CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“I have to admit, I figured you were talking about, you know, assault rifles, or some secret newtech spy toy.”
“Disappointed?”
“No,” she said, reaching for another slice of pizza, “I was starving.”
It was more bar than restaurant, a subterranean joint with brick walls and neon signs. Proper thin-crust pizza, not that thick crap only the tourists ate, with pepperoni and hot peppers. The crowd was casual, baseball caps and jeans, and the tri-d was tuned to the Bears game, good old Barry Adams up there making everyone else look silly.
Cooper spun the lid off the shaker of red pepper flakes and dumped a handful in his hand, then coated his slice with them. Greasy, cheesy, spicy goodness, washed down by a long swallow of a hoppy IPA microbrew.
The crowd all erupted in yells at once; the Bears had scored. Chicago did love its home teams. The replay showed Adams stepping through defensive linemen as if he had a hall pass from the Almighty. Shannon gave a little whoop.
“Football fan?”
“No. A Barry Adams fan.”
“I wondered,” Cooper said. “The first time I saw you. Well, the second time, really. The first time I just noticed a pretty girl. It wasn’t until we triangulated the cell signal that I realized you’d waltzed past my perimeter.”
She dabbed at a bit of sauce on her lips. “I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to pull it off, if you guys had a file on me.”
“No. Nothing.”
“I bet they do now.”
He laughed. “Yeah, I’d say so. I think the target order probably goes John Smith, then me, then you.” It was a strange thing to say, and stranger because it was true. Cover didn’t get much deeper than this. He was an enemy of the state. In the last six months he’d raided, robbed, and survived three—no, four, after today—run-ins with agents coming for his life. Earlier tonight he’d stolen experimental narcotics and delivered them to an abnorm prostitute who was a friend and possible lover of the most wanted terrorist in America, and now he was having dinner with one of that terrorist’s best operatives, a shadow woman who had probably killed as many times as he had.
He heard Roger Dickinson’s voice in his head. Tell me again. How is Cooper one of the good guys?
It was an unsettling thought, and he pushed it away. “So what’s it like for people like you and Adams? How does it work?”
“My gift, you mean?”
“Yeah.”
She picked up her pizza—he dug that she wasn’t a knife-and-fork woman—and chewed while staring thoughtfully into some middle distance. “Imagine you’re on one side of a freeway and you want to run to the other side. Cars are blurring by, and big trucks that would totally squash you, and motorcycles weaving in between. So what you do is you look in the direction they’re coming from, right? You see the relative speeds and distance, and you decide when to run and when to stop based on that.”
“Or you use an overpass.”
“Or that. But imagine instead you pointed a camera at it, and you recorded the next fifteen or twenty seconds. You saw where everything went. How one car switching lanes forced the truck to slow down, which backed up the lane, which made the biker step on the gas.”
“You mean twist the throttle. Motorcycles don’t have a gas pedal.”
“Whatever. The point is, you record all of that. Then imagine you could go back in time to the moment when you started recording, only now you know what’s going to happen. You know that the girl on her cell phone is going to change lanes without signaling, and the truck is going to slam on his brakes, and the motorcycle is going around. So avoiding them is easy.”
“You mean you see vectors?”
“Sort of. The cars, they’re just a metaphor. I can’t really do it with them; I can only shift around people. I need the cues from them. I don’t really know how I do it, I just—I look at a room, or a street, and I can see where each person is moving and looking.”
“Can you tell me what’s going to happen in the next fifteen seconds?”
“I don’t know what people are going to say, or if someone’s going to spill their drink. You don’t plan to spill your drink, so I can’t anticipate it. But I can see that the guy coming out of the bathroom is going to make it halfway down one row, then he and the waitress will be in each other’s way, and he’ll back around, only the guy sitting down right there is about to get up, so there will be a logjam. The waitress will stand still, because she’s going to the table beyond them, and the others will move out of her way.”
Cooper turned to watch. It played out exactly as she’d said. “That sounds exhausting.”
She cocked her head. “Most people launch straight into how cool it is, how they wish they could do it.”
“Well, it is, and I do. But you must get tired of all of it, all of the time.”
“Yours is on all the time.”
“Yeah, and I get tired of it,” he said. “It’s the dissonance. Between what they say and what they mean. Thank God I’m less of a reader and more about pattern recognition and gauging intent. I mean, I can tell when people are blatantly lying to me, when they’re bothered, that sort of thing, but I’ve met some readers who can tell you your deepest secrets after a two-minute conversation about the weather.”
“I have too. Most of them are shut-ins.”
“Wouldn’t you be? If I were surrounded by the secrets and lies of every person I saw, I’d stay away from people, too.”
“So your patterns. You can tell what people are about to do? Physically?”
“Yes,” he said. “And please don’t test it by tossing that fork at me.”
“Sorry.” She smiled and lifted her hand off the silverware. “No wonder John told us not to engage you.”
The offhand comment hit like a slap. “John—Smith? He knows who I am? By name?”
“Of course.” She was amused. “You thought it only worked one way? He knows all about you. I think he kind of respects you. He vetoed a hit plan on you last year, not too long before the thing at the Exchange. One of our guys wanted to plant a bomb in your car—what was it, a Charger?—to prove that even the DAR’s best wasn’t safe.”
“So what—I don’t understand. Why didn’t he?”
“John said no.”
“I mean, why didn’t John? Kill me?”
“Oh. He said that it would only piss the DAR off. That the cost was greater than the benefit.”
“He was right.”
“He also said that they couldn’t be sure your kids wouldn’t be in the car.”
Cooper opened his mouth. Closed it. Thought about how many times he’d climbed in the Charger, and how he never once checked for explosives. How many times Kate and Todd had ridden with him. Thought about the car in pieces, flames licking through the windows, and two tiny burned shapes in the back.
Shannon said, “So you must be quite a dancer.”
“What? No. No rhythm. I’d be a hell of a partner if someone led, I guess.”
“I’ll bear that in mind,” she said, “case we ever end up on the floor.” She folded her napkin atop her half-finished slice of pizza. “So what’s next?”
“We need papers that will get us into New Canaan. Driver’s license, passports, credit cards. I know a guy on the West Side, does great work.”
She gazed at him appraisingly. “Why didn’t you go to him instead of Zane?”
Damn it. Careful, man. “There’s a difference between papers that can get me in the gate, and the power to erase my past, let me start again.”
“This guy a friend of yours?”
“No.”