The 4400® Promises Broken (25 page)

Maia picked up the syringe and held it up between them.

“You can take this shot and stop a lunatic from destroying the world …” She set it down, without releasing him from her merciless stare. “Or you can refuse it … and watch Diana die.”

3:29
P.M.

D
IANA’S HEART RACED
like the engine of the alpine-white BMW high-performance motorcycle idling between her legs. She was at the back of the formation, behind Tom and Jed, who were mounted on, respectively, a blue Suzuki sportbike and a black Yamaha supersport street cycle. Their engines thrummed, deep and loud, with every rev of their throttles resounding inside the concrete environs of the Center’s underground parking garage.

Standing several yards in front of Tom was Kendall Graves. The slender, punkishly dressed, and colorfully tressed teen seemed more focused and serious now that the moment of action had arrived. She gave a two-finger salute to Tom.

He nodded in reply, then turned back to face Jed and Diana. “This is it,” he said. “All set?”

Jed flashed a thumbs-up and donned his riding helmet; as he lowered it into place, it bumped the muzzle of the
assault rifle strapped across his back. Diana dipped her chin to confirm that she was ready, and she put on her own helmet.

Immediately, her protective headgear muffled the roar of the bikes’ engines to a moderate drone. Its polarized visor eliminated the harsh green glare from the garage’s intense overhead fluorescent lights, and it cut down on the headache-inducing exhaust fumes from their engines and the garage’s pervasive odor of mildew festering on damp cement.

Kendall stood with her legs apart and her arms raised wide above her head, shaping herself into a human X. A pinpoint of golden light formed in front of her navel and expanded outward, like the iris of a camera spiraling open.

Within seconds, it was large enough for Diana to see through it, as if it were merely an open window. On the other side was a curving, two-lane wilderness road bordered by skinny pine trees and hardscrabble landscape. The sky above the road had the dark gray hue of tarnished tin. A blue recreational vehicle rolled toward them on the other side of the double yellow line, then it passed from view.

When the portal was open just wide enough for the trio and their motorcycles to pass through, Tom raised his arm, made a twirling motion that meant “move out,” and pointed forward. He leaned forward and down behind his bike’s windscreen, shifted the Yamaha sportbike into gear, and accelerated forward.

The Suzuki’s engine growled mightily as Jed cruised forward, following close behind Tom.

Diana squeezed her bike’s clutch, stepped down to shift
it into gear, and turned the throttle. Her BMW leaped ahead, the steady vibration of its engine pulsing with growing vigor.

It felt to her as if they were driving toward a movie screen, but then they rolled through it—and all at once the air changed. It was heavy with the scent of rain and the fragrance of pine, and it was warmer by several degrees.

In her side-view mirror, Diana saw the portal twist shut.
On our own now
, she reminded herself.

The plan was for one of Jordan’s clairvoyants—probably Hal or maybe Lewis Mesirow—to monitor the three NTAC agents’ progress in stopping the SUV. As soon as the agents had control of the bomb, Kendall would open another portal and send Marco through to disarm it.

We hope
, mused Diana.

Speeding in close formation, the trio rounded a bend into a long straightaway. Far ahead was the intersection that led to Grand Loop Road. Tom raised his fist, which was the signal to stop, and he waved Jed and Diana over to the right shoulder. They pulled over and stopped parallel with each other.

Tom flipped up his visor, so Jed and Diana did the same. “That’s the intercept point,” he said, glancing at the T-shaped intersection a hundred yards ahead. “Quick radio check.”

The three agents pulled compact walkie-talkies from their tactical vests and tested them to make sure that they worked, now that they were clear of the military jamming signals that had cut off all radio communications inside Seattle.

“Check, check,” Tom said, and his voice came through clearly on Jed’s and Diana’s radios. “Okay,” he said, putting away his walkie-talkie. “Diana, set up here, behind those trees, and watch for the white SUV. When it passes by, give us a heads-up. Jed, you’ll break left at the intersection, I’ll break right. We’ll set up for overlapping fields of fire. Take out the truck’s driver if you can. Otherwise, aim for his tires.”

“Got it,” Jed said, and he slapped his visor back down.

Looking at Diana, Tom asked, “Questions?”

“Nope,” she said, keeping a brave face. “Let’s do this.”

“All right,” Tom said. “Good luck, and good hunting. Last one back to Seattle buys the first round.”

He lowered his visor, ducked low, and sped away on his bike, with Jed barely two seconds behind him.

Diana pulled off the main road, onto a dirt trail that led deep into the pine forest. Once she was far enough in not to be visible to traffic on the main road, she turned back and set herself in place to emerge on a moment’s notice into a pursuit position. She wondered which would come first: the white SUV, or the storm that was threatening to rip open the sky.

She checked her watch. If the observations and calculations had been correct, Jakes would arrive within half an hour.

It was only 3:31
P.M.
Pacific time, but already this felt as if it had been the longest day of Diana’s life. She had woken up expecting just another Thursday at the office. Instead she had been forced to go rogue and fight for her life in a war zone. Now she was hundreds of miles from

Seattle, sitting on a motorcycle in the middle of Yellowstone National Park, lying in ambush for a fanatic with a doomsday fetish.

She wanted to swallow and choke down the anxiety welling inside of her, but her mouth was dry.
Nothing to be nervous about
, she told herself, hoping to salve her fears with sarcasm.
After all, it’s just us three standing between the human race and total extinction. What could possibly go wrong?

3:57
P.M.

Jakes watched the yellow line blur toward him as he cruised down the lonely two-lane stretch of West Entrance Road. He was less than a mile from the turn onto Grand Loop Road, which meant that his journey would draw to a close in fewer than forty minutes.

Confronted with the imminent end of his mission and his existence, he found himself in a philosophical state of mind.

It didn’t bother him to know that death was so near at hand. From the first moment he had accepted his assignment, he had known that he could never return to the future he had left. Whether he succeeded or failed, he had condemned himself to die in the past. That had made many other choices much easier.

He glanced at the sky and wondered if the stormhead would make good on its promise of rain before or after he reached his destination.
There would be a certain visual poetry to standing in the rain as my truck sinks into the lake
,
he thought with an expression of mild amusement.
Like something in a movie
.

There was still much that he didn’t understand about his mission, or about how his masters had occasionally changed their definitions of success. Most of the inquiries he had made before being sent back had been ignored or glossed over with evasions.

One conundrum that still nagged at him, even as he moved closer to making it irrelevant, was that of the causality paradox inherent in his mission. His superiors had insisted that the reason for his mission was to stop a renegade band of scientists from altering the past by creating the promicin movement and, by so doing, destabilizing his time’s last bastion of human civilization.

But how could the promicin movement succeed if I and my peers were still able to mount a response to it?
he wondered.
Wouldn’t altering the past immediately erase the world we knew?
He pondered the possibility that his leaders were deceiving him.
Might the real purpose of my mission have been hidden from me?

The more he thought about time travel, the less sense it made to him. Watching the forest blur past on either side of his SUV, he tried to let go of all his questions, but they continued to haunt his thoughts and demand answers.
If I succeed, and I wipe out Jordan Collier’s movement, will I be creating the future that I left? Or did that future vanish the moment the 4400 appeared on the shore of Highland Beach?

He recalled a hypothesis that suggested branching temporal outcomes created new quantum universes.
If that’s the case
, he concluded,
then the future I knew was

never in danger at all. It would simply have continued on its course, its past unchanging, while the renegades’ efforts to rewrite history accomplished nothing more than creating splinter timelines with different outcomes. But so what? What difference would it make whether parallel universes followed different paths? Why would they ask us to download ourselves into nanites and go back in time if there was no real threat to our power?

There were competing postulates, naturally. One was the “dominant probability” hypothesis, which held that if the likelihood of a given outcome became overwhelming, then the quantum realities it favored would eventually erase less probable universes from existence. If that conjecture proved to be correct, then it might explain why his masters felt it necessary to expend resources, energy, and personnel on multiple efforts to defend their preferred version of history.

A road sign on the side of the road informed him that he was approaching the turn to Grand Loop Road. It started to rain.

No point in obsessing over this now
, Jakes decided.
It’s not as if I’ll unravel centuries of contradictory temporal logic between now and when I reach the lake.

Orders were orders, he reminded himself. His mission was to disrupt, by any means necessary, the spread of Jordan Collier’s movement. The plan that he, Wells, and Kuroda had set into motion seemed perfectly suited to that goal; the fact that it also would transform the world into a very close semblance of the barren globe from which they had come was simply a bonus.

Jakes guided the SUV through an easy right turn onto Grand Loop Road. He imagined the look of shock on Collier’s face as the end of the world caught him unawares. It made him smile.

The SUV’s windshield spiderwebbed with cracks, pulverized glass stung Jakes’s face, and a large-caliber bullet tore off part of his left shoulder, spraying blood across the backseat.

His screams of pain mixed with squeals from the vehicle’s tires as it swerved wildly, back and forth across the road.

He fought to recover control of the SUV. Bullets peppered its windows and doors.

Blood poured down his numb left arm, soaking his shirt.

Nauseated and dizzy, he pressed his foot on the accelerator and struggled to see through the fractured-white windshield.

Over the rush of wind, the roar of the SUV’s damaged engine, and his own labored gasps, he heard more gunshots.

Next came the growling buzz of motorcycles, closing fast from behind him.

Holes appeared in his roof. Windows exploded into shards. Slugs perforated the passenger seat.

A random shot tore into his side. It felt like a rod of fire jammed deep into his guts, aching and burning inside him.

Then a deep boom shook his vehicle, and the wheel began fighting him, resisting his efforts to steer around the slow-moving cars on the road ahead.

Lost a tire
, Jakes reasoned.
So be it.

He started swerving, wide left and right, and though
he felt himself dying by degrees, he was laughing. The war was over, and whoever had found him out was too late to stop it. He was inside the effective target area for the warhead; though the lakeshore had been identified as the optimal detonation site, this desolate stretch of road would more than suffice.

Jakes knew that the dead-man switch linking him to the warhead would finish the mission, even if he himself could not. It didn’t bother him that he wouldn’t live to see the end. One death was just as good as another.

He rammed a station wagon out of his path and kept the gas pedal pinned to the floor as more bullets flew through his SUV.

This would be the last mile of his journey, and he was determined to enjoy the ride while it lasted.

Diana kept the throttle of her motorcycle pinned wide open as she flew down the winding road, slowly gaining on Tom and Jed.

They were more than fifty yards ahead of her, dogging the white SUV, which they had riddled with bullets from their assault rifles. Now they had to rely on their Glocks, but even a semiautomatic pistol was hard to aim and fire while pushing a sportbike to its limits in a high-speed, high-risk pursuit.

Wind hammered at Diana, and it sounded like thunder rushing over her helmet. Rain pelted her and slicked the road.

Up ahead, the SUV swerved from side to side, preventing Tom and Jed from pulling forward on either side of
it. Though one of its tires had been damaged by rifle fire, and Jakes had been wounded, he still had at least partial control of the vehicle.

Stuck on its rear flanks, Jed squeezed off a few more shots, which ricocheted off the Pathfinder’s rear door and bumper. The right-handed Jed was having trouble aiming his weapon with his left hand—a necessity imposed by the fact that a motorcycle’s throttle was located on the right handgrip.

Tom, who normally handled his weapon with his right hand despite being left-handed, was having an easier time shooting lefty. In two shots, he blasted apart the SUV’s rear window.

The SUV and the two motorcycles swung wide through a curve in the road. As Jakes raced ahead, Jed and Tom braked.

Coming the other way was a massive recreational vehicle almost wider than its lane. It veered toward the shoulder to avoid the madly winding SUV, which narrowly missed a head-on collision. The RV began to tip onto its side as it rode up the slope beside the road, then slammed into a stand of pines. Two people—the male driver and a female passenger—burst through its windshield and tumbled like rag dolls to the dusty ground.