Peters: Slaves.
To 17:56:
Walker: The thing is, there’s two ways to go into a fight. You can do it wearing body armor and slinging a rifle, or you can show up in your skivvies. Not only that, but the guy who looks like he can fight rarely has to.
Peters: That’s it exactly. I don’t want genocide. But we need to prepare ourselves. We have the right to fight for our own survival. And this is not a war that can be fought with tanks and jets.
Walker: You’ve heard rumors about the congressional investigation into Equitable Services.
Peters: Yes. But that’s not why—
Walker: Don’t soil yourself. I’m not threatening you. But I do wonder whether this plan of yours is patriotism or self-preservation.
Peters: Mr. Secretary—
Walker: What’s the target?
Peters: Are you sure you want to know the operational details, sir?
Walker: All right. You’re right.
To 19:12:
Walker: How many dead are you thinking?
Peters: Somewhere between fifty and a hundred.
Walker: That many?
Peters: A small price to defend hundreds of millions.
Walker: And these will be civilians.
Peters: Yes.
Walker: All?
Peters: Yes, sir.
Walker: No. No, that won’t do.
Peters: To ensure they’re seen as terrorists, it has to be civilians. An attack against the military frames them as a military power. It defeats—
Walker: I understand. But we need a symbol of the government there as well. Otherwise, it will seem random and unfocused.
Peters: What about an attack on your office?
Walker: Let’s not get carried away. No, I was thinking a senator, or a Supreme Court judge. Someone respected, symbolic. And we’ll need a patsy, too. A capable one who won’t get caught right away. Someone to become the boogeyman.
Peters: I have one in mind, sir. An activist named John Smith.
Walker: I know of him.
Peters: He’s already made a pest of himself; it’s only a matter of time before he would resort to violence anyway. And he’s very capable. Once we tip him over, he’ll play the part. Any, ah, symbolic target in particular?
Walker: I can think of a few.
To 24:11:
Walker: The key is to not let this get out of hand. We need an incident that unites the country, that justifies your work. Not something that kicks off a holy war.
Peters: I understand, and I agree. Frankly, the gifted are too valuable to risk.
Walker: Amen. But they need to be kept in their place.
Peters: Sometimes war is the only route to peace.
Walker: I think we understand one another.
To 28:04:
Peters: I’ve already chosen a target. A restaurant. I’ve got teams ready.
Walker: This is a hard assignment. Some of your shooters might flinch.
Peters: Not these men.
Walker: And afterward? Can you depend on their discretion?
Peters: Depend on it? No. But I can assure it.
Walker: Are you saying—
Peters: Operational details.
To 30:11:
Peters: Sir, I will handle everything. I will shield the administration in every way. But I need to hear directly from your lips, sir. I can’t proceed on an assumption.
Walker: You’re not recording this, are you?
Peters: Don’t be ridiculous.
Walker: I’m kidding, Peters. Good lord, if you were recording this we’d both be up a creek.
Peters: True. So. Sir? I need explicit authorization.
Walker: Do it. Orchestrate the attack.
Peters: And you understand that we’re talking about civilian casualties, maybe as many as a hundred of them.
Walker: I do. And I’m telling you to do it. As my daddy always said, freedom isn’t free.
Cooper tapped the pause button. A freeze-frame of the two men shaking hands, the director leaning out of his chair to reach across the table.
Bobby Quinn looked like a man desperate to rewind his life. To go back and make a left turn instead of a right. “I don’t believe it.”
Cooper stared at him. At the topography of his facial musculature, the zygomatic major and minor, the buccinator driving the corners of his mouth. “Yes, you do.”
“It’s not possible,” Quinn said heatedly. “You’re saying that Director Peters planned the massacre at the Monocle?”
“The murder of seventy-three people, including children. Yes.”
“But… why?”
Cooper sighed. “Because all the talk about preventing a war is bullshit. What they really want is to control it. They want to generate and maintain war at a low simmer. They want us all wound up and mistrusting each other. Norms and abnorms, left and right, rich and poor, all of it. The more we fear, the more we need them. And the more we need them, the more powerful they get.”
“He’s the president, Cooper. How much more—”
“That’s right. He went from secretary of defense to president of the United States. What does that tell you? And remember Equitable Services before the Monocle? Limping along in an abandoned paper plant, no funding, no support, rumors of congressional investigations that could send us all to jail? Then an activist who had never been violent before all of a sudden walks into a restaurant and murders everyone. And poof, the rest of the country starts seeing things Drew Peters’s way.”
“But what about the video from the restaurant?”
“The security footage is real. But Peters had an abnorm edit John Smith in later. The shooters work for Peters. Or did. I assume they’re dead now.”
“There you go,” Quinn said. “If that video is fake, why is this one real?”
“Who could fake it?”
“John Smith—”
“No.” Cooper shook his head. “The Monocle could be faked because Smith was relatively unknown, and the footage quality is poor, and especially because it was the DAR that did the investigation. But you can’t fake footage of the president. There’s too much of it available, too many ways to check it, too many people eager to. And why go to such lengths to hide a fake video?
“Besides. How many meetings have you sat in with Drew Peters? You really going to tell me that wasn’t him?”
Quinn said, “So why isn’t it encrypted?”
“I wondered that, too. But then I realized—it’s an insurance policy. No doubt Peters has some sort of fail-safe that tells people where to find this if he dies mysteriously. If it were encrypted, it would defeat the point.
“This whole thing,” Cooper said. “Everything we’ve done for the last years. All the actions, all the terminations. None of it was about truth, about protecting the public. They were just moves in a game we didn’t know about, made by players who don’t even want to win. No one wants to kill all the gifted. They just want to control them. And the rest of the country. And you know what? They do.”
Quinn said, “The terminations?” Going through the same thing Cooper had the night before, the first nibbles of a horror that would soon sink its fangs deep. “You’re saying that some of the people we killed, they—”
“Yeah,” Cooper said. He pitied the guy, wanted to give him time to process it, to begin to deal with the enormity of everything. But that risked Quinn freezing up, and there wasn’t time for that. “And I’m sorry to say this, but it gets worse.”
“How the hell can it get—”
“They have my children.”
“They—who?”
“Peters.”
“Come on, Cooper. That’s paranoid.”
“It’s not. I called home. Roger Dickinson answered.”
“Oh.” Quinn stared. “Oh shit.”