Brilliance (28 page)

“You,” Schneider said, as if he had only now noticed Cooper. “The poet.”

“Yeah.” He didn’t extend a hand.

“You need something?” The forger looked Shannon up and down dispassionately.

“New identities,” Cooper said.

“Already? I made you ten last time. You burn them all?” Schneider’s brow wrinkled. “That’s reckless. I don’t work with reckless people.”

“It’s not that. I need something better.”

Schneider snorted, then started walking, gesturing for them to follow. “My work is flawless. The seal, the microchip, the ink. You can look at the edge under a microscope and swear a brand-new card is ten years old. My code rats match my work to the government d-bases. There is no better.”

“But this time I’m crossing the border.”

“Doesn’t matter. They’ll work. Mexico, France, the Ukraine, wherever.”

“I’m not going to any of those places.”

Schneider stopped. Squinted. He leaned over the shoulder of an Asian girl, maybe twenty-two, watched her fingers spin beads onto delicate filigree. Schneider shook his head, sucked air through his teeth. “Too big,” he said. “Your spacing is too big. Do it right or you’re useless to me.”

The girl kept her eyes down, just nodded, began to unstring what she had done.

Schneider said, “You’re going to Wyoming.”

“Yes.”

“You’re a twist. You don’t need an ID. You can walk right in.”

“I don’t want to be myself.”

“Which self?” Schneider smiled his hideous smile. “Thomas Eliot? Allen Ginsburg? Walter Whitman? Who are you, Poet?”

Cooper met his eyes, returned the smile.

“New Canaan Holdfast is not like other places,” Schneider said. “The security there is very strong.”

“Very strong” was an understatement of epic proportions, Cooper knew. While the NCH had an open-door policy to immigrating gifted, Erik Epstein and the rest of the Holdfast government had a justified paranoia about being infiltrated. And with the planet’s largest concentration of gifted in a single location, they had quite literally the best people in the world securing their borders. DAR agents were allowed in New Canaan—it was still American soil, after all—but only if they identified themselves openly. A few had pretended to go native after badging in; all had been apprehended and politely escorted out by men with prominently displayed sidearms.

“Can you do it?”

“You’ll need complete identities. Supporting information in every major database. Recursive consumer profile generation.”

“Can you do it?”

“They will catch you eventually. The protocols will change or the search functionality will improve or you’ll screw up. And you don’t look right. Too much water fat.”

“Can you do it?”

“Of course.”

“How much?”

The forger sucked his teeth again. “Two hundred.”

“Two
hundred
?” It was an outrageous price, several times what he had paid before. Paying for these would wipe out most of the cash he’d accumulated over the last six months of being a bad guy. “You’re kidding.”

“No.”

“How about one hundred?”

“The price is the price is the price.”

“Come on. You’re screwing me here.”

Schneider shrugged. It was the same movement he had given earlier, when he had added six months to an indentured servant’s term. A move that said take it or leave it, it didn’t matter to him.

Cooper dropped the duffel on an empty work bench, yanked the zipper, and began to count out bundles. Criminal etiquette would have been to do it in private, but he didn’t care. Let one of these people jack the forger. Not his problem.

“Here. These are bundles of ten thousand.” He pushed the stack of twenty across the bench. Then he reached into the bag, pulled out two more bundles, and dropped them beside the others. “And that’s for the other guy. The one you cheated out of six months.”

Schneider looked amused. “A noble gesture.”

“He gets his ID tomorrow. Same as us.” Cooper laid a hand lightly on the stack of money, tapped his fingers. “Yes?”

The man shrugged.

“I want to hear you say it.”

“Yes,” Schneider said. “Tomorrow morning. Now,” he waved a smell away again. “There is work.”

Cooper spun on his heel and walked out, Shannon slipping like his shadow. He pushed through the aisle, down the steps, out the door. The night was cool, and he sucked the air deep, stalked to the car. Shannon let almost a mile of pavement slide beneath their wheels before she asked the question he’d seen her wanting to. “Why did you—”

“Because I don’t like the way he doesn’t even hide the way he sees us. As livestock, or slaves.”

“A lot of people do.”

“Yeah. But with Schneider, it’s truly impersonal. He could watch you burn to death and not make a move to pour water. It’s not hate, it’s…” He couldn’t think of the word, couldn’t put his finger on what exactly it was that so pushed his buttons. “I don’t know.”

“So paying for the guy was to show that you were Schneider’s equal?”

“Something like that. Just to make him notice, I guess. Shake him.”

“But it didn’t. You were still livestock. Like a cow learning to dance; it’s amusing, but it’s still a cow.”

He didn’t have anything to say to that, just drove in silence for a moment.

“It’s kind of ironic, actually,” she said. “Those clothes were knockoffs of Lucy Veronica’s new line. You know her stuff?”

“I know her name. She’s gifted, right?”

“Jesus, Cooper, pick up a magazine. Her styles have reinvented the fashion industry. The way she sees things—she’s spatial—changed everything. Her clothes are fetishized by socialite women. And those rich women are fetishized by middle-class suburban chicks, who want to be like the socialites, but can’t afford original Lucy Veronica. So what do they do to get the next best thing to couture designed by a brilliant? They buy a knockoff sewn by a brilliant. In a sweatshop.”

“Yeah, well, Sammy Davis Junior got to be in the Rat Pack, but that didn’t mean we had racial equality.”

Shannon half nodded, a noncommittal sort of gesture. He read her desire to launch into rhetoric, but instead she leaned back, slipped out of her shoes, and put her bare feet up on the glove box. “Anyway. It was nice of you. Paying for him, I mean. A nice thing to do.”

“Well, what the hell, right? Got to help each other out.” Realizing as he said it that he meant it, that it wasn’t just a line to play her. He was finding things murkier out here than he had expected; the relative clarity of his position at the DAR didn’t seem to translate.
But you’re still with department. Don’t forget that.
“Anyway, it wasn’t really my money.” He looked over at her, putting on a smile. “Turns out, I’m a pretty good thief.”

That got a laugh—he really liked her laugh, full-spirited and adult—which morphed into a yawn.

“Tired?”

“Dodging sniper fire, riding on top of a train, touring a sweatshop—it’ll wear a girl out.”

“Wuss.”

“I rode. On top of. A train.”

It was his turn to laugh. “All right. We’ll find a couple of beds.”

“I know a place we can go. Some friends of mine. We’d be safe.”

“How do you know?”

“Because they’re my friends.” She looked at him quizzically, the exterior lights glowing off her eyes. “Not everyone’s friends shoot at them.”

“Yeah, well, how do I know your friends won’t want to shoot at
me
?”

She shook her head. “They’re not part of the movement. Just friends.”

He eased the car left and got on the Eisenhower heading east. A low bank of clouds cut the skyline in half, the lights on the tallest buildings bright as a fairytale against indigo skies. The Jaguar’s tires hummed on the pavement. There were moments driving when he felt a perfect calm, as though he were the car, skimming above the road, power and control and distance. But tonight it felt off. The distance part, maybe. The last six months seemed like they had been all about distance: from his children, from Natalie, from the world he had so carefully built and the sensible position he occupied in it. Though he was a man who enjoyed his own company, talking to Shannon, having a partner, it made him realize he’d been lonely, too. It sounded nice to be around people.

Besides. Getting closer to her is getting closer to John Smith.

“Okay. Where to?”

Chinatown had given the DAR headaches since the beginning.

Not just in Chicago, and frankly, not just the DAR. Whatever the city, law enforcement always had trouble with Chinatown. The places were closed systems, insular worlds that existed within cities, traded with them, drew tourists from them, but nonetheless were never really
of
them. Police working Chinatown carried a bubble around, a small radius of American rule that extended only as far as they could see, that moved with them and left the place unchanged in their wake.

Which made law enforcement difficult. There weren’t very many Chinese cops, and the other races stood out like they were backlit. It wasn’t just a matter of not speaking the language; they didn’t even know how to ask the questions, which questions to ask. And in a world that existed within itself, a tight-knit community with its own leaders and factions, its own sense of and system for justice, what good could an outsider cop do? And all of that was before the gifted came along and complicated the picture.

Shortly after midnight, and the river was a ribbon of black. Light industry and warehouses gave way to dense clusters of brick buildings decorated with green awnings and pagodas, up-down shops with a riot of colorful signs, the characters meaningless as a paint squiggle to him. A handful had English subtitles with awkward phrasing:
EAT OR TAKE WITH, THE ALL-BEST CAMERAS, NOODLE FRESH SHOP
. Overlapping neon lit the night with science fiction colors.

“Where’s your friend’s place?”

“An alley off Wentworth. Park wherever you can, we’ll walk.”

He found a pay lot on Archer. He was about to get out of the Jag when she said, “Leave the gun.”

“Huh?”

“These are my friends. I’m not bringing a gun into their house.”

Cooper looked at her for a moment, wishing he had the call girl Samantha’s gift, that he could read Shannon, see the real her, understand her intentions. Was this some sort of a trick? Get him unarmed and outnumbered? She stared back. Cooper shrugged, unclipped the holster from his belt, slipped the rig under the front seat.

“Thank you.”

Shannon walked half a step in front of him. The windows of shops held a riotous array of crap—waving cats and colorful fans and plastic ninja swords. Tourist junk, but the tourists had gone for the night. Everyone on the sidewalk was a local, and many seemed to know each other. They passed the window of a butcher where the plucked carcasses of birds dangled by their feet. “So how do you know these people?”

“Lee Chen and I have been friends for a long time. He runs a business here.”

“Yeah, but how? How did you meet?”

“Oh, you know, in our mutual abnorm hatred of the world we recognized each other as kindred souls in a long battle.”

“Right.”

She grinned. “We went to high school.”

His gift followed the chain back—school together, but her friend is established here, odds are she grew up in Chicago, a good starting point if he ever needed to track her down. “Funny to think of you in high school.”

“Why?”

“The whole mysterious thing you have going.”

“Mysterious thing?”

“Yeah. You keep appearing out of nowhere, then disappearing. Before I knew your name, I called you the Girl Who Walks Through Walls.”

She laughed. “Better than what they called me in high school.”

“What was that?”

“Freak, mostly. At least until I got breasts.” They passed a restaurant called Tasty Place, another called Seven Treasures, and turned down an alley. The glow of the street faded. Dumpsters overflowed, the smell of rotting trash sweet. At the back of an unmarked brick building she stepped into an alcove, knocked on a heavy door painted green.

There was the sound of a heavy lock, and the green door opened. Within was a small antechamber with a metal folding chair, a paperback book split facedown on it. The guard nodded at Shannon, gestured to a door at the opposite wall, and then leaned on a button. Cooper heard an electronic buzz of a lock.

“What is this place?”

“This is Lee’s. Social club.” She opened the opposite door.

The room beyond was bright with bad lighting, overhead fluorescents battling thick clouds of cigarette smoke. There were eight or nine tables, half of them occupied. No one looked up. The men around the tables—it was all men, mostly older—stared forward, lost in a game played with dominos. Loose stacks of bills were scattered between ashtrays and bottles of beer.

“You mean casino.”

“I mean a social club. They socialize over Pai Gow. It’s part of the culture. Chance and fate and numbers are more important here.” She started around the edge of the room. Sugary pop music played in the background. Reaching a table of seven men, she stopped and stood quietly. The men ignored them, all eyes on the dealer, a younger guy, prematurely balding, who slid stacks of tiles to each of them. The tiles clicked softly as the players arrayed them in sets of two. When the last tiles had been placed, all the players turned them over, revealing patterns of dots, and at once the table exploded in a burst of Chinese. Money moved back and forth.

Shannon touched the dealer’s shoulder. He looked up at her. “Azzi.” His face broadened into a smile that vanished when he saw Cooper.

“Lee Chen,” she said and squeezed his shoulder. “This is Nick Cooper.”

The dealer stood up. The man to his left collected the tiles and began to mix them as the remaining players placed bets.

“Hi,” Cooper said. He held out a hand. “Nice place.”

“Sank you,” Lee said. “You po-rice?”

“No. I used to be.”

“Not po-rice. Now you are fliend to Shannon.”

“Umm. Yeah. Yes, I am her friend.” The man’s pidgin threw him, one of the classic problems of operating in Chinatown. So much nuance could be lost when only the broad strokes of a question were understood. He’d have to keep his answers simple, be sure not to offend—