“Good. Listen, I know you want to take this on. But all we can do is our job, one day at a time. I mean, at least we’re in the game. We’re trying. The rest of the world is just hoping things work out okay.”
“He’s out there right now. Somewhere. John Smith. He’s out there, and he’s planning an attack.”
“You know what he’s not doing?”
“Huh?”
“He’s not calling his best friend to agonize over whether the world is going to shit. That’s how I know we’re the good guys.”
“Yeah.”
“Get some sleep. For all we know, Smith’s attack is coming tomorrow.”
“You’re right. Thanks. Sorry for the hour.”
“No worries. And Coop?”
“Yeah?”
“Finish that drink.”
He made himself jog the next morning as planned. Cooper did five miles twice a week, hit the gym opposite days, and sometimes enjoyed it, though not today. The weather was nice enough, warmish and bright for a change, and last night’s insomnia cocktails didn’t affect him as much as he’d feared. But part of the pleasure of exercise was losing himself in the physical, offlining the analytical side of his brain for a while and just concentrating on his breathing and the rhythm of his muscles and the beat through his headphones. This morning, unfortunately, John Smith jogged with him. The length of the run, all Cooper could think about was something he had said yesterday. He may be a sociopath, but he’s also a chess master. The strategic equivalent of Einstein.
The trick was to figure out how to beat a man like that. Cooper was the top agent at arguably the most powerful organization in the country. He had enormous resources at his disposal; he could access secret data, tap phone lines, command police and federal agencies alike, deploy black-ops teams on American soil. If an abnorm had been designated a target, Cooper could kill without legal consequence—and had, on thirteen occasions. He could, in short, bring incredible force to bear…but only if he knew where to focus it.
His opponent, meanwhile, could attack wherever he wanted, whenever he wanted. Not only that, but even a partial success was a victory for him, where for Cooper, anything less than complete triumph was a failure. Prevent half the casualties of a suicide bomber, and you still had a suicide bomber and a lot of dead bodies.
Brooding on it made a five-mile run seem like ten. And in one of those charming little ironic moments, when he passed the convenience store at the end of his block, he saw that the locked security roll-door had been freshly graffitied: I AM JOHN SMITH.
What you are, pal, is an asshole with a can of spray paint. And man, do I wish I’d rounded the corner as you were finishing up.
Inside his apartment, he peeled off the sweaty T-shirt, caught a whiff—yow, laundry time—and headed for the shower. When he was done he flipped on CNN as he toweled his hair.
“—a significant increase in the so-called Unrest Index, to 7.7, the highest level since the measurement’s introduction. The jump is largely attributed to yesterday’s bombing in Washington, DC, which claimed—”
In the closet he chose a soft gray suit with a pale blue shirt, open collared. He checked the load on the Beretta—it was full, of course, but army habits died hard—and then clipped the holster to his hip.
“—controversial billionaire Erik Epstein, whose New Canaan Holdfast in Wyoming has grown to seventy-five thousand residents, most of them gifted and their families. The twenty-three-thousand-square-mile area, purchased by Epstein through numerous holding companies, has become a polarizing factor not only in the state, where New Canaan’s occupants comprise nearly fifteen percent of Wyoming’s total population, but in the country at large with the introduction of House Joint Resolution 93, a measure to allow the region to secede as a sovereign nation—”