Vincent’s racist asshole neighbors wouldn’t have let him pack a bag, or maybe even grab a wallet. He might well be on the streets with nothing.
A friend? Possibly. But right now, Vincent won’t be in a trusting frame of mind.
He’s scared, broke, and trapped. Looking for . . .
Sanctuary.
Cooper stood, finished the last of his coffee, then crumpled the cup and dropped it in the trash. “Let’s go.”
He’d been to Madison Square Garden only once, for a Knicks game a few years ago, and had come in through the bright glass lobby, along with about twenty thousand other people. This time they headed for a side entrance, what had once probably been for employees, a set of grungy metal doors on the undecorated side of the massive building. A mobile sign on a parked trailer read, MADISON SQUARE GARDEN REFUGEE HAVEN, and below that, ALL GIFTED WELCOME. Two soldiers in active camouflage chatted by the door, the digital patterns of their BDUs flexing and shifting as they gestured.
“Gentlemen,” one of them said as he opened the door. “Please have your identification ready.”
The room was a cramped security antechamber. Cameras monitored every angle, and more soldiers manned a walkthrough scanner and an X-ray conveyor. A weary mother carried a girl of six while her husband argued with a pretty woman in civilian clothes.
“But I don’t understand,” he said. “I thought families could come.”
“They can,” the woman said. “But for your safety, we’re quartering the gifted members of the family separately.”
“I’m not leaving my wife and daughter.”
“It’s just a matter of bunk assignment. You’ll still be together.”
“If we’re staying separately, then how are we—”
“Honey.” The man’s wife touched his shoulder. “We don’t have a choice. Unless you want to wait for someone to break down our door and drag you away?”
The little girl startled at that, said, “Who’s taking Daddy?”
“Nobody, baby,” the man said. “Nobody.” He stroked her hair. To Cooper’s eyes, the man’s rage and helplessness burned a dangerous shade of red, but he said, “Okay.”
“Please step this way.” The pretty woman turned to Cooper. “Welcome to Haven. Are you requesting admission?”
“No.” He flipped open his wallet. The picture was of a wildly different man. A man filled with certainty, who didn’t hope he was doing the right thing, he knew it. Fighting the good fight. Making hard choices for the greater good. Embodying the tropes that made him tear up at the heroic moments of movies—the swell of music, the bold self-sacrifice, the faith that the cause was worth dying for—all the soldierly clichés he’d bought into since he was a kid, they had belonged to:
COOPER, NICHOLAS J.
SPECIAL AGENT
DEPARTMENT OF ANALYSIS AND RESPONSE
EQUITABLE SERVICES DIVISION
Beside the ID was a badge, the logo in the center the all-seeing eye of the DAR. While he wasn’t on active duty, technically, he was still a government agent on extended leave. He’d thought about formally resigning from the department when he’d accepted the job as special advisor to President Clay, but he’d been uncertain he’d stay in politics.
There’s a wild understatement for you
The woman examined the identification. “Welcome, sir.” She handed them plastic badges. “Please keep these on your person at all time; they grant full access to Haven. If you’re armed, we’ll need you to leave your weapons here.”
“Why?”
“Just a precaution. We have several thousand residents and can’t risk an incident.”
Cooper wondered what that meant. “We’re not armed. But maybe you can help me find a . . . resident. Vincent Luce.”
She typed on hidden keys. “Section C, row six, room eight. Elevator to the fifth floor and follow the hallway out to the midcourt entrance.”
Badges in hand, they bypassed the security station, where soldiers waved wands over the family’s three sad bags. Packing them must have been hard. How did you decide which parts of your life to abandon? The father stared at him, and Cooper nodded. The man didn’t.
They stepped into the waiting elevator. When the doors closed, Ethan said, “I do not get it.”
“What?”
“No way I’d bring my family here.”
“No?” Cooper pressed the button for five. “You tried to sneak out of Cleveland in the middle of the night past a military quarantine. You telling me that if there’d been a warm, safe place to go to, you wouldn’t have considered it?”
“We didn’t ‘try.’ We did it. And all prisons start out warm and safe.”
“Prison? Come on.”
“Look how quickly this came together. Just days after the attack they had sleeping arrangements, security, even an ad campaign. Someone planned it in advance.”
“So?”
“So what are the odds they did it out of the goodness of their hearts?”
The elevator doors opened, and they stepped out into a bare concrete hallway. Soldiers and civilians moved through the unpolished guts of the arena: electrical conduit above, forklifts parked in alcoves, a faint tang of stale urine to the air.
“Speaking of residents and best interests,” Cooper said. “Vincent is literally our only lead, and we’re going to be asking him to betray Abe. Depending what your old boss means to him, he may not want to do that.”
“I got ya,” Ethan hammed in a bad film noir accent, “you’re saying we might needs to get rough, show him the wrong end of a pair a pliers.”
“I’m saying that he is going to help us, period.”
“Wait. You’re not kidding?” Ethan stopped walking. “Come on, man. That’s Gestapo crap.”
Maybe it was the leftover frustration from this morning, or the way the world seemed desperate to destroy itself, or the urine smell of the corridor. Maybe he was just tired and sore and hadn’t seen his kids in too damn long. Whatever the reason, the rage surged snake-quick, and without consciously planning the move, he spun and put Ethan up against the wall. The scientist yelped in surprise.
“I am sick,” Cooper enunciated carefully, “of being compared to the Gestapo.” A voice in his head said, Easy, easy, but another pointed out that he’d had two chances to kill John Smith, that he had brought down one president and failed another, that hard as he had tried to make a better world for his children, all that had happened was that he’d hastened the end of it. “America is at war because I didn’t act like the Gestapo. Seventy-five thousand soldiers died because I didn’t act like the Gestapo. That boy was lynched because I didn’t act like the Gestapo.”
It was only as he said it that he realized that was what was haunting him. A dead teenager missing a shoe. That was the real reason he’d beaten three men senseless this morning. And why just now his muscles had moved ahead of his mind. He made himself take a deep breath, and saw the fear in Ethan’s eyes, and his own rage drained away as swiftly as it had arrived.
“I’m sorry.” He let go of the doc. “I’m just tired of people who never have to make these decisions telling me that I’m a monster.”
Ethan stared at him. Opened his mouth, closed it. “Soren would have killed my whole family. You saved my wife and daughter. We may not always agree, but I will never think you’re a monster.”
Cooper nodded. Started away.
“A wee bit temperamental, maybe.”