Brilliance. Part 28

"I mean it, Cooper. Drop it."

He opened his mouth, wanting to fight. Wanting to burn out the anger inside of him in a battle, the two of them going for blood. He wanted to tell her about a pink stuffed animal he'd seen amidst the rubble in New York. But then he imagined the scene in Lee's apartment, the door blowing open without warning, the faceless streaming in, his former colleagues shouting, throwing the family down, shackling them on their kitchen floor, the same kitchen he'd stood in last night and chatted with friendly strangers.

It's on John Smith. If there wasn't terrorism, there wouldn't be tactical response teams. Smith's hands were stained with the blood of thousands. Lee and Lisa and Alice were just the latest.

He found himself remembering the evening of March 12, President Walker's speech to the nation. Cooper had caught it the next day, in a hotel outside Norfolk, already on the run. He'd watched it with an edgy stomach, afraid of what he might hear, that the president would be preaching fire and brimstone against abnorms. Instead, the man had urged tolerance. What were the words?

"It's said that the strongest partners.h.i.+ps are formed in adversity. Let us face this adversity not as a divided nation, not as norm and abnorm, but as Americans.

Let us work together to build a better future for our children.

And let us never forget the pain of this day. Let us never yield to those who believe political power flows from the barrel of a gun; to the cowards who happily murder children to achieve their aims.

For them, there can be-will be-no mercy."

He'd listened to that with a swell of pride, the patriotic equivalent of a hard-on. And the words still moved him. They represented the reason he was undercover now, the reason he hadn't seen his children in six months.

He had to find John Smith. And for him, no mercy.

The words were old, a mantra he'd repeated every night. What surprised him was the small voice that followed it. The one that said, And then what? Back to the DAR? Call in more tactical response teams? Can you really return to that?

Shannon said, "What will happen to them?"

"They'll be taken to the local field office. Questioned."

"Questioned."

"Yes," he said. "Hopefully, they'll tell the agents about us right away. That will make things go easier. They might get off with a warning."

"Don't lie to me, Cooper."

He glanced at her, saw the intensity in her eyes. Turned back to the road. "They'll be charged. The bar and apartment will be seized. One or both of them will go to prison for harboring fugitives."

"And Alice?"

Cooper gritted his teeth.

"Oh Jesus." Shannon buried her face in her hands. "An academy?"

"It's...it's possible. It depends if she tests as tier one."

"And even if she doesn't, she'll be marked. They'll track her. Now that the microchip bill pa.s.sed, they'll put a tag in her throat. Embedded up against the carotid, so even micro-surgery can't remove it. She'll never be safe again."

He wanted to say something comforting, something to make it better, but he couldn't think what that would be.

"My G.o.d. This is my fault. I should never have brought you there."

"There's nothing we can do for them now. We just have to get to Wyoming and get this settled. Get ourselves clear. Then maybe."

"Right." Her laugh had no humor in it. "G.o.d d.a.m.n it." She stared out the window, but he doubted she saw anything. "I sure hope you're worth it."

"What?"

The hesitation was tiny, a clenching in her trapezii, a flutter of the fingers. Tiny, but there. "I said I hope it's worth it. Getting to Wyoming."

Cooper held his own reaction back, tapping the steering wheel. Had she just misspoken? Possible. But that hesitation...she was holding something back. Hiding something.

Yeah, well, she's on the other side, remember?

He thought about calling her on it, decided against it. The events of the last twenty-four hours-my G.o.d, was that all it had been?-had generated a camaraderie between them. And yeah, she was attractive, in every sense of the word. But their friends.h.i.+p, or whatever it was, wouldn't survive this mission. It wasn't as if he could betray her, kill John Smith, and then see if she wanted to grab a cup of coffee sometime.

She was the enemy. Better not to forget that. Play his part, play it to the hilt, and keep an eye on her throughout.

Just get to Wyoming, get to John Smith, and end this.

For all the children.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE.

Three days of green and brown and the road humming beneath their tires, of billboards against endless sky, of seemingly identical gas stations and fading radio stations. I-90 west, a long gray ribbon unfurling through the rolling hills of Wisconsin, the flatlands of Minnesota, the sun-bleached scrub of South Dakota. The cities decreased in size as they rode, from the Milwaukee skyline dotted with church towers and brewery signs to the barely-there hint of Sioux Falls and the low-slung strip malls of Rapid City.

They could have made the whole thing in a mad run but needed to kill time anyway and so drove eight-hour days and had dinner at chain restaurants. The silence hadn't lasted. By the first evening, they were back to their calculatedly casual routine. They avoided politics, kept things light. Told stories of growing up, of friends and drunken misadventures and favorite books, tales neither intimate nor distant.

Last night they'd stopped at a roadside motel in the Black Hills. Ate delivery pizza and flipped channels on the tri-d, skipping the news networks without acknowledging it. Outside the world was black, just gone, and the sky awash with stars. He'd fallen asleep to the sound of her breathing in the other bed.

This morning they'd risen early and crossed into Wyoming. He'd visited the state only once, a camping trip with Natalie in the Grand Tetons a dozen years before. It had been late summer then, the mountains carpeted in green. He remembered making love in the morning while coffee boiled on the campfire and birds sang in the trees.

Here, though, on the eastern edge of the state, the landscape was low and blasted, th.o.r.n.y underbrush and dry rock. It didn't look like a place where people could live. The towns were tiny things clutching the highway.

Until they came to Gillette. It had once been a quiet place, twenty thousand people, mostly working in the energy industry. Then Erik Epstein had revealed that the ma.s.sive portion of the state he'd quietly been buying would be combined into one vast new "commune," a place he'd named New Canaan Holdfast, a home for people like him. Twist Territory, people had called it, and laughed at the idea of anyone trying to live there. Laughed, that was, until the full weight of his $300 billion came into play, and in a matter of months the world changed completely.

Gillette was the end point of a road into New Canaan. Along with two even smaller towns-Shoshoni on the west and Rawlins off I-80 to the south-it was one of the only ways to enter the Holdfast. Epstein had constructed broad highways, four lanes in each direction, that ran into the center of a wasteland, a rough-edged slash through some of the least desirable land of the United States. He'd bought the land for dollars an acre, bought it through holding companies and at auction, bought it around existing villages of twenty people, bought sprawling cattle ranches and mineral rights for ranges of oil and natural gas that lay too deep or were too spa.r.s.e to have been tapped. The result was a patchwork of stony desert, largely contiguous land that had been barely touched in all of human history.

And with that move, the previously inconsequential towns of Gillette, Shoshoni, and Rawlins became nationally recognized as the gateways into New Canaan. Ma.s.sive truck stops had sprung up, and housing for the thousands of construction workers who built the initial stages of the Holdfast. Restaurants and movie theaters and shopping malls swiftly followed. Finally came tourist hotels and trinket shops and storefront museums and all the rest.

As a kid, Cooper had loved science-fiction movies, especially the ones from the seventies, all gaudy colors and neon and people in jumpsuits. There was something so kitschily appealing about them, the world transformed into a metropolis two hundred stories high. But now, as they waited in a sea of trucks twenty minutes past Gillette, it occurred to him that the future hadn't turned out like that at all. The barren landscape and blinding sun looked more like the past. A cowboy western.

"How long does it take to clear the checkpoint?"

"From here?" Shannon was at the wheel; she craned her neck sideways to see around the 18-wheeler in front of them. "Probably fifteen minutes."

"Efficient."

"Has to be. The entrance is basically a ma.s.sive delivery depot."

"Yeah, I know." Like any DAR agent, he'd had numerous briefings on the Holdfast. While culturally it resembled Israel shortly after the Second World War, NCH faced a unique set of circ.u.mstances. Because it was American soil, it had to abide by US law. But $300 billion made for all manner of exceptions. Epstein's lawyers and lobbyists had cobbled together a hundred loopholes, resulting in the Holdfast being declared a separate county, with its own munic.i.p.al code. And because the entire NCH was privately held corporate land, access could be controlled. "All the inbound trucks drop off their loads here, and then they're distributed via an internal s.h.i.+pping network. Makes for a lot of jobs."

"Jobs the Holdfast has plenty of. Unemployment is zero. And not only research-trucking, construction, mining, infrastructure, the works."

"Sure. Got to have something for the normals to do."

She laughed. "Not just normals. Plenty of gifted move here to be part of something, but a tier-five calculator or a tier-three musician aren't exactly leading the charge in biomedical research."

"How long have you lived here?"

"I've had my apartment for three years. I don't know that I'd say I live here."

"I know how that is."

Ten minutes later he got his first look at the border. The four lanes of the highway doubled, then doubled again, and then again. The semis edged to the right, filling the bulk of the lanes, with pa.s.senger vehicles heading left. Each lane ran to a checkpoint not unlike a tollbooth. Guards in dun uniforms bearing the blue rising-star emblem of the Holdfast moved like ants, hundreds of them, talking to drivers, running mirrors under cars, walking German shepherds. The canopy over each checkpoint looked simple enough, but Cooper knew that it was packed with the most advanced newtech scanning devices in existence. The joke was that to see next year's DAR gear, you just went to Wyoming and walked into a bar. That was the true protection of the Holdfast, the trump card more important than the desolate landscape or Epstein's billions. The best minds in their fields, gifteds who individually jumped technology forward decades, here worked together, and the results flowed outward to the country as a whole.

You don't need an army to conquer America, Cooper thought. You just need to produce entertainment centers people can't live without.

Shannon pulled up beneath the canopy, the sudden shadow falling cool into the car. She rolled down the window, and a young guy with a neat moustache said, "Welcome to New Canaan Holdfast may I see your doc.u.mentation please," without pausing to breathe. They each dug for their pa.s.sports-they'd discussed it on the way, the importance of not seeming too ready, too eager-and pa.s.sed them over. The guard nodded and handed them to a woman behind him, who ran each against a scanner. Cooper knew it would be checking not only the validity of the pa.s.sport, but also recent credit history, driving and criminal records, G.o.d knew what else.

Time to see if Schneider screwed us. The IDs and credit cards had worked fine on the way out, but that meant nothing at all. This was the first real test. Cooper forced nonchalant interest, looking around like a tourist.

"Mr. and Mrs....Cappello," the guard said. "What's your business in New Canaan?"

"We just wanted to see it," she said brightly. "We're road-tripping to Portland and thought it would be fun to stop off."

"Any narcotics or firearms?"

"Nope." Cooper had left his gun in pieces in a Dumpster in Minnesota, knowing they'd ask. It didn't matter. He didn't really like guns all that much, and besides, one sidearm wouldn't make any difference.

"Where are you staying while you're here?"

"Thought we'd get a hotel in Newton." The first town in the Holdfast was one of the largest and largely open to tourists. Deeper in, there would be additional security screenings, and proof of business needed. DAR briefings had compared the Holdfast to layers of sieves; each layer screened out more, using additional legal loopholes, ranging from gated residential communities to high-security mining areas to government-affiliated research facilities. As Cooper watched, another guard held up a device he'd never seen, an unmarked rectangle on a pistol grip, and panned it slowly along the car. Checking for explosives? Taking pictures of them? Reading their auras?

The female guard handed their pa.s.sports back to the one with the mustache, who pa.s.sed them to Shannon. "Thank you for your cooperation. Please be advised that the New Canaan Holdfast is privately held corporate land, and that by entering you are agreeing to abide by the bylaws of Epstein Industries, to remain within designated s.p.a.ces identified in green, and to obey all requests of security personnel."

"Gotcha," Shannon said, then rolled up the window and put the car in drive.

And just like that, they were in.

It was different than he'd imagined.

Cooper had reviewed hundreds of photos and simulations. From above he'd seen the ma.s.sive warehouse districts cl.u.s.tered at each entrance, row upon row of hangars that served as way stations for everything from lumber to ethylene dichloride to whiskey, all the products the Holdfast imported. He'd studied the layout of the region, the network of roads that connected the towns and outposts that had grown overnight. He'd read the specs of the solar fields, where miles of black photoelectric panels glittered like the carapaces of insects, all moving in perfect timing as they tracked the sun across the daytime sky and the moon across the night. He knew the populations of Newton, Da Vinci, Leibniz, Tesla, and Archimedes, knew what the specialized role of each town was. He'd sat in lectures about the unique nature of a preplanned society built with near-limitless funding.

What he hadn't done was ride the streets of Newton with the windows down, smelling dust and the ionized discharge from the moisture condensers. He'd never watched a woman park her electric car at a charging station outside a bar and heard the hum of the generators engaging. And despite having read the figures a thousand times, he'd never realized how young the place was. It was one thing to know that the oldest recognized gifteds were thirty-three, and another to see a world of teenagers hurrying busily about, kids in construction helmets and driving trucks, children building a new world to a ten-year blueprint. There were older people, too, of course; plenty of families with gifted children had moved here, but they looked oddly out of place, outnumbered like faculty on a college campus.

Shannon's apartment turned out to be on a second floor above a bar. One room with a Murphy bed tucked neatly in, a kitchen that showed no sign of ever having been cooked in, a desk with a plastic plant bathing in sunlight. It reminded him very much of his own abandoned apartment in DC.

She'd ushered him in, then stood looking around for a moment as if trying to recognize the place, as if someone had been there in her absence and moved things around by inches. After a moment she announced she wanted to clean up. Through the wall he could hear the sound of the shower turning on and off in quick cycles-navy showers only, water too precious here to waste. Cooper opened the fridge, saw nothing but condiments and beer, helped himself to one. He paced the room, then stepped out onto the small balcony.

The Holdfast embodied the latest urban design theory, with wide bike lanes and public squares like Italian piazzas. He winced against the sun and slugged his beer and watched a cl.u.s.ter of twenty-year-olds break into a flirty game of tag, boys chasing laughing girls around, all of them lean and leathery and sunburned, flush with health. He wondered which could dance among the genome, or recall every detail of a face glanced a dozen years ago. He wondered which of them worked for John Smith, which of them were terrorists, which of them might have once been targets for him to pattern and track and maybe murder.

Murder?

He took another sip of beer, leaning on the railing. A moment later she joined him, wearing a sundress now, a cotton strappy thing that bared her shoulders. Her hair was still damp, and she brushed it with steady strokes. She looked good, smelled of some tropical shampoo, coconuts maybe.

"So we made it."

"We made it."

He turned and leaned against the railing, the metal hot through his T-s.h.i.+rt. He watched her brush her hair and then watched her watch him. "What?" she asked.

"I was just thinking. You're safe now."

"And you're not. It's uncomfortable, right? Someone in a uniform doesn't like the way you look and next thing you know, you end up in a brightly lit room." She c.o.c.ked her head. "I know that feeling."

He didn't respond, just held a level gaze.

She sighed. "Cooper, we had a deal. That means something to me. You got us here, I'll get us in to see Epstein."

"Okay," he said. "What do we do? Drop by his office and ask for an audience with the King of New Canaan?"

"I told you, only straights call him that."

"We're standing in his kingdom right now." He nodded to a pair of uniforms down in the square. "Those are corporate security guards, and he pays them."

"That's right, he does. But there are no sweatshops in the Holdfast."

Why are you needling her? She was right: He did feel uncomfortable. For years he'd moved through the world with the certainty of power. Here, he was at best a tourist with a fake pa.s.sport. And at worst, well, he had no illusions about his safety.

That wasn't what bothered him. He'd expected to feel like a soldier behind enemy lines. Only now that he was here, enemy territory turned out to be a cross between a kibbutz and a campus. It threw him, the feeling that this wasn't the beating heart of the evil empire.

Far from. What you've seen, you like. There was something inspiring about the place, the energy of it, the rational planning and joyful creation. It felt like a place that was building something. Aiming to the future. The rest of the country seemed mired in the past, always longing for a simpler time, even if that simpler time had never existed.

"What's our next move?"

"Step two is tomorrow. We go to Epstein, as I promised. Step three, we go our separate ways, I find my people and explain the situation."

"And step one?"

"Step one is you change your clothes and we go drinking. I'm home, and I want to celebrate."

They started in the bar below her apartment. From the outside it looked like any other, and he played his usual game with himself: country rock on the stereo, neon beer signs behind the bar, scarred wooden tables, the sweaty feel of too-bright sunlight pouring through the front windows, a jaded day-s.h.i.+ft bartender with tattoos.

For the first time in a decade, he'd gone one for five.