No; the angle was wrong. It was the view from behind the desk. The room as viewed by the hologram. By the other Erik Epstein.
“Do you see? We share eyes.”
The enormity of it. For more than a decade, the world had watched one Erik Epstein, heard him talk on CNN, followed his political maneuverings to establish New Canaan, tracked his corporate takeovers, seen him board private jets. All the while, the real Erik Epstein had been out of sight. Living in this basement, this dark cave of wonders.
He wondered if anyone in the DAR knew it. If the president knew it.
“But…why? Why not just stay out of sight?”
“Too hard. Too many questions. People want to see.” He said it nervously. “I like people. I understand them. But it would have been too hard. I didn’t want press conferences. I wanted to work in the data. Do you know what Michelangelo said?”
Cooper blinked, thrown by the change in topic. “Umm.”
“‘In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it.’” The words running together. When he finished, again Epstein fell silent, waiting.
Whatever this is, it’s important. One of the most powerful men on the planet is showing you a secret that at best a handful of people know. There’s a reason.
Cooper paused and then said, “The way Michelangelo saw marble, that’s how you saw the stock market.”
“Yes. No. Not just that. Everything. Data.” He turned and waved his arms in an intricate series of gestures. The whole room reacted, shimmering and twisting, a psychedelic light show of charts and numbers and moving graphs. A new set of data appeared. “Here. You see?”
Cooper stared, tracked from chart to chart. Tried to make sense of what he was looking at. Do what you do. Find the patterns the way you can assemble a picture of someone’s life from their apartment.
Population figures. Resource usage. A time-lapse of Wyoming from above, taken over years, the brown wasteland sprouting a neat geometric pattern of cities and roads. A three-dimensional chart of the incidents of violence in Northern Ireland mapped against the number of British pubs and the average attendance figures of churches. “New Canaan.”
“Obvious.” Impatient.
“Its growth. There,” Cooper said, pointing, “that’s about the external resources the Holdfast depends on. External resources are weak points, dependencies that could be used against you. And…” He stared, feeling that intuitional leap, almost tasting it, but not grasping it. He strained, knowing as he did that it didn’t work that way, any more than an artist could force a masterpiece.
New Canaan. This is about New Canaan. Only, most of it wasn’t, at least not explicitly. The historical data. The Sicarii in Judea and the murder of priests in a crowd, the numbers rising, then the intersection of that line and the sudden plummet. Something called the Hashshashin plotted against Shia Muslims in the eleventh century. He didn’t know what the words meant, or knew only fragments. Hashshashin. Wasn’t that the original term for “assassin”? He thought so, but also thought he’d picked that up in a kung-fu movie. He simply didn’t know enough history.
Forget what you don’t know. Look at the patterns. What do they say?
“Violence. This is about violence.” The words came out before the thought had finished forming.
“Yes! More.”
“I don’t…” He turned to Epstein. “I’m sorry, Erik, I can’t see the way you see. What are you showing me? Why?”
“Because I want you to do something for me.”
Favors for favors, sure. He’d watched the meeting upstairs. “You want me to do something in order to get your protection here, start a new life.”
“No,” the man said, his voice thick with scorn. “Not the lie. You don’t want a new life here. That’s not why you came.”
Careful. This could all be a trap. What if he wants you to reveal your real purpose so that he can…
What? This man, this gifted and odd and immensely powerful man, would he really share his secret just to uncover you? Ridiculous. If he cared, he could have had you thrown out of the NCH. Or buried in the desert.
“No,” Cooper said, “it’s not.”
“No. I know what you came for. It’s in the data.” Another whirl of his hands, and the room was suddenly filled with Cooper’s life. A scrolling timeline of every recorded date of importance in his life, from his hospitalization as a teenager to his divorce from Natalie. A geographical chart of the people he had killed. A table marking the frequency his ID had been used to access the DAR bathroom, and at what hours.
A case-file note about Katherine Sandra Cooper, age four: “Subject related details of teacher’s personal life suggesting strong abnorm tendencies. Recommend testing ahead of standard.”
Cooper’s stomach went cold. “You’re looking at my child?”
“The data. I look at the data. It tells me the truth. Now you tell me the truth. Why are you here?”
He turned from the screens. Fixed the man with a hard stare. The feeling he had, it was like getting e-mailed a porn video that turned out to be his wedding night, as if some shadowy freak had been hiding in the closet with a camera. Epstein looked at him, looked away, shot a hand through his hair again.
“I’m here,” Cooper said, slowly, “to find and kill John Smith.”
“Yes,” Epstein said. “Yes.”
“And you’re not trying to stop me.”
“No.” The man tried a smile, his lips wriggling like worms. “I’m trying to help you.”
Cooper walked down the hallway without seeing it. Trod the carpet without feeling it. Stepped into the elevator like a man asleep.
Tuned into Epstein’s dream.
“It was never money. It was art. The stock market was marble and the billions my sculpture.
“And then the world took it away. My art scared them. Upset the way things worked.
“But it was never the money. The data, you see? It’s the data. And so I needed a new project.”
“New Canaan.”
“Yes. A place for people like me. A place where artists could work together. Make new patterns and new data unlike anything ever. A place for freaks,” he’d said, trying that smile again. “But then that upset things, too. Real art does. So I brought that into the pattern. In this new project, integrating with the rest of the world is part of the design. I realized people thought I was taking from them. I never wanted to take. It’s not about the having, or the giving, it’s about the making.”
“What does this have to do with John Smith?”
“Look at the data. It’s all there. Look at the Sicarii.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
The man had snorted, a clever teacher with a dull student. “It means ‘dagger-men.’ In the first century, Judea was occupied by Romans. The Sicarii attacked people in public. Killed Romans, and also Herodians, those Jews who collaborated.”
“They were terrorists,” Cooper said, understanding beginning to dawn. “Early terrorists.”
“Yes. Here.” Erik had flicked his wrist and one graph expanded to fill the room in front of them. It was one Cooper had noticed before, a rising line marking murders. The line grew steadily…then intersected another line and plummeted. “You see?”