Brilliance Read online

  Light from the street revealed her face, eyes hard, lips set in a sneer. “So you’re gifted, huh?” Another glint of gold from her necklace, a delicately wrought bird. “What is it for you?”

  “Pattern recognition, especially body language.” He moved up until only half a dozen paces separated them. Kept the Beretta lowered.

  “That’s how you moved so fast.”

  “I don’t move any faster than you. I just know where you’re going to hit.”

  “Isn’t that sweet. And you use that to hunt your own kind. Do you like it?” She put her hands on her hips. “Does it make you feel powerful? I bet it does. Do your masters pat you on the head for every one of us you catch?”

  “Get down, Alex.”

  “Or you’ll shoot me?” She glanced across the narrow alley at the building opposite. The leap was far but doable, maybe six feet.

  “It doesn’t have to go this way. You haven’t hurt anyone yet.” He read the hesitation in her body, the tremble in her calf and the tension in her shoulders. “Get down and let’s talk.”

  “Talk.” She snorted. “I know how you DAR boys talk. What’s that term the politicians like? ‘Enhanced interrogation.’ Very pretty. It sounds so much nicer than torture. Just like ‘the Department of Analysis and Response’ sounds so much nicer than ‘the Bureau of Abnorm Control.’” Her body told him she was making up her mind.

  “It doesn’t have to go this way,” he repeated.

  “What’s your first name?” Her voice soft.

  “Nick.”

  “The man on the radio was right, Nick. About a war. That’s our future.” A strange resolve came over her, and she slipped her hands into her pockets. “You can’t stop the future. All you can do is pick a side.” She turned, glancing back at the alley.

  Cooper saw what she intended and started forward, but before he’d taken two steps, Alex Vasquez, hands tucked deep in her pockets, dove off the roof.

  Headfirst.

  CHAPTER 2

  Cooper spent all night and most of the following day cleaning up.

  The broken body of Alex Vasquez was the least of it. The medical examiners took care of that, joking about cause of death as they loaded her onto a gurney. He and Quinn had watched, the other agent holding an unlit cigarette, spinning it, sliding it between his lips, tucking it behind his ears. It wasn’t that he was trying to quit. He just savored the tension between holding the cigarette and the moment he lit it. Cooper watched facial muscles as Quinn finally took a deep drag and was pretty sure that the smoke itself was a letdown.

  “I always wondered if someone would be able to do that.” Quinn looked up at the roof of the hotel thirty feet above. “Must be hard to fight the survival reflexes, keep her skull leading the way.”

  “She put her hands in her pockets before she jumped.”

  Bobby Quinn whistled. “Shit, Cooper. What did you do to her up there?”

  They’d found her missing datapad in her hotel room and a stamp drive in her pocket. He’d given both to Luisa and Valerie, told them to hit the San Antonio field office and check them out. Vasquez had claimed the virus needed another week of coding. If she was telling the truth, the thing was far too complex for another programmer to easily finish.

  I dream the most beautiful programs never written.

  About two in the morning he’d put in a call to Drew Peters, director of Equitable Services. Despite the hour, his boss sounded wide awake. “Nick, good. What’s the word?”

  “Alex Vasquez is dead.”

  There was a pause. “Was that necessary?”

  “She killed herself.” Cooper hated talking on the phone. He felt handicapped when he couldn’t see the other person, the play of their muscles and the change in their pores and the widening of their pupils. When he couldn’t see someone, he had to take their words for what they were instead of reading the meaning beneath them. He’d heard that some readers actually preferred the phone because it stripped away the wild dissonance between what people said and what they were thinking, but for him, that was akin to cutting out his tongue because he didn’t like the way something tasted. “I couldn’t stop her.”

  “Too bad. I’d have liked to have talked to her.”

  “I think that’s why she killed herself. We spoke before she jumped, and she mentioned interrogation. It scared her. Not the process, but what she might tell us.”

  Another long pause. “Hard to see an upside to that.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “All right. Well, still a success, even if not total. Nice work, son. Get everything settled and come home.”

  After the call, there had been cops to deal with, and jurisdiction issues. The department wielded broad powers no local dared question, but government work always had a CYA factor, and there had been forms to fill out, authorization codes to pass, after-incident reports to write. His team had questioned the other patrons, making sure that Vasquez didn’t have a partner among them. He’d arranged to have the body shipped back to DC—thirty years since the first brilliants, and the scalpel crew still liked to take their brains apart—and put in calls for regional law enforcement to deliver the bad news to next of kin. Vasquez had a mother in Boston and a father in Flint, both normals. One brother, Bryan, also normal, a once-promising engineer turned dropout, last seen peddling weed in Berkeley.

  The previous days had been a long run, and Cooper felt raw and exhausted with the forms and the procedure, all the trappings of civilized law enforcement. Patience for bureaucracy wasn’t his strong suit even when he wasn’t worn out. When he finally got on the charter jet back to DC, the reclining seat felt like a featherbed. He glanced at his watch, figured a three-hour flight with an hour time difference, plus a ride from Dulles to Del Ray, call it ten o’clock. Late but not too late. He leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. Found a vision of Alex Vasquez waiting for him, that quarter turn she made when he had realized her intention, the way she had thrust her hands deep in the pockets of her jeans. The way she had planted herself off her right foot as she bent into her leap.

  I dream the most beautiful programs never written.

  Cooper was asleep before wheels up. If he dreamed of anything, he didn’t remember it.

  A hand on his shoulder woke him. He blinked, looked up, saw the flight attendant smiling down at him. “Sorry. We’re landing.”

  “Thanks.”

  “No problem.” The woman held the smile. It was a coquettish look, but he could see that it was practiced. “You need anything?”

  “I’m okay.” He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and glanced out the window. DC was smeared with rain.

  From the seat across the aisle, Quinn said, “I think she’s sweet on you.”

  “That’s because she doesn’t realize I work for the government.” He stretched, the joints in his shoulders and elbows popping. The jet was a commercial charter, nicer than the military gear they often used. He and Quinn were the only passengers. Luisa Abrahams and Valerie West, the other two members of his team, would be catching flights home tomorrow, after they’d finished wrapping up in San Antonio. Speaking of…

  “Any word on the virus?”

  “Good news, bad news. Luisa says the virus is, and I quote, ‘one vicious cunt of a piece of code.’ Good news is it’s not finished, and Valerie doesn’t think another programmer would be able to pick up where it leaves off. Says she definitely couldn’t.”

  “What’s the bad news?”

  “Vasquez wouldn’t have been able to use it. It would have to get past military security protocols. Those are designed by our best twists.”

  Cooper shot him a look.

  “No offense. Anyway, Luisa said that to work, it would have to be introduced inside the firewall.”

  “So Alex Vasquez had a contact. Someone inside the military.”

  “It would need to be someone with serious juice. Think that’s why she took her final bow? So she wouldn’t give up the name?”

  “Maybe.” The
fear of betraying a friend or lover might have given her the strength. Cooper wasn’t the suicidal type, but he imagined that if you were going to go by jumping, you’d want somewhere high and certain, a place where the ground was an abstraction. Vasquez would have been able to see every mark on the concrete, every piece of gum trod black, every bit of broken bottle sparkling up. It must have taken tremendous will to tuck her hands in her pockets and hurl her head at the concrete.

  The jet touched the runway, bounced once, and then settled in, the roar of air and engine growing as they braked to a taxi.

  “Got word from the office, too. Something’s brewing.”

  “What?”

  “No specifics yet. Just a lot of chatter at this point. But it’s got everybody keyed up.”

  What a surprise. Everybody’s been keyed up since 1986.

  That was the year Dr. Eugene Bryce had published a study in the science journal Nature formally identifying the brilliants, the oldest of whom were six. At that point, they were a curiosity, a weird phenomenon that people expected would likely be linked to pesticides or vaccinations or the deterioration of the ozone layer. An evolutionary blip.

  It had been twenty-seven years since that study, and though thousands more had followed, the world was no closer to understanding the causes.

  What was known was that slightly under one percent of children were born brilliant. The vast majority had fourth- and fifth-tier gifts: calendar identification, speed-reading, eidetic memory, high-digit calculation. Incredible abilities, but not problematic ones.

  Then there were tier ones like Erik Epstein.

  To Epstein, the movements of the stock market were as obvious as code had been to Vasquez. He’d racked up a net worth of $300 billion before the government had shut down the New York Stock Exchange in 2011. Most nations had followed suit. Global markets remained shuttered to this day. Debt holders had gone crazy. Property-rights lawsuits were on the docket in every country. Entrepreneurialism had vanished overnight; small caps had folded; the Third World had gotten even more screwed up than usual.

  All because of one man.

  Normal humanity could see the writing on the wall. What had once been a curiosity was now a threat. Whatever you called them—brilliants, gifted, abnorms, twists—they changed everything.

  Hence the Department of Analysis and Response, an attempt to deal with a radically shifting world. Though only fifteen years old, the DAR already had unspecified funding greater than the NSA. The agency handled testing, monitoring, research; it advised lawmakers and occupied a cabinet post. And every time a gifted engineer jumped technology forward a decade, the DAR got another half a billion. Still, as long as abnorms were productive members of society, good citizens who obeyed the laws, they were afforded the same rights and protections as everyone else.

  It was the ones who didn’t play nice that Equitable Services was concerned with.

  “Anyway, sounds like it’s all hands on deck to find the signal in the noise. No rest for the virtuous.” Bobby Quinn spoke through a yawn. “You drive here, or should I call for a ride?”

  “Call a ride.” He pulled his bag down and then dug out his keys.

  “Umm, Cooper?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Aren’t those car keys?”

  “Looks like.”

  Quinn rolled his eyes. “Must be nice to be Drew Peters’s fair-haired boy.”

  “Let me know if you find anything.” Cooper walked down the aisle, toward the open door. The flight attendant smiled as he passed. He smiled back, then walked down the stairs to the runway.

  The weather had driven DC indoors, and he made good time. Del Ray was at the north end of Alexandria, a cozy neighborhood of single-family homes nuzzling close against one another. The houses were well maintained and solidly middle class, with a sodden flag dangling from every fourth porch.

  Natalie’s was a tidy Folk Victorian, two stories, bright blue, and dotted with windows. A picket fence framed a postage-stamp yard, within which a black dirt bike lay on its side under a maple. Cooper pulled into the drive and killed the engine. He slid the Beretta and holster off his belt and locked both in the case beneath the passenger seat. The downstairs lights were on; he might not be too late after all.

  The rain had picked up, and Cooper hurried up the walkway, still wishing for a jacket. As he approached the front door, he heard footsteps behind it. There was the click of a deadbolt, and then the door swung inward. His ex-wife wore striped pajama bottoms and a worn T-shirt with a Greenpeace logo. Natalie’s feet were bare, her hair pulled into a ponytail. She smiled at him. “Nick.”

  “Hey,” he said as he stepped inside. He gave her a hug and was briefly enveloped in her familiar smell. “I’m sorry it’s late. I wanted to see them.”

  “They’re asleep.”

  “Can I pop in anyway?”

  “Sure,” she said. “I just opened some red. Want a glass?”

  “Bless you. Yes.” He bent over to untie his shoes, left them on the mat next to a jumble of sneakers. “I won’t be long.”

  The hall light was off, but Cooper had climbed these stairs ten thousand times. He padded up, skipping the squeaky step at the top. Gently, he opened the door to their room and stepped in. Pale light filtered in the windows, and he paused to let his eyes adjust.

  The room smelled of children, that sunlight smell over socks and sweat. The left side had posters of dinosaurs and nebulae, a big framed image of the earth rising from the moon. There were toys in heaps, robots and knights and cowboys.

  His son was curled on his side, hair in disarray, mouth open. A thin trail of spit ran from his lips to the pillow. His comforter was a bundle at his feet. Cooper eased the blanket up to cover Todd’s Spider-Man pajamas. The boy stirred, made a soft sound, and then rolled to his other side. Cooper bent over to kiss his forehead. Nine years old already. Won’t be long before he’ll stop letting me kiss him. The thought was a bittersweet spike through his chest.

  Kate’s side of the room was neater. Even in sleep she looked composed, lying on her back, her features calm. He sat on the edge of her bed and stroked her hair, feeling the warmth of her, the unbelievable softness of her four-year-old forehead. Skin as fresh and new as a May morning. She slept with the zombie depth of a child, and he watched the easy rhythm of her inhales and exhales. Something in him was refreshed at the sight, as if she slept for them both. He lifted Fuzzy Bear from the floor and tucked him against her side.

  Walking back downstairs, he heard music playing softly, one of the obscure female folk groups Natalie liked. He followed it to the living room, found her on the couch, feet tucked girlishly beneath her, a magazine on her lap. She looked up as he walked in and gestured to a syrah on the coffee table. “The kids good?”

  He nodded, poured, sat down at the other end of the couch. “Sometimes I can’t believe we made them.”

  “Our best work.” She held up her glass, and he clinked it. The wine was full and rich. He sighed, rolled his head back, and closed his eyes.

  “Long day?”

  “I started in San Antonio.”

  “Someone you were chasing?”

  He nodded. “A woman. Programmer.”

  “Did you have to kill her?” Natalie looked at him steadily. She’d always been blunt, to the point that people sometimes mistook her for cold. In truth, she was one of the warmest people he had ever met. It was just that she had the honesty of someone with nothing to prove. That was part of what had drawn him to her, all those years ago. He rarely met people whose thoughts and words and actions so closely synced.

  “She killed herself.”

  “And you feel bad.”

  “No,” he said. “I feel fine. She was a terrorist. The computer virus she was working on could have killed hundreds—maybe thousands—of people. Crippled the military. Only thing that bugs me is…” He trailed off. “Sorry. Do you really want to know?”

  She shrugged, the ripple of her trapezii graceful beneath her thin T
-shirt. “I’ll listen if you need.”

  He wanted to tell her, not because he was troubled by Vasquez’s death or because he needed Natalie’s benediction, but simply because it felt good to talk, to share his days with someone. But it wasn’t fair anymore. They’d always love each other, but it had been three years since the divorce. “No, I’m okay.” He sipped the wine. “This is good. Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  The room was warm and comfortable, scented with cinnamon from a candle on the coffee table. Outside, the rain fell soft and steady. A gust of wind stirred the trees. He wouldn’t stay long—they were good about boundaries—but it felt nice to sit in this sanctuary with his children asleep above him.

  Until Natalie took a tiny sip of wine and then leaned forward to set the glass on the table, swinging her legs to the floor. She took a breath and folded her hands in her lap.

  Ahh, shit. “What is it?”

  Nat glanced at him sideways. “You know, that used to drive me crazy. Just because you can tell I’ve got something on my mind doesn’t mean you shouldn’t shut up and wait for me to get to it.”

  “As I recall, there was an upside to me being able to read your body language.”

  “Yes, Nick. You were very good in bed. Better?”

  He smiled. “What’s on your mind?”

  “It’s Kate.”

  He stiffened, immediate paternal protectiveness leaping, the part that would always fill in the worst possible ending to any statement that began, It’s Kate. “What is it?”

  “She arranged her toys today.”

  It was such an innocuous statement that he almost laughed, his head full of all the sentences he’d imagined: It’s Kate, she fell down and hit her head. It’s Kate, the neighbor has been touching her. It’s Kate, she has meningitis. “So? She likes things neat. Lots of girls do.”

  “I know.”

  “You like things neat. Look at this place.” He gestured to the framed photos, dustless and aligned, to the square edges of the rug and the couch, to the basket on the coffee table that organized remote controls. “She’s just trying to be like Mom.”