A Better World (The Brilliance Trilogy Book 2)

by Marcus Sakey

  Freeze. Skip back. Soren entering the restaurant . . .

  He’d made himself watch it over and over, the impact never going away, the images never losing their horror.

  Cooper rubbed at his eyes with his good hand. In the hospital bed, his son lay still, breathing and little else. Tubes running into his arms. A mass of bandages around his shaved head.

  After the Epsteins had left, Cooper had convinced Natalie to lie down. She’d been reluctant, but exhaustion finally won over, and she’d curled up with Kate in the next room. Cooper, meanwhile, didn’t think he’d ever sleep again. His meds were wearing off, and it felt like talons were digging into his chest while a red-hot chainsaw spun in his hand. The pain was good, the tiniest penance for his hubris. Like watching the video again and again. Like picturing the troops massing outside New Canaan. Seventy-five thousand troops, a ridiculous excess of force. It wasn’t about subduing the Holdfast, it was about obliterating it. Even in this subterranean space, he could hear jets streak by overhead.

  If he could give back the life that had miraculously been returned to him in trade for Todd to be up and playing soccer, he’d do it without hesitation. But even that felt like it would be just a reprieve. John Smith would have his war, and the world would burn. No one was safe.

  And here you sit, helpless to do a thing about it. Hell, you couldn’t even protect your son.

  He could feel a scream building inside him and pictured it like a blast wave, a force that would sweep outward and flatten the world. But if the last months had taught him anything, it was that he was only a man.

  For lack of anything useful to do, he stabbed at the d-pad, shutting down the video and opening the file on Soren Johansen, the man who had tried to take his son.

  The file was extensive. Information on Soren’s birth, his early diagnosis. Every note from Hawkesdown Academy, where he’d grown up. Detailed analysis of his gift.

  Tier-one temporals were extremely rare, even amidst the rarified numbers of gifted, and Cooper hadn’t dealt with any personally. Philosophically, they presented a fascinating notion; like relativity, they proved that the very things people thought of as constants were in fact anything but. Of course, temporals didn’t actually bend time the way velocity did. It was entirely a matter of perception, and for most of them, it was a very slight variation. In the lower tiers, fours and fives, the difference might not even be noticed. An individual with a T-naught of 1.5, after all, might simply seem particularly quick-witted.

  But at 11.2, Soren’s T-naught was the highest Cooper had ever heard of. How strange the world must appear to him, every second stretched to agonizing lengths.

  Good. I hope your whole life has been misery.

  It also explained why his own gift hadn’t been of any use. Cooper read intentions, built patterns based on physical cues and intuition. But Soren hadn’t possessed any intention. He didn’t plan to swing here or stab there; he simply waited for his opponents to move and then took advantage of their molasses-slow crawl to put his knife where it would do the most damage. In fact, he’d made only two real attacks: the first security guard, whose throat he had cut, and . . .

  Cooper saw the moment again, squaring off against the guy, and in that time getting just one flicker of intent, one moment when he knew what was going to happen, the fucker spinning with his elbow up and arm locked.

  Todd’s breath caught for a second, and Cooper jumped, filled at once with unbearable hope and unimaginable terror. But then the breath rattled out again in a snore. A tiny biological hiccup. Even so, Cooper watched unblinking for another twenty breaths.

  The explanation of how he’d been beaten so handily did little to help. Okay, fine, Cooper read intentions, and the guy had none. But how that translated into practical action was less clear. How did you beat a man who used you to defeat yourself?

  Stand in front of him and stare him to death?

  The truth was, everything in life came down to intentions and results. Cooper’s intentions in killing Peters and releasing the video had been good; the results had been a disaster. Did that make his intentions wrong? If so, that meant morality was really only a way of talking about how we wished things were. Hope, empathy, idealism—maybe they didn’t matter. Maybe the only thing that counted was results.

  A cold pragmatist’s way of looking at the world, and he’d always felt Ayn Rand was a humorless hack. Intentions had to mean something, had to—

  Wait a second.

  He caught his own breath. Stared straight ahead, mind running in overdrive. Not patterning, not his gift, just thinking, and if he was right, then . . .

  Cooper dumped the d-pad from his lap and stood up. The move sent a spike of pain through his chest, and his head went wobbly, but he didn’t let that stop him. A quick look around the room, and there it was, in the corner of the room, a tiny bump about the size of a marble. He moved to the camera and started waving his arms. “Erik! Erik! I know you hear me, you bastard, this is your little world, come on—”

  The phone on the side table rang. Cooper moved to it, snatched it before a second ping. “Erik, I need data.”

  “Data. Yes. What?”

  “You said that Dr. Couzen was kidnapped by the DAR.”

  “Yes, statistical projection based on multiple variables—”

  “Yeah, I don’t care how you know. What matters here is intention.”

  “Statistically speaking, intention is rarely relevant—”

  “If the DAR took Dr. Couzen, then someone had the intention of seizing his work. We’re not talking about statistics, we’re talking about people.”

  A pause. “Explain.”

  Use Erik-speak. “I know President Clay. You’ll posit what I mean?”

  “Your gift for patterning. Yes. Posited.”

  “Clay is a good man. He doesn’t want a war; he’s being pushed into one. It’s the extremists on both sides. They’re trying to remove all options for compromise, for discussion. But Clay would seize on any reasonable way to avoid a disastrous conflict.”

  “Posited.”

  “Dr. Couzen’s work offers such a way. The fact that Clay hasn’t used it means that we can presume he’s not aware of it. And yet the DAR is a government agency. Which means?”

  “Forces within Clay’s administration have concealed it from him. Presumably the same forces that are pushing for war.” A beat. “And if you are able to prove that—”

  “Then in one stroke we can neutralize the hawks surrounding the president and foil John Smith’s plan for war. Because not only can we show him that he’s being played, but we can also give him the good doctor—because Couzen is already in government custody.”

  Cooper could picture Epstein in his cave of wonders, that darkened amphitheater where he danced with the datastream. Imagined him gesturing for charts and graphs, bright holograms of information that no one alive could interpret the way he could. Knowing that the man would be checking Cooper’s work, correlating it against a hundred other factors. He held his breath. So much came down to the next thing Erik said.

  When the man did speak, there was something like excitement in his voice. “Your theory is statistically valid. I’ll send all data on Dr. Couzen’s abduction to your system.”

  Cooper didn’t say good-bye, just hung up the phone and returned to his datapad. His chest felt like molten steel had been poured on it, his hand throbbed with every beat of his repaired heart, and it didn’t matter, because there was a way to make things right. To fix it, like Natalie had told him to. There was a way, and he had figured it out, goddammit. Not so helpless after all.

  He dropped in his chair, set the d-pad on the bed to free his good hand. The screen showed a massive file transfer in progress, but the most important pieces had already arrived. Cooper could feel his pulse, the rasping of his breath, and a joy that made his fingers tremble as he began to read, looking for the proof that he needed.

  It took five minutes to realize he was wrong.

  Fiv
e minutes to realize that things were even worse than he had imagined.

  CHAPTER 35

  Natalie said, “I don’t understand.”

  They were in the hallway of the subterranean clinic, Cooper pacing, feeling the weight of the earth above them, the weight of the world about to crack. He’d been so sure he was right, so sure he’d found a way out. For a moment life had seemed like it was supposed to, like if he fought the good fight and didn’t quit, maybe things would turn out all right.

  He’d imagined that it would take hours, that he would have to pore over personality profiles and arm-twist Bobby Quinn and maybe get Epstein to hack into privileged government systems. But all it had taken was five minutes of looking at the crime scene photos.

  “There is no way that the DAR kidnapped Dr. Couzen.”

  “How can you be so—”

  “Because it’s what I do, Nat. You know how many operations I’ve run for the DAR? How many times I’ve sent teams to arrest a target, or tracked one down myself? I know what our protocols look like. The DAR has some of the best tactical assets in the world.”

  “So?”

  “So, the window beside Couzen’s door was broken so that someone could reach in and unlock it. The DAR would have used a ram or a Hatton round, a specialized shotgun shell meant to breach a door. The neighbors reported hearing gunfire; the agency would have used suppressed weapons. There was furniture overturned, evidence of a struggle, but how does a 150-pound egghead make that kind of mess against a tactical team? And there was blood all over his lab; if the department wanted him alive, then that’s how they would have taken him.”

  “Maybe he had a gun. Maybe he saw the agents coming, and he—”

  Cooper shook his head. “It wasn’t the DAR. Trust me.”

  “Okay,” she said. “But what difference does it make who kidnapped him? Nothing has changed.”

  “Everything has changed.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he wasn’t kidnapped at all.”

  It was the blood that gave it away. He wasn’t a forensic expert, but you couldn’t do what he had spent a decade doing and not pick up a few things. If Couzen had been attacked by the DAR, and if he had fought back hard, and if they’d been forced to use a weapon that caused blood spatter at all, it would have been a firearm.

  The blood from a bullet wound sprayed in tiny droplets, what was called high-velocity impact spatter. Yet the blood on the wall was densely packed and medium size. The kind of pattern that occurred with brutal blunt force, like a lead pipe hitting the head. The kind of weapon the DAR would never use.

  But exactly the kind of pattern that might result if someone took a small container of their own blood and flung it at the wall. There was more, but that was when he’d known.

  “He faked it.” Cooper stopped pacing, leaned against the wall, his eyes closed. “He faked his own kidnapping. No one came for him.”

  Natalie paused, thinking it over. “But if that’s true, it means—”

  “It means that he’s running. That for some reason he decided to vanish and wanted to buy himself time. Maybe someone made him a better offer than the Epsteins. It doesn’t matter.” He rubbed his eyes. “All that matters is that the one man who has a solution to all of this madness has gone AWOL.”

  “I still don’t understand. Why is that worse?”

  “Because it means he’s hiding. Actively hiding.”

  “So find him.”

  He laughed. “I can barely move without seeing spots. My right hand is utterly useless. We’re ten minutes from a civil war, and the only guy who can stop it has a huge head start. My son is in a hospital bed.” Cooper slid down the wall and sat on the floor. “What do you want me to do?”

  He knew how everything he’d just said sounded, and he didn’t care. The floor tile was comfortingly cool through his hospital gown. He’d been running so hard for so long, and all that he’d accomplished was to make things worse. Enough.

  Natalie walked to the wall opposite him and sat down herself. Her hair was bundled back in a tight ponytail, and coupled with the dark circles under her eyes, it made her look drawn and pale. She said, “You think you’re the only one?”

  “No. I know that you—”

  “I’m the reason Todd is here. Me. It was my dumb idea, remember? I wanted us to be together, as a family. For the kids, and also”—she shrugged—“if I hadn’t had some romantic notion of all of us being together, of what it might mean for us, you and me, Todd would be back in DC right now. Instead, he’s in a coma. So don’t start with me, okay?”

  “Natalie—”

  “You don’t see it. You never did. In your head, it was always you against the world. You, personally, were going to be the man to save it.” She laughed coldly. “What would you even do if things did get better? Tell me, Nick, I’m curious. What would you do if suddenly the world didn’t need saving? Take up golf? Become a CPA?”

  “Hey,” he said, “that’s not fair.”

  “Fair?” She snorted. “You’re the only man I’ve ever loved. And we were so good together, we were happy, we made beautiful children. But somewhere along the line it stopped working. Maybe it was your job, maybe it was that you’re gifted and I’m not, maybe it was just that we fell in love too early, burned out on each other. Not fair, but, fine. Life happens, you move on. And we did, and that was okay too.

  “And then it turns out that Kate is an abnorm, and not only that, but she’s tier one. They’re going to take her from us.

  “Instead, you do this amazing thing. You go undercover and risk everything for her. Not fair. And the way it ended, not fair either.

  “But life starts to go back to normal. Maybe better than normal. And part of me starts to wonder, were we too quick before? Should we have stuck it out? And because I’m wondering that, and because I want you to know that you’re not alone, we come here, and—” She sucked in a deep breath. “ ‘Fair.’ Fuck you.”

  The words were a slap, and he jumped. “Natalie—”

  “You’re hurting, I get it. And things look bleak, I get that too. But don’t talk to me like that. Did we make mistakes? Sure. No doubt. But we were fighting on the side of the angels. I know it, and you know it too. And now you’ve got a choice. You can sit on the floor outside your son’s hospital room and wait for the bombs to start falling. Or you can take one last shot, no matter how slim the odds are, to make a better world. It’s up to you, Nick, it really is. No one could blame you no matter what you decide. But either way, don’t talk to me about fair.”

  As suddenly as she’d started, she stopped, and the silence felt like the aftermath of a thunderclap, the air electric. Cooper stared at her and felt a pain in his chest that had little to do with the knife wound. He tried to think of what to say, how to answer. Where to start.

  Finally, he said, “Couzen is a genius. He knows he’ll be pursued. He won’t go anywhere people would look for him. Nothing he owns, no family or friends, no research facilities.”

  Natalie gazed at him, that cool, level look that always matched her thoughts. “So how do you find someone if all you know is that he won’t go anywhere you expect?”

  He stared down at his hands. One in ruined agony—

  Time is against you. War will break out any moment.

  Dr. Couzen may be the only person on the planet who can stop it. His research could change everything. Even in this desperate hour.

  Only, he’s hiding, and the chances of you finding him are slim to none.

  The data Epstein gave you said that though Couzen was a genius, he didn’t work alone. He had a team of the best and brightest.

  Including a protégé.

  Where are you, Ethan Park?

  —the other still strong. He rose, then leaned over to offer his good arm to Natalie. She took it and stood opposite him. Their faces were close.

  Cooper leaned in and kissed her, and she kissed back, both of them hungry. After far too short a moment, he broke it, leaned
back. “You’ll tell the kids I love them?”

  Natalie bit her lip. He could see the realities hitting her, the consequences of her speech, and see that even so, she didn’t regret it, and he loved her for that. She nodded. “Where are you going?”

  “To convince Erik Epstein to loan me a jet. But first”—he smiled—“I’m getting out of this goddamn dress.”

  CHAPTER 36

  The sound of a low-flying plane pulled her from the deep black.

  Shannon blinked, rolled over. The hotel bed had half a dozen pillows on it, and she’d used them all. Her cocoon was warm and soft, and her body felt heavy in that good way. She yawned, then glanced at the clock.

  10:12 a.m. Good lord. She’d slept for . . . eighteen hours?

  Being awake for two days straight will do that to you.

  After Nick had left last night—well, the night before, she supposed, but not to her—she’d waited in the Tesla airport for Lee and Lisa to arrive. Molded chairs, bad music, her body aching and her eyes grainy, she’d sat vigil as her goddaughter slept. Shannon had stroked the girl’s hair and watched people walk by and waited out the gray hours.

  It had been almost dawn when she saw two figures running down the concourse. She hadn’t seen Alice’s parents in months, not since the night she and Cooper had stayed at their Chinatown apartment. A night that had ruined their lives, had landed them both in prison and their daughter in Davis Academy and Shannon in the emotional purgatory she’d been dealing with ever since. The two of them had aged years in those months, deep circles etched beneath Lisa’s eyes, a stoop to Lee’s shoulders she’d never seen before.

  But when they caught sight of their daughter, it was like the moment a campfire caught, a sudden flare of warmth and light. Shannon had shaken the little girl in her lap, said, “Sweetheart?”