by David Mack
“They used to date,” he said.
She nodded as if that explained everything, but something still seemed off-kilter. To pass the time, she looked out the window at the distant peak of Mount Rainier, or at the lines slowly passing under the wing of the plane as they taxied to the end of the runway, or at her own faint reflection on the window.
Then Tom unfastened his seat belt and got up. “I’m gonna go see what’s taking them so long,” he said. “Be right back.” Before Meghan could tell him to stay put, he was hurrying aft. She leaned across his seat and looked back in time to see him knock on the lavatory door and, like Diana, step back to let it open. The door remained open for several seconds.
Her curiosity was turning to suspicion. She muttered, “What the hell is going on?”
The two Jeds poked their heads up over their seat backs from the row ahead of her. J.B. smiled and said, “Maybe they’re trying to join the Mile-High Club.”
“You have to be in the air before you can do that,” Meghan said. “And I doubt that’s what they’re doing.”
J.R. asked, “Want us to go round ‘em up?”
“Would you mind?”
“Not at all,” J.R. said. The two Jeds undid their safety belts, got up, and marched aft.
A minute later, none of the agents who had gone aft had come back. Meghan decided it was time to see for herself what the hell was going on back there. She liberated herself from her own seat belt and quick-stepped down the aisle to the lavatory, where J.R. stood holding the door open.
Meghan asked, “What’s going on, Garrity?”
“Nothing,” he said with a poker face. “Everything’s fine.”
“Let go of the door and step back,” she said. “Right now, Agent. That’s an order.”
Reluctantly, he let go of the door and backed up against the aft bulkhead. Meghan closed the door and stepped past it, then pulled it back open to see what the hell was going on inside the closet-sized lavatory.
As she feared, it was empty.
“Is he breathing?” Tom asked.
“Barely,” Diana said, holding the wrist of the unconscious Marco. The dark-haired young analyst sat slumped in the backseat of the fugitive agents’ commandeered car, which was hurtling north on I-5 at breakneck speed. “His pulse is weak.”
J.B. was at the wheel, weaving through traffic as if their car were thread and the highway a needle. He threw a nervous look over his shoulder at Marco, then asked Tom, “How messed up is he? Should I head for the VA hospital? It’s the closest.”
Tom volleyed the question to Diana. “Your call.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not a doctor.”
She was still amazed that Marco had been able to tele-port off the plane and back into the terminal’s men’s room with her along for the ride. They had blinked from one place to the next without any visible sense of transition. For Diana, it had been almost magical. But judging from the pallid hue of Marco’s face, she realized it must have been far more arduous for him.
To manage such a feat even once would have represented a major step forward in the maturation of his promicin ability; the fact that he had then used a digital photo taken inside the aircraft’s lavatory to teleport back to the plane, which had still been visible taxiing down the runway, and then repeated the round-trip journey twice more—first to smuggle Tom back to the terminal and then, on his last trip, J.B.—had been nothing short of miraculous.
But then, before he could make one last jaunt to extricate J.R. from the plane, Marco had collapsed to the floor, where he’d lain racked with spasms for several seconds before losing consciousness. Out of time, and with no way back to the plane, they’d stuck to their plan, which had called for getting out of the terminal as quickly as possible. J.B. had gone to the parking lot, commandeered a car, and pulled around to the side entrance, where he’d picked up Diana and Tom, who had carried Marco.
What would happen next was anyone’s guess, unfortunately.
Trusting her instincts, Diana said, “I think he’s just exhausted, not dying. Let’s stay clear of the hospitals.”
“Okay,” Tom said. “Keep an eye on him though. If anything changes before we get back to the office, we can divert to Harborview or First Hill.”
“Copy that,” J.B. said, swerving through another cluster of vehicles traveling at less than a hundred miles per hour. “So we’re definitely heading back to NTAC?”
“Unless you can think of someplace else to make our stand,” Tom said. No one had any better suggestions.
The skyscrapers of downtown gleamed in the morning sun and loomed closer as the car continued heading north. After a few minutes, Diana was relieved to feel an increase in the strength and tempo of Marco’s pulse. His breathing returned to normal, and then his eyes fluttered weakly open.
Lolling his head to one side to take in his surroundings, Marco mumbled, “Guess we made it.”
“So far,” Diana said, favoring him with a grateful smile. “But we’d be nowhere without you. That was really something.”
He grinned. “Just a little trick I’ve been working on.”
Looking over his shoulder, Tom asked, “How do you feel?”
“I’ve been better,” Marco said, wincing as he sat up. “Which one of you used my head for batting practice?”
J.B. smiled at Marco in the rearview mirror. “We were afraid you might’ve busted something.”
“Nothing a year in the tropics won’t fix,” Marco said, before mustering a weak smile. “But I’d settle for some aspirin, an ice pack, and a nap.”
Leaning forward and searching the skies for who-knew-what, Tom replied, “Your nap might have to wait. Something is definitely going on.”
Looking out the windows, Diana said, “What’re you talking about? I don’t see anything.”
“Exactly,” Tom said. “When was the last time you saw the sky this empty above Seattle? Where’s the usual air traffic? I mean, we should at least be seeing high-altitude flyovers.”
Marco pressed the side of his face against one of the car’s rear windows and stared at the slivers of blue between the high-rises that lined the interstate. “You think they’re clearing the airspace,” he said. “Preparing the battlefield.”
Tom’s expression turned grim. “I think we need to get to cover, on the double.”
Facing a wall of television screens in the Collier Foundation’s executive conference room, Jordan saw the moment taking shape in all of its terrible glory.
All around him, his advisors and assistants chattered frantically as new intelligence came in. The air in the room was heavy with the funk of unwashed bodies and morning halitosis.
In the two and a half hours since the secretary of state had woken him up, Jordan had not had time to eat or even bathe. He’d barely had time to scramble into a suit without a tie and summon his inner circle. Now that they were gathered, Jordan felt like the ringleader of a circus run amok.
“We have reports of soldiers entering Magnolia Bluff from the Fort Lawton Reserve,” Gary Navarro said, from Jordan’s left.
From his right, Kyle added, “Tanks are crossing the Evergreen Point and Lake Washington bridges.”
“It could be more posturing,” interjected Lucas, the gestalt telepath, who was standing by with several of his most frequent psychic collaborators. “Another empty show of force.”
“Not likely,” said Jordan’s assistant, Jaime, who shouldered her way into the trio of men. “All NTAC personnel just left Seattle on a government jet from Boeing Field.”
The room went quiet as Jordan digested this latest news. He looked at the faces that surrounded him: at Gary and Kyle, at Jaime and Maia, at Hal and Renata and dozens of others. “I don’t need a shaman or the power of precognition to predict what’s about to happen,” he said, addressing the room. “Tell everyone this is it: the battle for Promise City has begun.”
TWENTY-FOUR
9:58 A.M.
TOM STOOD BESIDE DIANA
and watched her enter her security code into the keypad next to the front door. Drop-down titanium bars blocked the door, which itself was made of double-thick steel.
“Nice to see they remembered to lock up on their way out,” Tom joked. His three companions responded with unamused frowns.
Diana tapped in the last digit of her code and pressed ENTER on the pad. With a barely audible hum and vibration, the bars lowered and withdrew into the command center’s foundation of reinforced concrete.
J.B., who had been waiting with his keycard in hand, stepped forward and unlocked the door, then pulled it open for the rest of the team. Tom entered first, followed by Diana, Marco, and then J.B., who relocked the door behind him.
It felt strange to Tom to see the security checkpoints unmanned, the metal detectors and chemical-sniffing arches offline, and the overhead lights switched off. The only lighting was residual illumination. Most of it came from a row of juice and soda machines; the rest was the product of permanently lit exit signs set at regular intervals along the ceiling.
The four agents raced out of the lobby and sprinted through the corridors to the crisis center. Their running footsteps resounded in the empty hallways. The echoes were so sharp and loud that it made Tom self-conscious, despite the fact that there was no one else in the building to hear them.
Like the rest of the facility, the crisis center was dark. Almost as if by instinct, Tom started issuing orders. “Marco,” he said. “Get us data feeds from the outside, on the double. I’ll help Diana boot up the command system. J.B., get to the armory and scare us up some Kevlar and some firepower, in case somebody tries to take a shot at us.”
Marco and J.B. hurried away in different directions, leaving Tom and Diana to go from one station to another, bringing the crisis center online one terminal at a time.
Keying her log-on credentials into the system, Diana said with unconcealed anxiety, “If Meghan’s reported us as AWOL to the people in D.C.—”
“I know,” Tom said, not needing to be reminded that their access privileges to the nation’s unified security database, as well as to most of NTAC’s local intelligence-gathering sources, could be terminated remotely by their superiors at the Pentagon. “Let’s just hope Marco has a way to keep us in the game.” He heard Diana tapping keys. Then followed silence.
She stood at a terminal, hands pressed together in front of her face as if she were praying.
“Anything?” Tom asked, watching the screen in front of him spin a circle while chewing on the codes he’d entered.
“Still processing,” she said from behind her hands. All at once she relaxed and dropped her hands. “We’re in! Our passwords are still active.”
Half a second later, the terminal in front of Tom became active, scrolling with priority alerts from the Pentagon. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s finish booting up.”
They moved from one station to the next, entering their codes. Within minutes they were surrounded by more incoming data than they could possibly monitor at once with only four agents. As they powered up the last two adjacent workstations, Diana wondered aloud, “What are we supposed to do once we get everything working? Make popcorn and watch the city burn?”
“That depends,” Tom said. “Is there any popcorn left in the kitchen?” Rebuked by Diana’s scathing glare, he showed her his palms and continued: “Look, the whole reason for coming back was to save Maia. And to be honest, right now, I have no idea how to do that. But this is the safest base of operations we have. All we can do now is watch and wait. And I promise you, come hell or high water, we are not leaving the city without her.”
“Ditto that,” added J.B., who lumbered back into the center with an armload of full-torso bulletproof vests, two assault rifles strapped diagonally across his back, and two more rifles slung at his sides. “Your little girl’s comin’ home, Skouris.”
“Damn straight,” Marco said as he returned. He settled in at one of the supervisors’ terminals and began typing furiously. “Give me ten minutes and I should be able to keep them from locking us out. At the very least, I’ll be able to set up a back door so we can stay connected to the database.”
“Good work,” Tom said. “I’ll start pulling up the latest orders from SECDEF, see what’s going on out there.”
J.B. handed a rifle and a vest to Tom, then delivered matching gear to Diana and Marco. Walking past Tom, he stopped and said, “I need to make a few more trips. We need spare clips for the rifles, plus a Glock and some reloads for Marco.”
“Thanks, J.B.,” Tom said, giving his fellow agent a reassuring slap on the shoulder.
“There’s just one of me here, Tom. You can call me ‘Jed’ again.”
Tom nodded. “You got it.”
As Marco typed, Jed started walking, and Tom focused on the scads of raw data flooding into NTAC, Diana cleared her throat in a dramatic manner that was clearly meant to draw their attention. “Guys …,” she said.
All three men halted and looked at Diana. She stood, arms folded, looking a little misty-eyed. “There’s something I meant to say earlier, but I … the moment never seemed …” She paused for a moment, then tried again. “I just want to say … thank you. First for helping me get off the jet, and even more for coming with me. Once you got me off the plane, you could have left me to do this on my own. Instead, you’re all standing with me in the middle of a war zone.” She brushed a single tear from her cheek and shook her head. “Maia’s my daughter, I have to be here. But you guys—”
“I have to be here, too,” Tom said. “And not just ‘cause of my son. Because I’m your partner.”
Marco told her with a crooked, bittersweet smile, “If you’re here, I’m here.”
“NTAC tellin’ you to leave your kid? That wasn’t right,” Jed said. “The moment they did that, I was all-in for you. Whatever happens, I’ve got your back—and Maia’s.”
Diana grinned with what Tom took to be embarrassed joy, then sleeved fresh tears from her face. “Thanks, guys,” she said, forcing herself back into a semblance of composure. She lifted her Kevlar vest over her head, lowered it into place, and fastened its Velcro straps around her ribs.
“Now let’s get ready to kick some ass,” she said.
TWENTY-FIVE
10:14 A.M.
NO MATTER HOW far back Jordan stood from the details of the battle unfolding all around him, he felt as if he couldn’t see the bigger picture. Too many pieces were moving too quickly. For the first time since his return from the future, he wondered if he’d taken on more than he could master.
“Hal, Lucas, Renata,” he said to the core members of his telepathic gestalt, “we need an update on incoming aircraft.”
“Three combat wings spotted so far,” said Hal, the legally blind remote-viewer. “A dozen A-10 bombers inbound low and slow over Puget Sound. Ten F-22s on high-altitude approach from the northeast. From the southeast, sixteen Black Hawk helicopters loaded with troops. Plus, two AWACS support aircraft.”
Turning his attention to a bank of video monitors, Jordan noted the lines of tanks advancing over the bridges leading into Promise City from the east. He knew that a hard decision was at hand. “Gary? What’s going on down there?”
The athletic young telepath shook his head and frowned. “We’re taking casualties and losing ground,” he said.
Kyle stepped forward, invading Jordan’s personal space. “We’re losing ground because our hands are tied,” he said, his voice sharp with anger. “You’ve got our people using nonlethal, passive defenses. The Army has snipers picking our people off from a distance. If we don’t start fighting back—”
“Destroy the bridges,” Jordan said, cutting off Kyle’s rant. “Pull our people back to cover, then have Dieter and Stefka knock those tanks into the river.”
“Done,” Kyle said, stepping away to relay the order.
Even though the ventilation system inside the conference room was pumping out cool, conditioned air at full blast, Jordan’s face felt
warm. He palmed a sheen of perspiration from his brow, then took a deep breath.
Emil, one of Jordan’s personal bodyguards, nodded while listening to someone over a phone, then looked up and reported, “The enhanced beacons are holding. There are roughly three hundred Marines stuck west of Thirty-sixth Avenue and north of West Emerson Street.”
“What about the north-side bridges?” Jordan asked.
“No contacts at Ballard, Aurora, or Fremont,” Emil replied.
Gary grumbled with naked sarcasm, “Well, that’s a relief. I guess we’ve got nothing left to worry about—except for naval bombardment, biological warfare, and a possible nuclear attack.”
“Speak o’ the devil,” Hal said. “I see multiple warships at the far western end of Puget Sound gearing up their missile batteries. I think there’s a whole lotta metal comin’ our way.”
“All right,” Jordan said, doing his best to project calm and confidence to the room full of people looking to him for leadership. “We’ve prepared for this. Alert everyone on the air-defense team to stand ready.”
Telepathic senders and assistants with cell phones issued warnings to a legion of sentries posted on rooftops and in hidden positions throughout Promise City. Many of the sentries were electrokineticists, with talents ranging from force fields to signal scrambling to magnetic disruption.
Jordan hoped that with the help of other gestalt telepaths and the guidance of various clairvoyants, the electrokinetic guardians of Promise City would be strong enough and quick enough to deflect any missile attack, but he remembered a frequent bit of advice from his currently self-exiled friend Richard Tyler: Hope for the best, but plan for the worst.
He sighed and regretted not having the benefit of Richard’s military experience at such a crucial moment for the Movement. To his chagrin, he knew that he had no one to blame for Richard’s absence but himself. To stop the Marked, Jordan had pressured Richard into becoming something that he wasn’t: an assassin. It hadn’t taken long for Richard to sour on the assignment—and, by extension, on his association with Jordan.
