The 4400® Promises Broken (20 page)

Edging through the door, he paused to let his eyes adjust to the shadows inside the shack. Ahead of him, the fire had exposed and destroyed what looked like some high-tech security devices mounted inside the wall. Next to them was another half-disintegrated door, beyond which was a short hallway.

Everything inside the shack stank of burnt wood.

Marco pushed the sliding door open. It caught on something in its glide track. The grinding noise it produced made Marco suspect that it was ashes or other
debris deposited by the fire. With effort he shoved it through the obstruction, opening the portal fully. He was rewarded with a faceful of smoke that stung his eyes until they watered.

Waving away the acrid cloud, Marco walked with caution down the corridor, testing each floorboard’s integrity before trusting it with his full weight. A few boards answered his steps with ominous creaks, but the path felt solid.

Another open doorway at the end of the hall led to an elevator shaft, but there was no elevator. Perched at the edge, Marco stole a look down the shaft, which fell away into total darkness. To either side of him were motor housings that had likely controlled the elevator car, but they appeared to be warped and blackened, and their cables were missing.

Looking around, Marco muttered, “I guess some stairs would be a bit too much to ask for.” He cast another stare into the seemingly bottomless abyss. “No, let’s just have an elevator be the only way to the lab. What could possibly go wrong?”

He unsnapped the flap on one of his tactical vest’s many pockets. “Let’s see who’s laughing now, Dennis,” he said as he dug out four glow sticks that were tied together with a spare shoelace. With simple bending motions, he activated the flexible plastic rods. As the chemicals inside them mixed, they gave off a ghostly but intense white light. “That’ll do,” he said, then dropped them down the elevator shaft.

They fell almost directly straight down, with what
seemed to Marco like surreal slowness, but he timed their fall with his watch at just over four seconds. Doing the math in his head, he concluded that the sticks had fallen roughly three hundred feet.

“Let’s have a look at what’s down there,” he said to himself while retrieving a pair of compact but powerful binoculars from another bulging pouch on the front of his vest. He wrapped the field glasses’ strap around his wrist to keep from dropping them, then laid down beside the shaft’s edge.

Aiming the binoculars toward the distant glow sticks, he adjusted the focus until he had a sharp image of the bottom of the shaft. It was filled with the wreckage of the elevator car. Checking the sides, he saw a gap in one wall that he suspected would lead into the hidden laboratory.

He pictured himself prone atop a level portion of the wrecked elevator car …

… and then he was there.

God, I love teleporting
, he thought with a broad grin as he clambered down off the mangled elevator car. Grabbing the glow sticks, he took a few careful steps into the lab. He coughed as he inhaled more toxic-smelling smoke. Somewhat belatedly, he hoped that the fumes in the lab weren’t laced with deadly chemicals or radioactive particles.
Too late now
, he figured.

Moving through the lab, he felt suffocated both by the heat and the odor of gasoline. The smell was strongest in the areas that seemed to be the flashpoints of the fire.

Multiple ignition points and the presence of accelerant: those two factors alone would have been enough to suggest
arson even if the scientists hadn’t already absconded with the warhead they had built. Adding to Marco’s certainty that the lab had been deliberately destroyed was the rather uniform manner in which all of its computers had been smashed and piled together in the center of one workroom.

“Subtle, guys,” Marco said sotto voce. “Real subtle.”

He wandered from one room to the next, searching for more clues, no matter how trivial they might appear.

The blaze had scoured the lab of almost every scrap of paper. Glass beakers and vials had melted. Even most of the metal had been deformed by the extreme heat.

In a room that he guessed had served as one of the scientists’ temporary quarters, he saw the corner of a book on a table partly covered by a toppled locker. He climbed awkwardly over the locker to examine the book. Its front cover was seared black and its pages had been half consumed by fire, but its back cover was only slightly browned. Delicately, he opened it just enough to see what kind of tome it was.

It was a world atlas.

Marco pulled the book free from under the fallen locker cabinet and saw something else on the desk: a small rock. He reached over and picked it up. It was feather-light. Turning it in his fingers, he saw that it was oddly shaped and pitted with small cavities.
Must be volcanic
, he concluded.
Interesting
.

He stuffed the rock in a pocket apart from the metal he’d found outside the shack and tucked the burnt book under his arm. It wasn’t much, but he suspected there wasn’t anything else in the lab that was worth finding.

“Homeward bound,” he said, taking out his wallet and flipping it open to a photo of the NTAC Theory Room.

Staring at the image of his home-away-from-home, he knew he would momentarily be there.

“I don’t know how I could’ve doubted you, Marco,” Dennis said, in a tone so neutral that Tom knew it had to be sarcasm. “You’ve really blown this thing wide open.”

Marco sat, arms folded, eyebrows knitting together with sullen indignation, at his desk in the Theory Room. Tom, Jed, Diana, and Dennis had come downstairs at his request after he had returned from the Haspelcorp lab several minutes earlier.

Dennis poked at the volcanic rock on Marco’s desk. “I mean, these are the clues we were waiting for: a pebble, some scrap metal, and an atlas that’s been used for kindling. Nice work.”

“Fifteen minutes ago we didn’t have anything,” Diana said to him. “All we knew was that you got duped into helping three fanatics from the future build a doomsday weapon. And in case you forgot, you came here looking for help from us. So why don’t you do yourself a favor and shut up?”

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.”

1:21
P.M.

A
FTER 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.