Marcus Sakey: Brilliance

“Don’t joke,” she said, but she wrinkled her nose, and he knew the topic was safe for the moment.

She walked him to the door, the hardwood floors creaking with each step. The wind gusted outside, the storm picking up.

“I’ll tell them you came by,” Natalie said.

“Thanks.” He took her hands. “And don’t worry about Kate. It will be okay.”

“It has to be. She’s our baby.”

In that moment, he remembered Alex Vasquez just before she’d gone off the roof. The way the light had caught her from below, throwing her features into contrast. The determination in her pose. The way her voice had softened as she spoke.

You can’t stop the future. All you can do is pick a side.

“What is it?” Natalie asked.

“Nothing. Just the weather.” He smiled at her. “Thanks for the drink.” He opened the front door. The rain was louder, and the wind cold. He gave his ex-wife a final wave, then jogged down the path. It was one of those soaking storms, and his shirt was plastered to his shoulders by the time he reached his car. Cooper yanked open the door and slid inside, shutting out the storm. I really need to invest in a jacket.

His phone was DAR issue, and he activated the scrambler before he dialed, then tucked it between ear and shoulder as he pulled the case from beneath the passenger seat. “Okay.” The case was brushed aluminum, locked with a combination. He popped the latches. The Beretta was nestled in the clip-lock holster atop black foam. Funny, all the ways the gifted had jumped the world forward, and firearms technology remained fundamentally the same. But then, it hadn’t changed all that much since the Second World War. Guns could be faster, lighter, more accurate, but a bullet was essentially a bullet. “What’s going on?”

“Are you secure?”

“Sure.”

“Coop—”

“The scrambler’s on, and I’m sitting alone in a car in the middle of a hurricane outside my ex-wife’s house. What do you want me to say?”

“Yeah, all right. Sorry to interrupt, but get here. Someone you’re going to want to talk to.”

“Who?”

“Bryan Vasquez.”

Alex Vasquez’s older brother. The burnout with no last-known address. “Stuff him in an interview room for the night. I’ll get to him tomorrow.”

“No can do. Dickinson is already with him.”

“ What? What is he doing with my target’s brother?”

“I don’t know. But you know how our records showed that Bryan was a loser? Turns out, not so much. He’s actually a big shot at a company called Pole Star. His sister must have hacked their records, and ours. Pole Star is a defense contractor. Know what they specialize in?”

Cooper switched the phone to his other ear. “Guidance systems for military aircraft.”

“You’ve heard of them?” Quinn sounded surprised.

“Nope.”

“Then how—”

“Alex needed someone to plant her virus. They were working together?”

“Yeah,” Quinn said. “Not only that. He claims they were working with John Smith directly.”

“Bullshit.” Cooper picked up the Beretta, checked the load, then leaned forward and attached the holster to his belt.

“I don’t know. You should see the light in this guy’s eyes. And there’s more.” Quinn took a deep breath, and when he spoke again, his voice sounded muffled, as though he were cupping a hand around the receiver. “Cooper, he says there’s going to be an attack. A big one. Something that makes his sister’s virus look tame.”

The air in the car had grown cold, and Cooper’s flesh goose-bumped under the wet shirt. “Her virus would have killed hundreds of people.”

Bobby Quinn said, “Yeah.”

Like most institutions of its kind, the Department of Analysis and Response wasn’t much to look at from the street. There was a granite sign fronted by a neatly tended flowerbed, and half a dozen security gatehouses. A dense line of trees screened everything beyond.

The guards who stepped out were trim and serious looking, dressed in tactical blacks with submachine guns slung on shoulder straps. One of them circled the car, a heavy flashlight in one hand; the other moved to the driver’s side window.

“Evening, sir.”

“Hey, Matt. I told you, it’s Cooper.”

The man smiled, looked down at the ID Cooper held, then back up at his face. His partner shone the flashlight into the backseat of the car, the fingers of his right hand resting lightly on the grip of his weapon. “Hell of a night, huh?”

“Yeah.”

The flashlight spearing through his rear windows snapped off. The guard glanced over the car roof, then said, “Have a good one, sir.”

Cooper nodded, rolled the window up, and pulled through the gate.

To a casual eye, the road might have seemed designed for aesthetic reasons, winding as it did around nothing in particular. But the design concealed the protective measures. The curves limited speed, reducing the chance a car bomb could reach the complex. The manicured grounds assured excellent sight lines for sniper towers not quite hidden by clusters of very precisely pruned trees. Half a dozen times the steady hum of his tires hiccupped as he rolled over retracted spike strips. From the parking lot, Cooper could just make out the tips of the antiaircraft clusters mounted on the roof of the building.

Hell of a long way from the beginning. Had it really been seven years ago that he’d followed Drew Peters into the old paper plant? Cooper could still taste that faded fart stink, could see the slanting shafts of sunlight through high factory windows. The building had been shuttered for a decade, cheap, clean space hidden back in a Virginia industrial park. The director had led the way, followed by Cooper and eighteen others, all handpicked, all nervous, and all trying not to show it. Twenty highly skilled individuals who comprised the newest division of the DAR, the razor tip of a unique spear. Equitable Services. “The believers,” Peters had called them.

And for eighteen months, belief was about all they had. They worked on card tables in that drafty warehouse. Funding was so tight that there’d been a couple of months when they’d gone without pay. After the first terminations, the justice department launched an investigation to shut them down. Half the believers quit. Drew Peters remained steadfast, but circles began to form beneath his eyes. There were rumors of a pending congressional subcommittee, of a public excoriation. What they were doing was extreme, a privilege never granted to an agency—the right to hunt and execute civilians. Peters had assured them that he had support at the highest levels, that what they did was outside the traditional legal system. But if he was wrong, they’d face jail and possibly the death penalty.

Then an abnorm terrorist named John Smith walked into the Monocle, a Capitol Hill restaurant, and butchered seventy-three people, among them a US senator and six children. Suddenly, Drew Peters’s vision didn’t seem so extreme. Within a year, the paper plant hummed with activity; within two, Equitable Services had earned a reputation as the most prestigious subgroup of the DAR.

The rain had downshifted to a drizzle as Cooper parked and jogged to the front door. The internal security measures were just as stringent: a two-stage entrance, each requiring an ID scan and a video capture, a metal detector that his ID allowed him to bypass, an explosive-trace detection system that it did not, all overseen by men with body armor and automatic weapons. He went through it on autopilot, mind replaying the conversation with Quinn, running the angles. Wondering if it was possible that Alex and Bryan Vasquez really did work for John Smith. Wondering what it would mean if they did.