Marcus Sakey - Brilliance

Lacking any better ideas, Cooper did just that. There was still an attack imminent, still lives on the line.

Besides. You have a chance to catch John Smith. You want leeway? Catch the most dangerous man in America. Then see if the answer is the same.

He went looking for Valerie West—there’d been no need to snap at her that way, especially when it sounded like she had something—and found his whole team together and frenetic. The monitor in front of Valerie had a live satellite image, a rectangle maybe half a mile by a mile of tightly packed houses and narrow streets. Luisa Abrahams leaned over her shoulder, talking fast into the phone. Bobby Quinn, bulky with a vest, was checking the load on his weapon. As Cooper approached, all three turned to look at him. Then all three started talking at the same time.

Twenty minutes later he was in the back of a helicopter, the rotors thumping as the pilot flew over fields and forest, suburbs and golf courses. To the east the Chesapeake was a thin blue ribbon nicked by diamond sparkles of sunlight.

“It’s thin,” Cooper shouted over the noise. He’d unfolded his datapad from his pocket and snapped the display fabric taut. On the screen was a transcript of a conversation recorded three hours earlier between a man named Dusty Evans and an unknown caller.

DE: “Hello?”

UNK: “Good morning. How are you?”

DE: “Great. Looking forward to the fishing trip.”

UNK: “Everything ready?”

DE: “Got all our gear packed. Everything you asked for.”

UNK: “How’s the water?”

DE: “Clear as glass.”

UNK: “Glad to hear it. We’re going after the big one today.”

DE: “Yes, sir. It’s going to be a thing of beauty.”

UNK: “Yes. Yes, it will. Good work.”

DE: “Thank you. It’s an honor.”

UNK: “The honor’s mine. We’ll talk again later.”

“You said you wanted anything off the taps,” Quinn yelled back. “We got two dozen hits; this is the only one the analysts cleared.”

“It’s obviously coded, but what else? Who’s Dusty Evans?”

“Electrician, unmarried, twenty-four. Tested tier four in ninety-two—mathematical—joined the army in 2004, washed out of basic. Punched his sergeant, apparently. A couple of speeding tickets, an assault charge for a bar fight.”

“He was in one of the Vasquezes’ cell phones?”

“No. About three months ago he called a woman named Mona Appismo, who was in Alex’s cell phone.”

“That’s it?” Cooper felt a sinking inside him. For a moment he’d thought he conjured a miracle by sheer force of will. But now he felt himself drifting back to questions for which he had no answers. “This is a waste of time. He’s probably a nobody talking to his pot dealer.”

“Only if he’s got a thing for ditch weed.” Quinn grinned. “Unknown number turned out to be a cell phone in Wyoming. It’s from inside New Canaan. Belongs to a guy named Joseph Stiglitz.”

“And you’re thinking Joseph Stiglitz, JS, John Smith?”

“I’m not thinking it, boss. The analysts are.”

“The voice doesn’t match, does it?” For the last five years, they’d been running the most sophisticated computer search algorithms ever devised to find John Smith. Either the man had never once picked up the phone, or, more likely, he was disguising his voice. Easy enough to do on digital lines.

“No,” Quinn said, “but the phone was bought last month and never used. So who buys a phone but doesn’t even turn it on for a month?”

“Someone who plans ahead. Good thinking. Local cops on alert?”

“Yeah. They know to stay back, too. Luisa is coordinating, and I think they’re afraid of her.”

“Good.” Cooper slid his fingers across the face of the datapad, scanning the hurriedly assembled file on Dusty Evans. An arrest record from the assault charge listed him as six two and 230, hair black, eyes brown, no scars, a skull-and-snake tattoo on his right bicep. In the mug shot Evans looked like a pissed-off young man, his glare at the camera pure contempt.

There was an address in Elizabeth, New Jersey, a working-class burg forty-five minutes west of Manhattan. Vehicle registration for an older Ford pickup. His brief military service record: a fine shot, good fitness, but discipline problems. The helicopter banked, shifting Cooper against the frame. On the horizon he could see a low industrial city, Philadelphia, he thought. City of brotherly love. He remembered talking to Alex Vasquez by bar light, the sour taste of the coffee as he told her that there had been a bombing in Philadelphia that day. It had been a post office, after hours. A silly, pointless target.

Two thoughts rang in his head. First, if Joseph Stiglitz really was John Smith, then Cooper was closer than anyone had ever been to catching the man. And second, there was going to be a major terrorist attack on America today. Or at least starting today; it could be a multiphase strike. For all they knew, Smith could be about to march on the White House. Cooper didn’t have the information to say.

Trying to analyze a situation without enough data was like looking at a photograph of a ball in flight and trying to gauge its direction. Is it going up, down, sideways? Is it about to collide with a baseball bat? Is it moving at all, or is something on the blind side holding it in place? A single frame didn’t mean a thing. Patterns were based on data. With enough datapoints, you could predict just about anything.

It was no different with Cooper’s gift. It often felt like intuition: he could go through a subject’s apartment, look at their photographs, the way they organized their closet, whether there were dishes in the sink, and from that he could make a leap, oftentimes a leap that banks of computers and teams of researchers could not. But it wasn’t a matter of visions from the Almighty, and it couldn’t be forced. Without data, he was just as clueless as anybody else looking at the photograph of the ball.

All he had right now was one Dusty Evans, a man he’d never even heard of yesterday. A loser with no prospects, no special skills, no connections that made him valuable. He seemed an unlikely conspirator for someone like John Smith. On the other hand, he was a pissed-off young man—young abnorm man—which was a demographic Smith fared well with.

Philadelphia had grown large out the window. Cooper checked his watch; about half an hour till they landed. They’d know soon enough if Evans had anything to offer them. He turned, saw his partner looking at him. “What?”

“There’s something else.” Quinn scratched at a temple. Uncomfortable, Cooper could see, and stalling.

“Am I supposed to guess?”

“Right. Let me send it to you.” Quinn tapped at his own datapad, and then a notification box appeared on Cooper’s, asking if he would accept a file. He clicked yes, and a photograph filled the screen.

It didn’t capture the fluidity with which she moved, the graceful transfer of weight in each step, the elegance of her posture. But the girl talking on the cell phone was still very, very pretty. Probably about twenty-seven, full lips, brown hair in a chic cut that highlighted a dancer’s shoulders. Skin color said Mediterranean, or Jewish, maybe. Her mascara was thick, but as she wore no other makeup it seemed exotic rather than cheap. She was slender enough he could mark her clavicles beneath her fitted T-shirt.

Very, very pretty indeed.

“That’s our bomber,” Quinn said. “The photo is from an ATM security camera. Thankfully, all the major banks use newtech lenses these days to discourage fraud, so the quality is good. Five years ago she would have been a black-and-white blur. Anyway, Val checked the time stamp against the cell tower logs and the GPS coordinates. It’s her.”