“Sure,” he said. “I’m as okay as everybody else.”
“It’s awful,” she said, and immediately looked as if she wanted to amend that, find a stronger term, a word that could encompass the bodies and the smoke and the pink shock of a child’s stuffed animal in the middle of Broadway.
“Yes.” If there was such a word, Cooper didn’t know it. “I’m sorry to interrupt dinner.”
“It’s okay. Want something?”
“No, thanks.” With that, the small talk sputtered and died.
Peters said, “Let’s talk in the study” and then led Cooper through the house, past school photographs and framed macaroni art.
The “study” was a windowless room off the back of the house, with a desk and a couch, a sidebar, two muted tri-ds running the news. There was a silver-framed photograph of Elizabeth, the director’s wife, gone eight years now and buried in Oak Hill Cemetery. Was it only this morning Drew had told him that story?
The room sported a few less-traditional features, as well: inch-thick plating beneath the drywall, hydraulic steel door, buried hard-lines running to the DAR and the White House, a panic button that would seal the place like a vault and summon an assault team. The director poured two scotches, sat down, and looked at Cooper expectantly.
So Cooper took a breath and a sip of scotch and told him everything that had happened that day, every moment of the pursuit, how close he’d been to the bomber, how he had almost stopped things. And then he shared the idea that had struck him on a NoHo street—How you gonna tell the good guys from the bad guys?—the proposal that had driven him back here despite the distance and the impropriety and especially the magnitude of sacrifice it would involve.
Drew Peters said, “That’s a preposterous notion. Absolutely not.”
“It’s not preposterous. It’s perfectly feasible.”
“I can think of a dozen ways it could fail.”
“I can think of a hundred. But it gives us a chance, a real honest-to-Christ chance to get close to him.”
“He’d see through it. See you coming.”
“Not if we went all the way with it.”
“All the way.”
“Yes. That’s the only way to get him,” Cooper said. “We’ve been doing this wrong for years.”
Peters picked up his silver pen, spun it between long fingers. If he was offended, it didn’t show in his off hand, “Oh?”
“The way we’re working now, we have to bat a thousand just to tie. Say I’d been able to get to the bombs today. If I disarmed four of them and the fifth went off, it’s a win for Smith. If I disarmed them all, but if the press found out they’d been planted, it’s still a win. He can hit us anywhere, anytime, and any hit is a victory. We have to protect everywhere, all the time, and the best we can do is tie. A perfect defense alone never wins.
“If we want to end this, if we want to keep things from escalating, if we want to win, we have to neutralize John Smith. And this is a way to do it.”
“Not a way,” Peters said. “A chance.”
“That’s better than no chance.” Cooper took a swallow of scotch. He was exhausted, and the drink smoothed some of the rough edges. Cooper waited. The director gave nothing away, but the tiny muscles of his nose, his ears, the miniscule tensing of his shoulders, all said he was considering it.
“You understand what would be entailed? Just naming you rogue wouldn’t be enough,” Peters said. “I’d have to designate you a target.”
“Yes.”
“I won’t be able to hold back. The preliminary reports I’ve seen put the dead at more than a thousand. And this attack was in the heart of Manhattan. There will be no half measures. I’d have to cast you down like Lucifer. I can keep you off the news—probably—but within the agency, there’d be nothing I could do for you.”