Marcus Sakey: Brilliance

Alex Vasquez’s fingers went white around her bottle of Bud. She’d been slouching before, the lousy posture of a programmer who spent whole days plugged in, but now she straightened. For a long moment she stared straight ahead. “You’re not a cop.”

“I’m with the DAR. Equitable Services.”

“A gas man?” Her pupils dilated, and the fine hairs on the back of her neck stood up.

“We turn out the lights.”

“How did you find me?”

“We almost had you in Arkansas this morning. That’s ten hours and change from the border, too far to make in daylight. You’re smart enough to plan to cross during the day, when it’s crowded and the guards are sloppier. And since you’re more comfortable in cities, and San Antonio is the last big one before the border…” He shrugged.

“I could have just hidden somewhere, laid low.”

“You should have. But I knew you wouldn’t.” He smiled. “Your patterns give you away. You’re running from us, but you’re also running toward something.”

Vasquez tried to keep a straight face, but the truth was revealed in half a hundred tiny tells that glowed like neon signs to his eyes. You could give this up and play poker, Natalie had once told him, if anyone played poker anymore. “I thought so. Not working alone, are you?”

Vasquez shook her head, a tight, controlled gesture. “You’re awfully pleased with yourself.”

Cooper shrugged. “Pleased would have been catching you in Boston. But keeping you from releasing your virus counts as a win. How close were you?”

“A couple of days.” She sighed, lifted the beer bottle, and tilted it to her lips. “Maybe a week.”

“You know how many innocent people that could have killed?”

“It only targeted guidance systems on military aircraft. No civilian casualties. Just soldiers.” Vasquez turned to look at him. “There’s a war, remember?”

“Not yet there isn’t.”

“Fuck you.” Vasquez spat the words. The bartender, Sheila, glanced over, and so did a couple of people at nearby tables. “Tell that to the people you’ve murdered.”

“I’ve never murdered anybody,” Cooper said. “I’ve killed them.”

“It isn’t murder because they were different?”

“It isn’t murder because they were terrorists. They hurt innocent people.”

“They were innocent people. They could just do things you couldn’t imagine. I can see code, do you get it? Algorithms that confound straights are just patterns to me. They come in my dreams. I dream the most beautiful programs never written.”

“Come in with me. Do your dreaming for us. It’s not too late.”

She spun on her stool, clutching the beer bottle by its neck. “I bet. Pay my debt to society, right? Stay alive, but as a slave, betraying my own people.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Cooper smiled. “Are you sure?”

Her eyes sparked and then narrowed. She drew a shallow breath. Her lips moved as if she were whispering, but no words came out. Finally, she said, “You’re a gifted?”

“Yes.”

“But you—”

“Yes.”

“Hey. You all right, ma’am?”

Cooper broke the gaze for the split second he needed to take the man in. Six one, two twenty, fat over hard muscle that came from working, not the gym. His hands in front of him, half raised, knees slightly bent, balance good. Ready to fight if it came to that, but not anticipating it would. Cowboy boots.

Then he turned back to Alex Vasquez and saw what he had expected when he noticed the way she was holding the beer bottle. She had taken advantage of the distraction to swing at him backhanded. Her elbow was up and she put her back into it, and the bottle was whistling around to shatter on his skull.

But he was no longer there.

All right, then. No way to know for sure how the cowboy would react. Better to be safe. Cooper slipped sideways and snapped a left hook into the cowboy’s jaw. The man took it well, rolling with the impact, then lashed out himself. It wasn’t a bad punch, probably would have laid a normal man out. But Cooper saw the flicker of motion at the man’s eye, the tightening of the deltoid, the twist of the obliques, caught it all in an instant the way a straight might recognize a stop sign, and the meaning was as clear to him. The punch was a jackhammer, but for Cooper, who could see where it would be, avoiding it was the easiest thing in the world. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Vasquez slide off the stool and sprint for a door on the far wall.

Enough of this. He stepped in close, cocked his elbow and slammed it into the cowboy’s throat. All the fight went out of the man in an instant. Both hands flew to his neck, the fingers clawing at the skin, carving blood trails. His knees wobbled and gave.

Cooper thought about telling the man he’d be all right, that he hadn’t crushed the trachea, but Vasquez was already vanishing through the far door. The cowboy would have to figure it out for himself. Cooper pushed past and wove through the crowd, most of them frozen and staring, a few starting to move but too slowly. A stool was toppling as a man leaped off, and he read the pattern of the man’s muscles and the arc of the falling stool and split the difference, jumping the metal legs without engaging the guy. The jukebox had switched to Skynyrd, Ronnie Van Zant asking for three steps, mister, gimme three steps toward the door, which would have made him laugh if he could’ve spared the time.

The door had a sign that read HOTEL GUESTS ONLY. Cooper caught it just before it closed, yanked it all the way open to be sure Vasquez wasn’t waiting on the other side—he would have noticed a weapon on her, but she could have stowed it before she came into the bar—and then, seeing it was clear, spun around the frame. The hallway continued forward to another door, probably the lobby. A staircase carpeted in a bland pattern of orange and gray went up. He took the stairs, the music and bar sound fading, leaving the sound of his breathing echoing off the cinderblock walls. Another door led to a hallway, hotel rooms lined up on both sides.

He raised his right foot to take a step down the—

Four possibilities.

One: An unplanned panic sprint. But she’s a programmer; programmers deal in logic and anticipated possibility.

Two: She’s thinking of taking a hostage. Unlikely; she wouldn’t have time to try more than one room, and no guarantee she could handle the occupant.

Three: Going for a hidden weapon. But that doesn’t change the equation; if you can see her, she won’t be able to hit you.

Four: Escape. Of course, the building was surrounded, but she would have known that. Which means an alternate route.

Got it.

—hall. Eleven doors, ten of them identical except for the room number. The door at the end was plainer and unmarked. Janitor’s closet. Cooper ran to it, tried the handle, found it unlocked. The room was a dingy five by five. Inside was a cart of cleaning supplies and mini-toiletries, a vacuum, a steel rack of folded towels, a deep sink, and bolted to the near wall, an iron ladder to a roof hatch. The hatch was open, and through the square he could see the night sky.

She must have set this up after checking in. The hatch had probably been locked; Vasquez must have cut it or broken it, leaving herself a neat little escape. Clever. The hotel was a squat two-story in a row of similar buildings, and it wouldn’t be hard to move from one to the next, then climb down a fire escape and stroll away.

He reached for one of the slender rungs and hauled himself up. Spared a moment to be sure she wasn’t waiting at the top to brain him with a rock, then grabbed the lip and crawled onto the roof. Sludgy tar clung to his feet. Even through the wash of city lights, stars spilled across the horizon. He could hear traffic from the street below, and yelling as his team moved into the bar. Staying low, he glanced left and then right, saw a slender figure with her back to him, hands planted on a three-foot abutment that marked the edge of the roof. Vasquez pushed herself up, hooked a knee on the ledge, then rose to stand.