He couldn’t be sure that Dickinson would take me. If he were, he’d have stayed to help.
Since he didn’t, he suspected I might win.
And he knows that if I did, I’d come after him.
He won’t do what you expect.
—the night. Cooper caught himself on a handrail, turned the other way, sprinted upward. His calves burning and lungs screaming. Past the tenth, the eleventh, the twelfth.
Quinn said, “Shit. Cooper, I’ve got a helicopter inbound, ETA forty-five seconds.”
Sneaky, Drew. Very sneaky. Cooper said, “Good.”
“Huh?”
“Get out of here. Get Shannon out, get my family out. I’ll meet you at the rendezvous.”
“Cooper—”
“Now. That’s an order.”
The flight above the twelfth ended in a door. Cooper hit it at a run, the thing flying open to expose the roof. Gravel and the bulk of industrial air conditioners, the sudden cool of the evening air and the buzz of the city all around, and faint but growing louder, the whap of helicopter rotors.
The director was at the southeast edge of the building, in a clear space just barely broad enough for a helicopter to land.
A flash of an image, San Antonio, the rooftop with Alex Vasquez. Chasing her to the edge of the building, her body a silhouette against the night sky.
Peters heard him when he was about ten feet away, whirled. He said, “No,” and reached around his back. Cooper caught his arm, twisted it forward, then spun to bring the force of his other forearm down against the director’s elbow, which snapped with a sick pop. Drew Peters screamed, and the gun dropped from his limp fingers.
Cooper held him up with one hand, then used the other to dig in the man’s pockets. The stamp drive was in the front right. He took it, then gripped the man by his lapels and marched him backward. Three steps took them to the edge of the building. The skyline burned behind, a wash of lights on marble and monuments. The White House was lit from below, regal and imposing. He wondered if President Walker was there right now, if he was sitting in the Oval Office, or putting on a bathrobe and crawling into bed.
The chopper grew closer. A spotlight speared down from it, swinging back and forth, playing across the buildings. Hunting.
Peters’s face was sheened with shock-sweat, his eyes wide. But his voice was strangely level as he said, “You want to kill me? Go ahead.”
“Okay.” He marched Peters a half step back.
“Wait!” The heel of the man’s dress shoe slipped and scuffled at the edge. “This is bigger than me and you. If you do this, the world will burn.”
“Still hoping I’m a true believer, huh?”
“I know you are.”
“Maybe you’re right. Maybe I still do believe. But not in you, and not in your dirty little game.”
“It’s not a game. It’s the future. You’re going to have to choose sides.”
“Yeah,” Cooper said. “I’ve heard that.” He yanked his old mentor close, then shoved outward with all his strength.
As Drew Peters flew off the edge of the roof, he crossed the beam of the helicopter searchlight. A flailing rag doll a hundred feet above the concrete. And for a fraction of a second, the dazzling beam seemed to hold him up.
But only for a fraction of a second.
CHAPTER FORTY
It took him an hour and a half to get clean.
If done directly, the walk from the office building at 900 7th Street NW to the bench overlooking the Lincoln Memorial would only take about twenty minutes. Thirty if you strolled, enjoyed the route, which was one of the most famous in the world. Past the East Wing of the White House, the lights burning inside the windows at all hours. The Washington Monument, a spear in the heart of the night, the airplane warning light blinking slowly. The rippling reflections of the pond in Constitution Garden. The shiny black scar of the Vietnam Memorial bisecting the hillside. And finally the epic neoclassical bulk of the Lincoln Memorial itself. The broad marble steps leading up to the fluted columns, the colonnade glowing from spotlights within, somber old Honest Abe staring out in contemplation, as if weighing the country he had led.
But Cooper hadn’t gone directly. His first priority had been getting out of the building. The stairwell had given him access to the street. From there, he’d headed north and then east, hearing the telltale sounds of converging force. Quinn hadn’t been kidding about a small army; Peters must have summoned all nearby law enforcement. This being Washington DC, the most heavily policed city in the nation, that meant not only DAR teams, but also metropolitan police, Capitol police, transit police, park police, Secret Service uniformed division, and God knew how many others.
And as none of them seemed to know what was going on or for whom they were looking, the best description of it was “train wreck.”
Cooper assumed that might have been part of the point, that Peters was focusing on getting maximum manpower in place and then quarterbacking from the air. The confusion would give him plenty of latitude to write the story however he liked; probably, that rogue-agent-turned-abnorm-terrorist, Nick Cooper, had kidnapped his family before being cornered in this building by Equitable Services. All the extra force would look good, a blow for interagency cooperation that still assured the real credit went to the DAR.
Sorry about that, Drew. I guess falling a dozen stories onto concrete is going to mess up your plan.
The good news was that without a quarterback, all those forces spent most of their time tripping over one another. Sirens and lights, SWAT teams and the faceless, barricades and badges. Cooper used the confusion to get a little distance, and after that, the rest was routine. He tracked in and out of buildings, rode the Metro one stop north and then two south, circled the same block twice in each direction, and then finally set off across the Mall.
An hour and a half later, he was sitting on the park bench, staring back at Abraham Lincoln. Still twenty minutes before he could rendezvous with Quinn and Shannon.
Twenty minutes before he could see his children.
Twenty minutes to decide the fate of the world.
Cooper had his datapad out, the stamp drive slotted. He’d logged on and prepped the video file for distribution. He’d learned from John Smith’s mistake; instead of sending it to a handful of journalists who could be silenced, he’d prepped it for upload to a public video sharing system. All he had to do was press send and it would spread like wildfire. In an hour it would have propagated to thousands of people; by morning it would be everywhere, on every news channel, every website. The whole world would know the ugly truth.
All he had to do was press send.
What had Peters said? “This is bigger than me and you. If you do this, the world will burn.”
It would certainly mean the end of this administration. A president caught on tape authorizing the murder of innocent citizens? He’d be crucified, face jail time, maybe worse.
All of which was fine with Cooper. But the problem with striking sparks was that fire wasn’t easy to control. How far would this one go?
Faith in the government, already at an all-time low, would plummet. In their hearts, Americans already didn’t believe that their leaders cared about them. People thought of politicians in the most jaded and cynical terms, and with some good reason. But it was a big step to discover the government was ordering their murder.
And Equitable Services. To have even a chance at survival, it would have to disavow Peters, claim he was a fanatic operating outside of bounds. But even then, the agency might be destroyed.