Brilliance by Marcus Sakey Page A

you?”
    “Tell me, Roger. What would you have done differently?”
    “I wouldn’t have put him on that street corner in the first place.”
    “Oh yeah? Just lock up his twist-loving ass and throw away the key?”
    “No. Handcuff his twist-loving ass to a chair and go to work.”
    “A little recreational enhanced interrogation?” Cooper snorted, shook his head. “You could waterboard him till he grew gills, and it wouldn’t change the fact that he didn’t know anything.”
    “You don’t know that. And now we never will.”
    “We’re agents of the United States government, not some Third-World dictator’s private security force. That is not the way we work. We don’t have a torture chamber in the basement.”
    “Yeah, well.” Dickinson stared at him, his gaze level, eyes unblinking. “Maybe we should.”
    Yikes.
    “Roger, I don’t know what your problem is. I don’t know if it’s a personal grudge, or ambition, or if you just need to get laid. But we have a fundamental difference of opinion on what our mission is. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go do my actual, legal job.” He started away.
    “You want to know what my problem with you is? Seriously, do you want to know?”
    “I already do.” Cooper turned. “I’m an abnorm.”
    “No. It’s got nothing to do with that. I’m not a bigot. The problem,” Dickinson said, stepping forward, “is that you’re weak. You’re in charge, and you’re weak. And Equitable Services needs strong people. Believers.” He held the glare for a moment longer, and then he brushed past.
    Cooper watched him go. Shook his head.
I’m going to go with needs to get laid.
    “Everything copacetic?” Bobby Quinn asked as he returned to the workstation.
    “Sure. What have we got?”
    Valerie West said, “The nearest cell tower reports a dozen calls within ten seconds. Eight of them local. When you triangulate the location, only one set of GPS coordinates makes sense: 38.898327 by -77.027775.”
    “Which is…”
    “Right about…” She zoomed on the map. As she did, Cooper felt that intuitive tingle, like a tickle in his brain, his gift jumping ahead to tell him what he was about to see. “There.” The screen showed G Street, half a block east of 12th. The entryway to a bank. He recognized it.
    He’d been standing right beside it.
    Cooper closed his eyes, thought back. The movement of the moment, so many things he’d been taking in. The faded yellow blur of a taxi. The smell of auto exhaust, cooking grease from a fast-food restaurant. The muted rumble of the Metro and the rot smell of the sewer grate and the squeal of brakes two blocks down and the very, very pretty girl talking on the cell phone.
    You gotta be kidding me.
He turned to Quinn. “Do we have video of that spot?”
    “My cams were all pointing across the street.” His partner looked at the screen, pinched his lips, then snapped his fingers. “The bank. It would have security cameras.”
    “Get in touch. See if you can find a picture of our bomber.”
    Quinn snatched his suit coat from the back of the chair. “On it.”
    Cooper turned back to the two women. “We need to get out ahead of this thing. Valerie, we have Alex’s and Bryan’s cell phones, right?”
    She nodded. “SOP would be to dupe his when we arrested him. And analysts are probably already working her phone, pattern building based on the contact info.”
    “Good. Initiate a search. I want digital taps on every number in their cell phone. To two degrees of separation.”
    Luisa’s mouth fell open. “Jesus,” she whispered.
    Valerie was doing that thing with her hands again, only without the napkin to shred this time. “Two degrees?”
    “Yeah. I want taps on every contact in both phones. Then, any number that has connected with any of those contacts? I want them tapped too. Going back…six months.”
    “Christ on a chorus line.” Luisa stared. “That’ll be hundreds of people.”
    “Probably more like