You have spent the last five years working for evil men. You have done what they asked you to do. You believed. Truly.
John Smith isn’t the terrorist.
You are.
“Cooper?”
He heard her now. At a distance, looking for him. The sound of breaking twigs, the shuffle of dirt. She wasn’t a ghost after all.
He knelt there, in the stream, the water soaking through his pants, the moon glowing above. Didn’t want to be found. Didn’t want to hear any more.
“Nick?”
“Yeah,” he said. Coughed. “Here.”
He scooped up double handfuls of water, splashed them on his face. The cold shocking, clarifying. Knee-walked out of the stream, dropped on the bank. Listened to her approach, and for once saw her coming, sliding lithely between the trees.
Shannon hesitated for a moment when she saw him there, then adjusted her course. She splashed through the stream, then dropped down beside him. He saw her think about putting a hand on his shoulder, and decide against it. He waited for her to speak, but she didn’t. For a long moment they sat side by side, listening to the trickle of the water, burbling like an endless clock.
“I thought you were still in Newton,” he said, finally.
“I know,” she said. “Sorry.”
“That thing you said. In the diner. About hoping I took the chance for a fresh start.”
“Yeah.”
“You knew I was coming here.”
“He did. I was hoping…” She shrugged, didn’t finish.
Somewhere nearby, a bird screeched as it dove, and something squealed as it died.
“A couple years ago,” Cooper said, “I was tracking a guy named Rudy Turrentine. A brilliant, medical. A cardiac specialist at Johns Hopkins. He’d done some incredible stuff in his early career.”
“The Turrentine valve. The procedure they do now instead of heart transplants.”
“Yeah. But then he’d gone over to the other side. Joined John Smith. Rudy’s latest design had this clever new gimmick. It could be remotely shut off. Send the right signal, and bam, the valve quit working. It was hidden deep in the coding, some sort of enzyme thing, I never really understood it. Point was, it gave Smith the power to stop the heart of anyone who’d had this procedure done. Potentially tens of thousands of people.”
She knew enough not to say anything.
“Rudy ran, and I found him. Hiding in a shitty apartment in Fort Lauderdale. A multimillionaire, this guy, and a brilliant, and he was holed up above a payday-loan place in the part of town tourists don’t go.” Cooper rubbed at his face, a trickle of water still left there. “My team surrounded the building, and I kicked in the door. He was watching TV, eating pork fried rice. It was greasy, I remember that. You could smell it. It struck me as funny, this heart specialist eating heart-attack fare. He jumped, and it went everywhere. A short guy, shy. He looked at me, and he…”
After a long pause, Shannon said, “He?”
“He said, ‘Wait. I didn’t do what they say.’” A sob came from somewhere. It took him by surprise, a sob like a hiccup, and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d cried.
Shannon said, “Shh. It’s okay.”
“What did I do?” He turned to look at her, his gaze locked on her eyes glowing in the moonlight. “What have I done?”
She took a long moment before she spoke. “Did you believe it? That he could turn off people’s hearts?”
“Yes.”
“Then what you did, at least you thought you had a reason for it. You thought you were doing good. It’s the people who lied to you that you should blame.”
Cooper had a flash of Rudy Turrentine’s arms, flailing in wild punches as he stepped closer, as he moved where the man wasn’t swinging, as his own hands reached for the doctor’s head, as they twisted, sharp and hard, fast, always fast, never making it take longer than it had to.
“I’ve done things, too, Nick.” Her voice flat with effort. “We all have.”