The 4400® Promises Broken (5 page)

A sultry breeze tousled his still-dark but subtly graying hair as he reached the door of a sand-blasted wooden shack with a patchwork roof of corrugated tin and rusted sheet metal. To a casual observer, the tiny ramshackle building might look as if it were in danger of being carried away in the next dust storm. That impression was entirely by design.

He opened the rickety wooden door and stepped into the sweltering shade of a vestibule barely large enough for two people to stand in. The outer door closed behind him.

For a moment, there was only the feeble illumination of daylight peeking in through the gaps around the door. Then a panel slid open on the wall in front of Dennis, revealing the glowing green pad of a hand scanner—the first of three biometric security measures he would have to satisfy to gain entry to Haspelcorp’s secret, off-the-books weapons research laboratory. He put his hand on the pad and waited.

The device hummed as a bright, horizontal beam traveled up and down, reading his palm. A vaguely feminine but essentially neutral-sounding synthetic voice declared through a hidden speaker,
“Prepare for retinal scan.”

This was his least favorite part of the procedure; the emerald-colored light always left him seeing spots for a few minutes afterward. He took a breath, stared into the circular retnal scanner for his requisite semi-blinding, and forced himself not to blink.

When it was over, the synthetic voice said,
“State your name and clearance code for voiceprint authorization.”

“Ryland, Dennis. Authorization code Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot, three, one, six, seven, six.” He’d chosen his code himself. The words were a juvenile display of veiled contempt for his masters; the digits were the date of his daughter Nancy’s birth.

“Voiceprint and clearance code authorized.”
The security panel went dark. A series of magnetic locks behind it released with dull thuds and clacks. Then the wall swung away from him, admitting him to a short passage that led to a tiny elevator.

As soon as he entered the climate-controlled corridor, his face became drenched with perspiration. Now that the air around him was pleasantly cool, he realized how overheated he felt. Dennis took a handkerchief from his jacket pocket and mopped the sheen of sweat from his face and the back of his neck.

He got into the elevator and pressed the button for the secure sublevel. The doors closed, and the lift descended with a soft hum and only the slightest vibration.

It took half a minute to complete the descent. The lab was three hundred feet underground and shielded by the latest defenses and counterintelligence technologies. Finally, the lift slowed and stopped with a gentle bump. The doors opened.

Dennis stepped out into a wide-open space. Brightly lit and immaculately clean, its work areas were partitioned behind four-inch-thick panels of AlON—aluminum oxynitride, a clear ceramic polymer optically equivalent to glass but strong enough to be used by the military as a form of transparent armor for windows on tanks and aircraft.
Occupying much of the lab’s space were many of the most advanced automated research and fabrication devices ever invented. Haspelcorp had made a cottage industry of buying up promising patents from struggling inventors and then sequestering the fruits of those labors in places such as this.

Everywhere he looked, machines were hard at work. Flashes of blue-white light and showers of sparks danced on the edge of his vision. Motors whirred, hydraulics gasped, and generators purred, low and steady. Robotic arms moved parts from one space to another, milled tiny components to exacting specifications, and shaped the microscopic details of new microchips. Screens of data scrolled nonstop across huge computer monitors. Odors of ozone and hot metal filled the air.

And to think
, Dennis mused behind a thin smile,
three months ago this lab was empty.

Haspelcorp had been on the verge of dismantling the lab before Dennis had intervened. In the aftermath of the scandal that had erupted after Haspelcorp had been revealed as the original source of the promicin that Jordan Collier stole and distributed illegally around the world, the Department of Defense had revoked many of the company’s most lucrative defense research contracts. Without them, this lab had seemed to have no purpose; its maintenance had become just another liability on the company’s balance sheet.

Officially, the lab was still inactive. The only people who knew that it was back in business were Dennis and the trio of scientists who now had exclusive access to it. They had come to Dennis two months earlier with a proposal
so stunning and so tantalizing that if he had refused to back them, he would never have forgiven himself.

They had said they could rid the world of promicin.

Forty-eight hours later, after a flurry of clandestine meetings and classified memoranda, Dennis had installed them here, in this lab, with all the resources of Haspelcorp secretly at their disposal. Today he intended to find out what, precisely, his generosity had bought.

At the center of the sprawling subterranean space, the three white-coated researchers were gathered around a large, ceramic work table, on which rested a cylindrical device. The top half of its casing had been removed, revealing a complex amalgam of wiring, circuit boards, and shielded components. Myriad tiny parts and precision tools littered the table.

The chief scientist looked up as Dennis approached. He intercepted Dennis and extended his hand. “Mister Ryland! Thank you for coming. Did you bring the samples from LHC?”

He shook the man’s hand. “Yes, Doctor Jakes. I did.”

Noting that Dennis had come empty-handed, Jakes arched an eyebrow and flashed a wry, mischievous smile. “Are you hiding them some place I don’t want to know about?”

“They’re still on the plane,” Dennis said, releasing the younger man’s hand. “Before I turn them over, I think we need to talk a bit more about this project of yours. Starting with how you were able to tell the team at the Large Hadron Collider how to make an element that before yesterday was only a theory.”

“That theory has been the basis of my entire career,
Mister Ryland,” Jakes said. He walked back to the work table and nodded for Dennis to follow him. “And a generation of scientists before me devoted their lives to unraveling its secrets. Most of the work had been done before I got involved. Metaphorically speaking, I’m just lucky to be standing on the shoulders of giants.”

Standing at the table with the three scientists, Dennis eyed with suspicion the humming, high-tech gadget they were building. “Fine,” he said. “But I don’t think you appreciate the position you’ve put me in. A discovery like this can’t be swept under the rug. The folks at CERN are going apeshit over this, and it’s already on the radar at Homeland Security. Getting that sample and the antimatter out of Switzerland cost Haspelcorp nearly a billion dollars. Keeping it quiet cost
another
billion. So before I give it to you, I need to know why you want it.”

Waving his hand over the half-finished invention on the table, Jakes said, “To make this functional.”

“Explain it to me. In simple words.”

Jakes nodded to his blond female colleague, Doctor Kuroda. Dennis assumed that “Kuroda” was her married name, even though he had never seen her wear a wedding ring, which wasn’t unusual for people working in precision fabrication labs such as this.

Kuroda rested her hands on the device. “We need that element because, when bombarded with baryogenic radiation, it emits high-energy alpha particles. Because it’s a superdense and stable element with both closed-proton and closed-neutron shells, it can serve this function for up to several months. The radiation it emits will break down
the monoaminic bonds in promicin without affecting other organic tissues.”

Dennis massaged his forehead to stave off his impending headache. “I asked for small words,” he said.

The third scientist, an African-American man named Wells, replied, “This is a neutron bomb for promicin. It takes away the powers but leaves the people unharmed.”

“That I understood,” Dennis said. “What are its range and area of effect?”

Wells exchanged looks with Jakes and Kuroda, then said, “From an airborne platform at twenty miles’ range, you could zap a major city with two bursts in about five minutes.”

“Good,” Dennis said. “That’s very good. Will the people on the ground feel anything?”

“Not a thing,” Jakes said, rejoining the conversation. “They won’t know what’s happened till they go to use their promicin powers—and find out they don’t exist anymore.”

Dennis imagined Jordan Collier’s smug little smirk turning into a look of horror. The thought put a smile on Dennis’s face. “How long until we have a working prototype?”

Jakes shrugged. “Once you give us the sample? Maybe two or three days, barring any mishaps or interference.”

“Excellent,” Dennis said. He picked up a phone. “I’ll tell my crew to bring it down.” He punched in a Haspelcorp number that would connect him directly to the crew in the jet. As the line rang, he told the scientists, “Work quickly. We might need this sooner than we thought.”

“Don’t worry, Mister Ryland,” Jakes said with a beatific smile. “Soon the world will be completely back to normal.”

“I
DON’T CARE
if they were made with a 4400 ability or not,” Tom Baldwin said as he entered the office he shared with Diana at NTAC. “These are the best fat-free doughnuts I’ve ever had.”

He set two napkin-wrapped chocolate doughnuts and a paper cup of office-brewed coffee on his desk, then opened a drawer and took out a small plastic container of ubiquinone pills. The “U-pills,” as they were commonly known, were a natural dietary supplement that could ward off the airborne version of the promicin virus. Though there hadn’t been any reported cases of fifty/fifty since the Danny Farrell incident the previous year, Tom was taking no chances, especially since the now deceased NTAC scientist Abigail Hunnicut had tried to replicate the virus months earlier, as a prelude to a new pandemic. He popped one pill into his mouth and washed it down with a swig of coffee.

At the facing partner desk, Diana sat slouched in her chair—something she had rarely ever done in the years she
and Tom had worked together. She stared at the room’s back wall, her mien dour. Tom knew what was bothering her, but he hoped he might be able to change the subject. “Want a doughnut?”

Her voice was barely more than a mumble. “Not hungry.”

“How ‘bout a cup of coffee? You caffeinated yet?”

She kicked her plastic trash can across the empty space beneath their desks. It bumped to a halt against his leg. He looked down and saw four empty, coffee-stained paper cups. A strong aroma of slightly scorched java wafted up from the can.

“Guess so,” Tom said. Figuring that maybe not talking would be the wisest course of action, Tom settled into his chair, powered up his computer, and took a bite of his doughnut. He chewed all of three times before Diana spoke.

“Dammit, Tom, how could Maia
do that
to me?”

He forced himself to swallow his partially masticated mouthful, washed it down with a swig of too-hot coffee, and sighed. “I don’t—”

“I mean, she was always such a good kid, y’know? Sweet, polite, thoughtful, trustworthy.” Diana shook her head in confusion, so Tom nodded his in sympathy. “And mature! There were times she seemed more grown-up than my sister April.”

He had to roll his eyes. “Most people are more grownup than April.”

She conceded the point with a sideways tilt of her head. “True. But I expected better things from Maia. And all of a sudden she was angry and withdrawn all the time. She
wouldn’t talk to me. She got stubborn, too. Willful. Defiant. Now this? Siding with Jordan against me? Running away to Promise City? I just don’t get it, Tom. What the hell happened?”

It all felt so familiar to him that he had to grin. “It’s called becoming a teenager, Diana. You’re now the proud parent of a thirteen-year-old. My condolences.” He handed one of his pastries between their monitors, over the divide between their adjoining desks. “Have a doughnut.”

The simple but heartfelt gesture struck a humorous chord in Diana, and a crooked smile of amusement brightened her face as she accepted the doughnut. “Thanks,” she said.

“All part of the service,” Tom replied.

He took another bite of his doughnut, determined to enjoy it this time.

An alert flashed on his computer screen. A loud, guttural alarm noise crackle-squawked from his speakers. It was a warning that high-priority signals relevant to national security had just been intercepted by NTAC’s new Internet data filters. Across from him, similar noises and flashes of light indicated that Diana was seeing the same thing. Outside their office, echoes of the alarm filled the junior agents’ cubicle farm.

Goddammit
, Tom brooded, choking down another un-savored bite of his breakfast. He and Diana scrambled into action, trying to call up the flagged signals for hands-on analysis.

There was nothing there.

“Diana, do you have any intercepts on your screen?”

“No, nothing.” With each peck on the keyboard and click of the mouse, her forehead creased a little bit deeper with concern. “I thought I had something on the internal channels, but when I tried to follow it, it came up ‘Not Found.’”

“Same thing just happened to me,” Tom said. His frustration mounted as he chased digital ghosts through NTAC’s high-tech signals surveillance system.

One of the Jeds leaned in through their office door, his blue tie swinging like a pendulum beneath his head. “Did you guys just get that intercept alert?”

“The alert, yes,” Tom said, his fingers flying over his computer keyboard. “The intercept, not so much.”

“Same thing out here,” J.B. said.

Meghan shouldered past J.B. and wedged herself into the doorway beside him. “Sorry,” she said, and he nodded his acceptance of her curt apology. To Tom and Diana she said, “What the hell’s going on?”

Eyes wide with frustration, Diana looked away from her screen to answer Meghan. “Something tripped a bunch of red flags on Homeland Security’s servers, but there’s nothing in the logs. It’s either the biggest glitch the system’s ever had, or something weird just happened.”