The 4400® Promises Broken (24 page)

Jordan’s voice turned their heads toward the door. “I’m well aware of what’s happening,” he said, walking into the commissary. “But contrary to popular belief, aggressive abilities aren’t that common among the promicin-positive. For every person who develops a talent suited for combat, there are nineteen who don’t.” He stopped at the end of the table and stood with his hands clasped behind his back. “My people are badly outnumbered on the street, and most of those defending this Center have to do so with guns. I have one telekinetic fighting to keep a protective force field around the building, and one bodyguard skilled in psychic attacks protecting me. So it’s not that I don’t
want
to task anyone with helping you. It’s that I don’t currently
have
anyone available to do so.”

“Yeah, we get that,” Tom said. “And we’ll take out the truck on our own, if only we can
get
to it.”

“
That
,” Jordan said with a smile, “I can help with.”

Several minutes later Jordan returned, stopped in the stuffy commissary’s doorway, and looked back into the corridor behind him. “Kendall? Can you come in, please?”

Diana watched Jordan usher a pretty teenage girl into the dining hall. He directed her to the table with the NTAC agents and followed her in. As she drew closer, Diana saw that the girl was of mixed Asian and European ancestry. Her raggedly sheared, shoulder-length black hair was streaked with bright pink and turquoise highlights. She was attired in ripped blue jeans that had been faded almost to white; a Colbert Nation T-shirt; a leather jacket that looked as if it had endured more than one high-speed wipeout on a gravel road; and scuffed combat boots.

“Everyone,” Jordan said, “this is Kendall Graves. I’ve asked her to help you, and she’s agreed.” Nodding to the girl, he added, “Say hello.”

With a glazed look of boredom that seemed unique to adolescents, she lifted her chin at the agents. “Hey.”

Diana had no reason to dislike the girl, but everything about Kendall—from her dismissive hauteur to the way that she radiated feral sexuality simply by virtue of her youth—made Diana fear that this was what the future held for Maia.

Finger-combing his sweat-soaked hair from his eyes, Marco asked the girl, “Are you a teleporter?”

“I open portals,” Kendall said with evident pride. With
a casual turn of her head, she tossed her multicolored hair behind her shoulder. “Show me where you want to go, and I’ll give you a door that gets you there.”

Tom gave an approving nod. “Sounds perfect.”

“Beats dealin’ with the airlines,” Kendall said with a smile. She planted one hand to accentuate the curve of her hip and shifted her weight to emphasize the lines of her coltish legs. “So … where ya goin’?”

“Yellowstone National Park,” Diana said.

A befuddled look raised the girl’s steeply arched eyebrows, one of which Diana saw was pierced. “Where is that, exactly?”

“Wyoming,” Diana replied. “Heard of it?” Holding up a map of the United States, she pointed at the park. “Here.”

Kendall nodded, apparently ignoring Diana’s thinly masked, irrational hostility. “Cool. No sweat. I’ve done portals that far before. I can get you there.”

Tom asked, “Can you move more than one person at a time?”

“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.”

3:17
P.M.

T
OM 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.”