Epstein nodded. “Your friend Valerie’s analysis was correct.”
“You were listening in?”
“Of course,” Erik said as though that were normal. “However, she was suffering from institutional bias. John Smith wasn’t acting against the DAR. And though we are in his endgame, this is not the master stroke.”
“No,” Cooper said. “He thinks bigger than this.”
“Agreed. Statistically—” He caught himself nervously. “Umm, I mean, logically, the purpose is to weaken existing power structures. For greatest efficacy, terrorists benefit from a desperate nation.”
“Yeah.” Cooper looked at the screens. “Well.”
“However,” Epstein said, “we’re no closer to John Smith than before. Perhaps we should use alternate methods.”
“You mean start torturing Soren? No.”
“Extreme interrogation doesn’t fit your personality matrix. Understood. But there are people suited for it.”
“You think I’m squeamish?” Cooper made a sound that wasn’t a laugh. “After all that’s happened?” He shook his head. “I hate everything about the notion of torture, and I’d take Soren apart a piece at a time if I thought it would work. But it won’t.”
“Expand.”
“I offered Soren the one thing he’s always dreamed of and never imagined he might actually have. I’m sure you were watching. I even lied and suggested that it might be made permanent. And he pulled the plug out of his own skull.”
“Still, perhaps pain would—”
Cooper shook his head. “He’s too strong. I’m sure you could break him. But it would be his mind you broke, not his will. There are only two people in the world he cares about. Only two he even believes exist. You could drive him mad, but there’s no amount of pain that would make him betray . . .”
He trailed off.
Millie stared at him. “Wow. Are you serious?”
Cooper turned away from her accusing eyes. Looked at Erik Epstein, pale and powerful and surrounded by images of a world in crisis. “I need you to get someone for me.”
“Who?”
“The other person Soren cares about,” Cooper said. “His lover, Samantha.”
CHAPTER 21
Hawk was reading volume six of a graphic novel series when someone knocked on his door.
He didn’t really know if there was a difference between comic books and graphic novels, but the latter sounded better. A comic book might be some silly story of a rich duck and his nephews. What he was reading was a philosophical exploration of the devil’s continuing war with heaven. This devil wasn’t red and scaly, and he wasn’t exactly evil, although he certainly wasn’t good, either. More like doing his own thing, no matter what. He wanted free will, and heaven was all about predestination. Hawk knew on which side his mom would have fallen, and he was kind of falling the same way.
The knock was three soft raps, could be anyone, and so as he walked to the door, he let himself imagine it was Tabitha. Maybe asking for help with something. He was a better shot, maybe she wanted to practice—
John Smith stood in the hallway. “Hiya, Hawk.”
It was John who had first given him the nickname, and while Aaron had always liked Aaron Hakowski okay, it was no match for being the Hawk. He straightened and brushed his hair back. John had never come to his room before. Why would he? He was in charge of everything, and Aaron was just a kid whose mom had . . .
“Can I come in?”
“Ah, yeah, sure, of course.” He held the door open.
John stepped inside, took in the room, and Aaron suddenly saw it through his eyes, the crumpled blankets and piles of stuff all over the desk and, shit, a comic book propped open on his bed.
“What are you reading?”
“Nothing, just—”
“Ah.” John picked up the book, held it with a smile. “I love this series.”
“I—you do?”
“Great writing. Plus, I identify with him some. Plenty of people think I’m the devil, too. Risks of forging your own path.” John put it back on the pillow. “You mind if I smoke?”
“No, no, go ahead.”
“Thanks.” He slid a cigarette from the pack, snapped a silver Zippo. “Bad habit, but it helps me think.”
“Aren’t you worried about . . .”
“It killing me?”
Aaron nodded.
“Tell you the truth?” John shrugged. “I would be, if there was any chance I’d live long enough. Okay if I sit down?”
“Yeah.” Aaron took the chair from the desk, dumped a pile of books off of it. “So what do you mean about living—”
“I’m playing a game against the whole world, Hawk. I have been since I was eight years old. Do you know what happened to me then?”
Aaron shook his head.
“I took a test. It was new then, the Treffert-Down. Everyone was very excited about it, this scale for measuring brilliance. I’d been taught to do well on tests, so I did. I did so well, in fact”—John dug a Coke can from the garbage and ashed his cigarette into it—“that government agents came and took me away from my mom. They put me in an academy. They changed my name and started trying to break me. I spent ten years there. I watched them destroy my friends. Brainwash them, or worse. Sometimes much worse.”
“Mom told me about the academies,” Aaron said. “I’m really sorry.”
“I’m not.” John looked straight at him. “That made me. I realized when I was eight years old that that wasn’t a world I could live in. I decided to tear it down and build a better one. To pen a new history, one written in fire. And I’m going to succeed.”
“I believe you,” Aaron said.
“I’m going to succeed,” John continued, “but I’m not going to live. They’ll kill me.” He took another drag off the cigarette. “It’s pretty much guaranteed. So I can’t get too worried about lung cancer, you know?”
“But—can’t you run? Hide?”
“I ran for a long time. But now it’s time to act. And I can’t execute my plan and hide under a rock at the same time.” He leaned forward. “The other day you asked me about it. Do you still want to know?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You remember the man we brought in?”
“Dr. Abraham Couzen. You said he had discovered the most important thing in thousands of years.”
John smiled. “That’s right. Couzen discovered what makes people brilliant. More than that, he figured out a way to turn normals into abnorms. Non-coding RNA that alters gene expression.”
This must be a dream. If he’d opened his door to find Tabitha wearing lingerie and waggling a condom, it would have seemed more real than John Freaking Smith sitting on his bed and talking about graphic novels and non-coding RNA, whatever that was. “Does it . . . it works?”
“Yes. But that’s just the beginning. Do you know much about organic chemistry?”
From anyone else, the question would have been an insult, but Aaron realized that John meant it, face value. “No.”
“Okay, well, it was obvious that someone would discover the root causes of brilliance. I won’t bore you with the details, but there were indicators that it wasn’t too far down the line. Some of the best abnorm scientists are part of our cause, and I could have put them to work on it. But that’s a long-odds proposition. Better to let the world at large develop that, crowd-source it, if you will. Instead, we worked on a delivery mechanism. It started as a particularly nasty strain of flu, but that was a long time ago. Since then, we’ve refined and refined and refined it. We’ve created pretty much the most contagious cold the world has ever seen.”
“I don’t understand. How does making people sick help? Does it kill them?”
“I said contagious, not dangerous. The problem with biologicals as a strategic weapon is that they’re hard to use, hard to contain, and if effective, tend to wipe out their hosts. This is different. It doesn’t do much but give you the sniffles and a cough. But it’s so incredibly communicable, and so long-lived, that if we release it properly, we can count on most of the world being infected.”