From the seat across the aisle, Quinn said, “I think she’s sweet on you.”
“That’s because she doesn’t realize I work for the government.” He stretched, the joints in his shoulders and elbows popping. The jet was a commercial charter, nicer than the military gear they often used. He and Quinn were the only passengers. Luisa Abrahams and Valerie West, the other two members of his team, would be catching flights home tomorrow, after they’d finished wrapping up in San Antonio. Speaking of…
“Any word on the virus?”
“Good news, bad news. Luisa says the virus is, and I quote, ‘one vicious cunt of a piece of code.’ Good news is it’s not finished, and Valerie doesn’t think another programmer would be able to pick up where it leaves off. Says she definitely couldn’t.”
“What’s the bad news?”
“Vasquez wouldn’t have been able to use it. It would have to get past military security protocols. Those are designed by our best twists.”
Cooper shot him a look.
“No offense. Anyway, Luisa said that to work, it would have to be introduced inside the firewall.”
“So Alex Vasquez had a contact. Someone inside the military.”
“It would need to be someone with serious juice. Think that’s why she took her final bow? So she wouldn’t give up the name?”
“Maybe.” The fear of betraying a friend or lover might have given her the strength. Cooper wasn’t the suicidal type, but he imagined that if you were going to go by jumping, you’d want somewhere high and certain, a place where the ground was an abstraction. Vasquez would have been able to see every mark on the concrete, every piece of gum trod black, every bit of broken bottle sparkling up. It must have taken tremendous will to tuck her hands in her pockets and hurl her head at the concrete.
The jet touched the runway, bounced once, and then settled in, the roar of air and engine growing as they braked to a taxi.
“Got word from the office, too. Something’s brewing.”
“What?”
“No specifics yet. Just a lot of chatter at this point. But it’s got everybody keyed up.”
What a surprise. Everybody’s been keyed up since 1986.
That was the year Dr. Eugene Bryce had published a study in the science journal Nature formally identifying the brilliants, the oldest of whom were six. At that point, they were a curiosity, a weird phenomenon that people expected would likely be linked to pesticides or vaccinations or the deterioration of the ozone layer. An evolutionary blip.
It had been twenty-seven years since that study, and though thousands more had followed, the world was no closer to understanding the causes.
What was known was that slightly under one percent of children were born brilliant. The vast majority had fourth-and fifth-tier gifts: calendar identification, speed-reading, eidetic memory, high-digit calculation. Incredible abilities, but not problematic ones.
Then there were tier ones like Erik Epstein.
To Epstein, the movements of the stock market were as obvious as code had been to Vasquez. He’d racked up a net worth of $300 billion before the government had shut down the New York Stock Exchange in 2011. Most nations had followed suit. Global markets remained shuttered to this day. Debt holders had gone crazy. Property rights lawsuits were on the docket in every country. Entrepreneurialism had vanished overnight; small caps had folded; the Third World had gotten even more screwed up than usual.
All because of one man.