“Kept the name they gave me. Yeah. Remember how in the civil rights days, Malcolm X used to talk about giving up his slave name? Claiming his own? Well, I’ll do the same, as soon as people like me aren’t slaves. Right now, I want to remind everyone that I am what they made me.”
“You’re a terrorist.”
“I’m a soldier on the losing side. But the John Smith you’ve chased, the monster that kills children, who murdered seventy-three people in the Monocle, he’s not me. That John Smith wasn’t born. He was created. Because he served someone’s purpose.”
Cooper could feel his gift surging, patterning, building from data. The same way it always did, the way he couldn’t control any more than someone could choose not to be able to think. As always, the intuitive part of it was leaping ahead, building from the pattern, and he wanted it to stop, because if that was true, if this was true— “If the video is fake,” he said, knowing it was but not wanting to say it out loud, not sure of the reasons, “then who faked it?”
“Wrong question,” Smith said. He slid a hand toward his pocket, froze, said, “I could use a smoke. You mind?” He didn’t wait for a reply, but did move slowly, pulling out the pack and matches. Cooper catalogued the room, remembered the ashtray on the side table. So why had he stepped out before—
Because he wanted you to see.
He knew you were out there, and he gave you a way in.
Smith continued, lighting the cigarette around his words. “It’s not who faked the video,” snap, puff, exhale, “it’s who planned and executed the massacre. It’s who recruited, organized, and armed a methodical, highly skilled hit team and sent them to murder seventy-two innocent civilians and a senator. Faking the footage was just the cover-up. And the payoff.”
It was obvious and new at the same time, a paradigm shift that altered the whole world. Not just a faked video, but an orchestrated massacre. His gift filled in the pattern, dancing with new data—stop.
“Okay, so who…”
Smith walked around the end of the couch, flopped down on it. He ashed the cigarette and gestured to the opposite chair. Cooper ignored him. Smith said, “You play chess?”
“No.” He did, but not the way Smith meant. No one played the way Smith meant.
“The secret to the game is that beginners—actually, intermediate players, too, and sometimes masters—they tend to look at just the one side. But the trick to chess is to be paying more attention to what the other side is doing.”
“Okay.”
“Right,” Smith said. “Get to it. Fine. So, what did the Monocle accomplish?”
“It…a declaration of war. The murder of a senator who opposed you.”
“There are plenty of people who hate abnorms a lot more than Hemner did. And why would I want to declare war? When I was fourteen, I played three simultaneous games of chess against three grandmasters, and won them all. What are the odds that with no chance of victory, I declare war? No, you’re still thinking with your side of the board. Who benefited from the massacre?”
You, Cooper wanted to say, but found that the word stuck. How exactly had Smith benefited? Before the Monocle, Smith had been an activist, a controversial figure but a respected one, and free. Afterward he became the most hunted man in America. He’d had to abandon his whole life, to live for years as a fugitive with a target on his back.
“There you go. You’re getting it.”
“So what, you’re not just a strategic genius, you’re a reader, too?” The old smart-ass side coming out.
Smith shook his head. “I just know people. What happened after the Monocle?”
“You know what happened.”
“Cooper,” Shannon said. “Come on.”
He glanced at her, couldn’t untangle her expression. To her, he said, “Fine. I’ll play. After the Monocle, John Smith became a national figure. A terrorist. He was hunted from one end of the country to the—”
“Yes.” The look John Smith gave him was sad and warm at the same time, like a friend delivering bad news. “Yes. By whom?”
If this is true, it means that…
“No. I don’t believe it.”