Marcus Sakey - Brilliance

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.

The flames blew outward like the spray from a sunset ocean, orange and yellow and blue, ripples of fire spilling and sloshing. 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, disassociated, 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 assembled 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 pass this off as just another one. But a bomb going off in Washington 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 damn 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, shit, 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. Nobody 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 analysts 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 analysis 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?”

“A cell phone, probably,” she continued. “Cheap, dependable, won’t arouse suspicion if you’re caught with it. Just dial the—” She broke off, her eyes going wide. “Bobby, move.”

“Huh?”

“ Move .” She pushed the man out of his chair, then took it herself. Her fingers flew over the keyboard. The big screen flickered, and the frozen video of the explosion vanished, replaced by columns of numbers.

Cooper said, “If you can access the local cell towers and isolate calls made within a few seconds of the explosion—”

“I’m on it, boss.”

A voice from behind said, “We need to talk.”

Dickinson. Damn, but he walks softly for a big man. Cooper turned, met the agent’s eyes. Saw the anger crackling there. Not rage, nothing so out of control. More like anger was the fuel his engine burned.