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 window 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.
It might have worked if Cooper had been a normal kid, one in a line of victims. But he was different. And difference, as he learned that day, inspired a particular kind of savagery.
His algebra teacher had found in him a bathroom stall, curled at the base of a toilet, the porcelain bowl drenched with his blood. His eyes had been swollen shut, nose broken, testicles bruised, two fingers crushed. The kicks he’d taken on the ground cost him his spleen.
Dad had asked who’d done it, and so had the doctors and the teacher who found him, but Cooper never said a word. He just gritted his teeth and bore up for the three months it took to heal.