By one o’clock they were rolling through Elizabeth in a black Escalade commandeered from a DAR tactical response team. Bobby Quinn was expanding on one of his theories, and Cooper was driving and trying not to listen. The truck had been rebored and given twin turbochargers, and the result was a roar of muscle Cooper was digging on.
“So I finally figured out those anti-Wyoming people,” Quinn said. “I used to think, you know, why not? I mean, who needs Wyoming? You ever been there? Of course not. No one has. And maybe it would take some of the pressure off things if abnorms had a place they knew was safe. No big surprise Erik Epstein named the place New Canaan, right? Tap into the Jewish sympathy, parallel the situations.”
“Mmm,” Cooper said. He glanced at the map on the Escalade’s GPS. Outside the window Elizabeth looked exactly the way he had imagined. The houses were mostly two stories, small but tidy, nestled close. Older domestic cars were parked in squat driveways beneath crisscrossing power lines. The kind of neighborhood where a nurse and a plumber could own a home, raise a family.
“But then I figured it out. It’s like Risk.”
“Like risk?” Cooper asked, drawn in despite himself. “Who likes risk?”
“No, Risk. You know, Risk, that board game, the one with all the little plastic pieces and the map of the world? Risk.”
“Oh. Okay.” Cooper paused. “Yeah, still not getting it, Bobby. What’s like Risk?”
“You ever play it?”
“I don’t know. A long time ago.”
“My nephews were in town, we’d done the zoo already, the Mall, and I was going crazy for something to entertain them. See, the goal of the game is to take over the world—”
“That’s your revelatory realpolitik understanding of New Canaan and norm-abnorm relations? ‘The goal is to take over the world’?”
“Just listen. You start with a certain number of pieces in different countries, and you attack the countries next to them. You get more armies every turn depending on what countries you hold. Well, continents, really, you get armies for continents, but anyway, the point is, you get different amounts for different continents.”
“Okay.” Cooper turned onto Elm Street. Evans was at 104 Elm. He checked his mirror; no sign of police cars, nothing to startle the man. The sky was white.
“So say you own Australia. And you feel pretty good about yourself, right? You took it over a bit at a time, and the rewards are coming in now, a few armies every turn. And you’ve got all that water between you and the rest of the world. You’re rolling.”
“Right.”
“Wrong. Because someone out there has Asia. And they get like three times the armies you do. Every single turn, bam, you get two armies, they get six or seven. Over one turn, it’s not a big deal, right? You started out equal, so the few extra armies make a difference, but not a crucial one. Australia is still in the game. But after a few turns, things get dicier. Asia has a lot more power already. And Australia can see that it’s going to get worse. Given ten or twenty turns? Forget it. There’s no comparison between the two. They may have started at the same place, but now one is totally at the other’s mercy.”