy is moving. Headquarters, confirm.”

“Confirmed,” Bobby Quinn’s voice crackled in his ear. “Both signals are strong.”

The square across the street looked as planned and uninviting as ever, the black branches of manicured trees tossing in the wind. A couple of hardy souls huddled around the entrance to the nearest building, rocking from foot to foot as they sucked on cigarettes. The entrance to Metro Center Station had a steady stream of traffic. A row of newspaper dispensers, bright red and orange and yellow, ran along a low wall; at the end of it a man in a wheelchair shook a paper cup at passersby.

Cooper kept his stance casual, pitched his voice low. “God, what have you got?”

“Delivery Boy is heading north on 13th.”

“Clear view?”

“God sees all, my son.”

Everything is in place. You’re about to be a step closer to catching the most dangerous man in America.

Across the street, the agent at the FedEx truck finished loading his dolly and started for the near building. In a bench on the square, two women in business casual chatted as they picked at salads. One looked like the assistant principal of a middle school; the other was petite and lithe as a soccer player.

“How you doing, Luisa?”

“Never thought I’d say this,” dabbing at her lips with a napkin to cover the motion of her lips, “but I actually wish I was back in that cow-humping Texas backwater we just left.”

Luisa Abrahams was barely over five feet, pretty but not beautiful, famous for talking like a trucker, and perhaps the most stubborn person he knew. He’d picked her for his team after a mess of an op where her agent in charge had lost communication with her. The AIC hadn’t realized that her cover was blown and she needed support, so Luisa had chased a target two miles on foot, finally run him down, finished the job, and then called the AIC using her target’s cell phone. The insults she’d hurled at him circulated the agency for weeks.

Now she sat on a bench alongside Valerie West, the two of them pretending to be on their lunch. Val was a whiz with data analysis, but nervous in the field. Cooper was watching her shred her napkin, and weighing whether it was worth it to say something when Luisa touched the other woman’s knee, said something off-mic. Valerie nodded, shrugged her shoulders back, and tucked the napkin in her pocket. Good. Normally Cooper would have discouraged a romantic relationship between teammates, but the two often seemed better agents because of it.

Half a block away, Bryan Vasquez appeared in the crowd, walking behind a pair of tourists draped in cameras.

“All eyes,” he said. “Delivery Boy is here.”

Cooper ran through a mental checklist, making sure that everything was in place. Between the tracker, the cameras, the airship, and the agents, they had the corner locked down tight. Whoever came to meet Bryan Vasquez was going to be sitting in an interview room within an hour, bathing in that hopeless light and wondering just how true the rumors about Equitable Services’ “enhanced interrogation” privileges were.

Too bad we can’t let them walk and follow them to others.
The payoff could be sweet, but the risk was simply too great; with an attack imminent, if their only lead got away, it could cost God knew how many lives.

Through the earpiece Cooper could hear the calls and confirmations of his team tracking Bryan Vasquez. The man was walking on the other side of the street, and Cooper carefully didn’t look quite at him. Just loosened his stance and opened up his senses, trying to take in the whole scene, to parse it, filter for the pattern beneath. The faded yellow blur of a taxi. The texture of a tweed coat. The smells of auto exhaust and cooking grease from a fast-food restaurant. The dull platinum glow of the sky and the shadowless noon it created. The determined set of Bryan Vasquez’s shoulders as he stepped onto the sidewalk and turned to look around. The clanging of a flagpole halyard driven to dance by the wind. The bright red and yellow newspaper dispensers behind Vasquez. The muted rumble of the Metro and the rot smell of the sewer grate and the squeal of brakes two blocks down and the very, very pretty girl talking on the cell phone.