Brilliance

by Marcus Sakey

  He put his left hand on the knob. Moved to the side of the door. Gently spun the handle, weapon up and sweeping the room as it was revealed inch by inch.

  Bookcases, a leather couch, soft and expensive looking. Two chairs facing it. A lamp and an ashtray on a table beside the couch. A door in the far wall, closed, no light from below. A gas fireplace halfway up the wall, the flames dancing; twin flatscreens mounted above it.

  Both monitors showing the same video.

  Cooper slid into the room, weapon up, eyes forward as he closed the door behind him, and then moved to look at the flatscreens.

  The video was taken from a high angle, and showed men walking through a restaurant. Something squeezed inside him as he recognized it. The footage from the massacre at the Monocle on Capitol Hill. He’d seen it a thousand times, knew every frame. What was—

  Wait. The flatscreens weren’t showing the exact same video.

  At a glance, yes. The motion was the same, the angle, the footage of the bar and the patrons, the judge with his young mistress, the family from Indiana. But in the leftmost monitor, there were four men walking through the crowd. One in the lead, and three behind.

  In the right monitor, it was only the three behind, all wearing trench coats.

  In the left, John Smith wound his way through the crowd, his soldiers following behind.

  In the right, the soldiers walked alone.

  In the left, John Smith walked to the back booth where Senator Max “Hammer” Hemner sat.

  In the right, the three men approached his booth, but at an odd, indeterminate distance. As though there was a ghost in front of them.

  In the left, Hammer Hemner smiled at John Smith.

  In the right, Hammer Hemner smiled at three men who had approached his table.

  In the left, John Smith raised a pistol and shot the senator in the head.

  In the right, a hole just appeared in the man’s head, as if fired from elsewhere in the restaurant.

  In both monitors, the three bodyguards shrugged out of their coats, revealing cross-slung Heckler & Koch tactical submachine guns. Each took the time to extend the retractable metal stock and brace the weapon against his shoulder. The red light of an exit sign fell like blood against their backs.

  In both monitors, they began to fire. Their shots were precise and clustered. There was no spraying, no wide sweeps.

  A vein thumped in Cooper’s neck, and his hands were slick with sweat.

  In both monitors, the video froze. Then it scrubbed back ten seconds.

  In the left, John Smith raised a pistol and shot the senator in the head.

  In the right, a hole just appeared in the man’s head, as if fired from elsewhere in the restaurant.

  In both monitors, the three bodyguards shrugged out of their coats, revealing cross-slung Heckler & Koch tactical submachine guns. Each took the time to extend the retractable metal stock and brace the weapon against his shoulder. The red light of an exit sign fell like blood against their backs.

  The video froze, and scrubbed backward.

  Cooper had the sudden sense he was being watched, whirled, gun up. Nothing. Turned back to the monitor in time to see the action again.

  To watch the three shrug out of their coats, the red light of an exit sign falling like blood across their backs. Their weapons rising.

  Pause. Scrub back.

  The three shrug out of their coats, the red light of an exit sign falling like blood—

  There’s something wrong.

  Not just that John Smith isn’t in one of these.

  Something else.

  You were meant to see this. He knows you’re here. This is for you.

  But there’s something else wrong.

  —across their backs.

  Pause. Scrub back.

  The three shrug out of their coats, the red light of an exit sign falling like blood across their backs.

  Pause. Scrub back.

  The three shrug out of their coats, the red light of an exit sign falling like blood across their backs.

  It was the same. The red light was the same in both videos.

  But in the one on the left, the one he knew, John Smith was between them and the exit sign. His body should have blocked some of the light. Not enough to throw an obvious shadow, but still, the red shouldn’t have reached them. Certainly not the one nearest him.

  But if that was true…

  Cooper stared, feeling as if the ground had slipped away beneath him, as if he had turned to fog and could slip insubstantial through all that he thought solid.

  Then he heard the door open behind him.

  He spun, reflexes taking over, the gun coming up, right arm straight, left cradling the butt of the gun, both eyes open and staring down the barrel at the man who stood in the doorway. His features were balanced and even, strong jaw, good eyelashes. The kind of face a woman might find handsome rather than hot, the kind that belonged to a golf pro or a trial lawyer.

  “Hello, Cooper,” John Smith said. “I’m not John Smith.”

  CHAPTER 31

  Cooper stared down the barrel. Instinct had framed the sights square on the man’s chest. John Smith stared back at him, one hand on the doorknob, the knuckles white. His pupils were wide and his pulse throbbed in his throat.

  Pull the trigger.

  From behind and to one side, Cooper heard an unmistakable sound. What his old partner Quinn had once described as the best sound in the world, provided you were the one who made it.

  The racking of a shotgun.

  Smith made the tiniest head nod. Without lowering the pistol, Cooper risked a fast glance.

  Somehow, Shannon stood in the corner of the room. She looked small behind the pump-action, but had it braced perfectly, the butt against one delicate shoulder. The barrel had been cut down to almost nothing; it was more scattergun than shotgun. Even at this distance, with the right load—and it would be, he had no doubt—there was nothing he could do to avoid it. Shannon’s gaze was steady and her finger had pressure on the trigger.

  How did she do that?

  “I don’t have your gift,” Smith said. “But I’m pretty sure what you’re thinking. You’re figuring that there is no way she can fire before you do. And you’re right. You can probably get at least one. Odds are decent you kill me. Of course, if you do, it’s certain that she’ll kill you.”

  The world had gone wobbly and fast, everything blurring and blending. He felt like his life had become the video loop, pause, scrub back, pause, scrub back, nothing certain, everything changeable. The man was locked in his sights. Smith was nervous, that was clear. He might hope that Cooper wouldn’t do it, but he wasn’t certain.

  Everything in Cooper screamed to pull the trigger, to take the shot and drop John Smith and be done with it. To end this before…what?

  Smith spoke as if finishing Cooper’s thought. “The thing is, if you do, you won’t find out what happens next. You won’t learn the truth. Though you’ve already figured out the first bit. Haven’t you?”

  One gentle squeeze of the trigger, then another as swiftly as possible. Hollow-point ammunition tearing through soft flesh, lead splintering to shivering razor blades, wide gaping wounds. John Smith dead. Mission accomplished.

  That was all he had to do.

  Pull the trigger!

  He tried to speak, but only raw sound came out.

  “Haven’t you?”

  Cooper said, “The video is fake.”

  “Yes.”

  “You were never at the Monocle.”

  “I was, actually. Half an hour earlier. I met Senator Hemner. I had a gin and tonic, he had four scotches. He agreed to support some changes to a piece of legislation, an early bill limiting testing of gifted. I thanked him, and I left.”

  Take the shot take the shot take the shot take the…

  “Look at me,” Smith said. “I know you can tell when someone is blatantly lying to you. Am I lying?”

  A thousand times he’d watc
hed that massacre. Looked for every clue, for any hint that could lead him to the man who had perpetrated it. He’d noticed the red light, but not that it should have been blocked. And how would he? It was only when compared with another version that it even seemed odd.

  His version could be a fake. He’s had time to do that, nothing but time—

  But the official version is the one with the problem.

  “There’s more,” Smith said. “A lot more. But you’re going to have to put that down to hear it.”

  “Nick,” Shannon said, her voice low but firm, tinged with a note of hope, maybe, or regret for something that hadn’t happened yet but might. “Please.”

  He glanced at her. Saw that she would shoot him. Saw that she didn’t want to.

  A sudden wave of exhaustion swept him. A sense that the props that held him up had been kicked out.

  But if this is true, it…

  He stopped the thought. But lowered the gun.

  “Thank you,” Smith said.

  “Fuck you,” Cooper said.

  “Fair enough. I’d feel the same, in your position.”

  Shannon said, “Cooper, how about you set the gun on the table? I’ll set mine down, too.”

  He looked at her. She was back to calling him Cooper, he noticed, though it had been Nick a moment before. Funny, only Natalie and Drew Peters called him Nick. And now Shannon, exactly twice.

  “How about,” he said, “you go first?”

  He waited for her to look at Smith. Told himself that if she did, he would snap the gun up and fire, execute his target.

  Shannon bit her lip. Her eyes never left his.

  She dropped the barrel of the gun, let it dangle from one hand.

  Huh.

  Like a man in a dream, Cooper figured what the hell, set the safety, then tossed the gun on the table. What was the worst that would happen? They’d kill him?

  They already have.

  The thought came unbidden, a voice in a dark room. And just what the hell did it mean? He didn’t know.

  “Okay,” he said. Trying for something like casual, but not sure he’d hit it. “Fine. Let’s talk.”

  Smith seemed almost to sag, the tension streaming out of him. “Thank you.”

  “You weren’t sure I wouldn’t kill you, were you?”

  “No. It was a risk. Calculated, but a risk.”

  “Why take it?”

  “I wanted to meet you. No reward without risk.”

  “What did you mean when you said you weren’t John Smith?”

  “My dad’s last name wasn’t Smith. My mother never named me John.”

  “I know, you got it in the academy, boo-hoo. But you—”

  “Kept the name they gave me. Yeah. Remember how in the civil-rights days, Malcolm X used to talk about giving up his slave name? Claiming his own? Well, I’ll do the same, as soon as people like me aren’t slaves. Right now, I want to remind everyone that I am what they made me.”

  “You’re a terrorist.”

  “I’m a soldier on the losing side. But the John Smith you’ve chased, the monster who kills children, who murdered seventy-three people in the Monocle, he’s not me. That John Smith wasn’t born. He was created. Because he served someone’s purpose.”

  Cooper could feel his gift surging, patterning, building from data. The same way it always did, the way he couldn’t control any more than someone could choose not to be able to think. As always, the intuitive part of it was leaping ahead, building from the pattern, and he wanted it to stop, because if that was true, if this was true—

  “If the video is fake,” he said, knowing it was but not wanting to say it out loud, not sure of the reasons, “then who faked it?”

  “Wrong question,” Smith said. He slid a hand toward his pocket, froze, said, “I could use a smoke. You mind?” He didn’t wait for a reply, but did move slowly, pulling out the pack and matches. Cooper catalogued the room, remembered the ashtray on the side table. So why did he step out before—

  Because he wanted you to see.

  He knew you were out there, and he gave you a way in.

  Smith continued, lighting the cigarette around his words. “It’s not who faked the video”—snap, puff, exhale—“it’s who planned and executed the massacre. It’s who recruited, organized, and armed a methodical, highly skilled hit team and sent them to murder seventy-two innocent civilians and a senator. Faking the footage was just the cover-up. And the payoff.”

  It was obvious and new at the same time, a paradigm shift that altered the whole world. Not just a faked video, but an orchestrated massacre. His gift filled in the pattern, dancing with new data—stop.

  “Okay, so who…”

  Smith walked around the end of the couch, flopped down on it. He ashed the cigarette and gestured to the opposite chair. Cooper ignored him. Smith said, “You play chess?”

  “No.” He did, but not the way Smith meant. No one played the way Smith meant.

  “The secret to the game is that beginners—actually, intermediate players, too, and sometimes masters—they tend to look at just the one side. But the trick to chess is to be paying more attention to what the other side is doing.”

  “Okay.”

  “Right,” Smith said. “Get to it. Fine. So, what did the Monocle accomplish?”

  “It…a declaration of war. The murder of a senator who opposed you.”

  “There are plenty of people who hate abnorms a lot more than Hemner did. And why would I want to declare war? When I was fourteen, I played three simultaneous games of chess against three grand masters, and won them all. What are the odds that with no chance of victory, I declare war? No, you’re still thinking with your side of the board. Who benefited from the massacre?”

  You, Cooper wanted to say, but found that the word stuck. How exactly had Smith benefited? Before the Monocle, Smith had been an activist, a controversial figure but a respected one, and free. Afterward he had become the most hunted man in America. He’d had to abandon his whole life, to live for years as a fugitive with a target on his back.

  “There you go. You’re getting it.”

  “So what, you’re not just a strategic genius, you’re a reader, too?” The old smart-ass side coming out.

  Smith shook his head. “I just know people. What happened after the Monocle?”

  “You know what happened.”

  “Cooper,” Shannon said. “Come on.”

  He glanced at her, couldn’t untangle her expression. To her, he said, “Fine. I’ll play. After the Monocle, John Smith became a national figure. A terrorist. He was hunted from one end of the country to the—”

  “Yes.” The look John Smith gave him was sad and warm at the same time, like a friend delivering bad news. “Yes. By whom?”

  If this is true, it means that…

  “No. I don’t believe it.”

  Smith said, “Don’t believe what, Cooper? I haven’t told you anything.”

  —Drew Peters, the day he recruited you. Saying that the program was extreme, but that it was necessary.

  The early days of Equitable Services, working out of the paper plant. The constant rumors of getting shut down. The limited funding. The investigation. The threat of a congressional subcommittee.

  Then the Monocle.

  Seventy-three people dead, including a senator, including children. At the hands of an abnorm.

  A stunning validation of the vision of one man. One man who saw this coming. Who saw that the DAR needed the ability to go further than just monitoring.

  That it needed to be able to kill.

  Drew Peters, neat and trim, cool gray in his rimless glasses.

  Drew Peters, saying that he needed believers.

  Oh God—

  “If this is true, it means that…that…” He couldn’t say the words, couldn’t let them float in the air. If this was true, it meant that everything else was a lie. That he hadn’t been fighting to prevent a war. That he had been part of starting one. That the
things he had done, the targets he had terminated…

  The people he had killed…

  The people he had murdered.

  “No,” Cooper said. “No.” He looked at Shannon, saw nothing but sympathy on her face. Turned from it, recoiled, to Smith. And saw the same expression. “No.”

  “I’m sorry, Cooper, I really am…”

  And then he was running.

  PART THREE: ROGUE

  CHAPTER 32

  Out of the room, down the hall, through the bedroom, onto the balcony, over the railing, through the air, hitting hard. Behind him voices he was barely conscious of, a man, shouting something, something like Stand down! Let him go!, and the guard with his MP5 up but frozen, looking over his shoulder, Cooper thinking slide-tackle to drop him, spin, elbow to the solar plexus, right-hand chop to the throat, doing none of it, just sprinting past the stunned guard, the cold air slicing in and out of his lungs, his legs scissoring fast, feet slamming the ground, trying to outrun the things he’d heard, the pattern that formed in front of and behind and all through him, the gift that he couldn’t turn off, the gift that had become a curse, the cold and relentless intuitive leap that put the pattern together, the pattern that had been right in front of him all this time but in the dark, brought into sharp relief by the illuminating influence of a handful of facts and a little nudging, all of which he could have done himself but never had, and the consequences of that, the unbelievable, horrifying, consequences—

  “I need true believers.”

  Drew Peters had said that to him the first time they met, and several times since, never so many that Cooper had thought it more than a call for a certain kind of loyalty, a loyalty Cooper possessed, a willingness to do hard things for a greater good. That was all it had ever been, never a delight, never. In the power, sure, and the freedom, the position, but never the act itself, not the killing but the cause. He had done what he’d done to stop a war, not to start one, to save the world, not to—