by Marcus Sakey
Natalie stared at him for a long moment. “Come with me.” She stood and started for the arch into the kitchen.
“Where—”
“Come on.”
Reluctantly, Cooper rose, bringing the wineglass. He followed her through the kitchen to the sunroom that doubled as the playroom. Three walls were glass; on the fourth Natalie had painted a mural, a scene from The Jungle Book, the big bear Baloo floating on his back in a river, Mowgli lying on his chest. She was a capable artist; she had once filled notebooks with sketches, back when they had been teenagers who thought love was a noun, a thing you could possess. Natalie flipped on the overhead light. Todd’s side of the room was chaotic, the lids of toy bins open, a train under attack from a stuffed panda, an unfinished Lego creation that might one day be a castle.
Kate’s side was neat as a surgery. Her toy box was closed, and the spines of her picture books looked as if they’d been aligned with a ruler. A low shelf held dolls and stuffed animals—Raggedy Ann, a brontosaurus, a plastic crocodile, a boxy fire truck, a stuffed Goofy missing an eye, a parrot, Tinker Bell, a pudgy unicorn—all in line like a Marine formation.
“I get it,” he said. “It’s neat.”
Natalie made a short, sharp sound. “Sometimes I don’t understand you, Cooper.”
It was never a good sign when she called him by his last name. “What?”
“You have these amazing abilities. You can look at someone’s credit card statements, what books they’ve read, their family photo album, and from that know where they’ll run, what they’ll do. You can track terrorists across the whole country. Can you really not see this?”
“It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Doesn’t mean—aren’t you the one who says that if you want to understand how abnorms think, all you need to know is that the whole world is patterns? That all the rest of it—whether a gift is emotional or spatial or musical or mathematical—is secondary to the fact that brilliants are more tuned in to patterns than everybody else?”
“Let’s just give her some time. There’s a reason testing isn’t mandatory till age eight.”
“I don’t want to get her tested, Nick. I want to deal with this. I want to figure out what she needs.”
“Nat, she’s four. She’s imitating. It doesn’t—”
“Look at her stuffed animals.” Natalie walked over and pointed, but her eyes stayed on him. “They’re not neat. They’re alphabetical.”
He’d known that, of course, had spotted it the moment the lights flickered on. But his little girl, tested and labeled? There were rumors about the academies, the things that happened there. No way would he let Kate end up in one.
“Look at the spines of her books,” Natalie continued, relentless. “They’re arranged by color. And in the spectrum, from red to violet.”
“I don’t—”
“Kate’s an abnorm.” Her tone was matter-of-fact, a simple statement. “You know that. Probably for longer than I have. And we have to deal with that fact.”
“Maybe you’re right. Maybe she is a twist—”
“Not funny—”
“But maybe she’s just a little girl whose father is one. Maybe it’s not you she’s imitating. Maybe it’s me. Or maybe she does have a gift. What do you want to do? Test her? What if she’s tier one?”
“Don’t be cruel.”
“But what if she is? You know that means an academy.”
“Over my dead—”
“So then—”
“I’m saying that we need to deal with this. Figure out what her gift is and help her explore it. She might need help, tutoring. She can learn to control it.”
“Or maybe we could leave her alone and just let her be a little girl.”
Natalie squared her pelvis and put her hands on her hips. It was a pose he knew, his ex-wife digging in her heels. Before she could speak, his phone rang. Cooper gave her a what can I do? shrug and pulled the phone out. The display read QUINN—MOBILE. He hit TALK, said, “Not a good time. Can this—”
“Sorry, no.” Bobby Quinn’s voice was all business. “Are you alone?”
“No.”
“Call when you are.” His friend hung up.
Cooper slipped the phone back in his pocket and rubbed at his eyes. “That was work. Something’s going on. Can we talk later?”
“Saved by the bell.” Natalie’s eyes still had fire in them.
“I was always lucky.”
“Cooper—”
“I’m not saying we can’t talk about it. But I’ve got to go. And there’s no need to decide tonight.” He smiled. “The academies don’t accept entrants at this hour.”
“Don’t joke,” she said, but she wrinkled her nose, and he knew the topic was safe for the moment.
She walked him to the door, the hardwood floors creaking with each step. The wind gusted outside, the storm picking up.
“I’ll tell them you came by,” Natalie said.
“Thanks.” He took her hands. “And don’t worry about Kate. It will be okay.”
“It has to be. She’s our baby.”
In that moment, he remembered Alex Vasquez just before she’d gone off the roof. The way the light had caught her from below, throwing her features into contrast. The determination in her pose. The way her voice had softened as she spoke.
You can’t stop the future. All you can do is pick a side.
“What is it?” Natalie asked.
“Nothing. Just the weather.” He smiled at her. “Thanks for the drink.” He opened the front door. The rain was louder, and the wind cold. He gave his ex-wife a final wave, then jogged down the path. It was one of those soaking storms, and his shirt was plastered to his shoulders by the time he reached his car. Cooper yanked open the door and slid inside, shutting out the storm. I really need to invest in a jacket.
His phone was DAR issue, and he activated the scrambler before he dialed, then tucked it between ear and shoulder as he pulled the case from beneath the passenger seat. “Okay.” The case was brushed aluminum, locked with a combination. He popped the latches. The Beretta was nestled in the clip-lock holster atop black foam. Funny, all the ways the gifted had jumped the world forward, and firearms technology remained fundamentally the same. But then, it hadn’t changed all that much since the Second World War. Guns could be faster, lighter, more accurate, but a bullet was essentially a bullet. “What’s going on?”
“Are you secure?”
“Sure.”
“Coop—”
“The scrambler’s on, and I’m sitting alone in a car in the middle of a hurricane outside my ex-wife’s house. What do you want me to say?”
“Yeah, all right. Sorry to interrupt, but get here. Someone you’re going to want to talk to.”
“Who?”
“Bryan Vasquez.”
Alex Vasquez’s older brother. The burnout with no last known address. “Stuff him in an interview room for the night. I’ll get to him tomorrow.”
“No can do. Dickinson is already with him.”
“What? What is he doing with my target’s brother?”
“I don’t know. But you know how our records showed that Bryan was a loser? Turns out, not so much. He’s actually a big shot at a company called Pole Star. His sister must have hacked their records, and ours. Pole Star is a defense contractor. Know what they specialize in?”
Cooper switched the phone to his other ear. “Guidance systems for military aircraft.”
“You’ve heard of them?” Quinn sounded surprised.
“Nope.”
“Then how—”
“Alex needed someone to plant her virus. They were working together?”
“Yeah,” Quinn said. “Not only that. He claims they were working with John Smith directly.”
“Bullshit.” Cooper picked up the Beretta, checked the load, then leaned forward and attached the holster to his belt.
“I don’t know. You should see the light in this guy’s eyes. And there’s mor
e.” Quinn took a deep breath, and when he spoke again, his voice sounded muffled, as though he were cupping a hand around the receiver. “Cooper, he says there’s going to be an attack. A big one. Something that makes his sister’s virus look tame.”
The air in the car had grown cold, and Cooper’s flesh goose-bumped under the wet shirt. “Her virus would have killed hundreds of people.”
Bobby Quinn said, “Yeah.”
* * *
“Some of my best friends are normal. I mean, not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
—COMEDIAN JIMMY CANNEL
* * *
CHAPTER 3
Like most institutions of its kind, the Department of Analysis and Response wasn’t much to look at from the street. There was a granite sign fronted by a neatly tended flowerbed, and half a dozen security gatehouses. A dense line of trees screened everything beyond.
The guards who stepped out were trim and serious looking, dressed in tactical blacks, with submachine guns slung on shoulder straps. One of them circled the car, a heavy flashlight in one hand; the other moved to the driver’s side window.
“Evening, sir.”
“Hey, Matt. I told you, it’s Cooper.”
The man smiled, looked down at the ID Cooper held, then back up at his face. His partner shone the flashlight into the backseat of the car, the fingers of his right hand resting lightly on the grip of his weapon. “Hell of a night, huh?”
“Yeah.”
The flashlight spearing through his rear windows snapped off. The guard glanced over the car roof, then said, “Have a good one, sir.”
Cooper nodded, rolled the window up, and pulled through the gate.
To a casual eye, the road might have seemed designed for aesthetic reasons, winding as it did around nothing in particular. But the design concealed the protective measures. The curves limited speed, reducing the chance a car bomb could reach the complex. The manicured grounds assured excellent sight lines for sniper towers not quite hidden by clusters of very precisely pruned trees. Half a dozen times, the steady hum of his tires hiccupped as he rolled over retracted spike strips. From the parking lot, Cooper could just make out the tips of the antiaircraft clusters mounted on the roof of the building.
Hell of a long way from the beginning. Had it really been seven years ago that he’d followed Drew Peters into the old paper plant? Cooper could still taste that faded fart stink, could see the slanting shafts of sunlight through high factory windows. The building had been shuttered for a decade, cheap, clean space hidden back in a Virginia industrial park. The director had led the way, followed by Cooper and eighteen others, all handpicked, all nervous, and all trying not to show it. Twenty highly skilled individuals who comprised the newest division of the DAR, the razor tip of a unique spear. Equitable Services. “The believers,” Peters had called them.
And for eighteen months, belief was about all they had. They worked on card tables in that drafty warehouse. Funding was so tight that there were a couple of months when they went without pay. After the first terminations, the justice department launched an investigation to shut them down. Half the believers quit. Drew Peters remained steadfast, but circles began to form beneath his eyes. There were rumors of a pending congressional subcommittee, of a public excoriation. What they were doing was extreme, a privilege never granted to an agency—the right to hunt and execute civilians. Peters had assured them that he had support at the highest levels, that what they did was outside the traditional legal system. But if he was wrong, they’d face jail and possibly the death penalty.
Then an abnorm terrorist named John Smith walked into the Monocle, a Capitol Hill restaurant, and butchered seventy-three people, among them a US senator and six children. Suddenly, Drew Peters’s vision didn’t seem so extreme. Within a year, the paper plant hummed with activity; within two, Equitable Services had earned a reputation as the most prestigious subgroup of the DAR.
The rain had downshifted to a drizzle as Cooper parked and jogged to the front door. The internal security measures were just as stringent: a two-stage entrance, each requiring an ID scan and a video capture, a metal detector that his ID allowed him to bypass, an explosive-trace detection system that it did not, all overseen by men with body armor and automatic weapons. He went through it on autopilot, mind replaying the conversation with Quinn, running the angles. Wondering if it was possible that Alex and Bryan Vasquez really did work for John Smith. Wondering what it would mean if they did.
The vast portion of the department was given over to the analysis side of the job, which employed thousands of scientists and bureaucrats. They funded research and explored theory and advised politicians. They designed and redesigned and forever refined the Treffert-Down Scale, the test administered to children at age eight. They maintained the files on tier-one and tier-two gifted, tracking and collating every piece of data in the system, from medical records to credit history. They facilitated budgets and logistics and questions of jurisdiction. It was work done in cubicles and conference rooms, over the phone and the net, and the offices looked pretty much like any corporate headquarters.
Equitable Services, not so much.
The command center was dominated by a wall-size tri-d map of the United States. Actions and interventions were highlighted across the country. Analysts constantly fed data into the system, tracking the movements of targets. Cooper paused to scan the board, taking in the shifting colors, green to yellow to orange: the Unrest Index, a visual representation of the mood of the country that aggregated everything from frequency of graffiti tags to information on tapped phone lines, from protest marches to target terminations, mixed it all up and laid it over the map like weather patterns. A red pinpoint in San Antonio marked yesterday’s takedown of Alex Vasquez. Not a terribly public action, but even so, the people in the bar, on the street, they’d been affected. No matter how smoothly you tossed a stone into water, there were always ripples.
Alongside the tri-d, monitors and digital crawls ran news from every major source. There was a low hum of muffled phone conversation; direct lines ran to the Pentagon, the FBI, the NSA, and the White House. The air had a faintly ionized taste, like biting a fork.
The command center was the hub of the wheel, with hallways spoking off. He ran his ID through a reader and yanked open a heavy door. The clerk glanced up from behind a desk, his expression changing from boredom to sycophancy as he recognized Cooper. “Hello, sir. What can I—”
“Dickinson. Which interview room?”
“He’s in four, along with his suspect.”
“My suspect.” Cooper unclipped the holster from his belt, dropped it on the man’s desk.
“Yes, sir. But…”
“Yes?”
“Well, Agent Dickinson asked not to be disturbed.”
“I’ll be sure to apologize.” Cooper walked down the hall, shoes squeaking on the polished tile floor. He passed wooden doors with—
Dickinson knows Alex Vasquez is my case. He’s risking a beat down for meddling above his pay grade. Possible reasons:
One: Bryan Vasquez turned up in a separate investigation. Unlikely.
Two: Dickinson heard about the John Smith connection and is risking pissing me off for a chance to catch the big fish.
Three: Dickinson is trying to find evidence that I mishandled Vasquez.
Four: Both two and three. Asshole.
—reinforced glass windows centered in them. Two of the first three were occupied by nervous men and women sitting at plain tables under bright light. There was a rumor—a joke? Hard to tell at the DAR—that the fluorescent bulbs were the result of a multimillion-dollar program specially engineered to offer the most hopeless light possible. Cooper didn’t know about that, but they did make everyone look two weeks dead. Even Roger Dickinson, who had the kind of strong jawed good looks of quarterbacks in football movies.
The heavy door of interview room four muffled the shouting within, rendering the words indistinct. But through the w
indow Cooper could see Dickinson leaning over the table, one hand planted knuckles down, the other up and pointing, inches from the face of a man with the same cheekbones and brow line as Alex Vasquez. Dickinson was stabbing the air with his finger, jamming it back and forth as if he were pushing a button.
Using the shouting as cover, Cooper gently opened the door and slipped inside, catching it with one hand as it closed and easing it shut.
“—had better come clean with me, do you hear? Because this isn’t some speeding ticket. It’s not an eight ball of blow. You’re looking at terrorism charges, my friend. I will vanish you. Just”—Dickinson straightened, held his hands out in front of him, and stared at them in mock bewilderment—“where’d he go? Wasn’t there a guy here a minute ago? Some twist lover? Poof, he’s gone, no one knows where, never seen again.” He leaned forward again. “Do you hear me?”
“I hear you,” Cooper said.
The agent whirled, one hand blurring to his empty holster. Man, he’s fast. When he saw Cooper, he looked briefly sheepish, but that faded quickly, buried by naked dislike. “I’m in the middle of something.”
“Yeah? What?” Cooper spared a glance at Bryan Vasquez, saw no sign he’d try something stupid, so turned his attention back to Dickinson. “What exactly are you in the middle of? Which case? Who’s the target?”
Dickinson gave a wolfish smile. “Just following a lead. Never know where it’s going to go.” The other agent squared up to him. “Until I get there.”
Cooper flashed to a schoolyard brawl, one of a hundred. Military brats were always the new kids in town, the outsiders. They always had to fight for their place. But being an abnorm in a world that had only just begun to acknowledge the phenomenon took it to a different level. Seemed like every time he landed in a different school some bigger kid wanted to play Pound the Freak.
One time he’d tried to submit, see if that made things easier. His father had just been posted to Fort Irwin, a couple of hours outside Los Angeles. Cooper was twelve at the time, and the bully was fifteen, a big-toothed kid with red hair. Red seemed no more dangerous than any other bully, so Cooper decided to let him get a few hits in. Maybe if the kid got to show off for his posse, exert his male dominance, then he’d move on with no real damage done.
