“And when I don’t leave the bathroom? You don’t think that will trigger—”
“You’ll leave in a couple of minutes, and your bracelets will move around the theater. To your team, it looks like you decided to stick around and kiss babies.” He leaned in, stared the man in the face. “No one is coming to save you.”
Again, the flash of fear, again, mastered quickly. He might be a terrorist, but he wasn’t a coward. Smith nodded. “It’s good to see you, Cooper. Been a while.”
“Three months. You’ve been busy, haven’t you? I read your book.”
“What did you think?”
“Specious self-aggrandizing nonsense dressed up in pompous prose. Tell me, did you already have it written when we sat on that peak in Wyoming and watched the sun rise?”
“Of course.”
“All but the last chapters. The ones where you talk about the Monocle video and the president’s involvement.”
“No,” John Smith said. “I had those written too.”
Cooper laughed. “I appreciate you skipping the part where you pretend to be baffled and claim that you didn’t send me off to serve your own agenda.”
“I was perfectly honest with you. You knew that I had reasons.”
“Right. You wanted to turn a pawn into a queen.”
“Which I did.” Smith rubbed at his wrists, then touched his cheek gingerly. It was swelling badly, the purpling already starting. “So. It’s your meeting. What do you want?”
Quinn snorted, then moved behind Smith. Standard interrogation technique, let the man sweat the guy he couldn’t see. Cooper said, “I want you to know that I can get to you. Anytime. There is nowhere that I can’t find you, no security you can cloak yourself in, no rhetoric that will protect you. You’re mine now. You belong to me.”
“Huh.” Smith reached slowly into his suit jacket, pulled out the cigarettes. Put one in his mouth and lit it with shaking hands. “Funny.”
Cooper reached forward and plucked the smoke from his lips. He dropped it, then twisted his toe over the burning ember. “What is?”
“I expected more from you than a Gestapo routine. You just another bully in a suit?”
“I’m not the terrorist.”
Smith shrugged, glanced over his shoulder, then back again. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m an author. A teacher.”
“Save it.” Cooper leaned in until he could smell the man’s sweat. “I know better. Let’s put aside all your old sins, the bombings and assassinations. I know that you’re behind the Children of Darwin.” He spoke calmly and focused on details. Let his eyes soak up all the tiny clues, every tremble of muscle and pulse of blood. “I know that you ordered those trucks hijacked. That you ordered your soldiers to snatch innocent men and women, handcuff them on the side of the road, pour gasoline on them, and set them on fire.”
On cue, Quinn leaned in and held his d-pad in front of Smith’s face. Cooper couldn’t see it from this side, but he knew the image, had stared at it for hours. The burned corpse of a thirty-nine-year-old truck driver named Kevin Temple, blackened skull locked in a scream, ruined arms still bound behind him.
Cooper never let his eyes move from Smith’s face. He saw the pupils dilate, the orbicularis oculae tighten, the sudden flush of blood as the brain dumped adrenaline into his system. He imagined the other sensations the man would be feeling, the pressure at his bladder, the sweat soaking his armpits, the tingle in his fingers.
He saw it all, and in that moment, he knew that he was right. Smith had planned the attacks, had ordered the burnings. Had paralyzed three cities and left millions cold and hungry. He wanted a war.
John Smith said, “Got proof?”
Cooper smiled.
Then he clocked Smith in the other eye hard enough to knock him out of his chair. Before the terrorist hit the floor, Cooper leaned forward and slid the sidearm from Bobby Quinn’s holster. The weapon felt right in his hand. A flick of the thumb disengaged the safety.
Smith moaned, then rolled onto his side, his eye squinted shut. “Because you need that now.”
Cooper straightened his arm, aimed at center forehead.
“You’re not a secret policeman anymore, Nick. You don’t work for the DAR. You can’t just murder anyone you want.” He blinked, groaned again. “You shoot me, and you’ll spend the rest of your life in prison. Once a month you’ll see your children through plexiglass.” Despite his obvious pain, Smith smiled. “Pull that trigger, and you prove the truth in everything I’ve said, everything I’ve fought for.”
He’s right. But what choice is there? Someone needs to stop him.
You may not have legal authority. But there’s such a thing as moral authority.
Quinn said, “Boss—”
Cooper pulled the trigger.
The pistol bucked in his hand, that good firm punch. The shot was deafening in the small room, echoing off the crumbling walls and fading graffiti. John Smith lay on the broken concrete floor. The bullet had torn the smile right off his face.
Cooper squatted. He paused for a long moment. Then he said, “It’s something, isn’t it? A bullet missing your head by an inch, you never forget it. You’ll feel that wind in your dreams.”
He stood up, handed the pistol back to Quinn. “You’re right. I’m not a midlevel government employee anymore. I’m the special advisor to the president of the United fucking States. I know what you’re trying to do, and I won’t allow it.” He turned and started for the door. Over his shoulder, he said, “I’m coming for you, John.”
Quinn snickered, said, “Enjoy the walk home, asshole.”
Outside the burnout, the sun was shining on a cold blue afternoon. Broken glass tinkled under their dress shoes. Quinn sidearmed the keys to the SUV into the sewer grate as they walked to the sedan they’d left waiting. Quinn started the car, and they pulled away, driving through the decay of Anacostia, DC’s blighted southwestern section.
“Well,” Quinn said, “that was bracing.”
“Yeah.” Cooper stared out the window, watching the blur of rundown houses and abandoned businesses. “You know, I almost didn’t release it.”
“Release what?”
“The video from the Monocle. After we took down Peters, I sat on a bench near the Lincoln Memorial. I had the footage of Peters and President Walker planning the attack on the Monocle. The leaders of the free world agreeing to murder seventy-three Americans. I had it loaded on my d-pad, ready to send, but I just . . . sat there. Trying to decide.”
Quinn glanced over, said nothing.
“I knew what was right,” Cooper continued. “The storybook kind of right, the things my dad taught me. That truth is its own reward, and honesty is always the best policy. But I kept thinking, what if I’m wrong? What if by sharing this, I make things worse?” He shook his head. “I don’t know, Bobby. It’s getting harder to tell which way is north. On paper, I did the right thing. But because I did, three cities are under terrorist control. Because I did, twenty men and women died screaming, burned alive.”
“You can’t take that weight on, man.”
“Maybe. Or maybe I better learn from it.”
They hit a stoplight, and Quinn took the moment to pull out a cigarette. He tapped it, spun it, and then slid it between his lips without firing it. “I’m not gonna lie, I’m glad you didn’t shoot him back there. I’m not fond of prison.” The light turned green, and he accelerated. “But there’s no reason we couldn’t find a way to do it so we don’t get caught.”