by David Mack
“Please,” Tom said, lifting his glass.
She refilled it with half of what was left, then poured the rest of the robust red wine into her own long-stemmed glass. A distinctive aroma of candle smoke still lingered from the just-snuffed tapers on the dining room table, and a faint jazz melody drifted from the speakers beside the TV as Diana settled onto the opposite end of the sofa from Tom.
Cocking his head toward the music, he asked, “What are we listening to?”
“Ella Fitzgerald,” she said.
He grinned. “From Maia’s collection?”
She smiled back. “How’d you guess?”
They sat back, sipped their wine, and listened to Ella’s soft and sweet crooning for a while.
During a lull between songs, Tom sighed. “What a day. Did I tell you Meghan called this morning?”
“No,” Diana said. “What’d she say?”
He rolled his eyes and frowned. “If the U.S. mail still came to Promise City, I think she’d have sent me a ‘Dear Tom’ note, instead.”
With genuine sympathy, Diana said, “She dumped you?”
“Like a load of garbage,” Tom said. “She actually had a list of reasons. A list! Can you believe that?”
Diana perched her elbow on the back of the sofa and leaned her head on her shoulder. “What was item number one?”
“She tried to make it sound like a three-way tie,” he said, staring down at his stockinged feet. “Homeland Security read her the riot act and told her to end it, and that was probably part of it. The video of you and me shooting soldiers didn’t sit well with her, either.” Looking up at Diana, he continued. “But I think what pissed her off the most was that I lied to her in order to help you.” With a dismissive wave of his hand, he added, “Anyway, it’s not like we had much of a future at this point. She’s out there with a warrant for my arrest, and I’m in here, playing sheriff to Jordan’s insane-asylum utopia.”
Raising her glass, Diana said, “Let me know if you need a trusty deputy, Sheriff.”
“Consider yourself volunteered.”
As Tom sipped more wine, Diana said, “I have an odd moment of my own to share with you.” She shifted forward to the middle of the couch, reached over to the coffee table, put down her glass, and flipped open the lid of a cherry-wood curio box.
Inside the velvet-lined box was the syringe of promicin that her daughter had given her a few days earlier.
At the sight of it, Tom sat up and moved to the middle of the sofa, beside Diana, facing the box.
“Maia handed me this after I woke up from our Yellowstone op,” Diana said. “She says she won’t come home until I take the shot. When I told her I was immune, she said this was a new formula, something stronger. Is this what she gave to you?”
He nodded. “Yeah, I think it is. She wasn’t kidding about it being potent. It gave me an ability in under an hour.” Throwing a worried look at Diana, he asked, “You’re not thinking of taking it, are you?”
“Maybe,” she said, more defensively than she’d intended. “I mean, I want my daughter to come home, and if this is the only way …” She let her voice trail off, since she was certain that Tom understood. “Besides, you’re hardly one to talk. After all your rants against promicin, and all your speeches about choosing free will over prophecy, you still stuck the needle in your arm.” Narrowing her eyes with mock suspicion, she pointed at him and said, “What I want to know is, how the hell did Maia talk you into taking it when you wouldn’t listen to your own son? Why trust her vision instead of his?”
Tom averted his gaze. Diana imagined gears turning inside his skull as he considered his reply. Then he took a deep breath, turned his head, and looked into her eyes.
“I did it for you,” he said. “Maia said if I didn’t take the shot, I’d have to watch you die.” His voice faltered as he added, “I took the shot so I wouldn’t lose you.”
Awkward silence fell between them. Staring into his eyes, Diana suddenly became aware of just how close together she and Tom were. A romantically charged, almost-magnetic sensation passed between them. As they drifted incrementally closer, Diana suddenly wasn’t sad to know that Maia was miles away and not coming home tonight. She kept waiting for Tom to pull back, but he seemed to be as swept up in the moment as Diana felt …
She blinked and recoiled. Even though they were no longer NTAC agents, and no longer partners, a sense of taboo persisted in her mind, and it was a line she wasn’t ready to cross … yet.
Standing and backing up a step, she pushed wayward coils of her dark hair out of her eyes and smiled politely at Tom. “Well,” she said, “it’s getting late.”
He shot an amused look at the clock and was apparently too polite to point out that it wasn’t even eight-thirty. “Yeah, I guess so,” he said, putting down his wineglass on the table.
“So, I’ll see you at the Center tomorrow morning?” she asked, while watching him pull his still-laced shoes back on.
“Yup,” he said. Then he got up and followed her to the door, which she opened ahead of him. They did an awkward shuffle-step around each other as he slipped past her into the doorway then turned back. “G’night,” he said with a friendly smile.
“’Night,” she said, leaning forward. They planted chaste pecks on each other’s cheeks, then backed apart. He gave her a quick half nod, then walked down the hall, toward the stairs.
She started to close the door, and had almost pushed it shut, when she surrendered to a silly impulse. Silently, she cracked the door open just a sliver, and peeked out at Tom.
At the same moment, Tom slowed for just a step and cast a look back over his shoulder at her, with a gaze of wistful consideration that mirrored her own.
Overcome with a strange glee, she grinned at him.
He grinned back, then turned and continued out of sight and down the stairs.
Diana shut her door, then spun about and fell back against it with a dopey grin on her face. She had no idea what the next day might bring, but she knew two things about it already.
It was going to be different.
And it was going to be interesting.
FORTY-NINE
THEIR FACES HAD CHANGED, but the world had remained stubbornly the same. Something had gone wrong with the plan.
Concealed inside the bodies of a pair of swarthy Moroccan brothers, Wells and Kuroda huddled over a table tucked into the corner of a bustling Casablanca café. Outside its open façade, blinding afternoon sunlight baked the dusty street. Within the shadowy indoor oasis, the air was sultry and thick with fruit-scented smoke from dozens of burbling water pipes.
The other patrons all looked, to one degree or another, like the Marked agents’ new hosts: brown-skinned, dark-haired, and garbed in desert robes whose style hadn’t changed substantially in hundreds of years.
Picking at the finger food on the large metal platter between them, Wells wrinkled his nose at the cuisine. “I’d kill someone for a bacon cheeseburger right now,” he said.
“You’re the one who insisted we go native,” Kuroda said.
Wells huffed. “Like it makes any difference now. Jakes is gone, the plan’s a bust, and Collier’s more powerful than ever.” He cast a wary look around the room, to make sure none of the other patrons were spying on them. No one paid him any mind. “Next time, we’ll have to go straight at Collier.”
“Who says there’s going to be a next time?” Kuroda replied. “We’ve got nothing, Wells. All our cash went into the warhead. And now the timeline’s so fouled up, there’s no way to tell what’ll happen next. All those stocks you said were going to soar? They just tanked. The future that we knew is gone.”
Feeling his brow knit with rage, Wells grumbled, “I don’t care. I won’t just sit by and let Collier win.” He picked up the hose of his hookah and lifted the nozzle to his lips. “A new plan will take time,” he said. Then he inhaled a mouthful of sweet, cool smoke. He enjoyed the bubbling noises that emanated from the water pipe while h
e smoked. After he exhaled, he said, “Fortunately, time is something we currently have in abundance.”
Kuroda lifted his own hookah nozzle. “It’s the only thing we have in abundance,” he said.
The hose of Wells’s hookah undulated and jerked free of his grasp, and Kuroda’s did the same. The hoses swayed hypnotically, dancing between the two men with the deadly grace of serpents. Then the hoses shot forward and coiled around Wells’s and Kuroda’s necks, constricting in an instant to lethal effect.
All around them, the café’s clientele leaped from their cushions and shrieked “Djinn! Djinn!” In a matter of seconds the place was cleared. Plates of food lay discarded and overturned, their contents scattered on the satin pillows. Knocked-over water pipes spilled into merging puddles on the dirt floor.
Only the two Marked agents remained, writhing on the ground as their own hookah tubes strangled them.
Even as his vision began to dim and lose focus, Wells saw two tall figures clad in desert robes stalk into the café. The newcomers were silhouetted against the whitewash of daylight as they came to a halt and loomed above Wells and Kuroda.
The taller man asked the other, “Are you sure it’s them?”
His companion replied, “I’m sure.
These are the last two.” The tube around Wells’s neck coiled tighter than he would have believed possible. He felt his trachea collapse and heard his cervical vertebrae splinter as his world turned black.
In his final moment, Wells tasted defeat. The future he’d fought for was lost. The world belonged to Jordan Collier.
“Are you sure it’s them?” asked Richard Tyler.
“I’m sure,” Gary Navarro said, probing the minds of the two Marked agents writhing at their feet. “These are the last two.”
Wells and Kuroda had never suspected that Gary had learned everything about their cover identities from the mind of their accomplice, Jakes, before his death. From the moment they had arrived in Tokyo, operatives loyal to Jordan had been waiting for them.
Every move that they had made in the weeks since then had been tracked. Not for a single moment had either of them been left unwatched.
Cracking sounds from the necks of the Marked agents made Gary wince. Despite all he had been through in Promise City, witnessing a killing firsthand still made him queasy.
“Maybe you should wait outside,” Richard said, obviously having noted Gary’s discomfort.
Lying to save face, Gary said, “I’m fine.” Turning his back on the asphyxiating Marked agents, he asked Richard, “How did Jordan get you to come out of hiding for this?”
“Can’t you just look in my mind for the answer?”
“I could,” Gary said. “But I try not to do that to people who are on my side.”
Richard said, “I’m not on anyone’s side.”
“Then why are you here?”
Sickening sounds—wet crunches and the hiss of escaping gases and fluids—from the Marked agents’ bodies made Gary glad that he had looked away. He didn’t want to see whatever was happening, but his ears told him more than he wanted to know.
Staring dispassionately at the telekinetic damage he was inflicting, Richard said, “I’m just finishing what I started.”
Stepping forward, Richard reached inside his robes and pulled out a small glass vial filled with metallic powder. He removed the vial’s rubber stopper and sprinkled the powder on the two dead bodies.
Unable to suppress his morbid curiosity, Gary turned and watched as the powder drifted down and settled over the dead men’s grotesquely mangled faces. The substance seemed to absorb straight through the corpses’ flesh.
Moments later, a phosphorescent shimmering consumed their eyes, and electric-blue fire engulfed their skulls and spines. Dr. Kevin Burkhoff’s specially crafted radioactive nanopathogen made quick work of the Marked agent’s nanites, permanently annihilating their synthetic identities. As an added bonus, it all but cremated their hosts’ bodies into smoldering gray ash.
Then the glow faded, and all that remained was the greasy smoke of rendered human fat, the charnel odor of scorched flesh, and the oppressive North African noonday heat.
Gary activated a special communication device nestled inside his ear canal. Built by a promicin-enhanced genius named Dalton Gibbs, the invention permitted members of the Movement to communicate across any distance without any risk of their conversations being intercepted or tracked. Gary had no idea how it worked, and he had been assured that he didn’t need to know.
He keyed the transmitter. “Jordan, it’s Gary.”
“Go ahead.”
“Mission accomplished. The last two Marked are dead.”
“Good work. Come on home, and tell Richard I said thanks.”
Turning to share Jordan’s praise, Gary saw that Richard was gone, already vanished into the sea of bodies outside the café.
“Will do,” Gary said. “See you when I get back.” He turned off the device and slipped out of the café through its kitchen’s rear entrance. As he merged into the bustling crowd on the street, he pondered the final thought of one of the men he’d just helped kill: The world belongs to Jordan Collier.
He almost pitied the dead Marked agents, because he saw now that they had never really understood what promicin represented. They had been blind to its true promise.
The world did not belong to Jordan Collier.
Thanks to promicin, the world belonged to everyone.
FIFTY
TOM AWOKE TO the brightest, clearest morning he had ever seen in his life. It took several seconds for his eyes to adapt from the dark haven of sleep to the glare of consciousness.
Other sensations returned first. The hardness of the surface under his back. Odors of pine and ammonia. Rubbing alcohol with a hint of lemon.
A chill prickled the flesh of his bare arms and legs.
He wasn’t in his bed, or in his home.
Jolting to full awareness, he sat up and twisted left then right, taking in his surroundings: a circular room with surfaces of pristine white and gleaming chrome. Its high outer walls were dominated by windows, beyond which rolled a lush, paradisiacal landscape of rolling hills, thick forests, and sparkling rivers.
Three levels of sparsely appointed workstations encircled him. Svelte, immaculately groomed men and women in matching white clothing and shoes sat facing Tom while interacting with holographically projected displays. Low murmurs of conversation susurrated in the hemispherical chamber.
Above Tom, a transparent domed ceiling looked out upon a cloudless heaven so perfectly blue that it made him feel as if he had never really seen the sky before that moment.
“Good,” a man said. “You’re awake.”
Pivoting about-face, Tom was confronted by a middle-aged man with brown but graying crew-cut hair, a lean physique, and an unnerving stare, which Tom quickly realized was due to the fact that the man’s irises were as black as his pupils. Like the other people working in the room, he wore a long white lab coat and loose-fitting white pants, which appeared to be made of cotton, and white shoes that Tom now saw were canvas slip-ons.
Trying not to look as freaked-out as he felt, Tom said, “I’m in the future.”
“Correct,” the scientist said.
Tom squinted against the morning sunlight. “It looks different than I remember.”
“Naturally.”
Climbing down off the metal operating table, Tom asked, “What’s this about? The Marked?”
“Not at all,” said the scientist. “That threat is now completely neutralized.”
“You’re welcome.” Looking up and around as he rubbed some warmth back into his naked arms, Tom continued. “So what’s the problem? I did everything you told me to do. Isabelle’s dead, the Marked are done, and promicin’s going global.” Nodding at the verdant world outside, he added, “Even the future looks brighter. So what the hell am I doing here?”
The scientist adopted a grave expression and folded his hands be
hind his back. “Tom, there was a reason why we never gave you promicin during any of your previous visits to the future. Even when we sent you back to confront Isabelle, with all of her powers, we didn’t inject you with the drug. Didn’t you ever wonder why?”
Dread stirred the acid in Tom’s stomach. “Jordan always said he’d never force promicin on anybody,” Tom said.
“He wouldn’t, but obviously we did,” the scientist said. “But not in your case. We thought you understood. But then you went and took the shot anyway.”
Tom felt as if he were being put on trial for saving the world. “But Kyle, my son, he … he said the prophecy in the White Light book—”
“Enemy propaganda,” the scientist snapped. “Lies cloaked in just enough truth to make them plausible.” The scientist stepped forward and grabbed Tom’s T-shirt. “No matter what that book said, you were never meant to be promicin-positive, Tom. Never.”
Pushing the scientist away, Tom waved his arms at the clean, sunlit future and protested, “Okay, I took promicin! If I hadn’t, the world would’ve been destroyed. But everything looks fine to me, so what difference does it make?”
There was fear in the scientist’s eyes as he replied, “Possibly everything, Tom … Everything.”
Here ends the First Saga of The 4400
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
MY FIRST THANKS, as always, go to my wife, Kara, who once again had to accept my absence as my deadline slipped away from me, forcing me back to my old schedule of writing during the late watches of the night and the wee hours of the morning.
I’m also grateful to my editor, Margaret Clark, who had been asking me to write a novel of The 4400 for some time. It was a quirk of fate and of timing (also known as a series cancellation) that gave me the chance to tell such an epic tale set after the show’s untimely cliffhanger final episode.
