Brilliance. Part 7

Cooper chuckled despite himself. "Yeah, all right, Bobby. I hear you."

"Good."

"That was something." Cooper stood. "Getting all righteous on me. Didn't know you had it in you."

"I am multilayered. Like an onion."

"That part I'll buy." Cooper clapped his friend on the shoulder. "I'm going to check on Vasquez."

"Calm him down, will you? He's sweating so bad I'm afraid he might somehow shake that tracker loose after all."

"And thank you for that image."

"Here for you, boss." Quinn yawned and put his feet up on the polished wood table.

Cooper strolled down the hall, pa.s.sing a gold logo with the names of three white guys followed by LLC. The law office was in a building overlooking the Metro station where the meet was to take place. Quinn had reached out to them yesterday, and the partners had been delighted to help Equitable Services. Cooper had met one of them earlier, a trim guy with a halo of white hair who had wished him good hunting.

Good hunting. s.h.i.+t.

Two guards stood outside the corner office, their tactical blacks today replaced by bland business suits. The submachine guns were still ready-slung. He nodded at them. One said, "Sir," and opened the office door.

Inside, Bryan Vasquez stood by the window, his hands against the gla.s.s. At the sound, he jumped, turning with an expression that was part guilt and part nerves.

Fever Orange, Cooper decided to name the color. He thanked the guard, then stepped inside.

"You startled me," Bryan said. He had one hand pressed against the gla.s.s, the other to his chest. Ghostly white dots of condensation marked where the pads of his fingers had rested on the window. There were sweat stains at his armpits, and his chest rose and fell swiftly. He licked his lips as he s.h.i.+fted his weight from right to left.

Cooper slid his hands into his pockets and- He's dedicated to his sister, but he's also a believer. He's worried about his own safety but would never admit it. He's attracted to the idea of plots and secret worlds, to comrades in arms.

He needs a strong hand, but not so strong he shatters. He needs to be pumped up and sent out to do his piece for a better world.

-stepped into the room. "Sorry about that. I always get jumpy before these things, too." He pulled out the chair, spun it around, then sat with his arms on the back. "This part drives me crazy."

"What part?"

"The waiting. Too much time in your head. Once things start, it gets better. You know what you have to do, and you just do it. It's easier. Don't you think?"

Bryan Vasquez c.o.c.ked his head and turned to lean against the window with his arms crossed. "I don't know. I've never had to betray something I believe in to save my sister before."

"Fair point." He let the silence hang. Bryan looked like a man who expected to be punched; slowly he realized the blow wasn't in the air. A faint wind howled along the edge of the gla.s.s, and somewhere far away, a car horn. Finally, he moved to the desk and slumped awkwardly in the chair on the other side, all angles and elbows.

"I know this is hard," Cooper said. "But you're doing the right thing."

"Sure." The word drifting across the table.

"Can I tell you something?" He waited until the other man looked up. "Everything you said the other day about the way gifted are treated? I agree."

"Right."

"I'm an abnorm."

Bryan's face crinkled in conflicting directions: surprise and disbelief and anger. Finally the guy said, "What is it for you?"

"Pattern recognition, a sort of souped-up intuition. I read intention. That can be really specific, like knowing where someone is going to throw a punch. But personal patterns work, too; I get to know somebody, my gift forms a picture of them, helps me guess what they'll do."

"So if you're gifted, what are you doing-"

"-working for the DAR?" Cooper shrugged. "Actually, pretty much the same reasons you helped your sister."

"Bulls.h.i.+t."

"It's not. I want my children to live in a world where abnorms and straights coexist. The difference is, I don't think you get there by blowing things up. Especially when one group vastly outnumbers the other. See, normal people, like you," he gestured with palms together, "if you decided to, you could wipe out all the people like me. Every one of us, or close enough it wouldn't matter. It's a numbers game. You have ninety-nine to every one of us."

"But that's exactly why-" Bryan Vasquez stopped. "I mean."

"I know how you feel about the way Alex is treated. But you're an engineer. Think logically. The relations.h.i.+p between norms and brilliants, it's gunpowder. You really want to strike sparks?"

He pulled the stamp drive from his pocket, set it on the desk, halfway between them. "Don't forget," Cooper said, "you're not doing this for me. You're doing it for Alex."

It was a calculated play, backing up the philosophical get-out-of-jail-free card with a personal imperative. And it was far from the first time he had lied to a suspect.

So why am I feeling guilty about it?

The academy. Seeing that place had stirred up issues he thought he'd made peace with. Cooper pushed away thoughts of the playground, of the woman with the placard, and locked down his expression.

Bryan Vasquez took the stamp drive.

Cooper said, "Let's go."

"This is Quarterback. The ball is in play; repeat, Delivery Boy is moving. Headquarters, confirm."

"Confirmed," Bobby Quinn's voice crackled in his ear. "Both signals are strong."

The square across the street looked as planned and uninviting as ever, the black branches of manicured trees tossing in the wind. A couple of hardy souls huddled around the entrance to the nearest building, rocking from foot to foot as they sucked on cigarettes. The entrance to Metro Center Station had a steady stream of traffic. A row of newspaper dispensers, bright red and orange and yellow, ran along a low wall; at the end of it a man in a wheelchair shook a paper cup at pa.s.sersby.

Cooper kept his stance casual, pitched his voice low. "G.o.d, what have you got?"

"Delivery Boy is heading north on 13th."

"Clear view?"

"G.o.d sees all, my son."

Everything is in place. You're about to be a step closer to catching the most dangerous man in America.

Across the street, the agent at the FedEx truck finished loading his dolly and started for the near building. In a bench on the square, two women in business casual chatted as they picked at salads. One looked like the a.s.sistant princ.i.p.al of a middle school; the other was pet.i.te and lithe as a soccer player.

"How you doing, Luisa?"

"Never thought I'd say this," dabbing at her lips with a napkin to cover the motion of her lips, "but I actually wish I was back in that cow-humping Texas backwater we just left."

Luisa Abrahams was barely over five feet, pretty but not beautiful, famous for talking like a trucker, and perhaps the most stubborn person he knew. He'd picked her for his team after a mess of an op where her agent in charge had lost communication with her. The AIC hadn't realized that her cover was blown and she needed support, so Luisa had chased a target two miles on foot, finally run him down, finished the job, and then called the AIC using her target's cell phone. The insults she'd hurled at him circulated the agency for weeks.

Now she sat on a bench alongside Valerie West, the two of them pretending to be on their lunch. Val was a whiz with data a.n.a.lysis, but nervous in the field. Cooper was watching her shred her napkin, and weighing whether it was worth it to say something when Luisa touched the other woman's knee, said something off-mic. Valerie nodded, shrugged her shoulders back, and tucked the napkin in her pocket. Good. Normally Cooper would have discouraged a romantic relations.h.i.+p between teammates, but the two often seemed better agents because of it.

Half a block away, Bryan Vasquez appeared in the crowd, walking behind a pair of tourists draped in cameras.

"All eyes," he said. "Delivery Boy is here."

Cooper ran through a mental checklist, making sure that everything was in place. Between the tracker, the cameras, the airs.h.i.+p, and the agents, they had the corner locked down tight. Whoever came to meet Bryan Vasquez was going to be sitting in an interview room within an hour, bathing in that hopeless light and wondering just how true the rumors about Equitable Services' "enhanced interrogation" privileges were.

Too bad we can't let them walk and follow them to others. The payoff could be sweet, but the risk was simply too great; with an attack imminent, if their only lead got away, it could cost G.o.d knew how many lives.

Through the earpiece Cooper could hear the calls and confirmations of his team tracking Bryan Vasquez. The man was walking on the other side of the street, and Cooper carefully didn't look quite at him. Just loosened his stance and opened up his senses, trying to take in the whole scene, to pa.r.s.e it, filter for the pattern beneath. The faded yellow blur of a taxi. The texture of a tweed coat. The smells of auto exhaust and cooking grease from a fast-food restaurant. The dull platinum glow of the sky and the shadowless noon it created. The determined set of Bryan Vasquez's shoulders as he stepped onto the sidewalk and turned to look around. The clanging of a flagpole halyard driven to dance by the wind. The bright red and yellow newspaper dispensers behind Vasquez. The muted rumble of the Metro and the rot smell of the sewer grate and the squeal of brakes two blocks down and the very, very pretty girl talking on the cell phone.

A man in an oxblood leather jacket crossed the street toward Vasquez. There was purpose in his stride, a vector Cooper could see as if it was drawn with an arrow.

"Possible ID, leather jacket."

In his ear, the team confirmed the sighting. On the bench, Luisa set down her salad and put a hand on her purse.

Vasquez turned to face the guy, his eyes a question.

The man in the leather jacket slipped his hand in his right front pocket.

Vasquez's eyes darted from side to side.

Cooper forced himself to hold. He had to be sure.

The man stepped up to Vasquez...and then past him. He pulled a handful of change from his pocket and began to feed the newspaper dispenser.

Cooper let out his breath. He turned back to Vasquez, wanting to send him strength with a look, to let him know it was all right, it was under control.

Which is what he was doing when Bryan Vasquez exploded.

CHAPTER EIGHT.

The flames blew outward like the spray from a sunset ocean, orange and yellow and blue, ripples of fire spilling and slos.h.i.+ng. In slow motion it had an ethereal beauty. The fire roiled and twisted. In front of the blast dark shapes surfed, indistinct and spinning. It was really quite lovely.

Until the torn metal slivers riding the shockwave struck Bryan Vasquez like a thousand whirling razor blades.

"That's precision work," Quinn said. "See the way the explosion is shaped? Boom, straight out of the newspaper box. Whoever set it up designed their charges with care. All the force was projected forward through packed metal shavings. Result is a cone wide enough to guarantee they got their target, but not much else."

From Cooper's perspective, the thousands of metal shavings had looked like a swarm of locusts tearing Vasquez apart. The explosion had stunned his ears, and even now Quinn's voice seemed to be coming through a thick bath towel. He had a throbbing headache and burns on his hands from the metal trash can that he'd touched dragging a shrieking woman away from the fire.

For a short moment after the bomb had gone off, the world hovered in surreal balance. Thick smoke billowed from the wreckage. The limbs of a tree burned with pale orange fire like autumn leaves. Sound was disjointed, disa.s.sociated, effect not seeming to follow from cause. A woman wiped at her face, smearing blood and hair that had once been Bryan Vasquez.

It was as if, Cooper had thought, the bomb had been inside of Bryan, as if he himself had been an explosive device.

People stared at one another, unsure what to do, what this disturbance to their daily lives meant. But bombings had grown more frequent in the last years, and if it had never happened to them, they had at least seen it on TV and a.s.sembled their reaction from that. Some ran away; some ran to help. A few screamed. Sirens began to fill the noon air. Agents poured out of the FedEx truck and the phone company van. Then the real chaos started, cops and firemen and EMS and news crews converging from every direction.

A nightmare. What should have been a quiet little operation was now looping on CNN. Drew Peters had immediately played the national security card, shutting down any connection to the DAR. There had been a half a dozen bombings this year alone, mostly by abnorm-rights fringe groups, and for now, it was easy enough to pa.s.s this off as just another one. But a bomb going off in Was.h.i.+ngton DC, half a mile from the White House? That would get more attention. Chances were someone would dig up the DAR's involvement.

That wasn't Cooper's problem. He stayed out of politics. What bothered him was that John Smith had beaten them. He'd taken away the only lead they had on a major attack. "Who triggered it? The guy in the leather jacket?"

Quinn shook his head. They'd finally made it back to DAR headquarters, and he had the explosion footage up on one of the big monitors. He pressed a few keys, and the crimson slag heap sucked inward and upward to become Bryan Vasquez. The flames retreated, waving like banners. The door of the newspaper dispenser shut the explosion behind it. A man in a leather jacket put a copy of the New York Times back in the neighboring machine. "See? He's beside the blast. He lost an ear-which doesn't matter, because he d.a.m.n sure lost the hearing in it-and the docs are working now to see if they can save his left arm."

"Could have been a suicide run," Luisa said, way too loud. She'd been closer to the bomb than any of them.

"Maybe, but why? Besides, if he was doing the martyr dance, why not wire him instead of setting up a fake newspaper machine?"

"Maybe because it was supposed to be a secure area? Maybe because that should have been the only way to get a bomb in at all?" She was small but fearless, and Cooper had seen her leap into fights with men twice her size. "I thought you had the whole scene under control."

"I did," Quinn said too fast, his hands up. He looked from Luisa to Valerie, saw no support there either. Neither had been in the path of the shrapnel, but the shockwave had tossed them both like rag dolls, and neither looked inclined to forget it. Quinn turned to him. "Nick, s.h.i.+t, I was there all day yesterday, and the team in the van spent the night. We've got twenty hours of footage from a stack of cameras. n.o.body planted the bomb."

Cooper coughed. His partner reddened. "I mean, no one planted it while we were there. They must have put it there in advance."

"And you didn't check." Luisa's voice had a dangerous edge to it. "I got an idea, Bobby. How about next time I secure the scene, and you sit on the park bench in a skirt?"

"Weezy, I'm sorry, but-"

"Don't you dare, you piece of-"

"Enough," Cooper said. He rubbed at his eyes and listened to the sounds surrounding them, the clacking of keys, the quiet voices of a.n.a.lysts and operators speaking into microphones. Even in the face of this, and of the looming attack, there were still thousands of tier-one abnorms to track, dozens of active targets. "Enough. Two days we lost here. Two days and nothing to show for it." He straightened, looking from one to the other. "You all need to get it through your heads. John Smith is not just a twist with a grudge. He may be a sociopath, but he's a chess master, the strategic equivalent of Einstein. I'll bet he had that bomb in place weeks ago. You hear me? Weeks ago. Probably before Alex Vasquez even left Boston."

Luisa and Valerie looked at one another. He could read the fear in Valerie's eyes and the protectiveness that elicited in Luisa's. Quinn opened his mouth as if he was waiting for the words to come on their own. Finally he said, "You're right. I'm sorry. I should have checked everything inside a hundred yards of the meet."

"Yeah, you should have. You screwed up, Bobby."

Quinn lowered his head.

"And I should have told you to check. So we both screwed up." Cooper took a deep breath, blew it out hard. "Okay. Let's start with who triggered the bomb. Val, you're our a.n.a.lysis expert."

"I haven't had time to review-"

"Gimme your gut."

"Well, if it was me, I'd do it remotely. All you need is a detonator and a clear view."

"How would you trigger it?"