The 4400- the Vesuvius Prophecy

by Greg Cox

  She started to explain, then heard another voice calling her name. “Diana?” Tom called to her from the fallen cell phone. “What’s happening? Answer me, Diana!”

  “Hang on!” she called out to him as she scrambled for the phone. There were scorch marks on its casing, but at least it was still working. “I’m here, Tom.” She glanced at Garrity, who was slowly rising to his feet. He looked as if he was starting to remember where he was. “We’re both okay. Gorinsky just vanished.” She sniffed the air; even the distinctive ozone smell was gone. “I don’t know why.”

  “I think I can answer that,” Tom said glumly. He rapidly briefed her on the events at Abendson. Diana found herself torn between gratitude for her partner’s quick thinking and shock that Gorinsky was dead. Tom sounded pretty shook up, too.

  “Oh my God,” she whispered. “Are you okay?”

  “I’ll manage,” Tom said. She heard strident voices in the background. “But I’m going to be tied up here for a while, straightening out this mess. Don’t worry about me, though. You and Garrity just concentrate on bringing in DeMeers.”

  “Count on it,” she told him. “And, Tom . . . thanks.” She had no doubt that her partner had just saved her life for the umpteenth time. But who’s counting? Ending the call, she returned the phone to her pocket. She looked over at Garrity. “You up to this?”

  He nodded, despite looking a little under the weather. “Man, we don’t get paid enough for this craziness.” He recovered his own pistol from the dirt. Shaking his head to clear the last of the fuzz from his brain, he approached DeMeers and Sondra once more. “Now then, where were we?”

  “That’s it?” DeMeers protested. “You’re still not going to tell us what’s going on?” His composure crumbled as his temper hit its limit. He threw his cigarette onto the floor and stomped it out beneath his foot. His face flushed behind his beard. Veins pulsed at his temples. “This is insane. Why can’t you people just leave us alone!”

  The broken chandelier started rattling in the corner. A trickle of dust began falling from the ceiling. A faint vibration rattled the forgotten speakeasy.

  Another earthquake? Diana stared accusingly at DeMeers. No way was this another coincidence . . .

  “Stop it,” she ordered, brandishing her gun. “Right now.”

  “Stop what?” He waved his empty hands over his head. “I’m not doing anything!”

  His panicked expression suggested that he was telling the truth. Diana guessed that he had no conscious control over his tectokinesis, at least not yet. Many of the returnees had needed time to master their new abilities. As the floor quivered beneath her, it was unclear whether DeMeers’s time had run out. The concrete floor cracked and buckled.

  “I knew it,” Garrity said dourly. “I just knew this was going to happen.”

  “Cooper! What are they talking about?” Sondra demanded. Tottering unsteadily upon her feet, she grabbed on to his arm for support. She stared at her lover as though she had never seen him before. “Are you doing this?”

  “I don’t know!” He clutched his head. Veins throbbed across his skull. “I don’t understand!”

  The tremors increased in intensity. The cracked mirror crashed down onto the floor, shattering into dozens of pieces. A wooden keg toppled over. Decades’ worth of dust rained down from overhead, obscuring Diana’s vision. She covered her mouth with her hand to keep from choking on the flying sediment. Fighting to keep her balance, she braced herself against the rocking billiards table. Groceries bounced atop the moldy green felt; a six-pack inched toward the edge. The more agitated DeMeers became, the more the seismic paroxysms threatened to bring down the Underground on their heads.

  “DeMeers . . . Cooper,” Diana called out to him. “You have to calm down!” She laid her sidearm down on top of the table. “Look, I’m putting down my weapon. Nobody here wants to hurt you.” Following her lead, Garrity lowered his gun as well. “We just need to understand this ability of yours.” That wasn’t entirely true—there was still the matter of that hijacking thirty-five years ago—but that was the least of Diana’s concerns at the moment. “You need to calm down and let us help you . . . for all our sakes!” She considered reloading her gun with tranquilizer darts, but it seemed to be too late for that. It might just upset him more.

  Sondra seemed to get the message. “Please, honey, listen to her.” A rafter cracked loudly above them and she let out a frightened yelp. “You gotta stop this. Just close your eyes and think happy thoughts.”

  “I . . . I’ll try,” DeMeers promised, closing his eyes as instructed. Diana held her breath as she watched the man assume a more meditative demeanor. He inhaled deeply, only to end up coughing on the airborne debris. The walls trembled as he struggled to bring his breathing under control. His purple face started to pale back to pink. He unclenched his fists. The swollen veins shrunk in size until they were only faint blue streaks beneath his scalp.

  “That’s it!” Sondra encouraged him. “You can do it!”

  At first nothing happened, but then the tremors gradually subsided. Diana let out a sigh of relief as the floor stopped shaking. Clouds of dust settled onto the ground. The chandelier fell silent. Maybe they weren’t going to end up entombed after all.

  “That’s more like it.” She cautiously let go of the billiards table. “I think we’re okay now.”

  DeMeers hesitantly opened his eyes. He looked as surprised as anyone else to find the potential cave-in averted. “I did it,” he murmured in disbelief. “It really is me.”

  So it appears, Diana thought. Being careful not to alarm him, she holstered her gun. Garrity started to come forward with the handcuffs again, but Diana discreetly signaled him to back off. “Thank you for your cooperation, Mister DeMeers. If you and Ms. Jonnson could come with us now, we’d like to take you back to NTAC for observation.” She wiped the dust from her face. “You must realize by now that your new ability has to be managed somehow. It’s not going to just go away on its own.”

  “I guess not,” he muttered. All the fight had gone out of him. He squeezed Sondra’s hand. “Sorry, babe. Bet you didn’t know I was a one-man disaster area.”

  She gave him a comforting smile. “It will be okay, Coop. We’ll get through this.”

  Diana admired the other woman’s optimism and loyalty to her boyfriend. She wished she could be so confident that everything was going to turn out well in the end, but Maia’s unfulfilled prophecy still cast a pall over the future. Just take things one day at a time, she advised herself. That’s all we can do right now. The sooner she got DeMeers into an NTAC holding cell, properly dosed and tranquilized, the better.

  She gestured toward the exit. “After you.”

  TEN

  THE INTERROGATION ROOMS at NTAC were not meant to be cozy. Soundproof ceramic tiles covered the walls, cutting the chamber off from the rest of the world. A rectangular blue-steel table occupied the center of the room. Matching metal chairs were strictly functional. A one-way mirror allowed outside observers to view the proceedings without being seen. The temperature was deliberately kept a few degrees warmer than necessary, the better to sweat answers out of uncooperative suspects. The bare gray walls offered no distractions.

  Cooper DeMeers sat at the table opposite Tom and Diana. Although dosed with the inhibitor and a mild sedative, he still looked distinctly apprehensive as the two agents sat down across from him. Perspiration gleamed upon his bare scalp. A bright orange jumpsuit had replaced the dusty clothes he had been wearing when he was brought in. At Diana’s request, he was not shackled. A tranquilizer pistol rested against Tom’s hip just in case the med techs hadn’t gotten DeMeers’s dosage right. Seattle didn’t need another earthquake.

  Diana introduced Tom to the suspect. “Are they treating you all right, Cooper?”

  “Well enough,” he replied. “How is Sondra?”

  “She’s fine,” Diana assured him. As far as they could tell, her only crime had been helping DeMeers hide from NTAC.
“She’s been released on her own recognizance.”

  “That’s good,” DeMeers said, visibly relieved by the news. “She’s a great lady. She doesn’t deserve to get hassled on my account.”

  Tom decided to get straight to the point. He hauled up a box he had carried into the interrogation room and poured its contents onto the table in front of DeMeers. Scads of D. B. Cooper memorabilia, extracted from DeMeers’s foot locker, spilled across the tabletop. The scrapbooks, paperbacks, videos, and other items made an impressive pile. The evidence had already been checked out by the lab boys. DeMeers’s prints were all over them.

  “Quite a collection,” Tom observed. “Souvenirs of your historic jump? You like to take them out sometimes and bask in your notoriety? Must really stroke the old ego to know that people are still talking about you after all these years.”

  DeMeers had initially blanched at the sight of his belongings, but he quickly recovered. “You think I’m D. B. Cooper?” He scoffed at the very idea. “Is that what this is all about?”

  “Come on, Cooper,” Diana urged. “Level with us.” She ticked off the points of similarity. “You disappeared about the same time as D. B. Cooper. You match the physical profile. You have skydiving experience. You’re both bourbon drinkers. You even smoke the same brand of cigarettes.”

  “So?” he challenged them. “Is that all you’ve got?” He leaned back in his chair, appearing a bit more relaxed. “Look, you saw where I worked. I sling fish for a living.” He laughed bitterly. “You think I’d do that if I had two hundred grand stashed away somewhere?”

  Not if you lost it somehow, Tom thought. Back in 1980, nine years after the hijacking, about six thousand dollars of the ransom money had washed up on the shore of the Columbia River on the border of southern Washington. Found by a picnicking family, the soggy twenties had been identified by their serial numbers. Subsequent searches had failed to turn up the rest of the $200,000, but Tom wondered if perhaps all of Cooper’s ill-gotten gains had ended up in the river somehow. Maybe the bulk of the money had been washed out to sea?

  “Then what’s with the collection?” Tom waved the original FBI wanted poster in DeMeers’s face. The prisoner’s stubborn denials frustrated Tom. This wasn’t just about solving a decades-old mystery; it was crucial that they determine whether DeMeers was indeed the man Maia had seen in her vision. “Why the fascination with D. B. Cooper?”

  “It’s just a hobby,” he insisted. “Some people obsess over Jack the Ripper or the JFK assassination. Others search for Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster.” DeMeers shrugged. “I collect D. B. Cooper paraphernalia. It’s no big deal.”

  Tom didn’t believe him. “It’s got to be hard keeping this secret all these years. Even from your girlfriend. Don’t you ever just want to tell somebody who you really are, take credit for what you did?”

  “Nice try,” DeMeers snickered. “But even if I was D. B. Cooper, which I’m not, why risk going to prison for something that happened thirty-plus years ago? Bad enough that I got carried off by a glowing ball of light for three decades. You think I’d want to trade my freedom for a brief taste of fame?” He rolled his eyes at the sheer absurdity of the idea. “Besides, it’s the mystery of D. B. Cooper that keeps people talking. If he ever came forward, there would be one last flurry of headlines, then he’d disappear into obscurity forever. He’d end up just a forgotten footnote in the history of crime.”

  “Sounds like you’ve given this some thought,” Diana accused him. She looked over his file. “I see you were actually working at Sea-Tac Airport as a bartender back in 1971. What was the matter? Did you get tired of serving drinks to people who were actually going somewhere, flying off to interesting and exciting locations while you were stuck behind a bar washing glasses?” DeMeers scowled; Tom wondered if Diana was hitting a nerve. “I can see where that would get pretty old after a while. It must have been tempting to get on a plane yourself, maybe go for one big score that would change your life for good?”

  “Spare me the amateur psych profiles.” DeMeers shifted his weight, showing signs of impatience. “Look, are we done with this D. B. Cooper crap yet? I thought you were going to help me control my ability.”

  “What do you think the shots are for?” Tom chose not to mention Maia’s prophecy just yet. Instead he swept the souvenirs aside and produced the inflammatory manifesto they had found in DeMeers’s apartment. The flyer was sealed inside a transparent evidence bag. “What’s your connection to the Nova Group?”

  “Nova?” This time DeMeers seemed genuinely startled by the accusation. “I don’t have anything to do with that bunch.” He nodded at the flyer. “I just picked that up in a coffee shop on the Ave ’cause it looked interesting, you know. I’m a 4400; naturally it caught my attention. That doesn’t mean I’m some kind of terrorist.”

  No, just a former skyjacker, Tom thought. Still, DeMeers’s explanation made sense. Unlike a few minutes ago, Tom didn’t get a sense that the prisoner was lying to them. “So you don’t support the Nova Group’s agenda? Then why did you run from us at the Market the other day?”

  “I just freaked out, okay!” DeMeers raised his voice, and Tom tensed automatically. His fingers drifted toward the grip of his tranquilizer, but no tremors shook the interrogation room. Apparently the inhibitor was doing its job. “First that creepy Marine showed up looking for me, then you folks charged onto the scene.” His eyes lit up as a theory formed in his mind. “That Marine, the disappearing guy who attacked us in the Underground . . . is he part of the Nova Group? Is that what’s got you all wound up?” His voice faltered as he tried and failed to put all the pieces together. “But what’s that got to do with me?”

  “We were hoping you could tell us that,” Diana admitted. “Had you ever met him before?”

  DeMeers shook his head.

  “He’s a 4400,” Tom pointed out. “You would have been in quarantine together.”

  “Along with over four thousand other people!” He fidgeted restlessly in his seat; Tom figured he was probably craving a nicotine fix. “You think we all know each other? We were crammed in like cattle there.”

  That was a slight exaggeration, but Tom conceded the point. Even after two and a half years of dealing with the 4400 on a daily basis, he still didn’t know all their names and faces by heart. It was certainly possible that DeMeers and Gorinsky had never met before.

  “Who the hell is that guy anyway?” DeMeers glanced uneasily around the room, as though half expecting his ectoplasmic stalker to materialize at any moment. “Are you sure I’m safe here?”

  “For the record,” Diana informed him, “his name was William Gorinsky.”

  DeMeers didn’t miss her use of the past tense. “Was?”

  “He’s dead,” Tom said tersely. “You don’t need to worry about him anymore.”

  DeMeers didn’t ask how Gorinsky died. Maybe he didn’t want to know.

  “Does the name mean anything to you?” Diana asked.

  “Not that I can think of.” He paused to search his memory, then shook his head again. “So what happens now? How long are you people planning to hold me?”

  Good question, Tom thought. Inhibitor or not, he didn’t feel comfortable releasing DeMeers as long as Maia’s prophecy remained unfulfilled. But right now they couldn’t even be a hundred percent sure that they had the right guy. He flirted with the idea of confronting DeMeers head-on with the content of Maia’s vision, in hopes of getting him to crack, but that was probably something he ought to run by Diana first. Better to broach the subject more obliquely.

  “That depends,” he told DeMeers. “How often do you visit Mount Rainier?”

  The question caught the other man completely by surprise. “What the hell? What you want to know that for?”

  Before Tom could continue this line of inquiry, there was a knock at the door. Tom and Diana looked over to see Nina standing in the doorway. “Sorry to interrupt,” their boss said with a somber expression on her face. “But w
e have a situation.”

  Now what? Tom wondered.

  DeMeers was taken back to his cell, and Tom and Diana joined Nina in her office, where two visitors awaited them. One of them was a short man of Middle Eastern descent wearing a tailored Armani suit. He had an equally expensive haircut and neatly manicured nails. Tom put his age in the late forties, early fifties. Strands of silver infiltrated his black goatee. A young Asian woman accompanied him.

  “Agent Baldwin, Agent Skouris,” Nina explained, “meet Mister Rahmen Aziz, an attorney representing The 4400 Center, and his assistant, Simone Tanaka. They’re here on behalf of Cooper DeMeers.”

  Tom didn’t like the sound of that. The 4400 Center had been set up by the late Jordan Collier, a business tycoon who had returned to the present along with the rest of the 4400, to represent the returnees and advance their mission, at least as Collier conceived that mission to be. Following Collier’s shocking assassination, Tom’s nephew, Collier’s personal protégé, had inherited the reins of the Center. Tom generally trusted Shawn to do the right thing, as he had by helping them hunt down the Nova Group, but NTAC and the Center seldom saw eye to eye, especially these days.

  He eyed Aziz warily. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”

  “That’s correct, Agent Baldwin, but I’ve been employed by the Center for some time now.” He had a deep, mellifluous voice well-suited to coaxing juries. “My responsibilities have expanded recently, due to the unfortunate death of Matthew Ross.” The lawyer shook his head sadly. “Quite an unexpected tragedy. It took us all very much by surprise.”

  “Yeah. Us, too.” Someday soon, Tom knew, he would have to deal with the Isabelle Tyler situation. According to his contacts in the future, she was a lot more dangerous than even Diana knew. But Maia’s apocalyptic prophecy took priority right now. “How can we help you, Mister Aziz?”

  The attorney nodded at his assistant, who handed him a sheath of documents. “We have reason to believe that DeMeers is being held against his will and without legal representation.” He presented the documents to Nina. “We’re requesting that he be turned over to The 4400 Center for his own safety. As you know, Homeland Security has often dealt harshly with the 4400, in violation of their constitutional rights.”