Brilliance

by Marcus Sakey

  It might have worked if Cooper had been a normal kid, one in a line of victims. But he was different. And difference, as he learned that day, inspired a particular kind of savagery.

  His algebra teacher had found in him a bathroom stall, curled at the base of a toilet, the porcelain bowl drenched with his blood. His eyes had been swollen shut, nose broken, testicles bruised, two fingers crushed. The kicks he’d taken on the ground cost him his spleen.

  Dad had asked who’d done it, and so had the doctors and the teacher who found him, but Cooper never said a word. He just gritted his teeth and bore up for the three months it took to heal.

  Then he went looking for the bully and his posse. And that time, Cooper didn’t submit.

  “Something on your mind, Roger?” He met the man’s posture and gaze. The ritual was stupid and primitive, and he didn’t enjoy it, but it was a dance that needed dancing. “Something you want to say?”

  “I said it.” Dickinson didn’t blink or flinch. “Want to let me work?”

  He’s not a coward. An insubordinate bigot with boundless ambition, but at least not a coward. So what do you say, Coop? How far do you want to take this?

  “Gentlemen.” The voice behind them was cotton padding over hardened steel. It snapped the schoolyard moment like a twig. Cooper and Dickinson turned as one.

  With his conservative suit, rimless glasses, and impeccable shave, Drew Peters looked like a clerk or a pediatrician, not a man who routinely ordered the murder of American citizens. “Join me in the hall.”

  The moment the heavy wooden door slammed shut, Peters turned. “What was that?” His voice quiet and firm.

  Cooper said, “Agent Dickinson and I were just conferring about the best way to handle Bryan Vasquez.”

  “I see.” Peters looked back and forth. “Perhaps that kind of discussion should be had in private?”

  “Yes, sir,” Dickinson said. Cooper nodded.

  “And how is it, Agent Dickinson, that you happen to be interviewing Vasquez at all?”

  “My team discovered that the files on Bryan Vasquez had been altered. The current file lists him as a loser with no last known address. But the original file showed he lived and worked in DC.”

  “Someone hacked our system?” For the first time, Peters sounded genuinely annoyed.

  “Yes, sir. Either that, or…” Dickinson shrugged.

  “Or?”

  “Well, it could have been done by someone inside the agency.”

  Cooper laughed. “You think I was covering for Bryan Vasquez? All us twists hang out together on Friday nights?”

  Dickinson shot him a glare. “I’m just pointing out that it would have been easy to alter the files from inside the department. Under the circumstances, I thought it best to detain Vasquez immediately. Since Agent Cooper wasn’t present, I began the interview myself.”

  “Very proactive,” Peters said dryly. He turned to Cooper. “Take over as primary.”

  Dickinson said, “But, sir—”

  “Vasquez is his target, not yours.”

  “Yes, but—”

  The director cocked one eyebrow, and Dickinson swallowed whatever he had been about to say. After a moment, Peters said, “Grab a coffee.”

  Dickinson hesitated, then said, “Yes, sir,” and started away. To Cooper’s eyes, the tension and fury radiating from every muscle made the man seem almost wreathed in flame.

  Cooper said, “He’s a problem.”

  “I don’t think so. He’s a good agent, almost as good as you. And he’s hungry.”

  “Hunger I appreciate. It’s running a one-man witch hunt that I don’t like.”

  “The man who burns a witch—does he do it because he likes seeing people on fire, or because he believes he’s fighting the devil?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Enormously. Both men are doing a terrible thing. But the first is entertaining himself, while the second is protecting the world.” The director took off his glasses and polished them with a handkerchief. “You and Dickinson are a lot alike. You’re both true believers.”

  “The only thing Dickinson believes is that I’m in his way. You can’t honestly think that someone inside the department altered those files.”

  Peters waved the idea away as he put his glasses back on. “I don’t doubt Alex Vasquez had the skill to hack our systems.”

  “And Dickinson knows that. But he’s throwing accusations anyway.”

  “Of course. And I’m sure he does want your job. More than that, he probably genuinely doubts you. Remember, many people haven’t really accepted that abnorms aren’t the enemy. Oh, they’ll hold forth on it at a cocktail party, how it’s not norms versus abnorms, it’s civilization versus anarchy. But in their hearts…”

  “I’m a big boy, Drew. I don’t need Roger Dickinson’s love. There are plenty of people here who don’t like me. I’m an abnorm hunting abnorms, and that makes people nervous.”

  “It’s not just that. It’s also the power you have. Everyone else at Equitable Services operates within much stricter latitudes than you. Know why that is?”

  “I’ve been here since the beginning. And my record is better.”

  “No, son,” the director said gently. “It’s because I trust you.”

  Cooper opened his mouth, closed it. After a moment, he nodded. “Thanks.”

  “You’ve earned it. Now. Can you and Dickinson cooperate on the interview?”

  “Sure. Of course.” He had a flash of Dickinson leaning over the table, red-faced and yelling. “Though I guess I’ll be playing good cop.”

  “In that case,” Peters deadpanned, “God help Bryan Vasquez.”

  CHAPTER 4

  “What’s the attack?”

  “I already told you, I don’t know.” Vasquez’s voice was at once exhausted, frightened, and eager to please. “All I know is that there’s going to be one.”

  “Yeah, so you keep saying.” Dickinson tapped his fingers on the metal table. “Thing is, you’re not giving me any reason to believe you.”

  They’d been at it half an hour, and Cooper had spent most of that time letting Dickinson run through the preliminaries. Interrogation was a dance, and while the early steps were important, they weren’t delicate, so he’d used the time to size up Bryan Vasquez, to note his tells and ticks, to read the energy coming off him. One of the peculiarities of his gift was that he sometimes saw people almost as colors. Not literally—he didn’t have optical manifestations—but connotatively. The combined effect of a hundred subtle muscle movements—the level of dissonance between what someone was sharing versus what they held back—took on shades in his mind the way hot soup tasted red or a forest smelled green. Natalie was the cornflower blue of a clear winter morning, honest and cool. Director Peters was the heather gray of an expensive suit.

  In Cooper’s mind, Bryan Vasquez was an awkward orange, simmering with tension, angry but unfocused, withholding but not doing it well.

  “Haven’t you read a history book? This is a revolution. It’s set up in discrete cells so that we can’t betray one another. I can’t tell you what the attack will be because I don’t know. He set it up that way on purpose.”

  “‘He’ being John Smith,” Dickinson said.

  “Yeah.”

  “You spoke to him?”

  “Alex did.”

  Cooper said, “Personally?”

  “No.” The hesitation was almost imperceptible. “Over the phone.”

  You lying little shit. Your sister met with John Smith personally. No wonder she went off the roof. But what he said was, “How do you know she was telling you the truth?”

  “She’s my sister.”

  “Did you help her code the virus?”

  Vasquez looked stunned.

  “We know about it, Bryan. We know she was working on a virus to incapacitate the guidance of military aircraft.” He leaned into the table. “Were you the one who was going to execute it?”

  “No.” His voi
ce came out weak, and he started again. “No. I helped with the technical specs. Alex knows everything there is to know about computers. But airplanes…” He laughed. “I’m not sure she’d know how to buckle her seat belt. But the virus needed to be released inside military firewalls, at root level. It would take someone with clearance way, way higher than mine.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know.” His eyes were steady, his pulse elevated but no higher than it had been. He was telling the truth. Cooper said, “So how would it work?”

  “I’m supposed to deliver it to someone the day after tomorrow.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. I just show up and he’ll approach me.”

  “How do you know it’s a man?”

  “That’s what Alex said.”

  “Where?”

  Bryan Vasquez crossed his arms. “You think I’m an idiot? I won’t tell you for nothing. I don’t even know for sure that you have Alex.”

  Dickinson leaned in, his face hard. “Do you have any idea the world of shit you’re in? I wasn’t kidding about vanishing you.” He turned to Cooper. “Was I?”

  “No,” Cooper said, watching for the reaction. Saw it, the bob of the Adam’s apple, a bead of sweat on the cheekbone. But Bryan held himself together, said, “I’m not the only one in trouble. You are, too.”

  “How do you figure?” Dickinson with that wolfish grin again, the dangerous one.

  “Because whatever the attack is, it’s coming soon, and it’s big. Big enough that what we were doing was only a corollary to it. Do you understand?” Bryan leaned in. “Alex and I were crippling the ability of the military to respond to the real attack. So you tell me, who’s in a world of shit?”

  Cooper thought back to his conversation on the plane with Bobby Quinn, how Quinn had said there was a lot of chatter, that everyone was keyed up. Equitable Services routinely monitored phone and digital communications on a national basis. If an attack of significant scale was planned, it would be preceded by all kinds of coded communication. Cooper saw Alex Vasquez again, just before she jumped off the building. The turn of her head, the golden glint of her pendant. The way she tucked her hands in her pockets.

  “I don’t get it,” Dickinson said. “You’re normal. Why help her?”

  Bryan looked as if he’d bitten something foul. “That’s like asking why a white man would march with Martin Luther King. I’m helping because it’s the right thing to do. Gifteds are people. They’re our children, our brothers and sisters, our neighbors. You want to label them and track them and exploit them. And those you can’t control, you kill. That’s why.”

  Cooper kept his face bland, but his mind was racing. He was getting a read on Vasquez. Helping his sister was only part of the agenda. He also thought he was David, taking on Goliath. The undiscovered hero with the potential for immortality. It was precisely the kind of personality a revolutionary leader would exploit. Could he really be just one level of contact away from John Smith?

  The idea was staggering.

  Seventy-three people dead at the Monocle alone. Hundreds at his orders since then, and God knows how many to come. The most dangerous terrorist in the country, and this man might lead you to him.

  Dickinson let the silence linger just long enough for Vasquez’s righteousness to cool. “That’s nice. It’s kind of moving, even.” His tone was metered. “Thing is, you aren’t marching beside Dr. King, asshole. You’re making planes fall out of the sky.”

  Vasquez looked away. Finally he murmured, “She’s my sister.”

  The fluorescent lights hummed. Cooper weighed a play in his mind, turning it over. Decided to try for it. “Bryan, here’s the thing. Thus far, you aren’t really guilty of much. But your sister is in serious trouble. She’ll go to prison for the rest of her life for that virus. That’s if she’s lucky.”

  “What?” Vasquez straightened. “No. She didn’t execute it. Legally, you can’t charge her just for planning—”

  “It’s a terrorist attack against the military,” Cooper said, “by an abnorm. Trust me when I say that we can, and we will.”

  Bryan Vasquez opened his mouth, closed it. “What would I have to do?”

  “Lead us to the meeting.”

  “That’s all?”

  Cooper nodded. “Assuming your contact shows, of course. If he doesn’t, or if you warn him, deal’s off.”

  “And in return—”

  “I’ll personally guarantee that we won’t charge your sister.”

  Dickinson’s head jerked sideways to stare at Cooper.

  “That’s not good enough,” Vasquez said. “I want it in writing.”

  “Fine.”

  “Cooper, are you—”

  “Be quiet, Roger.” He locked eyes with the other agent, saw the man wrestling with himself, remembering that Peters had named him primary, weighing that against a deal to free a known terrorist. Saw Dickinson wondering if it was a twist thing, if he was showing sympathy to one of his own kind.

  Vasquez looked from one to the other, then said, “And I want to see her.”

  “No.”

  “How do I even know that you have her?”

  “I’ll prove it,” Cooper said. “But you’re not going to see her until after. And if you mess with me, you’ll never see her again.”

  Orange hate radiated in waves off Bryan Vasquez’s face. Cooper could see him trying to decide if he was the kind of man who would jump a table and attack a government agent. See him knowing that he wasn’t that man, that he never had been, and that fury didn’t change facts. Finally, Vasquez steepled his hands in front of his face and blew a long exhale into his palms. “Okay.”

  “Good. We’ll be back in a minute with your document.”

  The interview rooms were kept stuffy on purpose—warm, thick air made people sleepy, which led to slips—and the air-conditioning in the hallway felt great. He waited till he heard the door of the interview room click shut before he turned around.

  “Are you out of your mind?” Dickinson’s eyes were bugged. “Letting a terrorist—”

  “Get that document drafted,” Cooper said. “Make it simple and clear. If Bryan does what we want, we won’t charge his sister, period.”

  “I don’t work for you.”

  “You do now. You got proactive, remember?” Cooper stretched, popped his neck. Tired. “And when you’re done with that, go downstairs and get a necklace from Alex Vasquez’s personal effects. It’s gold, a songbird. Bring that back up for Bryan, to prove we have his sister.”

  Dickinson looked confused. “Downstairs?”

  “Yeah. In the morgue.” He turned and started to walk away, then spun back. “And Roger, make sure there’s no blood on it, would you?”

  PIERS MORGAN: My guest tonight is David Dobroski, author of Looking Over Our Shoulders: The Crisis of Normalcy in the Age of Brilliants. David, thank you for coming.

  DAVID DOBROSKI: My pleasure.

  PIERS MORGAN: There has been no shortage of books about the gifted and what they mean. But yours frames things differently.

  DAVID DOBROSKI: To me, it’s a generational issue. A generation is born, it matures, it comes into power, and eventually it passes that power on to the next. That’s the order of things. And yet it’s been disrupted. People fixate on technological advances, or the New Canaan Holdfast in Wyoming, but what it comes down to is far simpler—the natural order of things has changed. And my generation is the one facing that.

  PIERS MORGAN: But doesn’t every generation fear the one after it? Doesn’t every generation believe the world is, if you’ll pardon the expression, going to hell in a handbasket?

  DAVID DOBROSKI: Yes, that’s perfectly natural.

  PIERS MORGAN: So what’s the difference?

  DAVID DOBROSKI: The difference is, we never had our time. We never got to shine. I’m thirty-three, and I’m already obsolete.

  CHAPTER 5

  “You let him think his sister is alive?” Bobby Qui
nn smiled over the lip of his coffee. “You, my friend, are a bad, bad person.”

  “Whatever. I don’t disagree with what he said about abnorm rights, but blowing shit up isn’t the way to fix it. He and his sister would have killed hundreds of soldiers, and I’m supposed to be weepy about lying to him?” Cooper shrugged. “Not feeling it.”

  Last night’s rain had given way to one of those pale, chilly DC days. A patchwork of clouds pressed down on the city, shading the daylight a tarnished silver. The wind was cold, but Cooper finally had a coat on. That and the half dozen hours of sleep he’d snatched had done wonders for his mood.

  12th and G, Northwest. Bland office buildings loomed on all four corners, the windows reflecting back the cold sky. Between them was a public square of concrete and stone. Escalators ran up from the open mouth of Metro Center Station, vomiting men and women in business attire, all of them checking watches and talking on cell phones. According to Bryan Vasquez, all he was supposed to do was show up and stand on the corner. His mysterious contact would do the rest.

  “It’s a mess,” Quinn said. “High visibility, multiple escape options, way too many civilians.”

  “And whoever is meeting Vasquez could watch from any one of these buildings.” Cooper leaned back, spun in a slow circle. “Perfect position to make sure he’s not being followed.”

  “It could be a team, too. Spotters in the buildings, maybe security on the ground. An extraction crew. Decoys. Plus, we won’t know who we’re looking for until they make contact. Tactically, they have every advantage.”

  “Can we do it?”

  “Sure.” Quinn smiled. “We’re gas men.”

  “Never liked that nickname.”

  “You know where it’s from, right? Victorian era, the streetlights used to have to be extinguished by hand. The people that did it, they called—”