by David Mack
There was no response.
Diana stepped through the door into her daughter’s room. Maia wasn’t there. The bed was made, and through the open closet door it was obvious that many of Maia’s favorite pieces of clothing were gone. Also absent was Maia’s diary, which contained her alarmingly unerring visions of the future.
Oh, my God. Fear washed through Diana like ice water in her veins. Though her little girl was now thirteen years old and no longer required a sitter to stay at home, Diana had remained afraid that someone might try to take her. Everyone from the 4400 to the government to random kooks seemed to have an agenda for “the girl who could see the future.”
Her heart raced and her breaths came short and shallow as she searched Maia’s room for clues. No sign of a struggle, no note. That was good, but Diana was still panicking. She felt her pulse thudding in her temples. It was a battle to keep her mind clear as a hundred terrified thoughts welled up at once from the darkest corners of her imagination. Images of Maia trussed up, or gagged, or drugged unconscious in the back of a van.
She felt light-headed almost to the point of vertigo as she lurched out of Maia’s room and bounced around her home like a silver sphere in a pinball machine, ricocheting off the doorjambs and walls, weaving from her own room to the bathroom and back down the hallway, to the kitchen and then the living room.
Then she saw it, on the floor in front of the television.
A handheld digital video recorder. There was a pink adhesive note affixed to it. A single cable linked the device to an input jack on the side of the high-definition flat-screen TV. Diana hurried to the camera and picked it up.
The Post-it had a two-word message, scrawled in Maia’s distinctive block capitals: PLAY ME.
Pushing past the dreadful, sinking feeling in her stomach, Diana grabbed the remote off the coffee table and turned on the TV. As soon as the screen powered up, she saw that the display was already set to the auxiliary input. She activated the digital camera; the screen flickered blue and showed a zeroed time code. Diana took a breath and pushed the PLAY button.
A blurred picture flickered onto the screen, then sharpened into focus. It was Maia, sitting on the living room sofa, exactly where Diana was sitting watching the tape.
“Hi, Mom,” Maia said in the recording. She pushed a lock of her honey-blond hair from her face and continued. “Since you’re watching this, you’ve probably figured out that I’m not home. I decided to leave and go stay with Lindsey at the Collier Foundation.” Diana muttered vile curses under her breath as the video kept rolling. “I know that you know I told Jordan’s people about Harbor Island, and I know you’re coming home to yell at me some more, and I’m sorry, but …” The girl rolled her blue eyes. “I’m sick of it, okay? So I’m leaving, which I know you’re also mad about. But don’t bother being mad at Lindsey, because this wasn’t her idea, it was mine.” She glanced away from the camera for several seconds as a guilty look played across her innocent face. Then she looked back with a remorseful expression. “I love you, Mom, but that’s where I have to be. I’m sorry. Bye.”
Maia leaned forward and reached toward the camera. A moment later, the recording stopped. There was a burst of snowy gray static on the TV, followed by a blue no-signal screen.
Diana pressed STOP and turned off the TV, then sat with her face in her hands for minutes that felt like hours.
Conflicting emotions swelled inside her, competing for space: her rage at Maia’s defiance faced off against her fear for her daughter’s safety; her failure to control Maia’s willful behavior filled Diana with shame; and the sense that she had lost her daughter’s respect left her frustrated and bitter.
Most galling of all, there was little that anyone could do to help her bring Maia home against her will. Despite the girl’s legal status as a minor, there was no way that Jordan would permit Diana or anyone else to remove any 4400 against their will from his sanctuary at the Collier Foundation. Unless she could persuade Maia to come home of her own free will, Diana would have to accept that she had lost her to Jordan and his quixotic mission to spread promicin around the globe.
Her face felt feverish, flushed with anger at her helplessness. She got up, walked to the kitchen, and turned on the cold water in the sink. Cupping her hands under the cool torrent, she gathered a double handful and splashed it on her face, then patted a few more palmfuls on the back of her neck.
She had just begun to recover some semblance of calm when her phone rang. After drying her hands and face with a clean dish towel, she answered the phone. “Hello?”
“Diana? Tom. Meghan wants us both at The 4400 Center, pronto. I’ll pick you up in about ten minutes.”
“Why? What’s going on?”
“It’s Jordan,” Tom said ominously. “He just called a meeting.”
FIVE
HALF OF TOM’S ATTENTION was on his driving, and the other half was on Diana’s ranting.
“I’m serious, Tom, I’ve had it with Maia,” she said, sounding even more irate than she had just a couple of hours earlier on Harbor Island. “Running away is one thing, but running into the center of the bull’s-eye? Is she crazy?”
He cocked his head and allowed himself a thin, wry smile. “Sometimes I think we’re all crazy for staying here.”
Diana said nothing; she just stared out the window at the busy nightlife in Capitol Hill. It was a warm summer night, and the sidewalks bustled with people. A balmy breeze carried faint aromas of cigarette smoke and fresh coffee into the car.
The neighborhood—a curious mash-up of low-cost, apartment-style condos and some of the city’s most elegant mansions—had long been the heart of Seattle’s counterculture. Back in the nineties, some had called its plethora of coffeehouses and bars the birthplace of grunge music and fashion. Even now, after Jordan’s takeover of the city, this tight-knit community had hardly changed. Tom had never been comfortable hanging out in this part of Seattle, but he admired its resilience.
Tom steered his NTAC-issued sedan left off East Galer Street, past the southeast corner of Interlaken Park, along the tree-lined stretch of Crescent Road, and down the driveway of The 4400 Center. Four years earlier, the postmodernist white concrete building had been the Collier Museum, a modest but well-regarded repository for modern art. After the return of the 4400, Jordan had converted it into a safe haven and gathering place for the returnees. Backed by meticulously groomed gardens and flanked on three sides by the park, the Center was a much-needed quiet oasis in the city. In the wake of Jordan’s usurpation of the local government, it also served as “neutral ground” where he and NTAC representatives could meet.
Another generic-looking four-door sedan was parked at the Center’s entrance. One of the two incarnations of Agent Jed Garrity stood beside Meghan Doyle, the director of NTAC’s Seattle office, who in the year since her arrival also had become Tom’s not-so-secret girlfriend.
The blond woman stepped alongside Tom’s car as he pulled into a parking space and shut off the engine. As he and Diana got out of the car, Meghan’s demeanor was strictly business. “Still no word from Collier what this is about.”
“What a shock,” Tom deadpanned. As the four NTAC personnel walked across the brick driveway to the Center’s front entrance, Tom nodded to Jed, his longtime colleague. “Hey, J.R.”
The initials were short for Jed’s nickname, “Jed Red.” After the previous year’s viral promicin epidemic infected him, he had manifested an unusual 4400 ability: a copy of himself.
At first, no one at NTAC had known what to make of Jed’s doppelganger; some had mistaken his second self for a simple clone. But after one of the Jeds was killed during a field op several months ago, an exact duplicate of the slain Agent Garrity had appeared many miles away, leading NTAC’s think tank director, Marco Pacella, to hypothesize that Jed’s ability was to always have a protected backup of himself. If something bad happened to him, a new copy sprang into existence somewhere safe. Jed had called it “a strangely useles
s ability.” Marco had called it “the ultimate insurance policy.”
These days, the only way to tell the two identical but separate copies of Jed Garrity apart was the color of their neckties: one wore only red ties, and the other wore only blue. But no one at NTAC liked saying “Jed Red” because of the rhyme, and “Jed Blue” had spawned one too many “Jet Blue” jokes. So they now went by “J.R.” and “J.B.”
As the front door of the Center opened ahead of them, releasing a surge of clean-scented, cool air from inside the building, Tom noticed for the first time how badly he himself smelled. Between the mayhem on Harbor Island and the paperwork that had followed, he’d had no chance to shower or change his clothes, which were filthy and rank with sweat.
The Center’s chief executive, Shawn Farrell, stepped outside to meet them. “Thanks for coming on such short notice,” the trim, fair-haired young man said to Meghan. Shaking Tom’s hand, he added, “Good to see you, too, Uncle Tommy.”
“Likewise, Shawn,” Tom said.
“Let’s head in,” Shawn said, motioning for them to follow him into the Center. “Jordan and his people are waiting.”
Inside, their steps echoed on the polished stone floors of the main concourse. As they followed Shawn to the first-floor conference room, Tom was struck by the fact that his nephew, who physically was only twenty-one years old (he was twenty-four if one counted the years he had been missing during his abduction to the future), carried himself with the measured calm and dignified air of a much older man. Just a few short years earlier, it would have been impossible to get Shawn to dress in anything other than jeans, T-shirts, and sneakers; now he looked at home in a tailored Armani suit and custom, handmade Italian leather brogues. The crucible of responsibility had forged him into a true leader of the 4400 community.
Susan would be proud of him, Tom mused, before the memory of his sister’s untimely death in the fifty/fifty epidemic cast a pall over his moment of filial pride in her son.
Shawn pushed open the double doors of the conference room. A long table of dark wood stretched ahead of him and the NTAC agents. On Tom’s right, standing at the middle of the table, was the casually attired Jordan Collier. Past him were two advisors: Tom’s son, Kyle, and, to Tom’s surprise, the telepath Gary Navarro. With Tom and Diana’s help, the black former baseball player had gone into exile a couple of years earlier, to escape a life of forced service to the National Security Agency. This was the first time Tom had seen Gary since the night he left.
Standing behind Jordan was his new executive assistant, a pixyish woman in her mid-twenties named Jaime Costas. At Jordan’s left was another face Tom hadn’t expected to see this evening: Maia Skouris.
The thirteen-year-old whispered something to Jordan as the NTAC team filed in and moved to stand opposite them, on the other side of the table. A moment later, while everyone else was still sizing one another up, Jordan waved Shawn over to him, passed along another whispered confidence, then stood silently as Shawn circled the table with a hangdog look on his face.
Tom overheard as Shawn leaned close to Diana and said softly, “I’m really sorry about this, but I’m afraid I need to ask you to wait outside.”
Diana shot a deadly look at Shawn, who raised his hands and backed away from her, his demeanor contrite. Then she turned her seething glare at Maia, who made a point of sullenly averting her gaze. It was painfully obvious that this embarrassing moment had been the girl’s doing.
“Fine,” Diana said, giving free rein to her contempt.
As she turned away, Tom stopped her with a gentle touch on her arm. He lowered his voice. “I’ll talk to her for you.”
“Don’t bother,” Diana replied. She left the room in fast, angry strides and let the door slam shut behind her. Its impact echoed inside the conference room, a lingering memory of anger.
Meghan put her focus on Jordan. “What do you want?”
“First, to apologize for Harbor Island,” Jordan said.
Tom folded his arms across his chest and nodded in the direction of Diana’s exit. “You’re off to a great start.”
Nonplussed, Jordan continued. “Promise City’s peace officers have been reminded that NTAC has jurisdiction over Harbor Island—”
“What’s left of it,” J.R. cut in.
Jordan paused, then resumed. “Tonight’s crossfire was the result of a miscommunication, for which I take responsibility.”
“Funny,” Tom said, fixing his stare on Maia, who looked back at him with her own unblinking gaze. “I thought it was the result of someone giving you an unauthorized tip.”
Kyle spoke up. “It doesn’t matter where the tip came from, Dad. What matters is that we were trying to save lives.”
“Right,” J.R. replied. “Is that why your people were using deadly force out there? To save people by killing them?”
“I never told anyone to use deadly force,” Kyle said. “I only said they should protect themselves.”
Tom turned his ire at his son. “This was your decision?”
“We’re not here to lay blame,” Jordan said, holding up a hand to halt the brewing dispute. “What matters now is that we work together to keep the people of Promise City safe, and prevent conflicts like this from happening again.”
Meghan nodded, but she frowned her suspicion. “And how do you propose we go about doing that?”
“The Russians call it glasnost,” Jordan said. “Openness. We’ll share Maia’s precognitive warnings in exchange for an open discussion about the U.S. government’s intentions toward Promise City, and toward promicin-positive persons around the world.”
Rolling her eyes and heaving a disgusted sigh, Meghan said, “That’ll never fly with Washington, and you know it.”
Looking at Meghan but speaking to Jordan, Gary interjected, “What she means is, Seattle NTAC’s out of the loop. Washington’s keeping them in the dark, so they have nothing to offer us.”
Tom swallowed a mouthful of curses aimed at the tele-path. Instead he clenched his left hand into a fist behind his back.
Meghan turned and walked toward the door. “We’re done here,” she told Jordan. “Next time you want to meet, leave the mind reader at home.” J.R. fell into step behind her as they made their exit. Jordan and his team moved in the opposite direction, toward a different door that led to another part of the Center.
“Wait for me outside,” Tom said to Meghan, then slipped past her and Jed to circle around the table and catch up to Maia. He stopped the teen just before she reached the door. “Maia, hang on a sec,” he said, trying to sound diplomatic.
Maia turned and stood facing him in the doorway. There was a hardness in her eyes, and her face had begun to mature from the roundness of a child’s visage to the slender countenance of a striking young woman. She asked in a flat voice, “What?”
Behind her, Jordan, Kyle, and Gary all were watching and listening. Tom did his best to ignore them. “I know you and your mom are having problems right now, but I really don’t think running away’s gonna help. Do you?”
“Yes, I do,” she said, and started turning away.
He gently grasped her shoulder. “Wait,” he said. Then he saw the three men glaring at him, and he let go of her. Maia looked back and waited for him to speak. “C’mon,” he continued. “Your mom’s worried about you. And yeah, she’s ticked off, and I can understand if maybe you don’t want to come home tonight … but would you at least talk to her before she leaves?”
Maia seemed to consider the idea for a moment. Then her eyes once more turned cold and unforgiving. With a disdain beyond her years, she said, “There’s nothing to talk about.” Then she stepped through the door and didn’t apologize as she let it close in Tom’s face.
That could’ve gone better, he berated himself. He bowed his head, breathed a despondent sigh, and wondered what he was going tell his partner. Hey, don’t feel bad, Diana— now we both have kids who work for Jordan Collier.
SIX
July 22
, 2008
DENNIS RYLAND, executive vice president of Haspel Corporation, stepped out of his private jet into the retina-searing glare of morning sun on white salt flats. The twin turbine engines of the Gulfstream G650 desecrated the silence of the Nevada desert with their steadily falling whine.
Just a few months shy of his sixty-sixth birthday, Dennis felt as if the sun were burning away precious years of his life in the seconds it took him to descend the jet’s folding stair ladder to the runway. The temperature had just hit 112 degrees Fahrenheit, and the arid heat cooked the sweat from his face before it could escape his pores.
Inhaling the scorching deep-desert air, he recalled one of his favorite lines of classic cinema dialogue, from David Lean’s epic Lawrence of Arabia. Asked why he liked the desert so much, Peter O’Toole had replied with his trademark dry delivery, “Because it’s clean.”
The tarmac radiated heat through the soles of Dennis’s shoes. He quickened his step and cursed the protocol that demanded he wear a suit and tie even in this circle of hell.
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.”
