Written in Fire (The Brilliance Trilogy Book 3) by Marcus Sakey Read Free Book Online

since he was a kid, they had belonged to:
     
    C OOPER, N ICHOLAS J.
    S PECIAL A GENT
    D EPARTMENT OF A NALYSIS AND R ESPONSE
    E QUITABLE S ERVICES D IVISION
     
    Beside the ID was a badge, the logo in the center the all-seeing eye of the DAR. While he wasn’t on active duty, technically, he was still a government agent on extended leave. He’d thought about formally resigning from the department when he’d accepted the job as special advisor to President Clay, but he’d been uncertain he’d stay in politics.
    There’s a wild understatement for you
    The woman examined the identification. “Welcome, sir.” She handed them plastic badges. “Please keep these on your person at all time; they grant full access to Haven. If you’re armed, we’ll need you to leave your weapons here.”
    “Why?”
    “Just a precaution. We have several thousand residents and can’t risk an incident.”
    Cooper wondered what that meant. “We’re not armed. But maybe you can help me find a . . . resident. Vincent Luce.”
    She typed on hidden keys. “Section C, row six, room eight. Elevator to the fifth floor and follow the hallway out to the midcourt entrance.”
    Badges in hand, they bypassed the security station, where soldiers waved wands over the family’s three sad bags. Packing them must have been hard. How did you decide which parts of your life to abandon? The father stared at him, and Cooper nodded. The man didn’t.
    They stepped into the waiting elevator. When the doors closed, Ethan said, “I do not get it.”
    “What?”
    “No way I’d bring my family here.”
    “No?” Cooper pressed the button for five. “You tried to sneak out of Cleveland in the middle of the night past a military quarantine. You telling me that if there’d been a warm, safe place to go to, you wouldn’t have considered it?”
    “We didn’t ‘try.’ We did it. And all prisons start out warm and safe.”
    “Prison? Come on.”
    “Look how quickly this came together. Just days after the attack they had sleeping arrangements, security, even an ad campaign. Someone planned it in advance.”
    “So?”
    “So what are the odds they did it out of the goodness of their hearts?”
    The elevator doors opened, and they stepped out into a bare concrete hallway. Soldiers and civilians moved through the unpolished guts of the arena: electrical conduit above, forklifts parked in alcoves, a faint tang of stale urine to the air.
    “Speaking of residents and best interests,” Cooper said. “Vincent is literally our only lead, and we’re going to be asking him to betray Abe. Depending what your old boss means to him, he may not want to do that.”
    “I got ya,” Ethan hammed in a bad film noir accent, “you’re saying we might needs to get rough, show him the wrong end of a pair a pliers.”
    “I’m saying that he is going to help us, period.”
    “Wait. You’re not kidding?” Ethan stopped walking. “Come on, man. That’s Gestapo crap.”
    Maybe it was the leftover frustration from this morning, or the way the world seemed desperate to destroy itself, or the urine smell of the corridor. Maybe he was just tired and sore and hadn’t seen his kids in too damn long. Whatever the reason, the rage surged snake-quick, and without consciously planning the move, he spun and put Ethan up against the wall. The scientist yelped in surprise.
    “I am sick,” Cooper enunciated carefully, “of being compared to the Gestapo.” A voice in his head said, Easy, easy , but another pointed out that he’d had two chances to kill John Smith, that he had brought down one president and failed another, that hard as he had tried to make a better world for his children, all that had happened was that he’d hastened the end of it. “America is at war because I didn’t act like the Gestapo. Seventy-five thousand soldiers died because I didn’t act like the Gestapo. That boy was lynched because I didn’t act like the Gestapo.”
    It was only as he said it