by David Mack
“Yes,” he said. “I know.” He turned west and breathed in the faint scent of sea air. “The U.S. was never going to give up a city without a fight. But it’s like childbirth: the moment of separation will be painful and bloody.” He looked back at his three advisors. “But also completely necessary.”
Visibly discomfited by Jordan’s take on the situation, Gary shifted his weight and breathed a heavy sigh. “Maybe. But if so, shouldn’t we be getting ready for the battle?”
This time Kyle answered for Jordan. “We already are. Sentinels are in place all over the city. When the Army makes its move, we’ll make ours.”
“Isn’t that a bit risky?” Gary asked. “What if the Army comes at us with something we don’t expect?”
Tilting his chin toward Maia, Kyle said, “That’s what you’re here to prevent, isn’t it?”
She reacted with a steely glare at Kyle. “Even I don’t see everything. The future is always changing.”
“That’s what I’m saying,” Gary said, clearly unnerved by the detached manner in which Maia made her points. “We shouldn’t get overconfident. It’ll take just one mistake to bring this whole thing down on our heads.” To Jordan he added, “If the U.S. government really decides to play hardball, they won’t stop until they bury us. They’ll wipe Promise City off the map before they let us keep it. You know that.”
“Yes, I do,” Jordan confessed with a smile. “As a matter of fact, I’m counting on it.” He held his arms wide, as if to invite a crucifixion. “I know you might find this hard to believe, but this is all part of the plan.”
NINETEEN
NTAC’s OFFICES WERE mostly empty. Only a handful of late-shift agents monitored the emergency action stations, and a single squad of uniformed security guards manned the main entrance and patrolled the ghost-town-quiet corridors. The monitors of logged-out computers filled the warren of deserted cubicles and vacant offices with a pale blue glow.
Tom Baldwin loosened the top button of his shirt and palmed sweat from his forehead. To conserve electricity, the building’s air conditioners had shut off automatically at precisely 8 P.M. It was now more than an hour past that, and the atmosphere inside the facility had become warm and heavy.
The energy-saving measures had been implemented after the Army had taken the city’s electrical grid offline. In compliance with Department of Homeland Security disaster protocols, NTAC had switched over to its diesel-fueled emergency generators and lithium backup batteries, which were supplemented by a hard line to an array of solar panels and a stand of six wind turbines hidden miles away on Bainbridge Island, across Elliott Bay.
Tom’s footsteps echoed off the concrete steps and walls of the stairwell as he descended toward the sublevel that housed the Theory Room. The elevator would have been faster, but the need to limit power usage meant that all personnel were encouraged to use the stairs whenever possible.
As he had suspected, the Theory Room flickered with the telltale glow of video playback. He knocked once on the door, eased it open, and stepped inside. The faint aroma of pizza lingered in the air. Pepperoni, if I know Marco, he thought.
On the far side of the room, Marco swiveled his chair away from the full-wall projection screen. “Hey,” he said, lifting his chin at Tom in salutation, then turning back to the video.
“Hey,” echoed Tom, walking past rows of computer screens scrolling with data as they crunched raw intel from countless sources. “I was heading home when I saw your car in the lot. It’s late. What’re you still doing here?”
“Watching the world come apart at the seams,” Marco said, squinting at the wall of video as Tom sidled up to him. The bespectacled theorist picked up a remote control, pressed a few buttons, and subdivided the screen into eight smaller images, each showing a different video feed. “This is footage from all over the world,” he said. “Raw network feeds ripped from the satellites, pirate broadcasts. Some of it is being sent by p-positives who can transmit what they see and hear in perfect high-def. Talk about cinema verité.”
Images of violence and destruction cascaded across the wall. Each subwindow switched its feed every few seconds, creating an ever-changing mosaic of chaos and unrest. It went by so quickly that Tom had difficulty taking it all in. “What am I looking at?” he asked.
“Promicin-fueled uprisings all over the planet,” Marco said. He began pointing at images as they flashed by. “Monks in Tibet. Refugees in Sudan. Women in the Middle East. Settlers in Gaza. Workers in Venezuela. Rebels in Kashmir.” He shook his head, then looked up at Tom. “The drug’s spreading faster than we can track it. We could be looking at tens of millions of p-positives in a matter of weeks.”
“Jesus Christ,” Tom whispered, his voice muted in horror. “That means we’ll also be looking at tens of millions of promicin deaths.” He imagined distant lands littered with corpses twisted in the bloodied throes of agony. “Are they insane? Don’t they know what this stuff does?”
Marco nodded. “They know. And they don’t care.” Reacting to Tom’s disbelieving glare, he continued. “People in the Third World see promicin very differently than we do. They live every day with disease, starvation, genocide …” He shrugged. “Most of them figure they’re as good as dead, anyway. They have nothing left to lose, so they roll the dice on promicin.”
Tom frowned. “Makes sense. Most of the people here who took promicin were outsiders. People who’d lost hope, or felt like they’d hit bottom, or that the system had given up on them.”
“Exactly,” Marco said. “Now multiply that by ten million. Most people in North America, Europe, Australia, and Japan have it pretty good, even in the worst of times. Why would they want to play Russian roulette with only a fifty/ fifty chance of survival? But if you’re born poor in a place like Chad or Sudan, a fifty/fifty chance at getting a superhuman ability must seem like a good risk.” With a click of the remote control, he halted the rotation of the images on the wall. “And it’s working. In the last four days, new p-positives have defeated genocidal warlords in Somalia, forced the Taliban out of a dozen villages in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and declared Kashmir an independent city-state.” A dubious smile tugged at his mouth. “The meek are inheriting the Earth—as supermen.”
Eyeing the images with both wonder and dismay, Tom had a troubling thought. “If this is spreading in the Middle East, it won’t be long before groups like Al-Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah get their hands on it. We could be facing militant Islamic terrorists with promicin powers. They could make 9/11 look like amateur hour.”
“Possibly,” Marco said, popping open a can of soda. “But that’s not what I’d worry about if I were you.”
“What do you mean?”
Marco sipped his soda, swallowed, then pointed at the screen. “Most of the people who are drawn to taking promicin are the have-nots: the poor, the oppressed, the enslaved. The ones who survive are hailing Jordan Collier like he’s the Messiah. Even more disturbing, they’re becoming the new elite of the world, and you’d better believe some of them are going to decide it’s payback time. And not just on a personal level. I’m talking about an upheaval in the balance of power between nations—a global shift in the organization of human society.”
Tom looked again at the chilling tableau of video feeds: an emaciated African woman psychokinetically shredding trucks and felling helicopters in Sierra Leone; a young boy melting Chinese tanks in Shingatse; an ad hoc militia of poor civilians laying siege to the capital of Myanmar. Then he looked at Marco.
“Is this as bad as I think it is?”
“Worse,” Marco said. “Governments don’t give up power without a fight … This is how world wars get started.”
Part Two
These All Died in Faith
TWENTY
July 24, 2008
2:00 A.M. PACIFIC DAYLIGHT TIME
JAKES HUNCHED HIS SHOULDERS against the frigid night air of the Nevada desert. He took a quick drag off his cigarette and craned his head back as h
e exhaled, the better to admire the starry dome of the sky. The stars had long been hidden in the future world that had sent him here to reshape the past. Admiring the constellations, those brilliant pinholes in the curtain of night, almost made him regret his mission.
But he had his orders. There was nowhere to go but forward.
He glanced over his shoulder at Kuroda. Her body was garbed in stained gray coveralls, her hands were covered with thick welder’s gloves, and a dark welding visor masked her face. A tightly wrapped braid of her blond hair stuck out from under the back of her protective headgear.
Electric blue flashes of acetylene light made a silhouette of her, and white-hot sparks from her work bounced across the hard ground before fading away, as ephemeral as shooting stars.
Wells emerged from the entrance to the underground lab and shivered as he stepped into the bitter cold. Lifting one hand to shield his eyes from the blinding glare of Kuroda’s welding rod, he asked Jakes, “You sure she knows what she’s doing?”
“Better than either of us would,” Jakes said. He knew why Wells was nervous. Even a minor mistake could set off the dead-man’s switch on the antimatter warhead that Kuroda was securing to the cargo bed of a white sportutility vehicle. “Leave her be,” he advised his colleague. “She’s doing fine.”
“If you say so,” Wells replied. He walked toward the front of the SUV and nodded for Jakes to follow him. “Let’s go over it one last time.”
Jakes rolled his eyes. The plan hadn’t changed in weeks, yet Wells insisted on rehashing it ad nauseam. Still, Jakes reminded himself, best not to take anything for granted, especially when we’re so close to the endgame. He fell into step behind Wells, who took a road map from inside his jacket and spread it out on top of the truck’s hood.
“The good news,” Wells began, “is that the crisis with Jordan Collier has the U.S. government and its military focused on Promise City.” Casting a grim look at the map, he added, “But I’m still concerned that you’ll be too exposed, for too long. Flying would be faster.”
“Absolutely not,” Jakes said. Icy wind threatened to steal the map, which snapped and rustled under his and Wells’s hands. “Air traffic in this part of Nevada is much too closely monitored for us to risk that. I wouldn’t make it more than two hundred kilometers before getting shot down.”
Wells frowned. “Then what about a less direct driving route? Something that keeps you off the major highways?”
“You’re being paranoid,” Jakes said. “As long as I obey the speed limit and rules of the road, there won’t be a problem.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Wells replied. “You borrowed that body of yours months ago. Someone must have noticed by now that he’s missing.”
“Noticing that he’s missing and actively looking for him are two very different things,” Jakes said.
Cocking his head to one side, Wells replied, “Be that as it may, the less you’re seen, the better.” He traced Jakes’s planned driving route with his fingertip. “This is more than twelve hundred kilometers of open road.”
“One thousand, two hundred ninety-three, to be precise,” Jakes interjected, drawing a disapproving sidelong stare from Wells. He pressed on, “At most, we’re talking about fourteen hours of driving from here to the target. Under the circumstances, that’s hardly a prolonged window of risk. And traffic on main roads moves with relative freedom.”
“Fine,” said Wells, conceding the debate. “It’s just after two o’clock now. Fourteen hours on the road would make your ETA to target roughly four P.M. Pacific?”
“Yes, that sounds about right.” A gust of brisk night air tossed Jakes’s short brown hair into a frenzy. “You and Kuroda need to be well away from here—preferably in the air and headed west—before I trigger the warhead.”
Nodding, Wells said, “It’s taken care of. We’ll catch a flight to Tokyo out of McCarran at seven A.M. Once we get to Japan, we’ll find new bodies and go to ground.” A diabolical smile lit up his face. “When do you think Ryland will figure out that we’ve screwed him?”
“About an hour after the world ends,” Jakes said, then chortled as he slapped his compatriot’s back.
Wells folded up the map and handed it to Jakes, who nodded his thanks and tucked it inside his jacket.
The hiss and hum of activity behind the van ceased. Kuroda emerged and flipped up her visor. “All set,” she said, pushing shut the SUV’s hatchback with a dull thud. “Try not to hit any bumps, okay?”
“I’ll do my best,” Jakes said, hoping that the once-Asian woman now living in the body of a blonde was only joking. He opened the driver’s door and started to get in, but paused as Wells offered him his hand. He reached over and shook it.
“Thank you,” Wells said. “I don’t know that I could go through with it, if I were in your place.”
“Sure you could,” Jakes said, certain that it was true. “It’s just my turn, that’s all.”
Kuroda stripped off her work gloves and shook Jakes’s hand, as well. “If you’re having second thoughts, we could trade—”
“No, I wouldn’t dream of it,” he cut in. “Besides, only you can use your airline tickets. The decision’s made. Time to go.”
He let go of her hand and eased himself into the vehicle’s driver’s seat. His two colleagues stepped back as he shut the door and keyed the ignition.
The engine turned over with a low purr of combustion. In the truck’s rearview mirror, he saw a cloud of gray vapor rise from its exhaust pipe and dissipate into the night.
For a moment, he felt a twinge of hesitation. Then he recalled that this was exactly what he had volunteered for. It was for a mission such as this that he had agreed to have his consciousness downloaded into nanites and exiled forever to the past. This was the moment for which he had come.
“Clock’s ticking,” he said with a smile to his comrades. “Don’t miss your flight.” Then he shifted the vehicle into gear and drove away to keep his appointment with Armageddon.
TWENTY-ONE
7:04 A.M.
A SHRILL RINGING stirred Jordan Collier from a deep sleep.
He rolled over, still groggy, and flailed for the phone. His limbs felt heavy and clumsy, as if he were drunk. It took him a few slaps of his hand on the end table before he planted it on the phone’s receiver and plucked it from its cradle.
And to think, he mused ruefully, I used to be a morning person. Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he pressed the receiver to his ear and mumbled, “Hello?”
Jaime, his personal assistant, replied, “Sorry to wake you, Mister Collier. Please hold for the secretary of state.”
There was a click on the line, followed by a man’s voice. “Mister Collier, this is Secretary Greisman.” His voice sounded distant and was backed by the weak echo of someone conversing via speakerphone. “I don’t have time to play games with you, sir, so I’ll come right to the point: Did you and your people cause this disaster?”
At the risk of sounding like an idiot or like someone mouthing a pathetic denial, Collier asked with genuine, sincere confusion, “What disaster, Mister Secretary?”
“Are you serious? Turn on your goddamn television.”
Jordan groaned softly as he sat up and reached for the remote control to his bedroom’s wall-mounted flat-screen TV. “What channel?”
“All of them,” Greisman said. “Make it fast.”
He aimed the remote at the TV and thumbed the power-on button. As the screen cycled up from its standby state, there was a knock on his bedroom door. He pressed the mute on his phone and said in a hoarse morning voice, “Come in.”
The door opened. Jaime stepped in holding its knob, and Kyle walked past her and stopped at the foot of the bed, just out of Jordan’s line of sight to the television.
An image of widespread destruction faded up on the screen. Behind the news ticker headline MASSIVE EARTHQUAKE DEVASTATES SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA was a shattered metropolis, its skyscrapers reduced to smears of debris on the
ground and replaced by countless towers of smoke rising from the rubble and mushrooming into the sky. “Good God,” Jordan muttered as he unmuted the phone.
“It was a magnitude nine-point-four quake,” Greisman said, obviously intuiting what Jordan was seeing on the news. “It hit about thirty minutes ago. Leveled Frisco, L.A., and San Diego.”
Flipping to another channel, Jordan’s eyes went wide at the sight of the collapsed Golden Gate Bridge. All that remained of the iconic structure were its two colossal red arches; the span between them was all but gone, broken and vanished into the bay.
“There are tsunamis heading for Chile, Hawaii, and Japan,” Greisman continued.“We haven’t even started calculating the death toll in California, so there’s no telling what those waves’ll do. But the projections aren’t good.”
“We’ll take care of the tsunami before it makes landfall,” Jordan said. He covered the mouthpiece and told Kyle, “Wake up Raj.” Resuming his conversation with the secretary, he said, “If there’s anything we can do to help with rescue and recovery—”
Greisman let out a short, bitter chortle. “Like you ‘helped’ in Seattle? No, thanks.” Hardening his tone, he went on, “I’ll ask you again, Collier: Did your people do this?”
Turning his baleful stare toward Kyle, Jordan told the secretary, “No, sir. I did not order such an attack, I did not sanction it, and my people did not cause it.” Kyle returned Jordan’s gaze with his own unyielding glare, betraying nothing. Finishing his thought, Jordan added, “As horrible a tragedy as this is, I’m afraid it’s an act of God.”
“For your sake, it’d better be. Good-bye, Mister Collier.” A sharp click led to silence as the secretary hung up.
Jordan returned the phone to its cradle at his bedside. Then he picked it back up and pressed a button to call his assistant’s internal line. She picked up on the first ring.
“Yes, sir?”