The 4400® Promises Broken

by David Mack

  Jed added, “Couldn’t have said it better myself.”

  Tom directed his remarks to Marco. “What kind of analysis can we do on this stuff?”

  “Nothing more than basic tests, for now,” Marco said. “The rock and the metal I can put under a microscope, maybe confirm what they’re made of. One thing I will say about the rock is that it wasn’t from the desert near the lab. But without access to a full forensic suite, I can’t tell you much more than that.”

  Diana asked, “What about the book?”

  “A common atlas,” Marco said. “Published two years ago. I checked all the pages for markings, notes, or pieces torn out. Except for the parts that burned, it’s all there and unmarked.”

  Picking up a piece of the metal, Jed asked, “Did this get slagged in the fire?”

  “I don’t think so,” Marco said. “The heat damage is only on one side of each piece, and there’s no carbon residue. Plus, if my guess is right, those pieces are probably either aluminum or an aluminum alloy, in which case they would’ve shown a lot more deformation had they been in the lab when it got torched.”

  “Let me see that,” Tom said to Jed, who handed him the piece of lightweight metal. “This heat damage on the side … could that have been caused by welding?”

  That got Marco’s attention. “Now that you mention it, yeah. That’s exactly what that looks like.”

  Tom turned and saw that Dennis was nodding, but Jed and Diana were waiting for an explanation. “The scientists didn’t carry that warhead out of the desert on their backs. They had a vehicle—maybe a plane or a helicopter or a car.”

  Confusion narrowed Diana’s eyes. “And they welded it to the vehicle? What for?”

  Dennis replied, “Because the vehicle’s the delivery method.”

  “Exactly,” Tom said. “They’re either flying it or driving it to their target. The only good news is that their lab was pretty far from anything worth attacking.”

  “Whoa, hang on,” Jed said. “It’s less than ninety nautical miles from Las Vegas. That’s pretty high-value.”

  “Not if your goal is to wipe out Jordan’s promicin movement,” Tom said. His thoughts were a whirlwind as he struggled to see the big picture. He asked Dennis, “How much of that new superelement did you have shipped in from CERN?”

  “Just a few ounces,” Dennis said. “Plus some antimatter.”

  “Okay,” Tom said. “Marco, what would be the yield on that?”

  Marco rolled his eyes. “Ballpark figure? Assuming what Dennis told us about it is true and accurate, a few ounces would be enough to take out a major city. The effective blast radius would be somewhere between eight and ten miles.”

  “Which means they’d only need to get close to their target,” Diana said. “They wouldn’t even have to show themselves.”

  “You know what they say,” Marco replied. “‘Almost only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and thermonuclear devices.’”

  Dennis said, “Can we cut the gallows humor and stay focused here? Wherever that warhead is, we need to find it before it gets where it’s going.”

  “He’s right,” Tom said. “Let’s pull up the last twenty-four hours of satellite imagery for—”

  “Forget it,” Marco interrupted. “Satellites are all fragged. No GPS, no communications, no spy satellites. Any data they had was wiped.”

  Diana shot back, “What about the archives at the NSA?”

  “If we could get a line out, I’d be doing it already,” Marco said. “The Army cut our landlines, and they’re blocking all cellular and radio signals in the Seattle area. Right now we’re completely cut off from the Internet, cable television, and the national communications grid.”

  Jed sighed in frustration. “If we can’t analyze this stuff, and we can’t move any data in or out, what the hell are we supposed to do? Sit here with our thumbs up our asses?”

  Tom was certain that he knew what Marco was going to say next. He hoped that he was wrong … but he wasn’t.

  “I hate to say it,” Marco confessed, “but I think we need to ask either Shawn or Jordan for help.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  1:21 P.M.

  AFTER ELEVEN HOURS in the driver’s seat, Jakes could barely feel his ass. It had gone numb hours earlier, somewhere between Salt Lake City and Ogden, Utah. He didn’t mind, though, since itching had been all he’d felt from his hind quarters since crossing the Nevada-Utah border at Wendover.

  It’s my own fault, he chided himself. I should’ve made sure the air-conditioning in this heap worked before I left.

  He glanced at his left arm, perched on his door, elbow jutting out the open window. The sun had baked a rich brown hue into his skin; his left arm was now two or three shades darker than his right. A gas station attendant in Steptoe, Nevada, had called it a “driver’s tan.”

  Gray clouds had begun to crowd the sky shortly after Jakes had passed Salt Lake City, giving him some relief from the relentless barrage of ultraviolet solar radiation. Cruising north on the divided I-15 freeway into Idaho, he looked up and around. The sky was the color of dirty dishwater, and the humid air smelled of rain.

  As usual, there was nothing but crap on the radio.

  The road cut a mostly straight line across the Idaho landscape. It had two lanes heading north and two more heading south. Between the two sides of the road was a wide, gully-shaped median packed with hardy desert bushes and loose rocks.

  Flanking the highway were broad plains patched with tall weeds and browned soil and dotted occasionally with lonely, small trees. Beyond the plains rose low hills covered with scrub brush, lined up one after another, packed together into long walls of earth. No matter how much of it rolled by, it all looked the same to Jakes.

  By some minor miracle, the radio’s seek function landed on a station whose music Jakes didn’t actually hate, and he locked it in. Though his sojourn in the past had been relatively brief, he had come to appreciate much of America’s early-twenty-first-century culture, including its food and cinema, but especially its music, most of which had been lost by his own time. He drummed his hands on the steering wheel in time with the beat.

  It seemed a shame to consign so many of mankind’s creations to oblivion, but his mission didn’t allow him the luxury of sentimentalism. He could no more permit himself to become attached to this enviously privileged era of human civilization than a livestock farmer could allow himself to feel sympathy for animals led by necessity to the slaughter. For Jakes’s future to live, this sybaritic epoch had to die.

  The whoop of a siren cut through the music.

  Jakes looked in his rearview mirror. Red and blue flashing lights raced up from behind him. He recognized the white V-stripe markings on the Idaho State Police car chasing him, and he cursed himself for getting careless. Between the music, the hum of his engine, and the drone of the road passing under his wheels, he had lost focus on where he was and what he was doing.

  He slapped the turn signal to the right, slowed, pulled over to the shoulder, and stopped his SUV. The police cruiser rolled to a stop a few car lengths behind him. Jakes turned off his engine and radio, then waited with his hands on his steering wheel and his safety belt still secured.

  The sound of a car door opening followed by the snap of booted feet stepping across asphalt drew his eyes to his side-view mirror. The driver of the police car had emerged from his vehicle and was walking toward Jakes’s door. Another officer was still inside the car, on the passenger side.

  Where were they hiding? Jakes wondered. No billboards out here. Must’ve been behind a cluster of brush off the shoulder.

  Standing a few feet from his door was the imposing figure of an Idaho State Police trooper. Attired in dark gray pants, a black shirt, mirror-shaded sunglasses, and a black “Smoky the Bear” hat, the trooper stood in a loose but attentive pose, with one hand resting on the grip of his sidearm.

  “Sir, do you know why I stopped you?”

  “Yes, Officer,” Jake
s replied. “I was driving too fast.”

  “You were doing ninety-two in a posted seventy-five zone.”

  Keeping his voice as level and calm as possible, Jakes said, “Yes, sir. I got caught up in the music I was listening to, and I lost track of my speed. I have no excuse. I’m sorry.”

  Jakes’s statement of contrition didn’t seem to do much to satisfy the trooper, who regarded him with a stern mask of disdain. “Can I see your license and registration, please?”

  “Of course,” Jakes said. “They’re right here.” He opened the glove compartment and retrieved his driver’s license and vehicle registration, both of which were completely legitimate for the body he was inhabiting. As he leaned back to hand his papers to the trooper, he stole a look down at the semiautomatic pistol tucked between his seat and the gear shift.

  The trooper took the papers and eyed them with one raised eyebrow. “California? Long way from home.”

  “Yes, sir.” The first rule of talking to law enforcement personnel, Jakes had learned, was to keep one’s answers short.

  “And what brings you to Idaho?”

  “Vacation,” Jakes said.

  “Uh-huh,” the trooper said, still perusing the license and registration. He turned his head and looked through the SUV’s rear windows at the tarp-covered warhead in the cargo area. “Whatcha got back there?”

  “Camping equipment,” Jakes said. The second rule of talking to law enforcement officers was never to volunteer a single bit more information than was absolutely necessary.

  Stepping closer to the vehicle and shading his eyes with one hand as he looked through the rear driver’s-side window, the trooper said, “Doesn’t look like you brought much gear.”

  “I travel light.”

  “I can see that.” Deeper notes of suspicion crept into his voice. “Mind showing me what’s under that tarp, sir?”

  “Not at all,” Jakes said. “I can release the rear hatch from here, if you like.”

  The cop walked to the rear of the SUV. “Open it up.”

  Jakes undid his seat belt, bent forward, and reached down with his left hand to pull the release lever for the hatchback. He set his right hand on the grip of the pistol next to his seat. With a tug, he unlocked the rear hatch, which raised slightly.

  The trooper lifted the hatch fully open. Then he leaned in and supported his weight with one hand while he pulled aside the tarpaulin with the other. His jaw went slack when he saw the warhead inside its protective aluminum frame. “What the …”

  Without a word, Jakes drew his pistol, twisted around, and fired one shot through the trooper’s forehead, painting the road behind him with a reddish-gray spray of brain matter.

  As the dead man’s body slumped to the ground, Jakes fired three more shots at the parked police cruiser. Its windshield became veined with cracks as one slug after another pierced it and slammed into the head and chest of the second state trooper.

  After the thunder of four consecutive gunshots within the confines of his vehicle, the silence that followed felt almost surreal. The air inside the SUV was sharp with the sulfurous fumes of expended gunpowder.

  That was Jakes’s third rule of talking to law enforcement officers: knowing when to end the conversation.

  What a goddamn inconvenience, Jakes fumed as he holstered his weapon and got out of his SUV.

  He walked behind his vehicle, draped the tarp back over the warhead, and shut the hatch. Then he grabbed the dead trooper by his collar and dragged him back to the police cruiser.

  There were no other cars anywhere in sight, and for that small mercy Jakes was grateful to the universe at large. He opened the driver’s door of the cruiser and pushed the dead sergeant back inside beside his slain partner.

  Now to mop up, he told himself. He pulled the memory stick and the DVD from the vehicle’s standard-issue dashboard camera system, then used the car’s onboard computer to see whether they had already made a query based on his car’s license plate; the cop who had remained in the car had been in the process of entering the data when Jakes had shot him. So far, there was no official record of this traffic stop. Jakes canceled the entry.

  He shifted the police cruiser into neutral and pushed it off the road into a small stand of thick bushes. To drivers approaching it from behind, it would look like the world’s worst-hidden speed trap. Drivers on the other side of the divided highway would see it only from a distance, and the scrub brush would obscure the damage to the windshield.

  It would likely be several hours before anyone realized that these two men had gone missing. By then, Jakes would be long gone. Even if they found his fingerprints or DNA inside the car, it wouldn’t matter. His new identity had no criminal record. There would be no matching records on file.

  Walking back to his vehicle, he squinted up at the bruised-black underbelly of a leaden sky. It looked as if a storm was coming. He climbed back inside his SUV, tossed the memory stick and recordable DVD on the floor in front of the passenger seat, restarted the engine, and shifted into gear.

  A catchy song came on the radio.

  He turned it off. Eyes on the road, he admonished himself. There was still a long way to go—and no more room for error.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  1:53 P.M.

  THE LAST THING Tom had wanted to do was go back out and brave the crossfire hurricane that had descended on Seattle. But there were no working phone lines or e-mail, and cell phones spat out nothing but static. He might have tried sending smoke signals if half the city hadn’t already been on fire.

  Since no one else had been willing to drive, Tom had ended up behind the wheel of one of NTAC’s armored SUVs. Now he was dodging fireballs, bullets, and dozens of random, telepathically hurled projectiles on every block, as he navigated the narrow residential streets of Madrona.

  Yeah, this is exactly what I wanted to be doing today, he brooded while swerving through a slalom of overturned cars and trucks set ablaze.

  Diana was riding shotgun, and Dennis was sandwiched in an awkward pose between Jed and Marco in the backseat.

  “If I’d known we were taking the scenic route, I’d have brought my camera,” Dennis said, making no effort to mask his sour mood.

  Tom bashed aside the stripped husk of an old Trans Am that was blocking the road, then replied, “Don’t thank me, Dennis, thank the Army. They’re the ones who turned the interstate into Swiss cheese.”

  “We’ll have more room once we make the turn onto Madison,” Diana said, and she was right. Half a minute later, Tom pulled their vehicle through a tight, wheels-squealing, high-speed turn onto East Madison Street that pinned Tom and Jed against the SUV’s driver’s-side doors, and squashed Dennis even more firmly between Jed and Marco.

  The latest in a series of random gunshots ricocheted off their back window, leaving a dull gray scuff. “Good thing this ride’s got bullet-resistant glass,” Jed said, “or else this would’ve been a damn short trip.”

  “It’ll be short enough as it is,” Tom said. “We’d better figure out what we plan to say to Shawn before we get there.”

  Diana seemed surprised. “I thought you and Shawn were on good terms.”

  “We were, but …” He didn’t know how to finish the sentence. “You know how things get with family. And the way he did Maia’s dirty work at that meeting with Jordan didn’t help, either.”

  Dennis leaned forward. “I have a suggestion.”

  Seeing his former boss’s head thrust between the two front seats filled Tom with the urge to whack Dennis’s noggin with a mallet.

  Like a human Whac-A-Mole, Tom mused with a smile. “Let’s hear it,” Tom said, momentarily suppressing his mischievous impulse.

  “I know this’ll sound like a radical idea coming from me, but maybe we should tell your nephew the truth.”

  Diana directed a dubious look at Dennis. “Before I make any assumptions, exactly what do you define as ‘the truth’ in this situation, Dennis?”

  “We tell hi
m that the Marked have an antimatter bomb and are on their way to nuke Seattle unless his people help us find them and stop them.”

  Tom shook his head. “And when he asks how the Marked managed to build an antimatter bomb?”

  “Well, I don’t think we need to go into that,” Dennis said.

  Marco covered his mouth with his fist and fake-coughed as he muttered, “Bullshit.”

  “Use your head,” Jed said. “Some of these people are freakin’ mind readers, okay? The second you walk in there, they’re gonna know what you did and why you did it, so if I were you, I’d get ready to come clean.”

  Dennis let out an angry sigh and sat back. “Fine.”

  Jed wondered aloud, “What if Jordan’s people went to the Center?” Diana turned and looked back at him as he added, “I mean, what if we have to deal with not just Shawn, but Jordan, too? That’d make things, well … tense.”

  “The city’s getting blown to bits as we speak,” Diana said. “And you’re worried things might become tense?”

  Looking around for some kind of support but finding none, Jed replied like a scolded schoolboy, “You know what I mean.”

  It was Marco and Diana’s turn to get pinned to their doors as Tom steered the SUV through a hard, fast, uphill left turn onto Twenty-third Avenue East. Barring attacks and detours, the rest of their trip would be a straight shot north until they reached Crescent and made the turn toward The 4400 Center.

  “The big question,” Diana said, in her thinking-out-loud way of speaking to no one in particular, “is what are we going to ask Shawn or Jordan’s people to do about the bomb if they find it? Do we want them to destroy it?”

  Dennis said, “I’d rather they didn’t.”

  “Yeah,” Marco interjected sarcastically. “You might lose your job if that happened.”

  “There’s also the fact that it represents a major scientific achievement,” Dennis said. “I’d think you and Diana could at least appreciate its value on that level. Simply destroying it would be a waste.”