Read Written in Fire (The Brilliance Trilogy Book 3) for Free Online Page B

Abe this morning?”
    “No. Valerie kept us in the game, but I can’t ask her to play against her own team. Besides, even if she did, that would put us on the same footing as the DAR. We need to get ahead of them.”
    “How?”
    “The personal angle. You know Abe, they don’t. They won’t know about Vincent. We find him.”
    Ethan considered it, as cloud shadows slid across high-rises and the rattle of the subway rose a block away and beneath them. “I don’t see him going back to his apartment. Would he try to leave the city?”
    “Maybe. It wouldn’t be easy, though.” Commercial flights had been shut down since Epstein demonstrated he could crash anything with a computer. That was part of the reason there had been such a rush on the trains. That, and the looming sense that an open conflict was coming, and that when it did, cities would be a dangerous place to be.
    “He could have a car—”
    “Nah,” Cooper said. “Professional piano players, even brilliants, don’t make enough to keep a car in this city.” It felt good to work the problem. Though it seemed a lifetime ago, it had been less than a year since he’d hunted his own kind for the DAR’s most clandestine division. Slipping back into that way of thinking was easy.
    Vincent’s racist asshole neighbors wouldn’t have let him pack a bag, or maybe even grab a wallet. He might well be on the streets with nothing.
    A friend? Possibly. But right now, Vincent won’t be in a trusting frame of mind.
    He’s scared, broke, and trapped. Looking for . . .
    Sanctuary.
    Cooper stood, finished the last of his coffee, then crumpled the cup and dropped it in the trash. “Let’s go.”

    He’d been to Madison Square Garden only once, for a Knicks game a few years ago, and had come in through the bright glass lobby, along with about twenty thousand other people. This time they headed for a side entrance, what had once probably been for employees, a set of grungy metal doors on the undecorated side of the massive building. A mobile sign on a parked trailer read, M ADISON S QUARE G ARDEN R EFUGEE H AVEN , and below that, A LL G IFTED W ELCOME . Two soldiers in active camouflage chatted by the door, the digital patterns of their BDUs flexing and shifting as they gestured.
    “Gentlemen,” one of them said as he opened the door. “Please have your identification ready.”
    The room was a cramped security antechamber. Cameras monitored every angle, and more soldiers manned a walkthrough scanner and an X-ray conveyor. A weary mother carried a girl of six while her husband argued with a pretty woman in civilian clothes.
    “But I don’t understand,” he said. “I thought families could come.”
    “They can,” the woman said. “But for your safety, we’re quartering the gifted members of the family separately.”
    “I’m not leaving my wife and daughter.”
    “It’s just a matter of bunk assignment. You’ll still be together.”
    “If we’re staying separately, then how are we—”
    “Honey.” The man’s wife touched his shoulder. “We don’t have a choice. Unless you want to wait for someone to break down our door and drag you away?”
    The little girl startled at that, said, “Who’s taking Daddy?”
    “Nobody, baby,” the man said. “Nobody.” He stroked her hair. To Cooper’s eyes, the man’s rage and helplessness burned a dangerous shade of red, but he said, “Okay.”
    “Please step this way.” The pretty woman turned to Cooper. “Welcome to Haven. Are you requesting admission?”
    “No.” He flipped open his wallet. The picture was of a wildly different man. A man filled with certainty, who didn’t hope he was doing the right thing, he knew it. Fighting the good fight. Making hard choices for the greater good. Embodying the tropes that made him tear up at the heroic moments of movies—the swell of music, the bold self-sacrifice, the faith that the cause was worth dying for—all the soldierly clichés he’d bought into