_2016_05_13_16_27_46_462

“12.2 percent. But more important, he took down four agents. You think those guys aren’t trained for a tweaked-out brilliant? Plus, one of them was Bobby Quinn. I know you and he don’t get along, but trust me, he’s good at his job. Hormonal control alone isn’t the answer. But if Abe were also physiolinguistic, he might be able to read their body language and tailor a series of attacks based on their positions.”

“Those could coexist,” Ethan said. “Your patterning is more than just physical. Souped-up intuition, right?”

“But then, in Grand Central, he was able to move like Shannon. He read the motions of the crowd before they happened.”

“Maybe he just found a hole.”

“There wasn’t a hole. There wasn’t room to inhale. And yet he barely slowed down. As icing, at the same time he worked out a diversion. That’s like solving a quadratic equation while juggling and running a marathon.”

Ethan was quiet for a moment. “If you’re right . . .”

“This is what I do.” Cooper blew a breath. “I’m right. And it’s not just multiple gifts. It’s the strength of them. I’m tier one and thirty years younger, and after what I saw this morning, I’m not sure I could take him. Which means that for all purposes, the good doctor Abraham Couzen is tier zero. And I’d like to know how.”

Ethan hesitated. “I need a minute to think.”

“I bet.” Out the window, the city scrolled past. The same New York he’d visited countless times, and yet, not the same at all. There was an uneasy tension to everything, a nervous twitchiness. America could take a punch, but the last year had been a series of haymakers. The stock exchange bombing in March, resulting in more than a thousand dead. Abnorm terrorists seizing control of Tulsa, Fresno, and Cleveland, the last of which burned to the ground in the ensuing riots. The destruction of the White House and the massacre of seventy-five thousand soldiers. Not to mention the erosion of the social order: shuttered financial markets, basic services falling apart, growing mistrust of the government, increasingly violent tribalism.

America could take more than one punch, but it was reeling, and the evidence was everywhere. Trash bags were piled on street corners, black plastic stretching at the seams. Private military contractors with automatic weapons guarded luxury apartments. Billboards advertised Madison Square Garden as a haven for “those feeling threatened.” The rows of buildings seemed almost to be watching them, and it took a moment to realize that it was because so many had broken windows. A block of small businesses had been burned out, the glass gone, brick blackened, nothing but crusted ruins within. Graffiti on a scorched metal roll-door read, WE ARE BETTER THAN THIS.

Cooper thought of a flash of white sock, and wondered.

“Okay,” Ethan said. “This is just a theory, right? Without data, I can’t say for sure.”

“Roll the dice.”

“People have been searching for the genetic basis of brilliance for three decades. They couldn’t find it because it wasn’t there, not in the code. Our breakthrough was discovering the epigenetic basis of it. That’s why the answer was so slippery, because epigenetics is about the way DNA expresses, not the genes themselves. DNA is the raw ingredients, but you can make very different dishes from the same ingredients, and human DNA has twenty-one thousand genes. That’s a lot of ingredients. The trick is locating the specific cause. Abe called it the three-potato theory.”

“Right, you told me,” Cooper said. “If the cause of the gifts was eating three potatoes in a row, figuring that out is hard, because it’s a big world. But once you know, all you have to do is eat three potatoes.”

“Here’s the thing, though. Nature is messy. Evolution is about random errors—mutations—that end up conferring a survival advantage and get passed on. But so does a lot of other junk, stuff that doesn’t really do much but hitch a ride. So while you end up with three potatoes, they’re ugly potatoes. Lumpy, deformed potatoes. But what we developed was different. We reverse engineered it, developing a gene theory that was carefully targeted.”

Cooper got it. “You created a perfect potato. The Platonic ideal of a potato.”

Ethan shrugged. “It’s just a guess.”

“But if you’re right, then Abe isn’t just gifted. He’s the ultimate expression of brilliance. He can move like Shannon, analyze like Erik Epstein, plan like John Smith.”

“I . . . it’s possible.”

Cooper took a deep breath. Exhaled. “Well. I guess we better find him then, huh?”

The apartment building was in Hell’s Kitchen, a five-story walk-up on a street of weathered red brick and haggard trees. As they walked to the front door, Ethan said, “I don’t know who this guy is to Abe. Isn’t this a long shot?”

“When a long shot is all you have, you shoot long. Unless you can think of someone else?”

Ethan shook his head. “He’s private to the point of paranoia. Vincent is about the only person I ever heard him mention from his personal life.”