And for eighteen months, belief was about all they had. They worked on card tables in that drafty warehouse. Funding was so tight that there’d been a couple of months when they’d gone without pay. After the first terminations, the justice department launched an investigation to shut them down. Half the believers quit. Drew Peters remained steadfast, but circles began to form beneath his eyes. There were rumors of a pending congressional subcommittee, of a public excoriation. What they were doing was extreme, a privilege never granted to an agency—the right to hunt and execute civilians. Peters had assured them that he had support at the highest levels, that what they did was outside the traditional legal system. But if he was wrong, they’d face jail and possibly the death penalty.
Then an abnorm terrorist named John Smith walked into the Monocle, a Capitol Hill restaurant, and butchered seventy-three people, among them a US senator and six children. Suddenly, Drew Peters’s vision didn’t seem so extreme. Within a year, the paper plant hummed with activity; within two, Equitable Services had earned a reputation as the most prestigious subgroup of the DAR.
The rain had downshifted to a drizzle as Cooper parked and jogged to the front door. The internal security measures were just as stringent: a two-stage entrance, each requiring an ID scan and a video capture, a metal detector that his ID allowed him to bypass, an explosive-trace detection system that it did not, all overseen by men with body armor and automatic weapons. He went through it on autopilot, mind replaying the conversation with Quinn, running the angles. Wondering if it was possible that Alex and Bryan Vasquez really did work for John Smith. Wondering what it would mean if they did.
The vast portion of the department was given over to the analysis side of the job, which employed thousands of scientists and bureaucrats. They funded research and explored theory and advised politicians. They designed and redesigned and forever refined the Treffert-Down Scale, the test administered to children at age eight. They maintained the files on tier-one and tier-two gifted, tracking and collating every piece of data in the system from medical records to credit history. They facilitated budgets and logistics and questions of jurisdiction. It was work done in cubicles and conference rooms, over the phone and the net, and the offices looked pretty much like any corporate headquarters.
Equitable Services, not so much.
The command center was dominated by a wall-size tri-d map of the United States. Actions and interventions were highlighted across the country. Analysts constantly fed data into the system, tracking the movements of targets. Cooper paused to scan the board, taking in the shifting colors, green to yellow to orange: the Unrest Index, a visual representation of the mood of the country that aggregated everything from frequency of graffiti tags to information on tapped phone lines, from protest marches to target terminations, mixed it all up and laid it over the map like weather patterns. A red pinpoint in San Antonio marked yesterday’s takedown of Alex Vasquez. Not a terribly public action, but even so, the people in the bar, on the street, they’d been affected. No matter how smoothly you tossed a stone into water, there were always ripples.
Alongside the tri-d, monitors and digital crawls ran news from every major source. There was a low hum of muffled phone conversation; direct lines ran to the Pentagon, the FBI, the NSA, and the White House. The air had a faintly ionized taste, like biting a fork.
The command center was the hub of the wheel, with hallways spoking off. He ran his ID through a reader and yanked open a heavy door. The clerk glanced up from behind a desk, his expression changing from boredom to sycophancy as he recognized Cooper. “Hello, sir. What can I—”
“Dickinson. Which interview room?”
“He’s in four, along with his suspect.”
“My suspect.” Cooper unclipped the holster from his belt, dropped it on the man’s desk.
“Yes, sir. But…”
“Yes?”
“Well, Agent Dickinson asked not to be disturbed.”
“I’ll be sure to apologize.” Cooper walked down the hall, shoes squeaking on the polished tile floor. He passed wooden doors with—
Dickinson knows Alex Vasquez is my case. He’s risking a beat down for meddling above his pay grade. Possible reasons:
One: Bryan Vasquez turned up in a separate investigation. Unlikely.
Two: Dickinson heard about the John Smith connection and is risking pissing me off for a chance to catch the big fish.
Three: Dickinson is trying to find evidence that I mishandled Vasquez.