The 4400® Promises Broken (19 page)

“That’s the problem,” Gary said. “I have no idea. All I know about him is what little I’ve been able to read from the minds of his men, but most of them don’t know much besides his name, rank, and specialty: Commander Eric Frost, Navy SEAL.”

From the corner of his eye, Jordan saw a young man whisper to Shawn and hand him a sheet of paper. While Shawn read the report, Heather crossed her arms and asked Gary, “Do we know
anything
else? Even small details might make a difference.”

Gary said, “Including Frost, there are thirty enhanced soldiers working as a single unit inside Promise City. From his troops’ memories, I found out they entered the city through some underwater sewage tunnels in Elliott Bay. Once they got into the city, they split into three groups of ten men.”

Shawn interrupted, “His troops are wreaking havoc all over Belltown. They’re knocking out sections of the freeways and starting fires faster than we can put them out.”

Nodding, Gary continued. “I think their job is to keep us busy and off-balance while Frost and his team head east
and look for us. The last time his men saw him and his command team, they were crawling back into the Mercer Street flood control tunnel, on their way to a manhole at Eighth and Roy.”

“Which means they’re probably coming here,” Jordan said. “Where are they now?”

“No idea,” Gary said. “Frost is able to hide himself and the men with him. We haven’t been able to find him with telepathy, remote-viewing, or anything else.”

Looking hopefully at his brooding shaman, Jordan asked, “What about you, Kyle? Any suggestions on how or where we might head off Commander Frost and his team?”

Kyle stared at his shoes, then shook his head in defeat. “Sorry,” he said. “Cassie and I are drawing a blank. But we know their mission is to cap us, so we ought to start digging in. Cover the windows and doors, post sentries, the works. Maybe even—oh, I don’t know—get our hands on some guns?”

Gary added with an apprehensive sidelong look, “Guns might not be a bad idea, Jordan.”

“I don’t think we need them,” Jordan said. “But if they’ll make any of you feel better, be my guests.” He pointed at the assorted objects dotting the map. “While we’re getting ready for a showdown with Frost, let’s not forget to deal with the regular troops.” Looking at Gary, he asked, “Is Marisol still holding the line in Georgetown?”

“Last I heard,” Gary said.

“Good. Tell her to go on the attack; start taking back some lost ground. Send Raul and Qi Xian to help her.”
Turning to Shawn and Kyle, he asked, “Have either of you heard any news about the troops that breached our line out at Fort Lawton?”

Kyle pointed at the barren strip of land between Magnolia Bluff and Queen Anne. “Orson’s holding them at the fallback line west of the railroad tracks.”

“He’ll need reinforcements,” Jordan said. “Send over Sandra, Aasif, and Oliver. Make sure they know I want those soldiers back on their base by sundown.”

“Done,” Kyle said, stepping away to relay the order to one of the telepathic senders, who served as the Movement’s primary means of clandestine communication.

Jordan clapped his hands together. “Okay. Everyone else, let’s get to work securing the Center. Go.” The war council dispersed, and people moved quickly, taking their specific instructions from Shawn, Kyle, Gary, and the few of Jordan’s bodyguards who had professional close protection experience. Watching them all swing into action, it took Jordan a moment to notice that Maia was standing just behind him, staring at him.

“It won’t be enough,” she said.

“It never is,” Jordan replied, steeling himself for the worst, which he knew was yet to come. “It never is.”

12:42
P.M.

M
ARCO TAPPED AND
dragged icons, windows, and widgets across his computer’s touchscreen with such force that he nearly knocked it off the desk. He was struggling to keep up with the accelerating cascade failures of the city’s traffic monitoring cameras, which he had been using in a desperate effort to find Tom and Diana, who had gone missing after an altercation with a squad of enhanced soldiers nearly half an hour earlier.

Jed watched over Marco’s shoulder and cautioned him, “Easy, buddy. You’ll find ’em.”

“Not at this rate, I won’t,” Marco said, frustrated beyond all reason by the collapsing municipal data network. “The Army’s fragging all our public surveillance systems. By this time tomorrow, I won’t even be able to tell if it’s raining without looking out the window.”

“Sure you will,” Jed said. With a wry smile, he added, “This is Seattle. It’s almost
always
raining.”

Behind them, a man said in a gruff voice, “Ever the optimist, eh, Jed?”

They spun about. Jed started to raise his rifle—and froze.

Dennis Ryland stood in the doorway of the crisis center, his pistol raised and pointed at Jed and Marco. “Don’t get up,” he said. “I’m glad to see Homeland Security left somebody running the show here at NTAC, but I was kind of hoping it’d be more than just the two of you.” After a brief pause, he added, “No offense, of course.”

“None taken,” Jed said. “Mind telling us how you got in?”

Dennis shrugged. “I still have a few backdoor codes in the system,” he said. He smiled at Marco. “No thanks to you.” Pointing at Marco’s vest, he added, “Got enough gear, son? I’ve never seen anybody stuff the pockets of a tac vest like that.”

“I like to be prepared,” Marco said.

“Obviously. You must’ve been a Boy Scout.” Lifting his chin at Jed, Dennis said, “Would you mind putting down your rifle? It makes me a little nervous.”

Jed flashed an insincere smile. “And we wouldn’t want that, now would we?”

A pistol’s muzzle edged into view from the dark corridor and pressed against the back of Dennis’s neck as Tom Baldwin answered, “No, we sure as hell wouldn’t. Put your weapon on the floor, Dennis. Right now.”

The former director of NTAC did as he was told. He lowered his pistol, bent down slowly, and set it at his feet.

Tom said, “Kick it over to Jed.”

With a tap of his foot, Dennis sent his sidearm skittering
across the tiled floor to Jed, who caught it under his shoe while lifting his rifle and aiming it at Dennis.

“Step inside and take a seat,” Tom said, nudging Dennis forward. Tom followed Dennis into the crisis center. Half a step behind him was Diana, who entered with her own pistol leveled at Dennis’s head.

The middle-aged man settled into a chair and responded to the agents’ intense glares with an infuriatingly nonplussed smile. “Guys, don’t you think you’re overreacting here?”

Diana said, “I haven’t shot you yet, have I?”

“You might want to hear what I have to say before you blow my brains out.”

Tom holstered his weapon and nodded for Diana to do the same. She hesitated until Jed said, “It’s okay, Skouris. I’ve got him covered.” Reassured, Diana holstered her pistol.

“Okay,” Tom said to Dennis. “You want to talk? Talk.”

The smile faded from Dennis’s careworn features. “I’m in trouble,” he began.

Diana quipped, “And we give a shit because …?”

He ignored her and pressed on. “I authorized an off-the-books research project at Haspelcorp. Three scientists told me they could make a device to mass-neutralize promicin. Before long it turned into a multibillion-dollar investment.”

“Wait, I’ve heard this story before,” Tom said with a cynical frown. “‘And then, something went horribly wrong …’”

Dennis’s furrowed brow betrayed his growing irritation.
“At some point in the last twenty-four hours, those three scientists carried that device out the front door of a top-secret lab. By now it could be just about anywhere. Including here.”

“I don’t mean to sound callous,” Tom said, “but so what? A device that can neutralize promicin might be able to put an end to this little civil war.”

Lifting his eyebrows, Dennis said, “Exactly! That’s why I backed their project in the first place. It was the solution I’d been looking for—a way to end Collier’s insane movement without risking any more innocent lives.”

Diana wore a quizzical expression. “But why would they steal it? Corporate espionage? Personal agenda?”

“I honestly don’t know,” Dennis said. “I’ve been trying to figure that out for the last hour, but no answer I can think of makes any sense.”

Tom paced behind Dennis, on the other side of a row of computers. “Before we can figure out the
why
, we need to take a closer look at the
who
. These three scientists— you said they approached you with the project. Did they work for Haspelcorp?”

“No, they were independent contractors. I’d never heard of them, but a background check verified their credentials, so I listened to their pitch.”

Marco’s curiosity was fully engaged. “If these guys are major players in promicin research, I might know who they are,” he said. “What’re their names?”

“Peter Jakes, Robert Wells, and Helen Kuroda.”

Marco shook his head, stumped. “Never heard of ‘em.”

Tom cast a horrified glare at Dennis. “Did you say their
last names were Jakes, Wells, and Kuroda?” Dennis confirmed it with a curt nod, and Tom recoiled in shock. He said to Diana, “Those were the real names of three of the Marked agents.”

“Whoa!” Marco said. “Are you saying Haspelcorp backed a research project by the Marked?” He stared at Dennis. “Are you one-hundred-percent sure you know what they were building?”

“Of course,” Dennis said. “I saw it with my own eyes.”

Doubtful looks passed between the agents.

Marco said, “No offense, Dennis, but you can’t even use a computer.”

He replied defensively, “I’m learning.”

“Can you tell a hodoscope from a cavity magnetron?”

“Sure.”

Staring him down, Marco asked, “How?”

Dennis hemmed and hawed for a few seconds before mumbling, “Um … one has a cavity?”

“Nice try,” Marco said. “Tell me everything you procured for the Marked: parts, raw materials, fuels—the works.”

Rolling his eyes, Dennis said, “For God’s sake, Marco! There was so much, I can’t remember it all off the top of my head. But the one they really broke my balls about a couple days ago was the shipment from CERN—”

“Antimatter and a new transuranic element?” Marco cut in.

“Yes,” Dennis said, apparently caught off guard. “How …?”

Marco felt the blood rush from his face. He looked at
Tom and Diana, who also had paled at Dennis’s unwitting revelation.

“Oh, shit,” Tom said. He stared, dumbstruck, at Dennis. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done? Who those people were? Or what you just put into their hands?”

Dennis studied their reactions, frowned, then replied, “Apparently not.”

Diana ran a hand through her hair. “Okay, let’s think this through: Whatever it is the Marked had Dennis bring in from CERN, that’s what gave the U.S. government an excuse to attack Seattle. Now the Marked have an antimatter bomb. So the question we need to be asking is: What’s their target?”

“There might be evidence at the lab,” Dennis said. “They set it on fire before they left. They must’ve been trying to hide something.”

“Makes sense,” Tom said. “Do you have any pictures of the lab, either inside or out?”

“On my phone,” Dennis said. “I downloaded thirty seconds of video from the secure feed, in case we had to analyze it.”

“Good,” Tom said. “Give it to Marco.”

Pulling open his suit jacket, he said, “I’m going to reach in very slowly.” Tom nodded for him to continue.

Dennis produced his phone and handed it to Marco, who quickly accessed its most recent saved video file and hit
PLAY
.

The image on the phone’s screen was so dark and murky that Marco could barely discern any details. “Not sure I can use this,” he said to Tom. “I need to see a bit
more of where I’m—hang on …” The image changed to an exterior shot of the lab. He saw smoke belching up from a half-imploded ramshackle building in a barren desert. He looked at Dennis. “Nevada?”

“Yes. Good guess.”

“Thanks,” Marco said. “Okay, this I can work with.” He made sure that he had his own phone secure inside a closed pocket of his tactical vest, then stood up and nodded to Tom and Diana.

“Back in a few,” he said.

Then he stared deeply into the grainy video on the phone’s LCD screen. His eyes saw through the moving image, and the edges of his vision blurred, until all that he could see was the baked-white sand and sun-bleached sky of the desert …

Marco blinked and squinted against the desert sun.

It felt as if there was as much heat radiating up from the runway tarmac at his feet as there was beating down on him from above. The combination of direct and reflected sunlight was blinding, and painful pricklings needled his exposed skin.

This is what it feels like to get cooked alive
, he mused.

The sand-scoured wooden shack that hid the entrance to the secret Haspelcorp lab was dozens of yards away. As in the recorded video on Dennis’s phone, it continued to spew smoke through rents in its roof of rusted, corrugated metal.

Eager to get out of the sun, Marco walk-jogged toward the dilapidated building. His footsteps slapped against the
paved runway surface, making a tiny sound that was all but lost in the vast, lonely spaces of the deep desert. It was difficult for Marco to move so quickly in such dry, brutal heat, but he feared that if he slowed his pace or stopped to rest, the soles of his sneakers would melt under his feet.

He reached the shack. Littering the ground by the entrance were a few small bits of metallic debris. Some of the pieces’ edges were straight and clean; others were scorched and melted. Though he didn’t know what to make of them offhand, he suspected they might be worth analyzing later. He gathered the pieces, stuffed them into his pants pockets, then moved on to the shack.

He tried to open the door and tore it from its corroded and heat-warped hinges. Part of the wall fell away with it, reduced to a smoldering slab of charcoal. It broke into dusty black cinders at his feet.

“Construction by the lowest bidder,” he mumbled, even though the joke was solely for his own ears. Something about the profound emptiness of the landscape that surrounded him made Marco want to talk to himself.