by David Mack
He kicked the bike into gear and twisted the throttle. The engine roared, and the motorcycle laid down a strip of rubber as Tom launched it down the road. Wind slammed against his face and forced him to squint as he accelerated.
Diana wrapped her left arm around Tom’s waist and used her right hand to activate her walkie-talkie. “NTAC-Five to NTAC-One,” she shouted over the wind noise. “One hostile on a rice rocket, southbound on Eleventh! Agents in pursuit! Over!”
Their field command team squawked back in reply, “Copy that, NTAC-Five. We have eyes on the prize. Over.”
Tom kept his eyes on the distant figure ahead of them. The escaping rider was headed toward the West Seattle Bridge, which passed over Harbor Island without providing access to it. Police vehicles had closed off either end of the bridge, and their blue and red lights flashed brightly against the dimming sky.
NTAC snipers stood on the bridge with their weapons aimed over the guardrail as they watched Harbor Island and waited for targets to reveal themselves.
Another rippling disturbed the air ahead of the escaping suspect and made the bridge seem to waver like a mirage. Then the effect struck half a dozen of the elevated roadway’s concrete supports, which shattered as if they had been made of eggshells. Broken metal and stone collapsed into dusty rubble, and the roadway buckled and plunged to earth with a deep groan of distressed steel and a deafening thunderstroke of impact.
The suspect veered right onto Spokane Street and vanished into the spreading gray cloud of smoke and haze.
Shouting over Tom’s shoulder, Diana asked, “Where the hell’s he going?”
“Who knows?” Tom said, skirting the edge of the spreading cloud and searching for any sign of the suspect.
Keying the walkie-talkie again, Diana snapped, “NTAC-Five to NTAC-Seven! Get down here and blow this shit clear! Over!”
“Copy that, NTAC-Five. Over,” replied the chopper pilot. Seconds later, the black helicopter swooped low ahead of Tom and Diana. Its rotors kicked up enough wind to clear away the dirty fog and pounded out enough noise to drown out the engine of their sportbike as Tom twisted the throttle fully open. On the other side of the now bifurcated West Seattle Bridge, the suspect was racing away toward the Harbor Island Marina.
“NTAC-Seven,” Diana shouted into the radio, “suspect is at the marina! Repeat, suspect is at the marina! Put a light on him, but keep your distance! Over!”
“We’ve got him, NTAC-Five,” replied the chopper pilot. The helicopter’s harsh white searchlight beam zeroed in on the escaping suspect as he boarded a speedboat docked in a slip at the marina. The young man turned and glared upward into the beam. Then a focused ripple of distortion followed the light back to the helicopter—and shredded it in midair. It tumbled out of the sky, a firestorm of broken metal and burnt bodies.
Tom swerved left and narrowly avoided getting pinned under the mangled aircraft as it slammed to the ground and rolled over a dozen cars in the marina’s parking lot behind him. One vehicle after another exploded into flames, turning the lot into a fiery automotive graveyard. Shrapnel pattered across the ground on either side of Tom and Diana as they raced out of the lot and down the ramp to the marina’s outer slip.
The speedboat’s engine growled to life, and the suspect severed the mooring lines with a quick burst of his disruption power. Tom squeezed the brake handle, and the sport-bike skidded and fishtailed across the dock. Diana was off the bike before it stopped moving, her Glock already clearing leather as she shifted to her shooting stance.
As the bike halted, she opened fire on the boat, which sliced its way through the dark water of the Duwamish. Tom drew his Glock and joined his partner’s futile barrage. Diana’s weapon clicked empty. Tom’s pistol ran out of ammo a second later.
Then a white frost stilled the river’s churning surface, and the boat’s spreading wake stopped in mid-ripple. The icy change overtook the speedboat, which struggled for a moment through a thick slush, then came to a stop with a sharp crack of splintering fiberglass as the surface of the Duwamish froze solid for half a mile in every direction.
The young man in the boat turned and looked back in alarm, then staggered backward and collapsed.
Looking over his shoulder, Tom saw a pair of Jordan’s uniformed Promise City peace officers on the shore. One had his hand on the now frozen surface of the water. The other was still looking through the scope of her sniper rifle. Its wide muzzle had been modified to fire darts. Tom figured the darts must be loaded with the concentrated sedative and promicin-inhibitor that could render p-positive individuals unconscious and temporarily suppress their extrahuman abilities.
Diana noted the peace officers and holstered her weapon. “I guess we ought to go say thank you,” she said, sounding not very enthused about the idea.
“I guess,” Tom said. He holstered his Glock as they walked back across the dock to shore.
In the two minutes it took Tom and Diana to walk over to the peace officers, reinforcements arrived. A platoon of NTAC strike forces, dozens of Seattle cops and Promise City peace officers, and six NTAC agents—led by both incarnations of their colleague Jed Garrity, whose two selves had come to be distinguished by the colors of their neckties, one red, the other blue—raced one another across the ice sheet, all vying to be the ones to make the arrest.
The only people not in a hurry to reach the boat, it seemed, were Tom, Diana, and the two peace officers who were actually responsible for stopping the suspect’s escape.
“Nice work,” Tom said with a friendly nod to the duo. “I’m Tom Baldwin, and this is—”
“We know who you are,” the raven-haired woman said in a dry British accent. She glared at Tom with striking green eyes.
Tom and Diana exchanged apprehensive looks. In the years since the 4400 had returned, NTAC had been chiefly responsible for policing them, and Tom and Diana had been at the center of many of the most tumultuous events involving the returnees. Consequently, both agents had attained a measure of notoriety—or, in some circles, infamy.
As usual, Diana remained calm in the face of hostility. “We just wanted to say thanks, is all.”
The muscular, crew-cut man offered her his hand. “Any time,” he said. “Jim Myers. This is my partner, Eva Lynd.”
“A pleasure,” Diana said, briefly shaking his hand.
Tom said, “If you don’t mind my asking, how’d you guys get here before us? I thought Jordan agreed to let NTAC defend the city’s fuel reserves.”
“And you’ve done such a brilliant job of it,” Eva said, casting a sour glare in the direction of the inferno at the north end of the island.
Glossing over Eva’s verbal jab, her partner, Jim, replied, “We got a tip about the attack.”
“From who?” asked Diana.
Jim shrugged and shook his head, prompting Eva to frown and roll her eyes in disgust. “Just tell her,” Eva said. “She’ll find out when she checks our phone logs.” Jim aimed a pointed stare at her, but she ignored him and continued. “It was your future-telling daughter, Maia,” she said to Diana. “She warned us about the attack an hour ago.” Grimacing at the swath of destruction, she added, “Not that it made much difference.”
Eva and Jim turned and walked north, away from the shore and from Tom and Diana, who stood and watched them go.
Tom felt the tension in his partner’s silence and knew that Diana was seething over Eva’s revelation. He waited for her to snap. It didn’t take very long.
“How many times have I told Maia not to talk to Jordan’s people?” she asked rhetorically, her voice pitched with anger.
“I know,” Tom said, trying to sound sympathetic.
“How many times, Tom? How much clearer could I be? I told her not to talk to Jordan, or to any of his people in Promise City, not even that girl Lindsey she hung around with.”
He knew that playing devil’s advocate would be risky, but he tried anyway. “Look, it’s not like she’s a traitor, Diana. She was just tryin
g to help.” He lifted his chin toward the boat trapped in the ice. “And maybe she was right. If Jordan’s people hadn’t been here, that guy would’ve gotten away.”
Diana took a deep breath. Closed her eyes.
Exhaled slowly. Opened her eyes.
When she spoke, her voice was calm—which made the fury behind her words all the more frightening.
“Tom, I know that what you’re saying makes sense. You’re right: without Jordan’s people, we’d have lost the suspect. But right now, I don’t give a damn about that. What I care about is that my daughter did exactly what I told her never to do.” She took another breath, then added, “I’m going home now, Tom. And when I get there, I’m going to have a very long talk with Maia.”
THREE
JORDAN COLLIER STOOD at the window of his seventy-sixth-floor corner office. He stared southwest, across Elliott Bay, at the raging inferno that had engulfed Harbor Island. It had been ablaze for nearly an hour, growing brighter as the sky dimmed. The conflagration was mirrored on the rippling water.
There was a knock on his office door.
“Come in,” he said.
The door opened and closed. Footsteps followed.
Reflected in the window was Kyle Baldwin, one of Jordan’s top advisors, walking toward him. “You asked to see me?”
“I did,” Jordan replied, his tight-lipped frown barely masking his fury as he turned to face the towheaded younger man. “What happened down there?”
Kyle stopped in front of Jordan’s desk and bowed his head. “You’re upset about Harbor Island.”
“Yes, I am,” Jordan said. “People died out there tonight, and there was no reason for it.” He picked up a singlepage report and waved it angrily. “You didn’t even consult me before sending our people into NTAC’s territory. You knew the island was under their jurisdiction, Kyle. What were you trying to do?”
“Save their lives,” Kyle said. “We had a reliable tip that a bunch of fifty/fifties with a grudge were going after the fuel tanks. I thought if we moved fast enough, we could prevent the attack.” He paused as Jordan pivoted and made a show of looking out the floor-to-ceiling window at the burning spectacle in the distance. Rolling his eyes, Kyle added, “I know we failed.”
Jordan tossed the paper onto his desk, then settled into his chair. He ran a hand over his dark beard while he recovered his composure. “Most of NTAC’s agents are p-positive, Kyle, just like us, and they’re trained to handle situations like this.” Dismayed, he clenched his fist. “The real tragedy is that all those people died for nothing. So what if they blow up the fuel? We have people who can transmute fluids into anything we want: drinking water, gasoline—”
“Promicin,” Kyle interrupted.
That drew a scowl from Jordan. Pointing a finger, he continued. “We’re not going there, Kyle. This is not the time. We’re surrounded by the U.S. military, and we’ve got rogue p-positives all over the city. The last thing I want to do right now is start a war with the government.”
“You’ve already got a war with the government,” Kyle shot back. “One that they started.”
Exasperated, Jordan got up and walked to a wooden cabinet that housed a small selection of premium liquors and some lowball glasses. “I think you and I have different definitions of war. I’d call our current situation a standoff.” Jordan opened the cabinet’s front panel, which flipped down to provide a shelf, and he chose a glass.
“Sure, Jordan, but for how long? You think the Army’s gonna wait forever while we plot our next move?”
“Provoking them won’t buy us more time.” The self-styled leader of the Promicin-Positive Movement opened a bottle of twelve-year-old Glenmorangie Quinta Ruban single-malt scotch whisky and poured himself a generous measure.
One perk of having rechristened the now exiled Haspelcorp’s former headquarters (which previously had been known as the Columbia Center, the tallest building in Washington State) as the Collier Foundation building was that Jordan’s new base of operations had come fully furnished and generously stocked with luxuries.
Pushing the cork stopper back into the bottle, Jordan continued. “In any event, we’ve moved beyond guerrilla tactics. Diplomacy is our true show of strength. Only from a position of power does one have the option to negotiate.” He sipped the amber-hued liquor and savored its forceful overtones of port.
Kyle stepped closer to Jordan as he replied, “Great. While you’re busy negotiating, the Army’s gearing up to blow us off the face of the Earth. We need to start thinking in terms of ‘divide and conquer.’ If we put promicin in the water of six or seven major cities, we’d force them to split their focus.”
“And we’d probably kill forty or fifty million people,” Jordan said, wondering when his youthful shaman had become so hawkish in his worldview. He carried his drink back to his desk. “Not exactly a recipe for winning hearts and minds.”
“So what? You knew before you started giving it out that promicin would kill half the people who took it. When nine thousand died last year, you called it ‘the Great Leap Forward.’ So, what’s the matter? Fifty million too big a number?”
“The problem,” Jordan replied, his tone sharp with wrath, “is that no one was ever supposed to be forced to take promicin. Your cousin Danny’s viral ability was an accident, not part of the plan.” He set down his glass. “Did it ever occur to you that maybe we could build a future in which those of us who are gifted with promicin could live in peace with those who aren’t?”
Kyle turned and paced in front of Jordan’s desk, shaking his head in bitter denial. “Dream on, Jordan. Regular people hate us. They’re terrified of us. They want us dead.”
“Some do,” Jordan admitted. “But only because people tend to hate what they fear, and fear what they don’t understand.” Settling back into his chair, he added, “I refuse to believe that mass murder is the solution to that problem. Our war isn’t with the people of the world, Kyle, or with their governments. The war we have to fight is the one against prejudice.”
The young man let out a derisive huff. “If you say so.”
“Yes, I do say so. And I expect you to abide by it.”
A sullen look conveyed Kyle’s grudging surrender.
“You can go,” Jordan said, gesturing toward the exit.
Kyle walked quickly, clearly eager to be away from Jordan. He yanked open the office door. It rebounded off the wall with a dull thud as Kyle made his ill-tempered exit.
As the door slowly drifted shut, Jordan reclined his chair and sipped his scotch. He wondered, not for the first time in recent months, whether Kyle might soon go from being an asset to a liability. When the young man had come in search of him the previous year, he had proved his value as a visionary. Kyle and his invisible-and-inaudible feminine spirit guide, Cassie, had helped Jordan and his followers navigate the difficult path toward their goal of transforming the world and fulfilling Jordan’s prophecy of a better future for humanity.
Alas, in the months since they had transformed Seattle into the promicin-friendly redoubt known as Promise City, Kyle had started ignoring Jordan’s agenda of diplomacy in favor of heavy-handed and sometimes violent tactics.
Jordan wondered how much of this recent turn was Kyle’s will, and how much of it was Cassie’s—and whether there was any distinction to be made between them. So far, Jordan had been able to keep his hotheaded senior advisor under control, but he feared that this tenuous grace period would soon end.
His office door began to click shut when it was pushed open a crack. After a quick, soft knocking, his assistant, Jaime Costas, poked her head in. “You have a visitor, Mister Collier. One of the people on your short list for the leadership council.”
Beckoning his invitation, he said, “Okay.”
Jaime pushed the door open.
His visitor stepped into the doorway.
Jordan’s jaw went slack. He blinked in surprise. Put down his drink. Stood and greeted his guest with a gentlemanly nod.
“Please, come in,” he said, his heart swelling with hope. “It’s an honor.”
FOUR
DIANA SKOURIS PUSHED open the door to her apartment and tugged her keys from the lock. Telegraphing her mood, she slammed the door behind her and stormed across the living room. “Maia!” she yelled, her voice reverberating off the walls. “Get out here!”
She was beyond upset, past angry, and deep into irrational fury as she pulled off her jacket and flung it onto the sofa. There were so many things she wanted to shout at her adopted daughter that she didn’t know where to start. After all the years they had been together, and all the risks Diana had taken and sacrifices she’d made to protect Maia, she felt as if she had a right to expect more respect from the girl than this.
Dammit, I’ve told her a hundred times to steer clear of Jordan and his people, Diana fumed as she shrugged off her shoulder holster and set the weapon on the kitchen counter. All the 4400 have ever done for her is put her in danger—so why is her first loyalty to them and not to me?
That rhetorical question nagged at her as she opened the refrigerator and took note of the leftovers available for that night’s dinner—which Maia might or might not be allowed to have.
The apartment was quiet except for the hum of the fridge. Diana heard no sounds of movement coming from Maia’s room.
It didn’t surprise her that Maia was in no hurry to come out and face the music, but after all the stomping, screaming, and sulking that had followed Diana’s fiat that Maia cease all contact with Lindsey Hammond— her friend and fellow teen 4400—she at least expected to hear Maia defiantly drowning out her commands with Frank Sinatra music.
She’s probably either spooked or sulking, Diana figured. She let the fridge door close, then walked toward Maia’s room. “Maia? I’m serious: you need to come talk to me.”