Smith said, “Don’t believe what, Cooper? I haven’t told you anything.”
—Drew Peters, the day he recruited you. Saying that the program was extreme, but that it was necessary.
The early days of Equitable Services, working out of the paper plant. The constant rumors of getting shut down. The limited funding. The investigation. The threat of a congressional subcommittee.
Then the Monocle.
Seventy-three people dead, including a senator, including children. At the hands of an abnorm.
A stunning validation of the vision of one man. One man who saw this coming. Who saw that the DAR needed the ability to go further than just monitoring.
That it needed to be able to kill.
Drew Peters, neat and trim, cool gray in his rimless glasses.
Drew Peters, saying that he needed believers.
Oh God—
“If this is true, it means that—that—” He couldn’t say the words, couldn’t let them float in the air. If this was true, it meant that everything else was a lie. That he hadn’t been fighting to prevent a war. That he had been part of starting one. That the things he had done, the targets he had terminated…
The people he had killed…
The people he had murdered.
“No,” Cooper said. “No.” He looked at Shannon, saw nothing but sympathy on her face. Turned from it, recoiled, to Smith. And saw the same expression. “No.”
“I’m sorry, Cooper, I really am—”
And then he was running.
PART THREE:
ROUGE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Out of the room, down the hall, through the bedroom, onto the balcony, over the railing, through the air, hitting hard. Behind him voices he was barely conscious of, a man, shouting something, something like Stand down! Let him go!, and the guard with his MP5 up but frozen, looking over his shoulder, Cooper thinking slide-tackle to drop him, spin, elbow to the solar plexus, right-hand chop to the throat, doing none of it, just sprinting past the stunned guard, the cold air slicing in and out of his lungs, his legs scissoring fast, feet slamming the ground, trying to outrun the things he’d heard, the pattern that formed in front and behind and all through him, the gift that he couldn’t turn off, the gift that had become a curse, the cold and relentless intuitive leap that put the pattern together, the pattern that had been right in front of him all this time but in the dark, brought into sharp relief by the illuminating influence of a handful of facts and a little nudging, all of which he could have done himself but never had, and the consequences of that, the unbelievable, horrifying, consequences—
“I need true believers.”
Drew Peters had said that to him the first time they met, and several times since, never so many that Cooper had thought it more than a call for a certain kind of loyalty, a loyalty Cooper possessed, a willingness to do hard things for a greater good. That was all it had ever been, never a delight, never. In the power, sure, and the freedom, the position, but never the act itself, not the killing but the cause. He had done what he’d done to stop a war, not to start one, to save the world, not to—
Flashes: The moon cutting silver swathes through swaying trees.
A branch he stumbled on cracking, the dry white interior like bone.
His hands, pale against pine bark.
Finally, a tiny stream glowing in the moonlight, the water burbling clean over rocks worn smooth. His knees in the water, the shocking cold of it.
If what they had shown him was true, then Equitable Services was a lie.
An extreme arm of a government agency asking for powers never granted another. The power to monitor, hunt, and execute American citizens.
An agency that was hobbling along. Barely surviving. About to be investigated. And then, suddenly, vindicated.
Granted enormous power. Unspecified funds. Direct access to the president.
Because of a lie.
John Smith didn’t kill all those people in the Monocle.
Drew Peters did.