Marcus Sakey - Brilliance

Cooper said nothing, just looked at the woman. She had the hint of a smile on her lips, like she knew a secret.

“Thing is…” Quinn hesitated.

“I was right beside her.”

“Yeah.”

Cooper laughed through his nose, then took a deep breath. “I was afraid of that.” He caught Quinn’s look and said, “Yesterday, when we found out where the call came from, I was thinking back, and I thought I might have been.”

“Did you notice her at the time?”

“Look at her.”

“But you didn’t…”

Cooper shook his head. “Not a clue.” He laughed again and saved the photo to his desktop. “We got anything on her?”

“Nothing.”

“What about the phone she used?”

“It belonged to a woman, dental hygienist, named Leslie—” Quinn checked, “—Anders. We talked to her; she noticed her phone was missing last night, thought she’d left it somewhere. We’re confirming, but I think she’s clean. My guess is Foxy Brown there lifted it from her purse.”

“We recover it?”

“Nah. Probably in the sewers.” Quinn shook his head. “She whupped us good, boss. Twenty agents, an airship, cameras all over the place, snipers, and she strolled right in and blew up our witness.” His partner didn’t explicitly mention that the girl had stood beside Cooper while she triggered the bomb, but that was only because the words were in parentheses.

Cooper sighed. Crushed his d-pad into a square and jammed it in his pocket. “Well, one thing’s for sure.”

“What’s that?”

“Roger Dickinson is having a better day than I am.”

By one o’clock they were rolling through Elizabeth in a black Escalade commandeered from a DAR tactical response team. Bobby Quinn was expanding on one of his theories, and Cooper was driving and trying not to listen. The truck had been rebored and given twin turbochargers, and the result was a roar of muscle Cooper was digging on.

“So I finally figured out those anti-Wyoming people,” Quinn said. “I used to think, you know, why not? I mean, who needs Wyoming? You ever been there? Of course not. No one has. And maybe it would take some of the pressure off things if abnorms had a place they knew was safe. No big surprise Erik Epstein named the place New Canaan, right? Tap into the Jewish sympathy, parallel the situations.”

“Mmm,” Cooper said. He glanced at the map on the Escalade’s GPS. Outside the window Elizabeth looked exactly the way he had imagined. The houses were mostly two stories, small but tidy, nestled close. Older domestic cars were parked in squat driveways beneath crisscrossing power lines. The kind of neighborhood where a nurse and a plumber could own a home, raise a family.

“But then I figured it out. It’s like Risk.”

“Like risk?” Cooper asked, drawn in despite himself. “Who likes risk?”

“No, Risk . You know, Risk, that board game, the one with all the little plastic pieces and the map of the world? Risk.”

“Oh. Okay.” Cooper paused. “Yeah, still not getting it, Bobby. What’s like Risk?”

“You ever play it?”

“I don’t know. A long time ago.”

“My nephews were in town, we’d done the zoo already, the Mall, and I was going crazy for something to entertain them. See, the goal of the game is to take over the world—”

“That’s your revelatory realpolitik understanding of New Canaan and norm-abnorm relations? ‘The goal is to take over the world’?”

“Just listen. You start with a certain number of pieces in different countries, and you attack the countries next to them. You get more armies every turn depending on what countries you hold. Well, continents, really, you get armies for continents, but anyway, the point is, you get different amounts for different continents.”

“Okay.” Cooper turned onto Elm Street. Evans was at 104 Elm. He checked his mirror; no sign of police cars, nothing to startle the man. The sky was white.

“So say you own Australia. And you feel pretty good about yourself, right? You took it over a bit at a time, and the rewards are coming in now, a few armies every turn. And you’ve got all that water between you and the rest of the world. You’re rolling.”

“Right.”

“Wrong. Because someone out there has Asia. And they get like three times the armies you do. Every single turn, bam, you get two armies, they get six or seven. Over one turn, it’s not a big deal, right? You started out equal, so the few extra armies make a difference, but not a crucial one. Australia is still in the game. But after a few turns, things get dicier. Asia has a lot more power already. And Australia can see that it’s going to get worse. Given ten or twenty turns? Forget it. There’s no comparison between the two. They may have started at the same place, but now one is totally at the other’s mercy.”

98, 100, 102, 104. A single-story house of no discernible architectural style, painted the color of old cream cheese. A Ford pickup was parked in the driveway. The license plate matched. Cooper drove past, then pulled the Escalade to the curb half a block down and killed the engine. “So brilliants are Asia in this. We do all the growing and advancing.”

“Yeah. Thirty years ago, humans were all basically the same. I mean, sure, try telling that to a kid in Liberia, but you take my point. Then for whatever reason, vaccinations or livestock hormones or the ozone layer, you guys come along. And wham. I mean, it’s not an opinion that you’re better than us. You empirically are.” Quinn shrugged. “Better at everything. All the technology, the software, engineering, medicine, business. Hell, music. Sports. No straight can compete. The absolute best normal computer programmer in the world, could he match Alex Vasquez?”

Cooper shook his head as he checked his Beretta. Habit; the load hadn’t changed since this morning.

“And it’s only going to get worse. Right now we’re only a few turns into the game. But in another decade? Two?” Quinn shrugged. “And the problem is, it’s hard for Australia not to do the math. Not to see that if things go on, they will become totally irrelevant. We, normal humans, will become totally irrelevant.”

“Ready to go?”

“Yeah.”

The opened the doors and climbed out. Cooper took the lead, giving the streets a quick glance as they walked east. Bobby unbuttoned his suit jacket, took out a cigarette, spun it between his fingers. The air was cool but pleasant, more fall than winter. Not far away someone was playing basketball.

“Here’s the problem with your theory,” Cooper said.

“Hit me.”

“You said Australia and Asia, right? But there are only, what, forty thousand gifted born every year in the US. So across the last thirty years we’re looking at 1.2 million, give or take. Two-thirds of those are under twenty. Call it four hundred thousand adult abnorms.”

“Right.”

“Meanwhile, there are three hundred million straights.” They came to Evans’s house and started up the walk. Cooper kept his stride calm and his eyes on the windows. “We’re not Asia, my friend. We’re not even Australia. We’re a tiny minority surrounded by a very freaked-out majority. A majority that’s desperate to own a newtech TV so they can watch Barry Adams stroll through a defensive line in tri-d, but wouldn’t want their daughter to marry him.”

“You kidding? Adams’s contract with the Bears is a hundred sixty-three million dollars. When my ex and I have the Talk with my daughter, it’s going to be, ‘Sex is only for when two people are really in love, or when one of those two people is Barry Adams, in which case remember what we said about always giving your very best effort.’ Hell, I pray my little girl will marry him.” Quinn spread his arms like a television preacher. “Lord, please, I say puh -lease , bestow upon your faithful servant a rich twist son-in-law.”