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Cooper sighed. “Yeah. As bad as things are right now, he’s about to make them worse.” He told them about tracking Abe Couzen, about the fight on the street and the chase through the train station, the way Abe’s gifts had manifested, and he walked them through his kidnapping. “Now, it’s possible that Smith just wants to keep the serum from us.”

“No,” Erik said. “That would be the maneuver of a journeyman. Smith is a grandmaster. Every move functioning to highest efficiency on multiple levels.”

“I agree.”

“Which is why I asked you to kill him three months ago.”

My God. Three months. Is that all it’s been? Cooper flashed back to that conversation, when he’d first met the real Erik Epstein. The man telling him stories of ancient history, the early terrorists in first-century Judea who killed Romans and collaborators. How that had provoked a reaction that punished not just the killers but all the Jews. Comparing them to John Smith. Saying that if he were allowed to live, the US military would attack the NCH within three years.

Only, because you spared Smith—hell, you exonerated him—it happened in three months, instead.

You did what you thought was right, what your father taught you. And the world is suffering for it.

In a very real way, this is your fault.

“Yes,” Millie said.

He fought the urge to glare, to snap at them, to say that he’d done the best he could. Forced it down, and his temper with it, until he could speak in steady, level tones.

“We’ve been over my mistakes. And yours. For now, we have to put that aside and focus on ending this. Because John Smith certainly is.”

For a moment, the brothers just stared at each other. Finally, Erik turned to him. “What do you propose?”

“First we’ve got to find Smith. I don’t suppose you know where he is?”

“No.”

“You did before.”

“That was before.”

Right. Well, so much for the easy way.

“Then I need to talk to someone who does.” Cooper took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “I need to sit down with the man who killed me.”

“I just wanted to see if it would work.”

—ERNIE ITO, 11, ON WHY HE RELEASED A HOMEGROWN STRAIN OF BOTULISM IN HIS MIDDLE SCHOOL CAFETERIA, RESULTING IN THE HOSPITALIZATION OF MORE THAN FOUR HUNDRED CHILDREN AND THREE DEATHS TO DATE. ITO, A TIER-TWO BRILLIANT, DEVELOPED THE BACTERIAL STRAIN AS A SCIENCE FAIR PROJECT.

CHAPTER 11

As the chain drew taut, Luke Hammond felt something bloom in his chest. A raw feeling he’d known a few times before.

At nineteen, huddled in the bush in Laos, watching a village burn, black smoke blotting out a sweating sky.

On a ruined rooftop in Beirut as an ancient mosque collapsed in a cloud of dust.

Staring at the computer monitor tracking operators terminating a training camp in El Salvador.

It wasn’t a feeling he’d sought out. Not one he was proud of, per se. Not something he’d tried to pass to his sons, but though they’d never discussed it, he’d suspected each had known it as well.

A furious, terrible joy in destruction. The triumphant howl of victory—no, not quite—of . . . power. Power that you possessed and your enemy did not.

He downshifted the truck, looked to his left and right, to the dozens of others, pickups and jeeps and semis, all tethered by cold steel chains to the fence behind which hid the people who had murdered his children.

Then he hit the horn, held it for a long blast. A second time.

On the third, he floored the gas, heard the roar from all the other engines as their drivers did the same.

A strained scream filled the air as steel stretched to the breaking point, and he let up, put the truck in reverse, bounced back ten feet, then threw it forward again, the others doing the same, and the collective force rippled back through the chains to the fence, the metal bending, earth popping, razor wire twining and singing, and the post ripped right out of the ground, along with nineteen of its brothers. In his rearview mirror, he saw a hundred-yard span of the New Canaan Holdfast’s border ripple and collapse.

Then, from the crowd, the cheer.

“This. Ends. Now!”

Thousands of voices yelling as one.

“This. Ends! Now!”

Pounding through his chest, pumping through his veins, howling through his lungs.

“This! Ends! Now!”