The 4400® Promises Broken

by David Mack

  “I just open a door,” Kendall said. “Whoever goes through, goes through. One, five, ten—makes no difference to me.”

  “So far, so good,” Jed said. He asked Jordan, “Can we get our guns and ammo back? I’d rather not have to throw rocks at this sonofabitch when we catch up to him.”

  “I’ll have your weapons brought down,” Jordan said.

  Marco interjected, “If someone could throw in a few bottles of water while they’re at it—”

  “Consider it done,” Jordan said.

  Diana spread out a map of Wyoming on the table. The paper crinkled crisply under her hands as she said, “All we have to do now is decide where we should ambush Jakes.”

  Everyone gathered around the map. “At this point,” Jed said, pointing, “he’s probably still on West Entrance Road.”

  “Yeah,” Marco said, “but we have no way of knowing exactly where on the road. If we pop in behind him, we’re sunk.”

  Pointing at the map, Tom said, “I see another problem: not many side roads off that stretch. There’s no place to set up.”

  Crossing his arms, Marco said, “The only place where we’d have that is the intersection of West Entrance and Grand Loop Road. We know he has to make that turn to get to his target.”

  “Isn’t that cutting it kinda close?” Diana asked. “If we wait until he reaches the intersection, he’ll already be well inside the caldera’s perimeter. What if he detonates the warhead before we can disarm it?”

  “Then six billion people are gonna have a real bad day,” Tom said. “Jed and I can set up for sniper shots. Diana, we’ll need you as an advance scout, to give us a warning before he comes into range. As soon as he reaches the intersection, we’ll take the shot: kill him first, then stop the truck.”

  Jed nodded. “Copy that.”

  “Guys,” Diana said with a worried frown, “I hate to ask this, but what if you miss? How do we pursue the truck?”

  Tom looked expectantly at Kendall. “I don’t suppose we can take a car through with us?”

  “Sorry,” Kendall said. “I can only open a portal as wide as my arms can reach.” Striking a pose that reminded Diana of Leonardo da Vinci’s famous sketch “Vitruvian Man,” Kendall added, “Nothing wider than this can go.”

  Marco quipped, “Anyone got a Mini Cooper?”

  “Screw that,” Jed said. “I’m not doin’ a high-speed pursuit in a goddamn Mini Cooper.”

  “Relax,” Marco said. “It was just a joke.”

  Dismayed grimaces darkened the agents’ faces. Jed paced and wiped sweat from his face. Then he stopped, turned to the group, and said, “We could commandeer a car on site.”

  “There’s no guarantee we’ll find one exactly when we need it,” Tom said. “Plus, the moment we start jacking rides, the park’s rangers’ll be all over us. And in case any of you have forgotten, we’re technically all federal fugitives right now.”

  Diana looked at Kendall’s scratched-and-patched leather jacket and had a flash of inspiration. “Motorcycles!” she exclaimed. “Tom, I know you still know how to ride, and I can handle one okay. What about you, Jed?”

  “Hell, yeah,” Jed said. “I used to ride a Harley.”

  “Narrow enough to pass through the portal,” Diana said, “and more than fast enough to catch an SUV.”

  Tom smiled in approval. “Nice thinking.” He looked at Jordan. “Can your people scare us up some cycles?”

  “Absolutely,” Jordan said. “We have some in the garage.”

  “That leaves just one little problem,” Jed said. “Assume everything goes right: we clip Jakes and stop the truck. How the hell do we disarm this superbomb of his?”

  Everyone cast imploring looks at Marco.

  “Oh, sure,” the harried young analyst said with a put-upon scowl. “No pressure.”

  THIRTY-NINE

  3:17 P.M.

  TOM KEPT TELLING HIMSELF the same lie, in the hope that simple repetition would make it true: This is just another mission, no different than any other.

  He ignored the acid burning in his stomach. The sour bile twisting its way back up his throat. The adrenaline tremors that were shaking his hands.

  It’s nothing, he assured himself, even though he knew he was lying. No matter how many times the FBI or NTAC had trained him to go after rogue weapons of mass destruction, the real thing never felt like it did in the training exercises. The people who had trained him had been able to simulate everything except the sickening sensation of real fear.

  No simulation had ever made him hear his own pulse pounding in his temples, or feel his heart slamming against his sternum, or need to wipe sweat from his palms every ten seconds.

  I might never see Kyle again, he realized. There were many things he still wanted to say to his son and not nearly enough time to say them. I should ask to talk to him before I go, he decided. Just in case … He didn’t want to complete that thought.

  As soon as Shawn’s and Jordan’s people rounded up three motorcycles, Tom, Jed, and Diana would drive them through one of Kendall’s dimensional portals, on their way to a rendezvous hundreds of miles away, with a fanatic who was ready to end the world in a storm of fire and ice.

  “All in a day’s work,” he and Diana had joked, both of them hiding behind thin smiles made of nothing but bravado.

  For a few more minutes, however, Tom had a small office to himself as he prepared for the op. He had tightened the straps on his tactical vest, checked his Glock twice to make sure it was fully loaded, and visually confirmed that he had all three magazines for his M4A assault rifle tucked into pockets of his vest. As long as someone fetched him a decent riding helmet, he’d have everything he’d need to make a suicidal attack on a rogue Marked agent with an antimatter bomb.

  Nothing like playing for all the marbles, he mused, downing the last few drops of water from a liter-sized bottle.

  A knock on the office’s door startled Tom out of his gallows-humor reverie. He set aside his rifle and lunged for the door. His instincts told him that it was Kyle on the other side of the door, here to see him in case this proved to be their last opportunity to say good-bye.

  Tom pulled open the door and discovered that, as usual, his instincts were completely wrong.

  Maia Skouris looked up at him with her disturbingly steady gaze. “I need to talk to you,” she said. She strode into the office without waiting for his reply. “Shut the door.”

  Turning to face the blond teen, Tom said, “Maia, shouldn’t you be seeing your mother right now instead of me?”

  “There’s no time,” Maia said. She reached into a pocket of her dust-coated jeans and produced a needle and a syringe filled with luminous chartreuse fluid. “You need to take this,” she declared, placing the hypodermic needle on the desk. “Now.”

  “Stop right there,” Tom said, backing away from the syringe as if it contained something radioactive. He pointed an accusing finger at it. “Is that what I think it is?”

  She walked behind the desk, as if instinctively seizing the power position in the room. “It’s a concentrated version of the promicin shot,” she said.

  He shook his head. “I’ve been taking U-pills every—”

  “U-pills can’t block this,” Maia said. “It’ll work much faster than regular promicin, but it won’t matter unless you inject it before you leave on your mission to stop the bomb.”

  Tom recoiled in surprise. “How do you know about … ?” He let his question fade away. It wasn’t important how she knew about the mission. Folding his arms, he continued. “I’m absolutely not taking that shot, Maia.”

  “You have to,” she said, her voice becoming more forceful.

  He stepped forward and leaned on the desk, enabling him to loom over her. “Why? Because of that ‘White Light’ prophecy book Kyle says he found? I don’t care if that thing’s true or not. Even if it guarantees that I survive the shot, there’s no telling what kind of freakish power I’d get. What if it turns me into a living
nightmare, the way it did to my nephew Danny? Or to that Typhoid Mary woman your mom and I had to chase down a few years ago? Who’s to say I’d turn out any better than them?”

  “Me,” Maia replied. “That won’t happen to you. I promise.”

  Pushing back from the desk, Tom shook his head. “No,” he said. “Not good enough. I made a promise to myself, Maia. I refused promicin when Kyle offered it to me, and after the fifty/fifty virus killed my sister I swore I’d never take the shot. So I can’t just take your word for this.”

  “But you need to,” Maia said.

  “What’re you saying?” Tom asked, trying to figure out what the girl was leaving unspoken. “That you know I will take it?”

  “No,” Maia said. “What I know is that you have a choice.”

  “I’ve made my choice,” he said.

  Fury imparted a shrill edge to the teen’s voice. “You’re making the wrong one! You have to trust me.”

  “Trust you?” He almost laughed. “You’ve lied before, when it suited you. Made up false prophecies.”

  “I know,” she said, looking guilty. “This is different.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re the one who decides whether the human race lives or dies.” She met his stare. “Unless you take this shot right now, before you leave this room, every single person on the planet will die—starting with Diana.”

  Hearing his partner’s name jolted Tom. He wondered whether Maia had invoked her adoptive mother’s name because of some lingering resentment stemming from their argument a few days earlier, or if she was doing it merely to manipulate Tom.

  He rounded the desk and confronted Maia. “What do you mean, ‘starting with Diana’?”

  The girl held her ground, not backing up even half a step as Tom marched toward her.

  “Let me tell you something I’ve learned about the future,” Maia said. “It’s like a river—always moving, always taking the path of least resistance. Sometimes the things we do make ripples in the water; sometimes they make a splash. Only a few things are ever big enough to change the river’s direction.”

  Nodding at the needle on the desktop, he asked, “What does that have to do with Diana? Or the death of the human race?”

  “You and Diana are leaving in a few minutes to stop the bomb,” Maia said. “If you don’t take the shot, you’re going to fail, and Diana will be the first to die.”

  “And if I do take the shot? What happens then?”

  “That’s not as clear,” Maia said. “Right now, the future in which you don’t take the shot is the dominant one. It makes all the others too hard to see.”

  “So you’re saying I don’t take the shot.”

  “No!” Maia growled and pulled her fingers through her crud-encrusted hair in frustration. “Listen to me. Some events in the future can’t be changed, but some can. I’m not saying you don’t have a choice—you do. All I’m telling you is what the consequences of your choices will be.”

  Maia picked up the syringe and held it up between them.

  “You can take this shot and stop a lunatic from destroying the world …” She set it down, without releasing him from her merciless stare. “Or you can refuse it … and watch Diana die.”

  FORTY

  3:29 P.M.

  DIANA’S HEART RACED like the engine of the alpine-white BMW high-performance motorcycle idling between her legs. She was at the back of the formation, behind Tom and Jed, who were mounted on, respectively, a blue Suzuki sportbike and a black Yamaha supersport street cycle. Their engines thrummed, deep and loud, with every rev of their throttles resounding inside the concrete environs of the Center’s underground parking garage.

  Standing several yards in front of Tom was Kendall Graves. The slender, punkishly dressed, and colorfully tressed teen seemed more focused and serious now that the moment of action had arrived. She gave a two-finger salute to Tom.

  He nodded in reply, then turned back to face Jed and Diana. “This is it,” he said. “All set?”

  Jed flashed a thumbs-up and donned his riding helmet; as he lowered it into place, it bumped the muzzle of the assault rifle strapped across his back. Diana dipped her chin to confirm that she was ready, and she put on her own helmet.

  Immediately, her protective headgear muffled the roar of the bikes’ engines to a moderate drone. Its polarized visor eliminated the harsh green glare from the garage’s intense overhead fluorescent lights, and it cut down on the headache-inducing exhaust fumes from their engines and the garage’s pervasive odor of mildew festering on damp cement.

  Kendall stood with her legs apart and her arms raised wide above her head, shaping herself into a human X. A pinpoint of golden light formed in front of her navel and expanded outward, like the iris of a camera spiraling open.

  Within seconds, it was large enough for Diana to see through it, as if it were merely an open window. On the other side was a curving, two-lane wilderness road bordered by skinny pine trees and hardscrabble landscape. The sky above the road had the dark gray hue of tarnished tin. A blue recreational vehicle rolled toward them on the other side of the double yellow line, then it passed from view.

  When the portal was open just wide enough for the trio and their motorcycles to pass through, Tom raised his arm, made a twirling motion that meant “move out,” and pointed forward. He leaned forward and down behind his bike’s windscreen, shifted the Yamaha sportbike into gear, and accelerated forward.

  The Suzuki’s engine growled mightily as Jed cruised forward, following close behind Tom.

  Diana squeezed her bike’s clutch, stepped down to shift it into gear, and turned the throttle. Her BMW leaped ahead, the steady vibration of its engine pulsing with growing vigor.

  It felt to her as if they were driving toward a movie screen, but then they rolled through it—and all at once the air changed. It was heavy with the scent of rain and the fragrance of pine, and it was warmer by several degrees.

  In her side-view mirror, Diana saw the portal twist shut. On our own now, she reminded herself.

  The plan was for one of Jordan’s clairvoyants—probably Hal or maybe Lewis Mesirow—to monitor the three NTAC agents’ progress in stopping the SUV. As soon as the agents had control of the bomb, Kendall would open another portal and send Marco through to disarm it.

  We hope, mused Diana.

  Speeding in close formation, the trio rounded a bend into a long straightaway. Far ahead was the intersection that led to Grand Loop Road. Tom raised his fist, which was the signal to stop, and he waved Jed and Diana over to the right shoulder. They pulled over and stopped parallel with each other.

  Tom flipped up his visor, so Jed and Diana did the same. “That’s the intercept point,” he said, glancing at the T-shaped intersection a hundred yards ahead. “Quick radio check.”

  The three agents pulled compact walkie-talkies from their tactical vests and tested them to make sure that they worked, now that they were clear of the military jamming signals that had cut off all radio communications inside Seattle.

  “Check, check,” Tom said, and his voice came through clearly on Jed’s and Diana’s radios. “Okay,” he said, putting away his walkie-talkie. “Diana, set up here, behind those trees, and watch for the white SUV. When it passes by, give us a heads-up. Jed, you’ll break left at the intersection, I’ll break right. We’ll set up for overlapping fields of fire. Take out the truck’s driver if you can. Otherwise, aim for his tires.”

  “Got it,” Jed said, and he slapped his visor back down.

  Looking at Diana, Tom asked, “Questions?”

  “Nope,” she said, keeping a brave face. “Let’s do this.”

  “All right,” Tom said. “Good luck, and good hunting. Last one back to Seattle buys the first round.”

  He lowered his visor, ducked low, and sped away on his bike, with Jed barely two seconds behind him.

  Diana pulled off the main road, onto a dirt trail that led deep into the pine forest. Once she was far enou
gh in not to be visible to traffic on the main road, she turned back and set herself in place to emerge on a moment’s notice into a pursuit position. She wondered which would come first: the white SUV, or the storm that was threatening to rip open the sky.

  She checked her watch. If the observations and calculations had been correct, Jakes would arrive within half an hour.

  It was only 3:31 P.M. Pacific time, but already this felt as if it had been the longest day of Diana’s life. She had woken up expecting just another Thursday at the office. Instead she had been forced to go rogue and fight for her life in a war zone. Now she was hundreds of miles from

  Seattle, sitting on a motorcycle in the middle of Yellowstone National Park, lying in ambush for a fanatic with a doomsday fetish.

  She wanted to swallow and choke down the anxiety welling inside of her, but her mouth was dry. Nothing to be nervous about, she told herself, hoping to salve her fears with sarcasm. After all, it’s just us three standing between the human race and total extinction. What could possibly go wrong?

  3:57 P.M.

  Jakes watched the yellow line blur toward him as he cruised down the lonely two-lane stretch of West Entrance Road. He was less than a mile from the turn onto Grand Loop Road, which meant that his journey would draw to a close in fewer than forty minutes.

  Confronted with the imminent end of his mission and his existence, he found himself in a philosophical state of mind.

  It didn’t bother him to know that death was so near at hand. From the first moment he had accepted his assignment, he had known that he could never return to the future he had left. Whether he succeeded or failed, he had condemned himself to die in the past. That had made many other choices much easier.

  He glanced at the sky and wondered if the stormhead would make good on its promise of rain before or after he reached his destination. There would be a certain visual poetry to standing in the rain as my truck sinks into the lake, he thought with an expression of mild amusement. Like something in a movie.

  There was still much that he didn’t understand about his mission, or about how his masters had occasionally changed their definitions of success. Most of the inquiries he had made before being sent back had been ignored or glossed over with evasions.