Brilliance. Part 27

When they walked back through the loading dock, the big man was gone. Just as well. In his current mood, Cooper might have used him as a practice dummy.

"We could probably stay with Lee and Lisa for a few days."

Cooper unlocked the car, shook his head. "Let's get on the road."

"You want to drive to Wyoming?"

"Might as well. We need the time, and it's safer than an airport."

"All right." Shannon thumbed through her pa.s.sport. "Tom and Allison Cappello." She laughed. "If that's your way of trying to get me into bed, you get points for originality."

"Cute." He started the car and pointed it east. "So how did we meet?"

"Hmm?"

"We're married. If we get questioned, we need to be able to look married."

"Right. Well, at work, I suppose. It's true, after all."

The layers of irony in that made him smile. "Maybe a different job, though. Something boring, so no one asks follow-up questions about it."

"Accounting?"

"Anybody asks me about their tax return, we're done. How about...logistics. For a s.h.i.+pping company. No one wants to know how things get from place to place."

"Okay. I worked there first. We met when you were transferred to Chicago. No, Gary, Indiana. No one wants to know about Gary, Indiana, either," she said. "You were smitten with me, of course."

"Actually, I think you chased me. I played it cool."

"It was totally obvious. You kept pulling puppy-dog faces. And making excuses to come by my desk."

"You ever actually have a desk?"

"Sure, in my apartment. It does a great job of holding up my fake plant." She leaned back and tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. "We went to the movies for our first date. You were a gentleman, didn't try anything."

"But you were hot to go. You kept touching my arm and tossing your hair. Fiddling with your bra strap."

"You wish."

"And panting. I remember a lot of panting."

"Shut up."

Cooper smiled and merged onto the highway. Their rhythm was easy, natural. He wasn't flirting, exactly, but the banter was fun. They kept it up, kept it light, as he drove back to Chinatown. Lisa had made them promise to have lunch before they left, and it seemed as though they had the time to spare now. He pulled up a mental map of Wyoming. The Holdfast spanned a good chunk of the middle of the state, an ugly sprawl of desert and badlands cobbled together in a thousand real estate transactions, with a border like a gerrymandered congressional district. He figured it was about a twenty-five-hour drive. They could take it slow, get some rest along the way. Stop somewhere and buy a couple of wedding rings. And he could use the time to make a plan. Getting to Erik Epstein wouldn't be easy, and that was only a stepping-stone on the way to John Smith.

"The Amalfi Coast of Italy," she said. "That's where we honeymooned. We rented a room on the side of a cliff, with a balcony where we drank wine. Every day we swam in the ocean."

"I remember. You looked dynamite in that suit."

"The red one?" She looked at him through dark lashes. "You always liked me in red."

"It's good with your body," he said, the words spilling out before he could stop them. The memory of last night flashed back, the soft whisper of her s.h.i.+rt sliding off, and the image he'd invented. He felt a little heat in his forehead, glanced over at her.

She wore a half smile. "My body, huh?"

"Your skin, I mean. You said your dad is Lebanese-what's your mom?"

"French. All burgundy lips and flowing hair. They were quite the couple. He was a businessman, a very sharp dresser with a pencil moustache. The two of them were like something out of an RKO flick."

"Were?"

"Yes," she said simply.

"I'm sorry."

"Thank you." She set her shoulders, and he read the active change in topic there, marked it to the pattern that she was becoming in his mind.

He was just about to ask where they lived when he saw the Escalade. Traffic had been getting steadily worse as they'd drawn closer to Chinatown, which he'd chalked up to tourists and the lunch crowd. But the truck- Late model Escalade, black, tinted windows.

Parked half in, half out of the street. Like it stopped suddenly. Right at the intersection of Cermak and Archer, two of the arteries of Chinatown.

Engine running.

Government plates.

s.h.i.+t.

-sent a warning tingle down his spine. Cooper sat bolt upright, fingers tightening on the wheel. Shannon picked up the move, followed his eyes, said, "No."

He glanced in the rearview, half expecting to see black SUVs bearing down on them, but there was nothing but a long line of cars. If it was a trap, the other side hadn't swung shut yet. A U-turn? Conspicuous, a last resort. It could just be a coincidence, a DAR crash vehicle down here for something else, with a different target.

"Lee and Lisa," Shannon said, and jerked as if she'd been electrocuted. "No, no, no."

"We don't know-"

"The traffic," she said. "d.a.m.n, I should have seen it. Stop the car."

"Wait, Shannon, we can't-"

"Stop the car!"

He saw it then-the traffic hadn't just been slowing. It had been creeping to a stop. This wasn't a matter of a crowded street or a backed-up stoplight. Something was blocking the flow of cars. It could be an accident. A collision, with police on the scene.

Yeah. And I suppose the DAR is here to write tickets.

Cooper b.u.mped the car up over a curb into a small strip mall. Shannon was out the door before the wheels had finished rolling. He shut off the ignition and followed her, the two of them sprinting through the parking lot.

In the distance, a sound, loud and mixed. Not one source, but hundreds overlapping. His first thought was that it was a parade, some sort of festival, but he knew that was wishful thinking. He'd seen SUVs just like that a thousand times, had called them in a hundred times.

The DAR's private paramilitary police force, a blend of riot cop and SWAT team. They wore black body armor and helmets with visors that completely hid their features. The visors functioned as a heads-up display, enhancing targeting, displaying map coordinates, and allowing night vision. The department called the units tactical response teams.

The public called them the faceless.

Ahead of him, Shannon dodged past the end of the strip mall, leaped a short fence, and sprinted for Archer. Cooper poured it on, hit the fence without breaking stride, and pushed himself over it. She was halfway across the street, dodging through the snarled traffic. A small green s.p.a.ce surrounded an apartment building, and she blitzed through the middle of it. He lost sight of her as she rounded the building, leaning into the run, his breath coming fast with the sudden transition to motion.

Half a block to the north, another black Escalade was parked at the entrance to a bank. The doors were open, and he spotted three faceless in defensive positions. Bulky with armor and with blank gla.s.s for a head, they resembled predatory insects. Each man held a submachine gun with a folding stock. Shannon was racing south now, right down the middle of the street. Car horns added their screams to the roar of the crowd, closer with every step. Cooper caught up to her just as she made an abrupt turn. He followed.

And saw what was making the noise. The sidewalk and alley were jammed with people, most Chinese, all facing the other direction. They yelled and shook their fists. The group was densely packed and pus.h.i.+ng forward without making any progress. Over their heads, Cooper saw a dozen faceless with riot s.h.i.+elds cordoning off an alley.

The alley where Lee's social club was located.

No.

Shannon had hit the crowd already, slipped into it like an arrow into the ocean, her gift showing holes and vectors. Cooper followed as best he could, shoving his way through. The noise was unbelievable, a fury of anger and fear in a foreign language. As he watched, a man at the front scooped up a stone and hurled it. The rock bounced harmlessly off a s.h.i.+eld. The commando stepped forward and snapped the s.h.i.+eld into the guy hard enough that Cooper could almost hear the crunch of the man's nose shattering. He dropped, blood pouring, and the crowd roared louder. Cooper looked around frantically, taking in the low buildings, the fire escapes, the alley farther south, trying to find an opening he knew they couldn't risk.

DAR Tactical Response Team Protocol 43: In the event of an extraction from a dense and hostile environment, first establish a perimeter operating zone. Limit force application unless targets possess a significant strategic advantage and a demonstrated intent to employ that advantage.

Translation: unarmed people on the ground just get hit, but if anybody climbs on a building, shoot them.

Shannon had made it halfway through the crowd before stalling out. Even her gift couldn't find a way through the mob. The faceless held the mouth of the alley shoulder to shoulder, with Chinatown's furious residents layered twenty deep against them. Cooper grabbed a man in front of him and yanked, tangling the guy's foot as he went. The man staggered back into the crowd, and Cooper slid in behind Shannon.

"We need to go," he shouted over the roar of the crowd. Right now the primary team would be searching Lee's gambling den and the apartment above. They'd have thermal scans and dogs, and it wouldn't take them long to realize that he and Shannon weren't there. "They'll search the crowd for us."

"They're not here for us," Shannon said. Her cheeks had paled.

"What are you-" He followed her eyes to a prisoner transport van the size of a delivery truck parked halfway down, the back doors winged open. Riot-geared troopers guarded the rear of the truck, weapons at the ready. Another group was shoving two shackled figures down the alley, a balding man and a woman with chic hair, both of them yelling and fighting.

Lee and Lisa.

Cooper's stomach seized. As he watched, a commando buried the b.u.t.t of his gun in Lee's belly. Lisa screamed, tried to get to her husband. Another grabbed her from behind, stuffed a black hood over her head, and pushed her into the waiting wagon. Seconds later Lee was forced in beside her. Something in Cooper's chest raged and shrieked, railed against the cage of his ribs. He pushed forward, surging against the crowd, feeling more than hearing his yells. He gained six inches, lost them. It was like being caught in a thundering wave; he was rolled and tossed but made little progress. Shannon made even less, her gift useless here. Overhead there was the rotor of a chopper, and sirens from somewhere far away. Gla.s.s shattered, a window or a bottle. That triggered a reaction; the faceless locked s.h.i.+elds and braced themselves. From behind them, tossed over their head in a lazy arc, came a smoking canister. The tear gas. .h.i.t someone in the crowd, bounced downward; billows of white streamed up. A second and third canister followed. People began to gag and retch, the motion of the crowd reversing, sweeping Cooper and Shannon along with it.

The last he saw of the alley, before the gas and the panic consumed everything, was a soldier pulling a black hood over the head of eight-year-old Alice Chen.

Silence. It had been an hour, and the silence was still loud, and in it he could hear the echoes of the mob.

He'd gotten a pretty good huff of gas as the crowd split and surged. The frantic coughing had left his throat raw, and his eyes still stung and watered. He kept having to fight the speed of the Jaguar, his foot wanting to go heavy on the accelerator. Instead, he moved with the steady flow of traffic and saw the scene again and again. He'd been too far to make out details, but his imagination was happy to supply them: the wide-eyed trembling of the little girl, the pure panic she would have felt as men in black pulled her parents away from her. Her mother's scream as her father was beaten. The stranger's smooth insect mask reflecting her face as he bent over her.

And then the darkness, close and heavy, as the hood slid over her head.

He had seen it, had heard the crowd and felt the gas, and yet he still barely believed it. How could that mission have been authorized? Why take Lee and Lisa and Alice? Why take them that way?

"It had to be us." His voice thin and hollow against the weight of an hour's acc.u.mulated silence. "They were there for us."

Shannon didn't respond. She sat at the edge of the pa.s.senger seat, shoulders turned away, as if trying to get as far from him as possible.

"I can't believe it," he said.

"Why not?" She spoke to the side window. "This is what it looks like."

"Not normally. Somehow they knew we'd been there. They wouldn't come in like that otherwise."

She turned to look at him then, pure scorn on her face. "Are you serious?"

He searched for a response, but none of the words that came to mind were right. Everything he believed made a lie by the image of a hood going down over a child's face.

"This is how it works, Cooper. Don't you know that? Of course you do. You've ordered that before."

"No. Never."

"You've never sent faceless out? Top DAR agent, and you never ordered a mission?"

"Not like that."

"Like what, then? Did your team bring flowers and cake?"

"My teams were called in on criminals. Terrorists. Abnorms who had hurt someone, or were about to hurt someone."

"I'm sure that's what those men were told, too. That Lee and his family were terrorists. Same way the Gestapo believed the people they rounded up were plotting against the state."

"Come on. You can win any argument with the Gestapo or the n.a.z.is. The DAR is not the same."

"It look like it's heading in the right direction to you?"

"Okay, first, I'm not with the department anymore, remember? Second, maybe this wouldn't have happened if you guys would stop blowing up buildings and a.s.sa.s.sinating people. I hate what I just saw. It makes me physically sick. But you can't throw a bomb and then get upset if people don't like you very much. Those men thought they were going to catch the people responsible for an explosion that killed more than a thousand people."

"Whatever," she said, and turned away again.

A thought struck him. "Wait a second. I didn't know Lee and Lisa. But you did."

"So?"

"So how would the DAR know unless they were tipped off?"

"By who?"

"How about Samantha? Or..." He paused, let her work it out.

"You're suggesting John called the DAR and told them where to find us?"

"Did he know about Lee and Lisa?"

"It doesn't matter. He would never have done that."

"Maybe Samantha hasn't gotten the message to him yet. Maybe it was his attempt to take you out."

"Not a chance."

"Shannon-"