CHAPTER FIFTEEN.

Located west of DC's Naval Observatory, Ma.s.sachusetts Avenue Heights was a charming neighborhood of redbrick row houses whose proximity and small yards belied the affluence within. While not quite equaling the mansions and political swing of Sheridan-Kalorama, it was a wealthy neighborhood, the kind of place people said was great to raise kids, and home to numerous politicians, doctors, and lawyers.

The house on 39th Street NW was quaint and carefully maintained, with a pretty porch, manicured hedges, and an American flag. What wasn't quite as evident were the security cameras mounted not only on the house but along the walk-way and in the tree, the steel-reinforced doorframe, and the discreet gray sedan that pa.s.sed the house at random intervals twice an hour.

Cooper had been here many times. He'd sat on the picture-perfect back patio and sipped beer while the kids played. He'd helped design the security, and for several months, even served as a driver. During a mousetrap operation in which they'd leaked supposed weaknesses to terrorist elements, he'd run a team out of the place, sleeping in the spare room and hoping that John Smith might take the bait. He wasn't a stranger to the house on 39th Street.

Still, showing up unannounced after dark, wearing torn clothes and smelling of sweat and diesel, well, it wasn't something he'd normally do.

He rang the doorbell. Opened and closed his hands as he waited for what seemed a long time, conscious of the security measures trained on him.

When he opened the door, Drew Peters looked at Cooper for a long moment. His accountant's eyes took in every detail and gave nothing back. Cooper didn't say anything, just let his very presence speak for him.

Finally the director of Equitable Services glanced at his watch. "You'd better come in."

Cooper had interrupted dinner, so Peters brought him through the kitchen to say h.e.l.lo. The s.p.a.ce was bright and homey, with hardwood countertops and gla.s.s-fronted cabinets. It had always struck Cooper as out of character with the cool gray he a.s.sociated with Director Peters.

Of course, at home, he wasn't the director; he was Dad, and Cooper was sometimes Uncle Nick. The girls usually squealed when he came in. Maggie harbored a tweenage crush, while Charlotte often begged helicopter rides.

Tonight, though, Charlotte pushed broccoli listlessly around her plate, and Maggie stared at her hands. Finally, Alana, the eldest, rose. "Hi, Cooper. Are you okay?" She'd been eleven when her mother died, and since then she'd become the de facto lady of the house, watching over the others and taking care of meals. Cooper had often felt sorry for Alana-nineteen years old and forced to act forty. He wondered who she would have turned out to be if Elizabeth had lived. Imagined she wondered that, too.

"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 encompa.s.s 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 b.u.t.ton that would seal the place like a vault and summon an a.s.sault 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."

"I know."

"You'll be more hated than John Smith ever was. Because you were one of us, and you betrayed us. Every resource in the department's power will be aimed at you. There will be thousands of people hunting you. Literally thousands. If you're captured, I can reveal the truth. But-"

"But no one is going to try to capture me. If they have a shot, they'll take it."

"That's right. And meanwhile, you're going to be on your own. No resources. No requisitioned helicopters, no phone taps, no surveillance teams. No backup. Nothing."

Cooper just sipped his scotch. Nothing Peters was saying was a surprise to him. He'd had time to think it out on the flight down.

All commercial flights had been grounded, so he'd badged his way onto a Marine Corps C-130 and ridden in with a squad of jarheads. The boys were extra gung ho under the circ.u.mstances, but he could see the hurt under the oo-rah. America wasn't used to being hit this way, to an attack in the heart of its strength.

The response would be devastating. There would need to be a blood payment. The country would demand it.

It wouldn't be long before it got out that the bombing was John Smith's work. And in America's overwrought state, most people wouldn't make the distinction between abnorms and abnorm terrorists.

After all, it was abnorms who had forced the stock market to close in the first place. Abnorms who were taking the lead in every field. Abnorms who were making the rest of humanity feel small and secondary.

You can't stop the future. All you can do is pick a side. Alex Vasquez's voice in his head.

Not an easy choice. And more complicated than she would have admitted. Was he a government agent hunting terrorists, or a father whose daughter was in danger? Was he a soldier or a civilian? If he believed in America, did that mean he had to accept the academies?

All right, Alex. I've made my choice. But right now, this hour in the sky, this hour is for me. He'd leaned against the metal skin of the airplane, felt the thrum of the turboprops, the cold of the air rushing past, and he let himself think of what he was about to risk. All that he might lose. The staggering costs of the plan he was proposing.

And when he landed, he'd pushed that kind of thinking aside and begun to act. Now he stared across the table at the director, at the man's pale, calm eyes, and he said, "I can do this."

"There will be no going back. None. You succeed or you die."

"I know."

"Even a chance to get rid of John Smith is worth a gamble. If we don't, he may well tip this country into outright civil war." Peters looked away and tapped his fingers lightly on his desk. The news channels were playing footage of the explosion, and reflected in his rimless gla.s.ses, the Exchange fell again and again.

Finally, he said, "Last chance, son. Are you sure you want to do this?"

"Yes. I'll kill John Smith for you." Cooper set his gla.s.s on the desk and leaned forward. "But there's one condition."

Natalie's house.

A tantalizing hint of silhouette flickered across one of the curtains. The lights were on, and the windows glowed b.u.t.tery warm. Del Ray was too much part of the city for the sky to be truly black, but the queasy purple of light pollution was lonelier than night. It made those windows, and the life within them, all the more attractive.

Cooper stared out of the windshield. Took a deep breath, blew it out. There was an emptiness in his stomach, a hollowness he hadn't felt in years. A childish sort of yearning pain, the way he'd felt when he was twelve and all the rewards he'd ascribed to adulthood-love, freedom, certainty-seemed a million years away. The emptiness of the morning bed after a glittering dream of girls and adventure.

Now that things were in motion, he wanted more than anything to stop it all. To beg the director to call it off. It was too much. The costs were too high.

But then he remembered what this was really about, and he put childish fantasy away.

He climbed out of the Charger-something else he'd have to abandon soon, his beloved car and its even more beloved license-to-speed transponder-and crossed the street. The night air nipped but didn't bite. Everything smelled clean. He was sore and tired, but he tried to record every detail, to move with heightened awareness. It would be a long time before he could walk this path again.

At the front window, he paused just out of the spill of light. The curtains were parted a couple of inches, and through them he could see his children. Todd was staging an elaborate action-figure battle, the pantheons all mixed up, armored knights fighting alongside World War II soldiers and s.p.a.ce monsters. The tip of his tongue protruded from the corner of his mouth as he mounted a robot on a horse. Kate sat on the sofa with a picture book in her lap, turning the pages backward and talking softly to herself. Through the open archway he could see Natalie in the kitchen, washing dishes. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and her hips swayed as she scrubbed, semidancing to music he couldn't hear. The quiet peace of the scene, the warmth and safety and domesticity, was a jagged knife through his belly. Cooper closed his eyes. You've already chosen sides.

He took out his phone and dialed. Through the window he saw his ex-wife dry her hands on a towel and pull her phone from her pocket. "Nick. Are you okay? I called you a bunch of times and left messages-"

"I know. I'm okay. But I need to talk to you."

Even at this distance, he could see her stiffen. "Is it about Kate?"

"No. Yes. Sort of. Listen, I'm outside. Can you come out?"

"You're outside? Why didn't you knock?"

"We need to talk first. Before the kids know I'm here."

"Okay. Give me a minute."

Cooper pocketed his phone. Took one last look through the window, felt his stomach slip and his heart squeeze, and then stepped away. He moved over to the lone tree, a maple down to a last handful of leaves. Quick flash of memory, the tree as it had been when he and Natalie had bought the house, a runty little thing held in place by wires.

Natalie came out a few minutes later. She paused on the step, screening her eyes from the porch light, then spotted him leaning. The subtle shifts of expression on her face might have barely registered with a stranger, but each emotion was as distinct to him as if the words had been projected on her forehead. Happiness that he was alive. Guarded concern about the way he'd asked to meet her. Fear of what he had to say about Kate. A quickly overcome desire to run back inside and slam the door. "Hey," she said.

"Hey."

She tucked her hands in her pocket and looked him in the face. Knowing him well enough to recognize that he had something to say, and waiting for him to start. That cool, levelheaded forthrightness that he had always loved. A siren sounded nearby, and it quickened his heart. He glanced at his watch. Tick-tock.

"Am I keeping you?"

"No, I-" He took a breath. "I have to tell you something." He glanced at her, at the yard, at the window. Had that been motion in the curtain?

"For Christ's sake, spit it out."

"I'm going to be going away for a while."

"'A while'? What does that mean?"

"I'm not sure. Maybe a long time."

"Something for your job."

"Yes."

"Something to do with today."

"Yes. I was there. Manhattan."

"My G.o.d, are you-"

"I'm fine," he said, then shook his head. "No, that's not true. I'm p.i.s.sed and I'm frustrated and I'm hurting. I was trying to stop it, Nat. I almost did stop it. But I didn't, not quite, and all those people..."

"Did you try as hard as you could?"

"Yeah. I think so. Yeah."

"Then it's not your fault. Nick, what is this? What's going on?" A miniscule widening of her eyes flashed her fear up at him.

"The explosion today. It was John Smith."

"You can't know that yet. Maybe it was-"

"It was John Smith. The worst terrorist attack on America in history, and it was an abnorm who did it."

"But...that's going to...things are going to...my G.o.d, it's going to get worse. They're going to come after abnorms. Really come after you."

"Yes." He stepped forward and took her hands in his. "So I'm going after him. John Smith. Not the same as before. Something different."

"What?"

"The only way to get close is if he thinks I'm on his side. So I'm going to be. I'm going to leave the agency and go on the run."

"I don't understand."

"The bombing. They're going to blame it on me."

She stared at him. He could practically hear her mind working. "Wait, no, it doesn't make sense. He'll know. John Smith, he'll know you weren't in on it."