A Better World (The Brilliance Trilogy Book 2)

by Marcus Sakey

  “I’m not going to do anything stupid. But they have to let us by.”

  At the entrance to the mall parking lot, two soldiers carrying machine guns stood beside a wooden barricade. Ethan pulled up to it and rolled down his window.

  “Sir, do you have authorization to be here?”

  “Can you tell me what’s going on?”

  “Sir, I’m going to need you to turn the vehicle around.”

  “I’ve got my baby daughter with me,” Ethan said. “We’re almost out of food, have no baby formula, and now no heat. We’re just trying to get to Chicago to stay with my mother-in-law. Is there someone we can talk to?”

  The soldier hesitated, then pointed. “My CO.”

  “Thank you.”

  Ethan drove where the man indicated. A handful of civilian vehicles and an eighteen-wheeler were parked in a cluster. He pulled up alongside and killed the engine. Turned to Amy, saw her look, and said, “I’m not going to do anything stupid. I just want to see if they’ll let us past.”

  She took a breath, held it, and let it whistle out. “Okay. Talk good.”

  He smiled, leaned over, and kissed her quickly.

  The night was colder than he’d expected, his breath turning to frost. The makeshift command center was lit by headlights and pole-mounted floods. He heard arguing and followed the sound of it to a group of people in civilian clothes, facing a soldier with ramrod posture and an implacable expression. An aide stood beside him, holding a rifle. Beyond them were more vehicles, a Humvee and a tank and, wow, a couple of helicopter gunships bristling with weaponry. Ethan joined the crowd.

  “—you don’t understand, my wife needs insulin, we used the last of it this morning, and without it, she’s going to—”

  “—packed rig due in Detroit tomorrow morning—”

  “—there’s no heat, no food, come on, show a little—”

  The soldier raised both hands in a calm down gesture. When everyone quieted, he said, “I understand your concerns. But my orders are explicit. No one is to pass this checkpoint. For those of you with medical emergencies, we have rudimentary capabilities here, and the hospitals in Cleveland are operational. For everyone else, all I can say is that every effort is being made to supply food and repair the power grid.”

  “Can you tell us what’s going on?” Ethan asked.

  The officer gave him a quick evaluative glance. “The DAR believes the leadership of the Children of Darwin are here. There are missions underway to capture them. Our job is to ensure that none slip past. Which I’m afraid means that no one can leave Cleveland.”

  “That’s insane,” said a goateed kid in front of Ethan. “You’re locking down the whole city to catch a couple of terrorists? That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Listen, man.” A burly guy in a John Deere cap stepped forward. “I’m a truck driver. Bad enough people are burning us alive, but if I don’t get my load to Detroit on time, I get stuck with the whole bill. That ain’t gonna happen. So how about you let me past?”

  “No one gets past.”

  “Now you listen to me—”

  “Sir.” There was a way soldiers and cops could say “sir” and mean, “I’m inches from beating your ass,” snapping their voice like a broken cable. “Get back in your vehicle right now.”

  This is a waste of time. Ethan was about to leave when John Deere grabbed the officer’s arm.

  Oh, don’t do that, that’s a very bad—

  The floodlights seemed to flare in the officer’s eyes. His aide stepped forward and snapped the butt of his assault rifle into the trucker’s face.

  The sound was an egg thrown against concrete. The man collapsed.

  Ethan saw motion behind the two soldiers, on the Humvee.

  The .50 caliber machine gun swiveled over to aim at them. Maybe twenty feet away, and even from this distance the barrel seemed a hole big enough to crawl into.

  Ethan stared past it, to the man pointing it. He was good-looking in that blond sort of way, cheeks ruddy beneath his helmet, gloved hands on the weapon, finger on the trigger. He looked all of nineteen years old, and scared.

  What was happening? How and when had things slipped into this strange new place? A world where the grocery store didn’t have groceries, where the power vanished, where terrorism wasn’t something happening to someone else. A world where the line between this moment and utter disaster was so slender as to be defined by the fear in the heart of a nineteen-year-old boy.

  The other civilians seemed frozen. On the ground, the trucker made a wet sound.

  Slowly, Ethan raised his hands. Keeping his eyes locked on the soldier behind the gun, he began to back away. One step, and then another, and then he was apart from the group, and then he was turning around and walking back to the CRV where his wife and daughter waited. He opened the door and got in.

  “Any luck?” Amy looked over at him, read his expression, and he could see it mirroring on her face. “What? What happened?”

  “Nothing,” he said, and started the SUV. “We’re going home.”

  Here’s the thing about freedom: Freedom is not a couch.

  It’s not a television, or a car, or a house.

  It’s not an item you can possess. You cannot put freedom on layaway; you cannot refinance freedom.

  Freedom is something you need to fight for, not once, but every single day. The nature of freedom is that it is fluid; like water in a leaking bucket, the tendency is for it to drain away.

  Left untended, the holes through which freedom escapes widen. When politicians restrict our rights in order to “protect us,” freedom is lost. When the military refuses to disclose basic facts, freedom is lost. Worst of all, when fear becomes a part of our lives, we willingly surrender freedom for a promise of safety, as if freedom weren’t the very basis of safety.

  There’s a famous poem written about the complacency of the German people under Nazi rule; today, it might read:

  First they came for the revolutionaries,

  and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a revolutionary.

  Then they came for the intellectuals,

  and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t an intellectual.

  Then they came for the tier ones,

  and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a tier one.

  Then they came for the brilliants,

  and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a brilliant.

  Then they came for me,

  and there was no one left to speak for me.

  —From the introduction to I Am John Smith

  CHAPTER 12

  It didn’t look like much from the outside. But in Shannon’s experience, the truly scary places never did.

  The first thing she saw was a low granite wall bearing the words DEPARTMENT OF ANALYSIS AND RESPONSE. Beyond that, a dense line of trees screened the compound from view. She signaled, waited for an opening in traffic, and then steered the sedan up to a security gatehouse. It was a bright fall day, and the two men in black body armor looked alien against the cloudless blue. They moved well, one of them splitting off to circle the car while the other approached the driver’s side. Both had submachine guns slung across their bodies.

  Shannon rolled down the window and reached in her purse. The ID, scuffed and faded, identified her as a senior analyst; the picture looked like it was a few years old. “Afternoon,” she said, polite and bored at once.

  “Good afternoon, ma’am.” The guard took the ID, his eyes flicking between it and her face. He swiped it against a device on his belt, which beeped. He handed it back to her. “Beautiful day, isn’t it?”

  “One of the last,” she said. “S’posed to be colder next week.” She didn’t look behind her, didn’t check the mirror for the armed man examining the back of her car.

  The guard glanced over the car roof at his partner, then nodded at her. “Have a good day.”

  “You too.” She put the ID in her purse. The metal gate parted, and she drove throug
h.

  And into the lion’s cage we go.

  No, that wasn’t really it. This was more like walking into the lion’s cage, strutting up to the beast, and jamming her head between its jaws.

  The thought sent a shiver of adrenaline. She smiled, drove steadily.

  The DAR grounds were nice enough, in a lethal sort of way. The road meandered in curves that seemed senseless, but would keep a car bomber from gaining speed. Every fifty yards or so she felt her tires hum over retracted spike strips. The landscape was green lawns and carefully pruned trees, but tall towers were dotted amidst them. No doubt snipers were tracking her progress.

  The building itself was bland and sprawling, looking more like a Fortune 100 office than the nation’s largest spy agency. At the west end, a construction crew worked on a five-story addition, welders on the beams sending showers of sparks. Apparently business was good at the DAR.

  Shannon found an empty parking place about halfway down a lane, turned the car off, and flipped down the visor to look in the mirror. She could never get used to herself as a blonde. Odd how many women dyed their hair that color. In her experience, being a brunette hadn’t turned men away.

  It was a good wig, though, the highlights layered well to blend with a hint of root. The makeup was heavier than she preferred, but that was the point. She put on a pair of plastic-framed designer eyeglasses. An affectation in this era of easy surgery, but that was what made them fashionable.

  “Okay,” she said, then shouldered her purse and left the car.

  It really was a beautiful day, the air cool and tasting of fallen leaves. One of the things she loved about being on a job, it heightened her awareness of everything. Every taste sweeter, every touch electric. On the walk in, she could just make out the tips of antiaircraft batteries mounted on the roof of the building.

  The lobby was marble floors and tall ceilings and armed guards. One line broke into several, each leading through a metal detector. Cameras stared unblinking from every corner. She joined the queue, looked at her nails, and thought about John.

  When he had first proposed this little adventure, her response had been, “You want me to go where?”

  “I know.” John Smith wore a gray suit and a clean shave, and he seemed taller than she remembered. Healthier. The benefits of not being on the run, she supposed, not having that 24/7 paranoia pressing down. “It sounds crazy.”

  “Crazy I’m okay with. This sounds like suicide. Besides, I’m tasked out. All my attention is focused on West Virginia. I’ve got sins to make up for.”

  “I understand,” he’d said, with that smile of his. A good smile, he was a handsome guy, though not her type. Too conventional, like a real estate agent. “But I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t worth it.”

  “Why?”

  He told her, and the more he talked, the more incredible the tale seemed. Coming from anyone else, she wouldn’t have believed it. But if John was right—a safe bet—then this could change everything. Shift the entire balance of power. Recalibrate the world.

  Of course, first they had to find it. Which was where robbing the DAR came in. Why dig through a haystack yourself when someone already had the coordinates of the needle?

  “Thing is, we can’t just hack in. The DAR knows any data connected to the Internet is vulnerable. They keep their most precious secrets on discrete networks inside the compound. The computers are connected to each other, but not to the world, so the only way to access them—”

  “Is to go into the compound itself.”

  He’d nodded.

  “How would I even get through the gate?”

  “I’ll take care of that. The ID won’t just get you in, it’ll confirm your whole life. Redundant records backfilled into their system. Payroll data, employee reviews, work history, the whole bit. I’ve got my very best on this. It should be simple.”

  “If it’s so simple, why do you need me?”

  “In case it turns out not to be. Look, I’m not going to lie to you, Shannon. If you get caught, there won’t be a trial. They probably won’t even acknowledge they have you. You’ll end up in a maximum-security cell where they will spend the rest of your life trying to break you, and there will be nothing I can do to help.”

  “You really know how to tempt a girl.”

  “But that’s not going to happen. You can do this, I know you can.” He leaned his chin on his hand, the drink untouched in front of him. “Besides, there’s more. While you’re in there, you can get everything there is to know about West Virginia. The complete security package. You’ll be able to wash away your sins without risking lives.”

  She’d weighed that. “What if I say no?”

  “Then you say no. It’s always up to you, you know that.”

  The line moved well, and within a minute she was walking to a metal detector. She took off a delicate silver necklace shaped like three icicles and coiled it beside her purse in a bin on the conveyor belt.

  The fear hit as she was walking to the metal detector, armed guards on either side, DAR agents behind and beside her. A sudden heavy thump in her chest like a double-kick drum, and a dump of chemicals into her bloodstream. It was nothing new, nothing she wasn’t used to; it happened every time. But this time the fear was sharper, more intense.

  More fun.

  Shannon smiled at the guard as she walked through the metal detector. He waved her along. She waited for her bin to come through the conveyor, put on her necklace, grabbed her purse, and headed into the headquarters of an agency that had maintained a kill order on her for years. John hadn’t been kidding; whatever brilliant had coded the ID truly was good.

  He damn well better be.

  As if in response to her thought, the glasses flickered to life. The inside of each lens was lined with a monofilament screen, the display visible only from this angle. The left showed a 3-D wireframe map of her position in the building; on the right, the words GOOD HUNTING appeared. She kept her smile internal.

  Shannon strolled down the hall, the heels of her boots clicking on the tile. Once past the security, the Department of Analysis and Response resembled nothing so much as a large corporation: offices and cubicles, elevators and employee washrooms. It made sense. The department was split into two parts, and this was the analysis side. It was larger by far, employing tens of thousands of scientists, policymakers, advisors, headshrinkers, and stat-counters.

  The other section was response, a different creature altogether. A creature that planned kidnappings, arrests, and assassinations. That had a governmental mandate to murder. Nick’s old department.

  This facility had been his office once, the source of his power. He’d been the top gun of its most secret division. How many times had he strutted these hallways? What had he been thinking when he did? Back then he’d drunk the Kool-Aid, believed in everything the DAR stood for. She pictured him, that almost cocky calm he wore like a tailored suit.

  Speaking of her type.

  She’d hated him the first time they’d met. Nick had killed a friend of hers, a brilliant who had started robbing banks. A sad and damaged boy, broken by the academy, lost in the world. It wasn’t his fault that he’d gone so wrong, and while she agreed that he needed to be stopped—innocent people had been killed—that didn’t mean she was okay with his murder, or prepared to forgive the soulless assassin who had committed it.

  Thing was, Nick turned out to not be that at all. He was warm and passionate and smart. He was dedicated to his children and willing to do anything for them. In truth, they were actually a lot alike, both of them fighting to make a better world. They just had different ideas of how to accomplish it.

  Shannon wished she could have told him what she was doing today. His first reaction would have been fury, but once she’d explained the reasoning, she was pretty sure he would come over to her side.

  Pack that all away. Telling him was too big a risk, and this place is too dangerous to be thinking of anything but the job.

  She wa
lked down a long corridor, took an elevator up three flights into a broad atrium. People passed, looking at d-pads and talking about meetings. At thirty years old, Shannon had never been in a meeting, liked it that way. An aerial walkway with glass on both sides gave her a view of the complex. Enormous, with that rabbit-warren look of constant expansion. She reached the end, turned left.

  Twenty yards away, a door opened, and a man and woman walked out. She was small, maybe five-one, but strutted with a screw-you spitfire energy. The man was fit, medium height, wore a shoulder holster. She recognized him. They’d brought down a presidential administration together. Bobby Quinn, Nick’s old partner, the planner with the dry wit. A funny guy, good at his job, she’d liked him.

  She had no doubt, none at all, that if he recognized her, he would take her.

  Don’t kid yourself, sweetie. There’s no “if.” You think fake blond hair, high-heeled boots, and a pair of glasses is going to protect you from Bobby Quinn?

  He was talking to the woman as he walked, his hands out and gesturing. He would reach Shannon in seconds, and if he saw her, she would never see another autumn afternoon.

  She didn’t need to think. Didn’t need to look around. The trick to doing what Nick called “walking through walls,” and what she called shifting, was that it wasn’t about studying the world and then making a decision. The only way to be invisible was to know where everyone was all the time, where they were looking, and where they were going. Every room, every minute. On bad days she got wicked migraines from the data overload, like sitting too close to the tri-d.

  Data. Like:

  The analyst in the bad tie digging through a file cabinet, actual printed papers, trust the government to be running behind.

  The FedEx guy pushing the trolley, whistling, the stops on his route clear to her as a diagram.

  The administrative assistant stepping from the break room with a coffee in her right hand and her eyes on the d-pad in her left.

  The flirting couple almost-but-not-quite touching, his hand about to reach for her arm.