A Better World Read online

  “So how long are you here?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “Maybe awhile.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Things.”

  “Ah. More things.”

  “It’s getting worse, Cooper. That war you’re always worrying about is closer than ever. Most people, norm or abnorm, just want to get along, but the extremists are forcing everyone to take sides. You know that in Liberia they’ve started abandoning babies with birthmarks? They believe it’s a sign of the gifted, so they just dump them. In Mexico, brilliants have taken over the cartels and are using them against the government. Private armies headed by abnorm warlords and funded by drug money.”

  “I watch the news, Shannon.”

  “Not to mention that there are right-wing paramilitary groups popping up across America. The KKK all over again. Last week in Oklahoma, a gang of straights kidnapped an abnorm, tied him to their pickup, and dragged him around a field. You know how old they were?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “Sixteen. School bombings in Georgia. Microchips implanted in people’s throats. Senators on CNN, talking about expanding the academies to include tier-two or even tier-three children.”

  He turned away, walked to a park bench, and took a seat. The pillars of the Lincoln Memorial glowed white in the floodlights, the steps still crowded with tourists. From this distance he couldn’t see the statue, but he could picture it, Honest Abe lost in thought, weighing the issues that threatened to tear apart his union.

  “Cooper, I’m serious—”

  “It’s too bad.”

  “What is?”

  “I was kind of hoping you came to see me.”

  Shannon opened her mouth, closed it.

  Cooper said, “So what does John want?”

  “How did you—”

  “Your pupils dilated, that’s focus, and you glanced left, that’s memory. Your pulse picked up ten beats. You laid out a bullet list of horrors, easy enough, but you did it in geographical order, far to near, which isn’t likely to happen randomly. And you called me Cooper, instead of Nick.”

  “I . . .”

  “That whole argument was memorized. Which means that you’re trying to convince me of something. Which means that he is trying to convince me of something. So let’s have it.”

  Shannon stared at him, the corner of her lip tucked between her teeth. Then she sat down beside him on the bench. “I’m sorry. I really did come here for you. This was separate.”

  “I know. That’s what John Smith does. He dresses his agendas in plans and wraps his plans in schemes. I get it. What does he want?”

  She spoke without looking at him. “Things have changed since he’s been exonerated. You know he wrote a book.”

  “I Am John Smith. Really put his heart into the title.”

  “He’s public now, lecturing and talking to the media.”

  “Yeah.” Cooper pinched at the bridge of his nose. “And this has what to do with me?”

  “He wants you to join him. Think how compelling that would be—Smith and the man who once hunted him, working together to change the world.”

  Cooper stared out at the fading light, the people climbing the stairs of the memorial. It was open twenty-four hours a day, which he’d always found moving.

  “I know you don’t trust him,” she said softly. “But you also know he’s innocent. You proved it.”

  It wasn’t just Lincoln, either. Martin Luther King Jr. had stood on those steps and told the world about a dream he had. And now anyone could come here, any hour of the day, from the aristocracy to the guy emptying the trash—

  The garbageman’s posture is rigid, his hair is agency short, and he’s been emptying that can for a long time.

  While he does, he’s looking everywhere except to his right . . . where a businessman is talking on a cell phone. A cell with a dark display. A businessman with a bulge under one arm.

  And that sound you hear is the rev of a high-cylinder engine. Super-charged.

  —and everyone was welcome.

  Cooper turned to Shannon. “First, John is as innocent as Genghis Khan. He may not have done the things he was blamed for, but he’s bloody to the elbows. Second, get out of here.”

  She was a pro and didn’t make any sudden moves, just took in the space like she was enjoying the view. He caught the subtle tightening in her posture as she spotted the trashman. “We’re better together.”

  “No,” he said. “I’m still a government agent. I’ll be okay. You’re a wanted criminal. Do your thing. Walk through walls.”

  The sound was growing louder, engines coming from multiple directions. SUVs, most likely. He glanced over his shoulder, turned back. “Listen, I mean it—”

  Shannon was gone.

  Cooper smiled, shook his head. That trick never got old.

  He stood and removed his jacket, took his wallet from his pocket, and set both on the ground. Then he stepped back and put his arms out, his palms empty.

  They were good. Four black Escalades with tinted glass swept in at the same time from four different directions, a Busby Berkeley raid. The doors winged open, and men spilled out with choreographed precision, leaning across the hood with automatic rifles. Easily twenty of them, nicely arrayed, with clean firing lines.

  The good news was that this team was so clearly professional, and operating with such impunity, that they were almost certainly governmental. The bad news was that there were plenty of people in the government who wanted him dead.

  Ah well. Keeping his hands wide, he shouted, “My name is Nick Cooper. I’m an agent with the Department of Analysis and Response. I’m unarmed. My identification is in my wallet on the ground.”

  A man in a nondescript suit climbed out of the rear of one of the SUVs. He walked across the circle, and as he did, Cooper noticed that the guns were now swiveling to cover other directions.

  “We know who you are, sir.” The agent reached down, picked up Cooper’s wallet and coat, and handed them back. Then he spoke in the clipped tone used to broadcast into a microphone. “Area secure.”

  A limousine pulled around the circular drive. It bumped up over the curb, glided between two SUVs, and stopped in front of them. The agent opened the door.

  With a mental shrug, Cooper climbed in. The car smelled of leather. There were two occupants. One was a trim woman in her midfifties with steely eyes and an aura of intense competence. The other was a black man with the look of a Harvard don . . . which he had in fact once been.

  Huh. And you thought the day was headed in a strange direction before.

  “Hello, Mr. Cooper. May I call you Nick?”

  “Of course, Mr. President.”

  “I apologize for the rather dramatic way this meeting came about. We’re all a little bit on edge these days.” Lionel Clay had a lecturer’s voice, rich and deep and dripping erudition, rounded just slightly with South Carolina twang.

  That’s a polite way to put it. As the gifted continued to dominate every field from athletics to zoology, normal people were growing nervous. It wasn’t hard to imagine a world divided into two classes like something out of H. G. Wells, and no one wanted to be a Morlock. On the other hand, the more extreme elements of the gifted weren’t fighting for simple equality—they believed they were superior, and were willing to kill to prove it. America had grown accustomed to terrorism, to suicide bombers in shopping malls and poison mailed to senators. Worst of all had been the March 12th attacks; 1,143 people died when terrorists blew up the stock exchange in Manhattan. Cooper had been there, had wandered the shattered gray streets in a daze. Sometimes he still dreamed about a pink stuffed animal abandoned in a Broadway intersection. We’re more than on edge—we’re batshit scared. But what he said was, “I understand, sir.”

  “This is my chief of staff, Marla Keevers.”

  “Ms. Keevers.” Though Cooper had been a government agent for eleven years, politics had never been his thing; still, even he knew of Marla Keevers. A hardcore political fixer, a backroom dealer with a reputation for ferocity.

  “Mr. Cooper.”

  The president rapped his knuckles on the partition, and the limo slid into motion. “Marla?”

  The chief of staff said, “Mr. Cooper, did you release the Monocle video?”

  Well, so much for preliminaries.

  He thought back to that evening. After Shannon freed his children, Cooper had chased his old boss up to the roof. He’d retrieved the video of Drew Peters conspiring with President Walker, and then he’d tossed his mentor off the twelve-story building.

  That had felt good.

  Afterward, Cooper sat on a bench not far from here deciding what to do with the video. The massacre at the Monocle restaurant had been the first and most incendiary step in dividing the country: not North versus South, not liberal versus conservative, but normal versus abnorm. Revealing the truth about that attack felt like the right thing to do, even though he knew it would have consequences beyond his control.

  What was it Drew had said just before the end? “If you do this, the world will burn.”

  President Clay was watching him. It was a test, Cooper realized. “Yes, I did.”

  “That was a very reckless decision. My predecessor may not have been a good man, but he was the president. You undermined the nation’s faith in the office. In the government as a whole.”

  “Sir, if you’ll forgive me saying, President Walker undermined that when he ordered the murder of American citizens. All I did was tell the truth.”

  “Truth is a slippery concept.”

  “No, the great thing about the truth is that it’s true.” A hint of that old antiauthority tone was coming out, and he caught himself. “Sir.”

  Keevers shook her head, turned t
o look out the window. Clay said, “What are you doing these days, Nick?”

  “I’m on leave from the DAR.”

  “Are you planning to return?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Come work for me instead. Special advisor to the president. How does that sound?”

  If Cooper had listed a hundred things the president of the United States might have said to him, that wouldn’t have made the cut. He realized his mouth was open, and closed it. “I think maybe you have bad information. I don’t know anything about governing.”

  “Let’s cut through it, shall we?” Clay fixed him with a steady gaze. “Walker made a mess of things. He and Director Peters turned the DAR, which might have been our best hope for a peaceful future, into a private spy shop for personal gain. Would you agree?”

  “I—yes. Sir.”

  “You yourself have killed more than a dozen people and leaked highly classified information.”

  Cooper nodded.

  “And yet out of the entire catastrophe, you were the only person who acted righteously.”

  Keevers wrinkled her lips at that, but said nothing. The president leaned forward. “Nick, things are getting worse. We’re on the edge of a precipice. There are normals who want to imprison or even enslave all brilliants. There are abnorms who favor genocide of everyone normal. A new civil war that could make the last one look like a minor skirmish. I need help averting it.”

  “Sir, I’m flattered, but I really don’t know the first thing about politics.”

  “I have political advisors. What I don’t have is the firsthand opinion of an abnorm who dedicated his life to hunting abnorm revolutionaries. Plus, you’ve proven that you will do what you believe is right, no matter the cost. That’s the kind of advisor I need.”

  Cooper stared across the limousine. Scrambled to remember what he knew of the president. A history professor at Harvard, then a senator. He had a vague memory of an article he’d read, a piece suggesting that the real reason Clay had been chosen as VP was for electoral math. As a black man from South Carolina, he’d mobilized both the South and the African-American vote.

  Jesus, Cooper. A vague memory of an article? That right there tells you whether you belong in this car.

  “I’m sorry, sir. I truly appreciate the offer, but I don’t think I’m the man for the job.”

  “You misunderstand,” Clay said mildly. “Your country needs you. I’m not asking.”

  Cooper looked at—

  Clay’s posture, his body language, they’ve been perfectly in line with his words.

  This isn’t a PR move or a way to quiet you.

  And everything he said about the state of the world is accurate.

  —his new boss.

  “In that case, sir, I serve at the pleasure of the president.”

  “Good. What do you know about a group called the Children of Darwin?”

  ONE WEEK BEFORE THANKSGIVING

  CHAPTER 2

  Ethan Park stared.

  The supermarket shelf was empty. Not thinly stocked. Not lacking variety. Empty. Cleaned out.

  He closed his eyes, felt the world wobble. Long hours he was used to; the research team had been on the edge of a breakthrough for a year, and as they’d moved into proof-of-concept trials, the days had started blurring, meals eaten standing up, naps snatched in break room chairs. He’d been tired for a year.

  But it wasn’t until Amy gave birth to Violet that he discovered true exhaustion. The blackness behind his closed eyes felt dangerously good, a bed on a cold night that he could just wrap himself in, drift away—

  He snapped to, opened his eyes, and checked the shelf again. Still empty. The sign above the aisle read SEVEN: VITAMINS – CANNED ORGANICS – PAPER TOWELS – DIAPERS – BABY FORMULA. Paper towels there were still plenty of, but on the shelf that until today had held Enfamil and Similac and Earth’s Best, there was only dust and an abandoned shopping list.

  Ethan felt oddly betrayed. When you ran out of something, you went to the grocery store. It was practically the basis for modern life. What happened when you couldn’t take that for granted?

  You return to your exhausted wife and hungry baby with a dumb look on your face.

  Before they’d had a child, he’d scoffed at the idea that breast-feeding was difficult. He was a geneticist. Feeding the young was what breasts were for. How hard could it be?

  Pretty hard, it turned out, for dainty modern-day breasts, breasts draped in cotton and lace, breasts that never felt wind or sunlight, never chafed and roughened. After a month of agonizingly slow feedings, of being patronized by a “lactation consultant” peddling specialized pillows and homeopathic creams, of Amy’s nipples cracking and bleeding and finally growing infected, they’d called a halt. She’d tied down her breasts with an Ace bandage to stop milk production, and they’d switched to powdered formula. Their entire generation had been raised on it, and they’d done okay. Plus, it was so easy.

  Easy, that was, until there was no formula on the shelf.

  So. Options.

  Well, at Violet’s age, bovine milk was not ideal. Casein protein micelles were too taxing for a baby’s developing kidneys. On the other hand, cow’s milk is better than no milk—

  The dairy case was empty. There was a piece of paper taped to it.

  WE APOLOGIZE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE. RECENT ATTACKS HAVE DISRUPTED SHIPPING. WE HOPE TO BE RESTOCKED SOON. THANK YOU FOR YOUR PATIENCE IN THIS DIFFICULT TIME.

  Ethan stared at the paper. Yesterday everything had been normal. Now there was no formula on the shelves. No milk in the fridge. What was happening here?

  Baking.

  He spun on his heel and jogged down the aisle, conscious of shoppers piling goods indiscriminately, clearing whole shelves into their carts, arguing and shoving. Ethan had a vision of the store an hour from now, cleared down to greeting cards and magazines and school supplies. Maybe no one had thought of . . .

  Where the evaporated milk should be was just a glaring hole.

  Ethan squatted down in front of it, stared at the back of the shelf, hoping a can or two had been missed. Knowing they hadn’t.

  Another store.

  The front of the Sav-A-Lot was jammed, the checkout lines overflowing. The checkers looked stunned. Ethan pushed his way outside.

  It was mid-November, cloudy and cold. He jumped at the honk of a horn, an Audi that barely slowed. The parking lot was overflowing, a line of cars backing out to Detroit Avenue. He climbed in the truck and tuned in WCPN as he spun out of the parking place.

  “—reports of massive shortages across the entire Cleveland metro area. Police are asking everyone to remain calm. We’re joined now by Dr. James Garner of the Department of Transportation and Rob Cornell of the Department of Analysis and Response. Dr. Garner, can you break this down for us?”

  “I’ll try. Early this morning there was a series of devastating attacks on the shipping industry in Tulsa, Fresno, and of course Cleveland. Terrorists hijacked more than twenty trucks and murdered the drivers.”

  “Not just murdered them.”

  “No.” The man coughed. “The drivers were burned alive.”

  Jesus Christ. There had been a lot of attacks in the last years. Terrorism had become a fact of life in America. They’d all almost gotten used to it. Then March 12th had happened, the explosion in the new stock exchange in Manhattan. More than 1,100 people dead, thousands more injured, and suddenly there was no ignoring the unpleasant schism developing in America. But as hideous as that attack had been, there was something worse about this, something more brutal and intimate about pulling a living soul from his truck, pouring gasoline on him, and striking a match.

  “—in addition, supply depots in all three cities were bombed. Fire crews stopped the blazes in Tulsa and Fresno, but Cleveland’s depot was destroyed.”

  The announcer cut in. “All credited to the abnorm group calling itself the Children of Darwin. But these are major cities, with thousands of deliveries.”

  “Yes. But because of the attacks on drivers, insurance carriers had no choice but to withdraw coverage across the board. Without insurance, trucks are prohibited from even leaving the yard.”

  Ethan had made two stoplights but caught the third. His fingers tapped at the wheel as he waited.