The 4400® Promises Broken (2 page)

The Marked had recently suffered brutal setbacks in their covert war against the 4400—people abducted from far-flung parts of the world over the course of nearly six decades of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, taken by agents of the future determined to alter the shape of things to come. Injected with the neurotransmitter promicin, which gifted them with extraordinary paranormal abilities, the 4400 had been returned en masse
on August 14, 2004, in order to avert a catastrophe that would end the world as they knew it.

In other words, the returnees had been changed and sent back to erase the past and topple the future’s last bastion of stable civilization, which the Marked were sworn to defend.

Unfortunately, the war had turned against the Marked. An assassination squad—sent by Jordan Collier, the charismatic leader of the rapidly spreading promicin movement, and led by the ex-military telekinetic returnee Richard Tyler—had killed seven of Jakes’s fellow agents.

It was likely a matter of simple luck that Jakes had escaped Tyler’s attack on Wyngate Castle, the opulent redoubt that George Sterling had built with his movie-industry millions. If not for a secret passage Jakes had added to the estate, he, Wells, and Kuroda would likely be dead.

They were now the last three agents of the Marked. They alone remained to save their future from Collier and his quasi-religious promicin movement.

As his bonds fell away, Jakes stood. “That’s better,” he said. Kuroda handed him his clothes. He dressed quickly, then walked toward the exit. Wells and Kuroda followed him. “I wired what’s left of Sterling’s fortune to the Caymans with the rest of our assets,” Jakes said. “We can use that as startup capital.”

Kuroda picked up her briefcase, in which she carried the new nanite-transfer device. “I still don’t see how we’re supposed to do anything posing as these
nobodies
,” she said.

“Impersonating people in high places worked for as long as it could,” Jakes said. “Now we have to lie low.”

Wells was dismayed. “How does that help us? We’ve already missed our window of opportunity against Collier.”

“Maybe,” Jakes said. “Maybe not.” He opened the door to the dimly lit stairwell, where the air was hot and stuffy compared to the cool confines of the subbasement. “That’s why we have to make a new friend—one who wants to stop him as much as we do.”

Over their trudging footfalls, Kuroda said, “You’ve already made contact with this ‘new friend,’ haven’t you?”

“Yes, I have,” Jakes said. Even though his new body was relatively young and physically fit, the heat in the stairwell had rivulets of sweat running down his back as he climbed one switchback flight after another, back to the main floor.

Laboring up the steps behind him, Wells protested, “It’s still too late. The date for the calamity came and went.”

“I know,” Jakes said. Pushing open the door to the ground level of the hotel under construction, he squinted against the glare of the late-afternoon sun. Wind like a gust from a furnace whipped his brown hair from his face. “But all that means is that Collier prevented the disaster he knew about.” He permitted himself a malevolent smirk. “It’s time to give him one he won’t see coming.”

July 21, 2008

H
ARBOR
I
SLAND WAS BURNING
. Crimson flames filled the late-dusk sky with black smoke that stank of oil.

The huge, man-made wedge of land at the mouth of the Duwamish River was an industrial maze of fuel refineries, smelting plants, and shipping yards. It also housed Seattle’s largest reserves of gasoline and aviation fuel, and was one of the few parts of the city that had not fallen under the control of Jordan Collier in the months since he had renamed Seattle as Promise City, his safe haven for the world’s promicin-positives.

Tonight it was a battlefield.

Moving down a street flanked by searing walls of fire and twisted, burnt machinery, National Threat Assessment Command agent Tom Baldwin held his Glock 26 steady in a white-knuckle grip and advanced toward the fray. At his side was his partner, Diana Skouris. Ahead of them and leading the way was an NTAC tactical strike
team equipped with full combat gear and M4A1 assault rifles. Roving searchlights from a helicopter high above them swept the path ahead.

The strike team sergeant lifted a fist and signaled the two plainclothes agents to hold up. Tom and Diana kneeled but kept their semiautomatic pistols at the ready as the strike team fanned out across an intersection blocked by smoldering debris and gutted cars. With one sweaty hand, Tom adjusted his bulletproof vest, which was a bit snug in his armpits.

Blades of lightning flashed from the sky. Blinding white strikes hit three members of the NTAC team, who fell in smoking heaps. Their comrades opened fire, filling the air with the angry stutters of a fully automatic barrage. Tom doubted they even knew what they were shooting at.

Everyone hit the deck as a flash of detonation filled the street in the distance: another fuel tank had exploded. The shock wave almost knocked the fillings from Tom’s teeth. A reddish-orange fireball roiled into the night sky.

Tom reached out and put a hand on Diana’s shoulder. He shouted over the clatter of rifle fire, “You okay?”

The slender brunette nodded, then hollered back, “We’re sitting ducks out here!”

He nodded, then pointed to a clear route through a parking lot. “That way!” They scrambled off Lander Street, crossed Thirteenth Avenue, and jogged east through the lot toward Eleventh Avenue.

A handful of men and women dashed up the road in the distance ahead of Tom and Diana. In the flicker of firelight, Tom saw that they wore the uniforms of Promise
City peace officers, a newly formed law enforcement entity composed of promicin-positive former Seattle cops as well as civilian volunteers. They answered only to Jordan Collier, which rubbed Tom the wrong way, but they were Seattle’s best defense against rogue p-positives.

A figure of smoke appeared in the peace officers’ midst. It solidified into a black-clad young man, who plunged a knife into one officer’s upper back. As the rest of the slain officer’s comrades turned to face their attacker, he transmuted back into smoke and vanished.

More lightning lanced from the overcast sky and hammered the peace officers. Tom lifted his arm to shield his eyes from the painful flash. Thunder rolled in its wake. As he lowered his arm, he saw that Diana had done the same. They resumed running toward the besieged Promise City cops.

Motorcycle engines growled. A wave of kinetic force that shimmered like heat radiation leveled the few remaining peace officers. Moments later, three Suzuki sportbikes roared down the road, heading south, away from the acres of erupting fuel tanks.

Tom stopped and raised his Glock. Diana did likewise. They aimed and fired multiple shots at the escaping cyclists.

The rear and middle riders twitched and tumbled off their bikes, which toppled and skidded as the wounded terrorists landed hard on the asphalt.

Their last shots missed the first rider, who sped away into the canyons of stacked, multicolored shipping containers that dominated the southern and eastern parts of the island.

“C’mon!” Tom shouted, holstering his Glock and
sprinting for the downed bikes. Diana stayed with him, pacing him at a full run. They reached the closest bike, whose engine had stalled. “Help me,” Tom said, sliding his hands under the bike. Together they pushed it upright. Tom climbed on and quickly restarted the engine as Diana hopped onto the seat behind him.

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.”