And still, today.
A few more stabs at the datapad, and the headlines were replaced by the VCS. Virtual Crime Scenes, there was a piece of newtech he wasn’t sure he was glad of. A photorealistic, completely manipulatable model of the inside of the Monocle as John Smith had left it, down to every smear of blood and spatter of brain matter. Cooper could pan and twist and tilt to any angle, could view the mess from the height of the ceiling or the intimacy of inches. It was an incredibly useful forensic tool that had been instrumental in solving many cases, but that didn’t make it any easier to take when he scrolled down beneath the table where Juliet Lynch had dragged her son Kevin. Being able to see the angle of her body, the star-shaped hole in her face, that was forensically handy. But the ability to see her expression, the remnants of the face of a woman who had without warning watched her husband’s head explode, who had in an incomprehensible instant gone from the simple happiness of a family vacation to howling chaos and the abyss, that Cooper didn’t need or want. It was one thing to understand she had died knowing—not fearing, knowing—her son would die, too; it was another to see the holes in the hand she had stretched out to protect him, as if a mother’s palm could stop bullets.
Screw the jog. Cooper pushed himself up from the couch and walked to the kitchen. The fluorescent light seemed surreal at this hour, and the standard-issue black-and-white floor tile was grim. He dumped the rest of his water in the sink, dropped a couple of ice cubes into the glass, and poured chilled vodka over them.
Back in the living room, he picked up his phone and dialed. Took a sip, savored the icy bite.
“Hey, Cooper,” Quinn said, his voice thick with sleep. “You okay?”
“I was just watching the Monocle.”
“Again?”
“Yeah. What are we doing, Bobby?”
“Well, we’re not sleeping.”
“Sorry about that.”
“S’okay. Just busting your balls. So. The Monocle.”
“The VCS. That woman under the table.”
“Juliet Lynch.”
“Right. I was looking at that again, and it hit me, that could have been Natalie. And the kid, it could have been Todd.”
“Shit. Yeah.”
“What are we doing? All of us, I mean. Ever since I visited the academy, I haven’t been able to shake it.”
“Shake what?”
“The feeling that things are about to get a lot worse. That we’re on the brink, and nobody seems to want to step away from it. All these horrors we’re creating. The academies, the Monocle, they’re the same. Flip sides of the same horror. And meanwhile, I’ve got two kids.”
“And mentally you’re putting Kate in an academy and Todd at the Monocle.”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t.”
“I know.”
“All of this stuff, it’s a mess. I know. We all know. Not just DAR. The whole country, the whole world knows it. We’ve been on this collision course for thirty years.”
“So why aren’t we swerving?”
“Got me, boss. That’s above my pay grade.”
Cooper made a sound that wasn’t a laugh. “Yeah.”
“You know what I do, these thoughts hit me?”
“What?”
“I pour myself a stiff drink.”
“Check.”
“Good. Listen, I know you want to take this on. But all we can do is our job, one day at a time. I mean, at least we’re in the game. We’re trying. The rest of the world is just hoping things work out okay.”
“He’s out there right now. Somewhere. John Smith. He’s out there, and he’s planning an attack.”
“You know what he’s not doing?”
“Huh?”
“He’s not calling his best friend to agonize over whether the world is going to shit. That’s how I know we’re the good guys.”
“Yeah.”
“Get some sleep. For all we know, Smith’s attack is coming tomorrow.”
“You’re right. Thanks. Sorry for the hour.”
“No worries. And Coop?”
“Yeah?”
“Finish that drink.”
He made himself jog the next morning as planned. Cooper did five miles twice a week, hit the gym opposite days, and sometimes enjoyed it, though not today. The weather was nice enough, warmish and bright for a change, and last night’s insomnia cocktails didn’t affect him as much as he’d feared. But part of the pleasure of exercise was losing himself in the physical, offlining the analytical side of his brain for a while and just concentrating on his breathing and the rhythm of his muscles and the beat through his headphones. This morning, unfortunately, John Smith jogged with him. The length of the run, all Cooper could think about was something he had said yesterday. He may be a sociopath, but he’s also a chess master. The strategic equivalent of Einstein.
The trick was to figure out how to beat a man like that. Cooper was the top agent at arguably the most powerful organization in the country. He had enormous resources at his disposal; he could access secret data, tap phone lines, command police and federal agencies alike, deploy black-ops teams on American soil. If an abnorm had been designated a target, Cooper could kill without legal consequence—and had, on thirteen occasions. He could, in short, bring incredible force to bear…but only if he knew where to focus it.
His opponent, meanwhile, could attack wherever he wanted, whenever he wanted. Not only that, but even a partial success was a victory for him, where for Cooper, anything less than complete triumph was a failure. Prevent half the casualties of a suicide bomber, and you still had a suicide bomber and a lot of dead bodies.
Brooding on it made a five-mile run seem like ten. And in one of those charming little ironic moments, when he passed the convenience store at the end of his block, he saw that the locked security roll-door had been freshly graffitied: I AM JOHN SMITH.
What you are, pal, is an asshole with a can of spray paint. And man, do I wish I’d rounded the corner as you were finishing up.
Inside his apartment, he peeled off the sweaty T-shirt, caught a whiff—yow, laundry time—and headed for the shower. When he was done he flipped on CNN as he toweled his hair.
“—a significant increase in the so-called Unrest Index, to 7.7, the highest level since the measurement’s introduction. The jump is largely attributed to yesterday’s bombing in Washington, DC, which claimed—”
In the closet he chose a soft gray suit with a pale blue shirt, open collared. He checked the load on the Beretta—it was full, of course, but army habits died hard—and then clipped the holster to his hip.
“—controversial billionaire Erik Epstein, whose New Canaan Holdfast in Wyoming has grown to seventy-five thousand residents, most of them gifted and their families. The twenty-three-thousand-square-mile area, purchased by Epstein through numerous holding companies, has become a polarizing factor not only in the state, where New Canaan’s occupants comprise nearly fifteen percent of Wyoming’s total population, but in the country at large with the introduction of House Joint Resolution 93, a measure to allow the region to secede as a sovereign nation—”
Breakfast. Cooper broke three eggs in a bowl, beat them frothy, and dumped them in a nonstick pan. He toasted a couple of slices of sourdough, poured a coffee big enough to dock a yacht, slid the scrambled eggs on the toast, and squirted sriracha on top of that.