“How did you find me?”
“We almost had you in Arkansas this morning. That’s ten hours and change from the border, too far to make in daylight. You’re smart enough to plan to cross during the day, when it’s crowded and the guards are sloppier. And since you’re more comfortable in cities, and San Antonio is the last big one before the border…” He shrugged.
“I could have just hidden somewhere, laid low.”
“You should have. But I knew you wouldn’t.” He smiled. “Your patterns give you away. You’re running from us, but you’re also running toward something.”
Vasquez tried to keep a straight face, but the truth was revealed in half a hundred tiny tells that glowed like neon signs to his eyes. You could give this up and play poker, Natalie had once told him, if anyone played poker anymore. “I thought so. Not working alone, are you?”
Vasquez shook her head, a tight, controlled gesture. “You’re awfully pleased with yourself.”
Cooper shrugged. “Pleased would have been catching you in Boston. But keeping you from releasing your virus counts as a win. How close were you?”
“A couple of days.” She sighed, lifted the beer bottle, and tilted it to her lips. “Maybe a week.”
“You know how many innocent people that could have killed?”
“It only targeted guidance systems on military aircraft. No civilian casualties. Just soldiers.” Vasquez turned to look at him. “There’s a war, remember?”
“Not yet there isn’t.”
“Fuck you.” Vasquez spat the words. The bartender, Sheila, glanced over, and so did a couple of people at nearby tables. “Tell that to the people you’ve murdered.”
“I’ve never murdered anybody,” Cooper said. “I’ve killed them.”
“It isn’t murder because they were different?”
“It isn’t murder because they were terrorists. They hurt innocent people.”
“They were innocent people. They could just do things you couldn’t imagine. I can see code, do you get it? Algorithms that confound straights are just patterns to me. They come in my dreams. I dream the most beautiful programs never written.”
“Come in with me. Do your dreaming for us. It’s not too late.”
She spun on her stool, clutching the beer bottle by its neck. “I bet. Pay my debt to society, right? Stay alive, but as a slave, betraying my own people.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Cooper smiled. “Are you sure?”
Her eyes sparked and then narrowed. She drew a shallow breath. Her lips moved as if she were whispering, but no words came out. Finally, she said, “You’re a gifted?”
“Yes.”
“But you—”
“Yes.”
“Hey. You all right, ma’am?”
Cooper broke the gaze for the split second he needed to take the man in. Six one, two twenty, fat over hard muscle that came from working, not the gym. His hands in front of him, half raised, knees slightly bent, balance good. Ready to fight if it came to that, but not anticipating it would. Cowboy boots.
Then he turned back to Alex Vasquez and saw what he had expected when he noticed the way she was holding the beer bottle. She had taken advantage of the distraction to swing at him backhanded. Her elbow was up and she put her back into it, and the bottle was whistling around to shatter on his skull.