The 4400® Promises Broken (11 page)

“One thousand, two hundred ninety-three, to be precise,” Jakes interjected, drawing a disapproving sidelong stare from Wells. He pressed on, “At most, we’re talking about fourteen hours of driving from here to the target. Under the circumstances, that’s hardly a prolonged window of risk. And traffic on main roads moves with relative freedom.”

“Fine,” said Wells, conceding the debate. “It’s just after two o’clock now. Fourteen hours on the road would make your ETA to target roughly four
P.M.
Pacific?”

“Yes, that sounds about right.” A gust of brisk night air tossed Jakes’s short brown hair into a frenzy. “You and
Kuroda need to be well away from here—preferably in the air and headed west—before I trigger the warhead.”

Nodding, Wells said, “It’s taken care of. We’ll catch a flight to Tokyo out of McCarran at seven
A.M.
Once we get to Japan, we’ll find new bodies and go to ground.” A diabolical smile lit up his face. “When do you think Ryland will figure out that we’ve screwed him?”

“About an hour after the world ends,” Jakes said, then chortled as he slapped his compatriot’s back.

Wells folded up the map and handed it to Jakes, who nodded his thanks and tucked it inside his jacket.

The hiss and hum of activity behind the van ceased. Kuroda emerged and flipped up her visor. “All set,” she said, pushing shut the SUV’s hatchback with a dull thud. “Try not to hit any bumps, okay?”

“I’ll do my best,” Jakes said, hoping that the once-Asian woman now living in the body of a blonde was only joking. He opened the driver’s door and started to get in, but paused as Wells offered him his hand. He reached over and shook it.

“Thank you,” Wells said. “I don’t know that I could go through with it, if I were in your place.”

“Sure you could,” Jakes said, certain that it was true. “It’s just my turn, that’s all.”

Kuroda stripped off her work gloves and shook Jakes’s hand, as well. “If you’re having second thoughts, we could trade—”

“No, I wouldn’t dream of it,” he cut in. “Besides, only you can use your airline tickets. The decision’s made. Time to go.”

He let go of her hand and eased himself into the vehicle’s driver’s seat. His two colleagues stepped back as he shut the door and keyed the ignition.

The engine turned over with a low purr of combustion. In the truck’s rearview mirror, he saw a cloud of gray vapor rise from its exhaust pipe and dissipate into the night.

For a moment, he felt a twinge of hesitation. Then he recalled that this was exactly what he had volunteered for. It was for a mission such as this that he had agreed to have his consciousness downloaded into nanites and exiled forever to the past. This was the moment for which he had come.

“Clock’s ticking,” he said with a smile to his comrades. “Don’t miss your flight.” Then he shifted the vehicle into gear and drove away to keep his appointment with Armageddon.

7:04
A.M.

A
SHRILL RINGING
stirred Jordan Collier from a deep sleep.

He rolled over, still groggy, and flailed for the phone. His limbs felt heavy and clumsy, as if he were drunk. It took him a few slaps of his hand on the end table before he planted it on the phone’s receiver and plucked it from its cradle.

And to think
, he mused ruefully,
I used to be a morning person
. Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he pressed the receiver to his ear and mumbled, “Hello?”

Jaime, his personal assistant, replied,
“Sorry to wake you, Mister Collier. Please hold for the secretary of state.”

There was a click on the line, followed by a man’s voice.
“Mister Collier, this is Secretary Greisman.”
His voice sounded distant and was backed by the weak echo of someone conversing via speakerphone.
“I don’t have time to play games with you, sir, so I’ll come right to the point: Did you and your people cause this disaster?”

At the risk of sounding like an idiot or like someone mouthing a pathetic denial, Collier asked with genuine, sincere confusion, “What disaster, Mister Secretary?”

“Are you serious? Turn on your goddamn television.”

Jordan groaned softly as he sat up and reached for the remote control to his bedroom’s wall-mounted flat-screen TV. “What channel?”

“All of them,”
Greisman said.
“Make it fast.”

He aimed the remote at the TV and thumbed the power-on button. As the screen cycled up from its standby state, there was a knock on his bedroom door. He pressed the mute on his phone and said in a hoarse morning voice, “Come in.”

The door opened. Jaime stepped in holding its knob, and Kyle walked past her and stopped at the foot of the bed, just out of Jordan’s line of sight to the television.

An image of widespread destruction faded up on the screen. Behind the news ticker headline
MASSIVE EARTHQUAKE DEVASTATES SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
was a shattered metropolis, its skyscrapers reduced to smears of debris on the ground and replaced by countless towers of smoke rising from the rubble and mushrooming into the sky. “Good God,” Jordan muttered as he unmuted the phone.

“It was a magnitude nine-point-four quake,”
Greisman said, obviously intuiting what Jordan was seeing on the news.
“It hit about thirty minutes ago. Leveled Frisco, L.A., and San Diego.”

Flipping to another channel, Jordan’s eyes went wide at the sight of the collapsed Golden Gate Bridge. All that
remained of the iconic structure were its two colossal red arches; the span between them was all but gone, broken and vanished into the bay.

“There are tsunamis heading for Chile, Hawaii, and Japan,”
Greisman continued.
“We haven’t even started calculating the death toll in California, so there’s no telling what those waves’ll do. But the projections aren’t good.”

“We’ll take care of the tsunami before it makes landfall,” Jordan said. He covered the mouthpiece and told Kyle, “Wake up Raj.” Resuming his conversation with the secretary, he said, “If there’s anything we can do to help with rescue and recovery—”

Greisman let out a short, bitter chortle.
“Like you ‘helped’ in Seattle? No, thanks.”
Hardening his tone, he went on,
“I’ll ask you again, Collier: Did your people do this?”

Turning his baleful stare toward Kyle, Jordan told the secretary, “No, sir. I did not order such an attack, I did not sanction it, and my people did not cause it.” Kyle returned Jordan’s gaze with his own unyielding glare, betraying nothing. Finishing his thought, Jordan added, “As horrible a tragedy as this is, I’m afraid it’s an act of God.”

“For your sake, it’d better be. Good-bye, Mister Collier.”
A sharp click led to silence as the secretary hung up.

Jordan returned the phone to its cradle at his bedside. Then he picked it back up and pressed a button to call his assistant’s internal line. She picked up on the first ring.

“Yes, sir?”

“Jaime, wake up Hal and Lucas. I need them to help Raj neutralize the tsunami caused by the California earthquake.”

Jaime acknowledged his instructions, then hung up to carry them out. Setting the phone down once again, Jordan sighed and threw a weary look in Kyle’s direction. “I didn’t just lie to the secretary of state, did I, Kyle?”

“I don’t know,” Kyle replied. “Did you?”

“Don’t play dumb with me. Did we or didn’t we have anything to do with causing this morning’s earthquake in California?” Sensing the young man’s reluctance to answer, Jordan pressed him. “Kyle, we’re standing on the brink of war, and this could be what pushes us over the edge. I need to know: Did we do this? Have you and Cassie pushed us into a war?”

Kyle turned away from Jordan, but his face was still visible in the mirror above Jordan’s dresser. The youth seemed to be struggling for an answer, but Jordan suspected that Kyle was getting his talking points from Cassie.

At first a guilty pall washed over Kyle’s features. Within seconds it was pushed aside by a mask of fear. Then his mien turned blank; his eyes went dead and his expression took on the slack neutrality of a sociopath. He turned back to face Jordan.

“It’s impossible to say for certain,” Kyle declared. “There are a lot of rogue p-positives out there. A lot of them have grudges against the government. It would only take one going off the reservation to cause something like this.”

It was an artless evasion, in Jordan’s opinion. Kyle was good at many things, but lying persuasively was not one of them.

“That’s not what I asked, Kyle, and you know it. But
since you seem committed to misinterpreting me, allow me to rephrase my question: Did you—or did Cassie, acting through you—plan, order, or sanction, personally or through a proxy, the initiation or exacerbation of this morning’s earthquake by any promicin-positive group or individual?”

The ghost of a smirk haunted Kyle’s face. “Good question,” he said, walking toward the open bedroom door. As he left, he said over his shoulder, “I’ll look into it and get back to you.”

Kyle closed the door behind him. It shut with a heavy, wooden thud. Jordan stood and stared dumbly at it, unsure what troubled him more: the fact that Kyle was obviously lying to him, or that the youth and his dark muse had just given the United States the perfect excuse to declare war on Promise City.

8:05
A.M.

T
OM HAD JUST
settled in at his desk across from Diana when a muffled roar of frustration from outside their office called them back to their feet. They nearly collided in the doorway as they gazed past the NTAC bullpen, where a dozen agents were prairie-dogging over the walls of their cubicles, all of them looking at the source of the commotion: the director’s office.

Meghan Doyle was going berserk.

She slammed the handset of her phone up and down against its base on her desk. With one yank she tore the phone’s cord from its floor jack, picked up the whole unit, and let out a scream of rage as she hurled it at the wall. The phone shattered into a storm of plastic debris, loose wires, and orphaned computer chips that scattered across her office’s floor. Then Meghan slumped back into her chair, planted her elbows on her desk, and buried her face in her hands.

All the agents in the bullpen stared for several seconds at their silently exasperated director. Then, like a flock of birds turning in unison, they swiveled their heads toward Tom, who recoiled slightly from their unspoken collective plea.

He looked at Diana. She was staring at him, too.

Holding out his upturned palms in desperate supplication, he implored his partner, “Oh, c’mon. Why me?”

“She’s
your
girlfriend,” Diana said, arching her eyebrows.

Goddammit, I really hate it when she’s right
, Tom fumed.

He felt the weight of the room’s attention as he emerged from his office, crossed the bullpen with his hands tucked sheepishly into his pants pockets, and ambled toward the door of Meghan’s office. J.R. lifted his coffee mug as a salute to Tom as he passed by his desk. On the other side of the bullpen, J.B. used tactical hand signals to sarcastically warn Tom,
Keep your eyes open and your head down
.

As Tom drew closer to his destination, he wondered why things like this always seemed to happen before he got a chance to drink his first cup of coffee.
One cup of java before the world falls apart
, he brooded.
Is that really so much to ask?

When he reached Meghan’s office, he looked back at Diana for encouragement. She motioned him forward with a backhanded flicking gesture that made her look as if she were shooing a fly. He grimaced, lifted his hand, and with the knuckle of his middle finger knocked so softly that he barely felt his hand make contact. Then he listened with his ear to the door.

“What?” Meghan demanded from behind the closed portal.

Figuring that was as close to an invitation as he was likely to receive under the circumstances, Tom opened the door and slipped inside. Easing the door shut behind him with one hand, he reached with the other for the rod that adjusted the angle of the Venetian blinds on her office’s window-wall, which faced the bullpen. He turned it to fold the slats of the blinds closed for privacy. “Rough morning?” he asked.

Her face was still in her hands. “What gave you that idea?”

“Nothing in particular,” he said, hoping to ease into the conversation with some mild ironic humor. “Just a feeling.”

She sat up, reclined her chair, and stared at the ceiling. “I just got off the phone with the secretary of Homeland Security,” she said. “It was a short conversation. He did most of the talking.” She sighed. “The good news is that I’m being transferred to a warmer climate—the Atlanta office.”

Swallowing to suppress his rising sensation of dread, Tom asked, “And the bad news is …?”

“I’m being demoted,” Meghan said, flashing a thin smile taut with rage. “He’s making me a field agent, despite the fact that I have no law enforcement experience or tactical training.” She shook her head. “I get the impression this is payback for his being strong-armed into giving me this job in the first place.”

Bits of broken plastic crunched under Tom’s shoes as he
circled around the desk to be closer to Meghan. He sat on the edge of her desk and took her left hand in both of his. “Did he even give you a reason why?”

“Oh, yeah, he gave me a reason, all right,” she said, rolling her eyes in disgust. “He said someone filed a complaint about the fact that I’ve been sleeping with you. ‘Inappropriate fraternization with a subordinate,’ he called it. Like I’m single-handedly corrupting the integrity of the republic.”

Tom clenched his jaw to keep from spouting profanities. “Dammit, Meghan, I’m sorry. I never meant for—”

“Stop,” she cut in. “You have nothing to be sorry for.” She huffed with contempt. “They’re just using the dating thing as an excuse. I know what this is
really
about: they blame me for losing Seattle to Collier, and they think the earthquake in California is the direct result of that. Face it: I’m a scapegoat.” She shut her eyes and bared her teeth in furious denial. “I can’t believe I have to move to Georgia.”