Written in Fire

CHAPTER 18

Cooper died again.

The knife was a Fairbairn-Sykes, a slender dagger useful only for killing. Made of carbon-fiber sharpened to a point a molecule thick, it slid through clothes and flesh and muscle to skewer the left ventricle of the heart. Death was almost instant.

Soren withdrew the blade and started away, his face expressionless.

“Repeat,” Cooper said.

The projection jumped back ten seconds. Breakfast out for him and Natalie and the kids, a couple of weeks ago. It was security footage, but taken in the Holdfast, so both the coverage and resolution were extraordinary. He could remember the conversation perfectly, Todd talking about soccer here, how the rules were different because of the brilliants, and Cooper was listening and joking around, and then on the edge of the screen Soren slit the throat of one bodyguard, then took three steps and opened the brachial artery of a second. Blood spray lashed nearby tables.

In the footage, Cooper didn’t hesitate. He stood and hurled a chair as he charged. The fight was brief and pitiful: the chair missed, his jab missed, and his hook was blocked by the edge of the dagger, which split his hand in half. And that was as good as it got.

What came next was a nightmare. Todd, seeing his dad hurt, ran to help. Soren cocked an arm and spun with terrible force, his elbow colliding with Todd’s temple, snapping the boy’s head sideways. In the footage, Cooper screamed, then launched himself at Soren, who positioned the dagger precisely to slide through clothes and flesh and muscle to skewer the left ventricle of the heart.

Cooper died again.

Even now, knowing that Todd was going to be okay, that Soren had failed—that Cooper had later beaten him—it still tore shreds from his sanity to watch that elbow whistle through the air, to see his son’s eyes go glassy.

That’s the point of this exercise, right? Remind yourself what you’re facing.

He’d been so pleased with himself for thinking of the carrot for Soren. He’d hated it, too, the notion of presenting comfort to the monster who had attacked his son. But sitting in the virtual chapel beside the assassin, he had again felt an emotion he didn’t want: pity.

It was the wetness in Soren’s eyes. Tears prompted by hearing music for the first time. Imagine the strength it must have taken to yank himself from that dream. To possess what he had always wanted but never believed possible . . . and to refuse it.

Cooper was still reeling. Soren’s will had inspired something like awe in him, and he couldn’t afford that. Which was why he’d found this quiet conference room to relive the worst moment of his life again and again.

He was about to tell the terminal to repeat the video when his phone pinged. Funny, his phone used to be practically a living thing, always buzzing with a message, an e-mail, an alert, a status update. But in the last months, he’d dropped out of that world. Out of the world at large, really. Now it was something of a novelty to get a message.

QUINN: NEED TO TALK. ASA-F’ING-P.

Cooper started to type a reply, then remembered he was in a conference room. “System. Begin video call.” He rattled off Bobby’s number.

“All communications with locations outside the Holdfast are temporarily—”

“Override.”

“Enter authorization code, please.”

“Ask Epstein.” He waited, imagining a message popping up in Erik’s subterranean lair, one more point of data amidst a river of them. His head throbbed, one of those killer headaches right behind the eyeballs, and he rubbed at them as he waited.

A moment later the air shimmered, the footage of his death replaced by the view of a bright office, white walls with picture frames leaning against them, moving boxes stacked beside a desk. Cooper smiled. “Bobby. Scored an office in the new building, huh? I like it, a window and everything. All your ring-kissing paid off.”

Quinn wore a trim suit and an amused expression. “That took, what, forty seconds? You know, the boys will like you better if you play hard to get.”

“Just can’t help it when you’re involved.”

“Got some friends who want to say hello.” Quinn leaned forward to tap a button, and the video feed split into two.

“Jesus, boss,” Luisa Abrahams said, “you look like you spent the night blowing homeless dudes at the bus station.” Beside her, Valerie West strangled a laugh.

Not so long ago, the four of them had been a team, the most decorated in Equitable Services. They’d tracked terrorists and assassins, planned operations that spanned the country, served as the long strong arm of the United States. Years of hunting bad guys together, of late nights and delivery food and twanging nerves and last-second saves. Seeing them all now, he realized how much he’d missed that. Missed them. “Weezy,” he said, and ran a hand through his hair. “Poetic as ever. This better?”

“Oh yeah, I’m ready to switch jerseys. Sorry, babe,” she said as she nudged Val, “but I just can’t resist him any longer.”

“Enough,” Quinn said. “Is this line secure?”

“Not even a little bit. I’m in the Holdfast.”

“What? Why?”

“Pursuing my lifelong dream to become a cowboy.” Cooper shrugged. “What do you think? I’m hunting John Smith.”

“Ah. On that note, after our last chat, I got to thinking,” Quinn said. “Most of the department’s resources are focused on Epstein these days, but I was curious what our old playmate was up to. I asked Val to do a little pattern scanning.”

“Yeah, um.” The data analyst shifted in her chair. She had the pallid skin of someone who received most of her light from a computer monitor. Which was true, and part of why she was so great at what she did. It was Val who had tipped him and Ethan off to Abe Couzen in Manhattan. “Look, this is just a theory.”

“I rate your theories over other people’s facts. What have you got?”

“I think John Smith is about to attack. Like, immediately.” She paused. “You play chess, boss?”

“I know how the pieces move.”

“Okay, well, there’s basically three phases. In the opening, both sides are positioning their forces. So for Smith, that was his time on the run, building a network, recruiting followers. Then comes the midgame, which is a lot of testing weaknesses, trading pieces. It can be bloody, but it’s not the real conflict. Like the last few years: assassinations, the explosion at the stock exchange—”

“The Children of Darwin?”

“No,” she said. “They were the beginning of the endgame. Nothing is safe in the endgame—your most powerful pieces, the positions you’ve spent the whole game building, all of it can be sacrificed. All that matters is winning.”

Sounds like John Smith in a nutshell. “So what’s his play?”

“I don’t know. But it’s big, and it’s imminent.”

“Tell me.”

“So, first warning is that Smith’s lieutenants have fallen off the radar. They all ran pretty deep anyway, but we’d always get ripples: a face-match arriving too late, some credit activity, coded messages in online havens, that sort of thing. Over the last days, that’s all stopped. I mean, gone. Then there’s the financials. You remember his smurfed bank accounts in the Caymans and Dubai?”

He nodded. The phrase “follow the money” may have been made famous by a movie, but it was standard procedure in intelligence and antiterrorism work. The DAR had a huge staff of forensic accountants dedicated to freezing illegal money. In Smith’s case, they’d never been able to prove accounts belonged to him. But there was a difference between proof and certainty, and for years, a number of suspicious offshore accounts had been closely monitored.

“In the last forty-eight hours,” Valerie said, “fourteen have gone empty.”

“How much in total?”

“North of a hundred million dollars.”

“Holy—can you trace it?”

She shook her head. “Our hottest coders had backchannel routines to prevent any withdrawal. I mean gray-hat stuff, quasi-legal hacks that could provoke international incidents. But the money is still gone. Worse, no alarm bells were tripped. If Quinn hadn’t asked me to look, we wouldn’t even have known.”

His stomach had a sour feeling like he’d eaten raw chicken. Cooper stared, processing. “So he’s going all in. Any guess as to his intentions?”

“Not specifically. But this is John Smith we’re talking about, right? You called him the strategic equivalent of Einstein.” Valerie shrugged. “Whatever he’s planning, it won’t be what we expect.”

And it will be devastating. Cooper said, “Bobby, you have to take this to the director.”

“You think?” Quinn shook his head. “I love you, man, but my paychecks read DAR. I talked to her before I texted you. But remember what I said in that dive bar?”

“Yeah, that the whole world is on fire.”

“And that there’s a shortage of water.” Quinn shrugged. “The director understands the threat. But across the country we’ve got brilliants being persecuted, burned out, lynched. There are massive food shortages. Riots in a dozen cities. A militia rampaging through Wyoming. Three assassination attempts on the president in the last two weeks. The metric for threat is a moving target.”

Cooper’s headache hadn’t been improved by any of this, and he leaned his elbows on the table, dug his fingers in just above his eyes. “Did you share my theory about the tier zeroes?”

“Sure,” Quinn said. “Had to explain to the powers that be how an egghead kicked my butt.”

“Any response?”

“They agree it would be bad.”

“Terrific.” Cooper sighed, straightened. “Listen, I know you all took a risk sharing this with me. I appreciate it.”

“Oh, don’t be an asshole,” Luisa said. “Just wish you were here, boss. This is getting grim.”

“Don’t worry,” Cooper said. “I’m still fighting.”

Quinn said, “All right, partner. We need to go earn our paychecks.”

“Yeah. Thanks again.”

“No sweat. Just remember, beer is on you.”

“Forever, buddy. Forever.”

His old friend smiled and opened his mouth to reply. Before he could, everything went white, and his office window exploded in a rain of fire and sparkling glass.

The video connection failed.

But in the fraction of a second before it did, Cooper heard screaming.