Written in Fire (The Brilliance Trilogy Book 3) (16 page)

“No. Stay here, and stay sharp.” Luke cut around the perimeter, trying to ignore the stares of frightened children. The dome was modular, with the gymnasium being the largest section, and inflated halls led to group dorms and classrooms. The good news was that there couldn’t be too many places to hide. Doubtless he’d find the missing one under a bed.

At the door, a thought struck him, and he turned around and did another quick headcount. 2, 4, 6, 8 . . . 9. Ten counting himself.

Something in him went icy, and he unsnapped the strap on his sidearm.

The hallway beyond the gym was quiet, just the moaning of the wind against the fabric, and, faint, the sound of a voice and something that might have been a whimper. Luke started out as swiftly as silence would allow, then decided screw silence, and ran.

He found them in one of the classrooms, the sound of pleading coming through a zippered canvas door. The girl was blonde and crying, stretched face-first over a desk. She flopped and yanked, but she was probably sixteen, and thin. Gorecki was behind her tugging at her jeans, while one of the others, a guy out of Michigan named Healy, held both her arms in beefy hands.

When Luke ripped the door open, Healy straightened, an
oh shit
look on his face. Gorecki turned awkwardly, his pants around his ankles to expose his weapon.

For a moment they all stared, Luke and his teammates and the girl too, her head turned sideways and tears streaking her face.

Gorecki said, “She’s just a twist, man.”

Luke thought of his boys, his fine sons, burning alive. Josh burning in the sky, Zack burning in his tank. Soldiers, both of them. Both murdered by abnorms, by the work of a tier-one computer programmer. A tier one like this girl.

He drew his sidearm, braced it in both hands, and shot Gorecki twice through center mass and once in the head, swiveled, and did the same to Healy.

Then he holstered the weapon and went to look for a blanket for her.

CHAPTER 18

Cooper died again.

The knife was a Fairbairn-Sykes, a slender dagger useful only for killing. Made of carbon-fiber sharpened to a point a molecule thick, it slid through clothes and flesh and muscle to skewer the left ventricle of the heart. Death was almost instant.

Soren withdrew the blade and started away, his face expressionless.

“Repeat,” Cooper said.

The projection jumped back ten seconds. Breakfast out for him and Natalie and the kids, a couple of weeks ago. It was security footage, but taken in the Holdfast, so both the coverage and resolution were extraordinary. He could remember the conversation perfectly, Todd talking about soccer here, how the rules were different because of the brilliants, and Cooper was listening and joking around, and then on the edge of the screen Soren slit the throat of one bodyguard, then took three steps and opened the brachial artery of a second. Blood spray lashed nearby tables.

In the footage, Cooper didn’t hesitate. He stood and hurled a chair as he charged. The fight was brief and pitiful: the chair missed, his jab missed, and his hook was blocked by the edge of the dagger, which split his hand in half. And that was as good as it got.

What came next was a nightmare. Todd, seeing his dad hurt, ran to help. Soren cocked an arm and spun with terrible force, his elbow colliding with Todd’s temple, snapping the boy’s head sideways. In the footage, Cooper screamed, then launched himself at Soren, who positioned the dagger precisely to slide through clothes and flesh and muscle to skewer the left ventricle of the heart.

Cooper died again.

Even now, knowing that Todd was going to be okay, that Soren had failed—that Cooper had later beaten him—it still tore shreds from his sanity to watch that elbow whistle through the air, to see his son’s eyes go glassy.

That’s the point of this exercise, right? Remind yourself what you’re facing.

He’d been so pleased with himself for thinking of the carrot for Soren. He’d hated it, too, the notion of presenting comfort to the monster who had attacked his son. But sitting in the virtual chapel beside the assassin, he had again felt an emotion he didn’t want: pity.

It was the wetness in Soren’s eyes. Tears prompted by hearing music for the first time.
Imagine the strength it must have taken to yank himself from that dream. To possess what he had always wanted but never believed possible . . . and to refuse it.

Cooper was still reeling. Soren’s will had inspired something like awe in him, and he couldn’t afford that. Which was why he’d found this quiet conference room to relive the worst moment of his life again and again.

He was about to tell the terminal to repeat the video when his phone pinged. Funny, his phone used to be practically a living thing, always buzzing with a message, an e-mail, an alert, a status update. But in the last months, he’d dropped out of that world. Out of the world at large, really. Now it was something of a novelty to get a message.

Q
UINN:
N
EED TO TALK.
ASA-F’
ING
-P.

Cooper started to type a reply, then remembered he was in a conference room. “System. Begin video call.” He rattled off Bobby’s number.

“All communications with locations outside the Holdfast are temporarily—”

“Override.”

“Enter authorization code, please.”

“Ask Epstein.” He waited, imagining a message popping up in Erik’s subterranean lair, one more point of data amidst a river of them. His head throbbed, one of those killer headaches right behind the eyeballs, and he rubbed at them as he waited.

A moment later the air shimmered, the footage of his death replaced by the view of a bright office, white walls with picture frames leaning against them, moving boxes stacked beside a desk. Cooper smiled. “Bobby. Scored an office in the new building, huh? I like it, a window and everything. All your ring-kissing paid off.”

Quinn wore a trim suit and an amused expression. “That took, what, forty seconds? You know, the boys will like you better if you play hard to get.”

“Just can’t help it when you’re involved.”

“Got some friends who want to say hello.” Quinn leaned forward to tap a button, and the video feed split into two.

“Jesus, boss,” Luisa Abrahams said, “you look like you spent the night blowing homeless dudes at the bus station.” Beside her, Valerie West strangled a laugh.

Not so long ago, the four of them had been a team, the most decorated in Equitable Services. They’d tracked terrorists and assassins, planned operations that spanned the country, served as the long strong arm of the United States. Years of hunting bad guys together, of late nights and delivery food and twanging nerves and last-second saves. Seeing them all now, he realized how much he’d missed that. Missed them. “Weezy,” he said, and ran a hand through his hair. “Poetic as ever. This better?”

“Oh yeah, I’m ready to switch jerseys. Sorry, babe,” she said as she nudged Val, “but I just can’t resist him any longer.”

“Enough,” Quinn said. “Is this line secure?”

“Not even a little bit. I’m in the Holdfast.”

“What? Why?”

“Pursuing my lifelong dream to become a cowboy.” Cooper shrugged. “What do you think? I’m hunting John Smith.”

“Ah. On that note, after our last chat, I got to thinking,” Quinn said. “Most of the department’s resources are focused on Epstein these days, but I was curious what our old playmate was up to. I asked Val to do a little pattern scanning.”

“Yeah, um.” The data analyst shifted in her chair. She had the pallid skin of someone who received most of her light from a computer monitor. Which was true, and part of why she was so great at what she did. It was Val who had tipped him and Ethan off to Abe Couzen in Manhattan. “Look, this is just a theory.”

“I rate your theories over other people’s facts. What have you got?”

“I think John Smith is about to attack. Like, immediately.” She paused. “You play chess, boss?”

“I know how the pieces move.”

“Okay, well, there’s basically three phases. In the opening, both sides are positioning their forces. So for Smith, that was his time on the run, building a network, recruiting followers. Then comes the midgame, which is a lot of testing weaknesses, trading pieces. It can be bloody, but it’s not the real conflict. Like the last few years: assassinations, the explosion at the stock exchange—”

“The Children of Darwin?”

“No,” she said. “They were the beginning of the endgame. Nothing is safe in the endgame—your most powerful pieces, the positions you’ve spent the whole game building, all of it can be sacrificed. All that matters is winning.”

Sounds like John Smith in a nutshell.
“So what’s his play?”

“I don’t know. But it’s big, and it’s imminent.”

“Tell me.”

“So, first warning is that Smith’s lieutenants have fallen off the radar. They all ran pretty deep anyway, but we’d always get ripples: a face-match arriving too late, some credit activity, coded messages in online havens, that sort of thing. Over the last days, that’s all stopped. I mean, gone. Then there’s the financials. You remember his smurfed bank accounts in the Caymans and Dubai?”

He nodded. The phrase “follow the money” may have been made famous by a movie, but it was standard procedure in intelligence and antiterrorism work. The DAR had a huge staff of forensic accountants dedicated to freezing illegal money. In Smith’s case, they’d never been able to prove accounts belonged to him. But there was a difference between proof and certainty, and for years, a number of suspicious offshore accounts had been closely monitored.

“In the last forty-eight hours,” Valerie said, “fourteen have gone empty.”

“How much in total?”

“North of a hundred million dollars.”

“
Holy—
can you trace it?”

She shook her head. “Our hottest coders had backchannel routines to prevent any withdrawal. I mean gray-hat stuff, quasi-legal hacks that could provoke international incidents. But the money is still gone. Worse, no alarm bells were tripped. If Quinn hadn’t asked me to look, we wouldn’t even have known.”

His stomach had a sour feeling like he’d eaten raw chicken. Cooper stared, processing. “So he’s going all in. Any guess as to his intentions?”

“Not specifically. But this is John Smith we’re talking about, right? You called him the strategic equivalent of Einstein.” Valerie shrugged. “Whatever he’s planning, it won’t be what we expect.”

And it will be devastating
. Cooper said, “Bobby, you have to take this to the director.”

“You think?” Quinn shook his head. “I love you, man, but my paychecks read DAR. I talked to her before I texted you. But remember what I said in that dive bar?”

“Yeah, that the whole world is on fire.”

“And that there’s a shortage of water.” Quinn shrugged. “The director understands the threat. But across the country we’ve got brilliants being persecuted, burned out, lynched. There are massive food shortages. Riots in a dozen cities. A militia rampaging through Wyoming. Three assassination attempts on the president in the last two weeks. The metric for threat is a moving target.”

Cooper’s headache hadn’t been improved by any of this, and he leaned his elbows on the table, dug his fingers in just above his eyes. “Did you share my theory about the tier zeroes?”

“Sure,” Quinn said. “Had to explain to the powers that be how an egghead kicked my butt.”

“Any response?”

“They agree it would be bad.”

“Terrific.” Cooper sighed, straightened. “Listen, I know you all took a risk sharing this with me. I appreciate it.”

“Oh, don’t be an asshole,” Luisa said. “Just wish you were here, boss. This is getting grim.”

“Don’t worry,” Cooper said. “I’m still fighting.”

Quinn said, “All right, partner. We need to go earn our paychecks.”

“Yeah. Thanks again.”

“No sweat. Just remember, beer is on you.”

“Forever, buddy. Forever.”

His old friend smiled and opened his mouth to reply. Before he could, everything went white, and his office window exploded in a rain of fire and sparkling glass.

The video connection failed.

But in the fraction of a second before it did, Cooper heard screaming.

CHAPTER 19

Owen Leahy was in the shower when the man came for him.

December didn’t often mean snow in northern Maryland, but somehow that was how he always thought of Camp David: bare trees brittle with frost, and a swirl of faint snowflakes. The image stuck in his head even in summer, and he’d find himself feeling chilly, craving extra blankets and hot showers. He’d been standing in the billowing steam for half an hour, thinking, idly tracing the pattern of liver spots on his forearms with water-wrinkled fingers.

Then suddenly there was an officer in a naval uniform in his private bathroom. “Mr. Secretary? There’s been an attack.”

Six minutes later, they were jogging past bare trees and frosted greenery, Leahy’s hair dripping on his suit, tie flapping behind him like a tail. Agents and soldiers were everywhere. Although officially a “country retreat,” Camp David was in effect a fortress, with antimissile batteries positioned in the woods and a nuclear-safe bunker deep underground.

When the president was in residence, the Laurel Lodge conference room served as the Situation Room. Leahy entered, quick-scanning the assembled team: representatives from the armed forces, the intelligence services, the cabinet. Many were new to their posts, replacing men and women who’d been killed in the missile strike on the White House, but he knew them all.

“Madam President.” To the room at large he said, “What’s happened?”

Sharon Hamilton, the national security advisor, said, “A wave of terrorist attacks across the country.”

“How many?”

“It’s hard to say.”

“Why?”

“They’re still taking place.” Hamilton gestured to the bank of tri-ds.

After the last year, Leahy would have bet he couldn’t be shaken by footage of disaster. He’d watched the stock exchange fall, seen Cleveland burn, watched American troops massacre each other. And in a way, what was onscreen now was no different. It was just that there was so much of it. The screens were a grid of chaos and fire. Buildings smashed, infernos raging, people running in terror. Civilians spattered in blood, walking hollow-eyed. Children crying in the streets. And on the incident map, red dots glowed across the breadth of the country.

“Jesus. Any pattern to the targets?”

“Mostly military and political. Shooters in city hall in Los Angeles. A suicide bomber in a mess hall in Fort Dix. Two trucks forced the governor of Illinois’s limo into the Chicago River. There was a bomb outside the Federal Reserve—that one was stopped. The safety controls on the natural gas lines to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta were subverted, and the bulk of the complex is on fire. Most devastating so far is a massive explosion at the DAR, bombs apparently planted during the expansion of the facility. The newest building was flattened.”

“Casualties?” He looked to Marjorie May. The DAR director’s cheerful name belied her icy blend of political savvy and ruthless efficiency. But now her voice trembled as she said, “It’s the middle of the workday. A thousand people, maybe more.”

The world wobbled, and for a moment, Leahy thought he might fall down. He gripped the edge of the table so hard his knuckles went white. “The abnorms?”

“I’ve spoken to Erik Epstein,” the president said without looking away from the screen. “He offers condolences and assures us that the Holdfast was not involved.”

“Bullshit.”

Ramirez glanced over, cocked her head. Leahy said, “Sorry, ma’am, but that seems unlikely.”

“Respectfully, I disagree,” Marjorie May said. “I think John Smith is likelier. It’s his MO, and we’ve got a pattern of indicators suggesting he was about to attack.”

“Even so, Epstein is facing invasion. That makes him the real threat.”

“Mr. Secretary, I assure you, Smith represents—”

“I understand,” Leahy said. “I’m suggesting they’ve joined forces. Smith could be functioning as Epstein’s fixer, allowing him deniability. Alternately, maybe Smith fears Epstein capitulating in order to protect New Canaan.” He paused. “Regardless, this provides the political cover we would need to attack.”

“Enough.” Gabriela Ramirez had turned from the screens.

“Madam President—”

“Sit down.”

Leahy pulled out a chair. He opened his mouth to take up the argument again, but the president cut him off. “Listen to me, all of you. ‘Who’ is not important. There are attacks on America
happening right now
. Our people are dying. The first order of business isn’t assigning blame, and it’s not gearing up for war. Our job is to stop any further attacks. To save lives. Am I understood?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Now. DAR. I’m sorry for your losses, but I need you to work through it. Can your people do that?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Good. As of this moment, the national priority is stopping more attacks. I want all resources tasked to threat analysis and prevention.”

“I understand.” Director May hesitated. “We’re going to be stretched pretty thin. Many of the people killed today were agents and operators. Plus, on any given day, we have indicators of hundreds of threats. If we’re investigating all of them, we won’t be able to do much else. Including finding the instigator of today’s attacks.”

“I want this situation under control first. Secretary Leahy.” Ramirez turned to him. “What’s your plan for halting the militia attack on the Holdfast?”

Leahy sat quietly. It was a trick he’d developed over the years: fingers on the table, eyes steady but slightly unfocused, like he was performing complex mental calculations. Make them wait. It was particularly effective at managing people who were used to immediate answers to their questions—like presidents. Just before the silence grew uncomfortable, he spoke. “Madam President, I don’t think we should.”

“Explain.”

“Sometimes the best defense is keeping your opponent off-balance. NSOL represents an opportunity to do that.”

“
If
I make the decision to attack the Holdfast, it will be with United States soldiers.”

“The public is already vocal in their desire for a response. After today’s tragedy, they will
demand
we strike back. The New Sons allow us to do that without limiting our options.”

“Mob rule is not our way.”

“Stopping the militia will be seen as a demonstration of weakness.” Before she could respond, he added, “There’s also the fact that we can’t.”

President Ramirez raised one eyebrow.

Choose your words carefully.
“The retrograde of military forces leaves us in an awkward position.” Looks danced around the room, everyone catching the subtle jab. Ramirez had ordered the retrograde, and though Leahy hadn’t said as much, the hint of blame wasn’t hard to catch.

“Are you saying that our military isn’t currently capable of stopping a crowd of civilians?”

“I’m saying, ma’am, that any incursion into the Holdfast has a good chance of being perceived as an attack. Even if our only purpose is to turn back the militia, there is no way Epstein can be sure of that. Not only that, but the retrograde isn’t complete. There are still numerous vulnerabilities in our armed forces.” Leahy gestured to the tri-d where live footage of the DAR complex ran. The ruined building looked like God had stomped on it. Choking smoke rose from a hundred places, and bodies were strewn everywhere. “Today is a reminder of what abnorms are capable of. If we corner Epstein, there’s no guarantee that he won’t launch an all-out attack.”

He thought about adding more, decided against it. After a long moment, Ramirez turned back to the screens.

Leahy didn’t let himself smile. He wouldn’t have wished for the events of the day, but he could use them. The terrorists continued to miss the point. The more damage they wrought, the more they strengthened the position of men like him. Ramirez had basically ordered the DAR to chase their tails playing defense, and in the meantime, left the field open to those who could see that no game was ever won on defense alone.

Even now, the New Sons of Liberty were pushing deeper into the Holdfast. The drone bombardment hadn’t stopped them; Epstein’s bluff had failed. What came next wouldn’t be pretty, but it would be effective.

You’re going to have your war. The war America needs. Focused, contained, and crucial.

And when it’s over, you’ll still be standing—atop the heap.