Marcus Sakey - Brilliance

To his team Cooper said, “Keep on it. This won’t take long.” He started away, jerking his head for Dickinson to follow without waiting to see if the man would. Alpha dog posturing, stupid but necessary. He led the way to a dead space beside the stairs, put on a smile because he just couldn’t resist, and said, “What’s on your mind?”

“What’s on my mind ? How about what’s on your collar?” Dickinson gestured. “That wouldn’t be a little Bryan Vasquez, would it?”

Cooper glanced down. “No. That blood belonged to a woman I pulled away from the fire.”

“Are you actually proud of yourself?”

“That’s not the word I’d choose, no. You got a point?”

“I found Bryan Vasquez. I brought him in. We had one lead, one , and I brought him in. And you just let him get blown up.”

“Yeah, none of us really liked him. We took a vote, decided what the hell—”

“Is this a joke to you?”

“Tell me, Roger. What would you have done differently?”

“I wouldn’t have put him on that street corner in the first place.”

“Oh yeah? Just lock up his twist-loving ass and throw away the key?”

“No. Handcuff his twist-loving ass to a chair and go to work.”

“A little recreational enhanced interrogation?” Cooper snorted, shook his head. “You could waterboard him till he grew gills, and it wouldn’t change the fact that he didn’t know anything.”

“You don’t know that. And now we never will.”

“We’re agents of the United States government, not some Third-World dictator’s private security force. That is not the way we work. We don’t have a torture chamber in the basement.”

“Yeah, well.” Dickinson stared at him, his gaze level, eyes unblinking. “Maybe we should.”

Yikes.

“Roger, I don’t know what your problem is. I don’t know if it’s a personal grudge, or ambition, or if you just need to get laid. But we have a fundamental difference of opinion on what our mission is. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go do my actual, legal job.” He started away.

“You want to know what my problem with you is? Seriously, do you want to know?”

“I already do.” Cooper turned. “I’m an abnorm.”

“No. It’s got nothing to do with that. I’m not a bigot. The problem,” Dickinson said, stepping forward, “is that you’re weak. You’re in charge, and you’re weak. And Equitable Services needs strong people. Believers.” He held the glare for a moment longer, and then he brushed past.

Cooper watched him go. Shook his head. I’m going to go with needs to get laid.

“Everything copacetic?” Bobby Quinn asked as he returned to the workstation.

“Sure. What have we got?”

Valerie West said, “The nearest cell tower reports a dozen calls within ten seconds. Eight of them local. When you triangulate the location, only one set of GPS coordinates makes sense: 38.898327 by -77.027775.”

“Which is…”

“Right about…” She zoomed on the map. As she did, Cooper felt that intuitive tingle, like a tickle in his brain, his gift jumping ahead to tell him what he was about to see. “There.” The screen showed G Street, half a block east of 12th. The entryway to a bank. He recognized it.

He’d been standing right beside it.

Cooper closed his eyes, thought back. The movement of the moment, so many things he’d been taking in. The faded yellow blur of a taxi. The smell of auto exhaust, cooking grease from a fast-food restaurant. The muted rumble of the Metro and the rot smell of the sewer grate and the squeal of brakes two blocks down and the very, very pretty girl talking on the cell phone.

You gotta be kidding me. He turned to Quinn. “Do we have video of that spot?”

“My cams were all pointing across the street.” His partner looked at the screen, pinched his lips, then snapped his fingers. “The bank. It would have security cameras.”

“Get in touch. See if you can find a picture of our bomber.”

Quinn snatched his suit coat from the back of the chair. “On it.”

Cooper turned back to the two women. “We need to get out ahead of this thing. Valerie, we have Alex’s and Bryan’s cell phones, right?”

She nodded. “SOP would be to dupe his when we arrested him. And analysts are probably already working her phone, pattern building based on the contact info.”

“Good. Initiate a search. I want digital taps on every number in their cell phone. To two degrees of separation.”

Luisa’s mouth fell open. “Jesus,” she whispered.

Valerie was doing that thing with her hands again, only without the napkin to shred this time. “Two degrees?”

“Yeah. I want taps on every contact in both phones. Then, any number that has connected with any of those contacts? I want them tapped too. Going back…six months.”

“Christ on a chorus line.” Luisa stared. “That’ll be hundreds of people.”

“Probably more like fifteen or twenty thousand.” Cooper glanced at his watch. “Get the academy coders on board. Pull them off the Echelon II scans we’re running for John Smith if you have to. If anyone out there says anything, anything that sounds related to this attack, I want analysts digging in fifteen seconds later. You get me?”

“I get you.” Valerie’s face showed the early traces of excitement. It was a dream for someone like her. The keys to the kingdom. He had essentially made this the single biggest investigative priority in the country and then put her in charge of it.

“Boss,” Luisa said. “I don’t mean to second-guess. But twenty thousand NatSec taps, all initiated without a judge? Not to mention pulling the resources, what a monster bitch of a bill this will come with? Are you sure? I mean, you know what they’ll do to you if it doesn’t work, right?”

“I’ll be sent to bed without supper.” Cooper shrugged. “Make sure it works out. If it doesn’t, we have bigger things to worry about than my career.”

The Monocle on Capitol Hill was an institution. Located just a few blocks from the Senate offices, for fifty years the place had hosted DC’s powerbrokers. The walls were covered with autographed eight by tens of every politician of influence for five decades, every president since Kennedy. It was busy even on a Monday evening.

A Monday evening like the one when John Smith strolled in.

He was broad shouldered but lithe, a quarterback’s body wrapped in a decent suit, with a white shirt open-collared beneath. Three men followed him, their movements almost synchronized, as though they had practiced the act of stepping into a restaurant.

Smith ignored them. He paused in the entrance, looking around as if to memorize the scene. When a pretty hostess touched his arm and asked if he was meeting someone, he smiled as he nodded, and she smiled back.

The restaurant was split between bar and dining area. The former was boisterous, a deluge of laughter and conversation. Half a dozen flatscreens ran the Wizards game; three minutes to the end, and they were down ten points. The patrons were mostly men, ties tucked between the third and fourth buttons of their shirts. Smith walked through, past the stools holding lawyers and tourists and clerks and strategists. The three men followed.

The restaurant portion was mood lighting and high-backed booths, patrician, with the feel of a previous era. An appellate judge clinked cocktail glasses with a woman not his daughter. A family from Indiana took in the scene, mom and dad chatting around mouthfuls of steak while junior used the scraps of his hamburger to buttress the walls of Fort French Fry. A corporate headhunter put the recruitment moves on a twentysomething in nerd glasses.