“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.”