by Greg Cox
He heard more footsteps outside, growing louder as they neared his door. A guard going about his rounds, presumably. Cooper wondered if maybe the guard could get him an aspirin. He felt a headache coming on.
“Excuse me,” he called out. He got off the cot and walked barefoot over to the door. “I don’t want to cause any problems, but can you—”
The footsteps halted right outside the door. “Cooper DeMeers?”
The tinny voice sounded familiar, but Cooper couldn’t place it right away. “Yeah, that’s me.” Placing his face against the cold steel door, he peered out through the eye slit.
William Gorinsky stared back at him.
A frightened yelp escaped Cooper’s lips. His heart skipped a beat. They told me he was dead!
Yet there was no mistaking the beefy figure standing outside the cell. It was undeniably the same guy who had come after him at the Market and in the Underground, the menacing stranger who had disappeared right before Cooper’s eyes three nights ago. But how had he gotten past all of NTAC’s security—and why was he here in the first place?
You’re supposed to be dead!
“What are you?” Cooper whispered, his mouth as dry as a desert. “What do you want from me?” He backed away fearfully from the door. “Why won’t you leave me alone?”
Gorinsky didn’t bother to explain. “Stand back,” he said unnecessarily. There was a loud electrical zap and the cell door slid open. Nothing but empty air now separated Cooper from the other man, the one who should have been six feet under by now. The acrid smell of burnt circuitry filled the cell.
“K-keep away from me!” Cooper stammered. His back was pressed up against the far wall of the cell. He screamed for someone to save him from the intruder. “Guards! Somebody! Help!”
Gorinsky scowled impatiently. “C’mon, hurry up!” He beckoned to Cooper. “I’m breaking you out, you moron!”
“You there!” A guard’s voice intruded on the scene. “Step away from the cell and put your hands where I can see them!”
Gorinsky ignored the command. “Don’t you know what they’re planning?” he snarled at Cooper. “They’re going to lock you up for life, numbskull! This is your only chance!”
Could that be true? Cooper didn’t know what to think. Meanwhile, the commotion had awoken his fellow prisoners. The other inmates shouted for attention, demanding to know what was going on. How many people did NTAC have confined down here, Cooper wondered, and just how long had some of them been held prisoner? Over the last couple of years, he’d heard plenty of horror stories about innocent returnees who had been “disappeared” by the government and never heard from again, but he’d always been unsure how seriously to take such rumors. Just a bunch of crazy conspiracy theories, or a preview of coming attractions . . .?
“This is your last warning!” the guard shouted at Gorinsky. “I’m authorized to use deadly force. Stand down or else!”
“Knock yourself out,” Gorinsky taunted the guard.
Gunshots blared in the corridor. Flinching from the noise, Cooper expected Gorinsky to keel over, spouting blood from gaping chest wounds, but the intruder just muttered an obscenity and marched away from the door, straight into the barrage of gunfire. Bullets ricocheted off the doors and walls outside the cell, striking sparks against the impervious metal, while the guard’s voice grew increasingly panicky. “Oh, crap! You’re one of them!” He emptied his semiautomatic pistol without inflicting any discernible damage to Gorinsky. “Drop, damnit! What does it to take to put you down?”
An alarm went off belatedly. Blaring sirens tortured Cooper’s ears, adding to the cacophony inside the violated cell block. He was surprised the cell block hadn’t gone into lockdown mode yet. Maybe the guards were still trying to figure out what was going on? He hesitated, uncertain how to proceed. Mustering his courage, he peered around the open doorway just in time to see Gorinsky seize the hapless guard, who started twitching as though zapped by a taser. Cooper instantly recalled the minor electrical shock he had received the first time Gorinsky had grabbed him at the Market, as well as the way his mysterious stalker had attacked those two NTAC agents in the Underground. No way, Cooper thought. He wasn’t sure exactly what kind of ability Gorinsky had, but he knew he didn’t want to ever be on the receiving end of it. You’re not getting me that way!
Gorinsky let go of the guard, who collapsed limply onto the floor. “What are you waiting for?” he hollered at Cooper, looking back over his shoulder. More guards came charging down the stairs at the end of the corridor. Metal grilles began to descend from the ceiling, between him and freedom. “Run!”
Cooper didn’t need any further prompting. Unsure whom exactly he was trying to get away from, the guards or Gorinsky, he made tracks away from both of them. Other inmates shouted at him as he ran past their cells, begging for information or release, but Cooper couldn’t afford to listen to their pleas. Like a baseball player diving for home, he slid beneath the descending grille only moments before it connected to the floor. He jumped to his feet and kept on running. Encountering a staircase beyond the cell block, he took the steps two at a time, his bare feet slapping against the cool concrete. Sheer terror and adrenaline exorcised his earlier grogginess. His heart was pounding a mile a minute. He prayed to God that he still had enough inhibitor in his system to keep his goddamn ability from bringing the entire building down on his head. He hadn’t felt this scared since the last time he’d jumped out of a 727 . . .
A startled-looking guard suddenly appeared on the stairs before him. “Hold on!” the man shouted, reaching for his sidearm, but Cooper barreled right into him, knocking the guard flat on his back. On instinct, he snatched the pistol from the stunned guard’s holster and hopped clumsily over his sprawled victim on his way up the steps. There was no turning back now, he knew. He had to get away or be locked up for life. Bursting from the stairwell, he found himself in the lobby of the building. NTAC’s official seal was emblazoned on the polished marble floor. Metal detectors guarded the empty reception desk. He looked around frantically for the nearest exit.
To his surprise, he spotted a young Japanese woman standing right outside the front entrance. She called to him through a pair of wide glass doors. A sleek copper-colored Jaguar was parked at the curb behind her.
Who? Cooper wondered in confusion. As far as he knew, he had never seen the girl before. Is she with Gorinsky?
He couldn’t hear what she was saying, but her intent was clear. He ran up to the door and tried to pull it open. It rattled in its frame, but refused to budge. Locked, he realized. Figures. Stymied, he looked helplessly at the woman, who pointed emphatically at the gun in his hand. Oh right, he thought sheepishly as she stepped away from the door. I forgot.
Wincing in anticipation, he took aim at the lock and fired. A loud report momentarily drowned out the shrieking alarms. He rammed the door open with his shoulder and dashed out onto the sidewalk outside. The nearly deserted streets and sidewalks confirmed that it was way past most people’s bedtime. Streetlamps illuminated the landscaped grounds outside NTAC headquarters. Greasy puddles informed him that it had rained earlier. A clock tower revealed that it was nearly three in the morning.
“Hurry!” The woman grabbed him by the arm, practically dragging him toward the waiting sports car. She shoved him into the passenger seat, then scurried around to jump behind the wheel. “Buckle up!”
“Wait!” he pleaded. Things were happening too fast for him to keep up. “Who are you? What’s this about?”
“No time for that.” She threw the car into gear and accelerated away from the curb. Behind them, a night-owl bus honked and slammed on its brakes. The Jaguar rapidly left it behind, speeding north through the late night traffic. Tinted windows guarded their privacy. “You can thank us later.”
Us? It occurred to Cooper that the nameless woman, if she was in cahoots with Gorinsky, didn’t seem too concerned about leaving her partner behind to face the music. Then again, he recalled, Gorins
ky could disappear into thin air. He might have already pulled another vanishing act by now.
Blocks sped by as he examined the woman behind the wheel. At least twenty years younger than him, she had the look of a sexy grad student. Her lustrous black hair had a pixie cut, but it was her striking brown eyes that really got your attention. Her dark bronze irises had a thin golden halo around them, giving her eyes an almost preternatural quality. Trick contact lenses, he wondered, or a natural gift? She was dressed for stealth, in a black sweater and slacks. Her tense expression grew more relaxed the further they got from NTAC. It looked like they might have made a clean getaway. A Starbucks coffee cup rested in the Jaguar’s cup holder. The woman helped herself to a sip as she deftly navigated the city streets.
“Please,” Cooper begged. “You gotta help me out here. Where are you taking me?”
“Someplace safe,” she promised.
FIFTEEN
DIANA AND MARCO were working late, although she wasn’t entirely sure why. Their laptops sat open atop her kitchen table, alongside a stack of blue folders from the office. Refrigerator magnets pinned Maia’s artwork and school bulletins to the fridge. Buttery yellow walls gave the kitchen a warmer feel than Diana’s work space downtown. Leftover slices of pineapple pizza—Maia’s favorite—rested on top of the kitchen island nearby. Diana nibbled on a slice as she sorted through the papers on the table.
“Here.” Marco handed her a steaming cup of hot tea, fresh from the microwave. “You look like you can use this.”
“Thanks.” She appreciated him staying up to work with her on this; she suspected that digging through evidence probably wasn’t what he’d had in mind when he’d come over tonight. Talk about a nice guy, she thought. I really don’t deserve him.“What time is it anyway?” She glanced at the clock over the stove. “Oh, God.”
It was almost three-thirty in the morning. Maia had been asleep for hours, and Diana knew that she and Marco ought to be in bed, too. This being Monday, tomorrow was a workday. Her alarm clock was going to go off way too soon.
“I’m okay,” he insisted. “I’m used to pulling all-nighters.”
“No. This is ridiculous,” she scolded herself. There was no point in working this case anymore, let alone losing sleep over it. Gorinsky was dead, and, as of a few hours from now, Cooper DeMeers was no longer her problem or her responsibility, thanks to the heavy-handed intervention of the NSA. “Why can’t I let this go?”
“Well there’s always Maia’s unfulfilled prophecy,” he reminded her.
This is true, she thought. It was difficult to achieve closure when, at the back of her mind, she was still dreading her inevitable encounter with “D. B. Cooper” atop an unruly mountain. But even putting that aside, there were still plenty of unresolved questions nagging at her brain, most of them involving William Gorinsky. How had the mentally disturbed veteran found out about DeMeers in the first place, and how had he managed to keep one step ahead of NTAC the whole time? And why had he been after DeMeers anyway?
Diana focused on that first question. Where had Gorinsky received his information from? She didn’t want to think that there was a leak at NTAC, which meant looking somewhere else . . . like maybe Abendson Psychiatric Hospital.
Pages and pages of medical records from Ward 59 were spread out across the table. A court order had allowed them to obtain the files over Doctor Clayton’s vehement protests. She hated to violate the patients’ privacy like this, but if there was anything she had learned at the CDC, it was that sometimes public safety trumped privacy concerns . . . and that the best way to combat an infection was to trace it to its source. In this case, Ward 59. Marco sat down across from her as they continued to comb through lists of the hospital’s staff and patients, looking for some connection to Cooper DeMeers and/or the Nova Group. If we can find something by morning, she thought, that might give us leverage we need to keep Cooper out of the NSA’s clutches.
The fact that Cooper’s ability had definite military possibilities was not lost on her. She didn’t want another Gary Navarro on her conscience.
“You know,” Marco said, yawning, “a nice long rest in a padded cell is starting to sound better and better.”
She knew how he felt. The long columns of names were already swimming before her eyes. The fact that the staff at Abendson seemed to have an unusually high turnover rate didn’t make her and Marco’s task any easier. No doubt the large concentration of 4400 patients contributed to the hospital’s personnel problems; much of the public remained frightened of the returnees and their abilities, and the Nova Group’s recent campaign of terror hadn’t helped matters any. Diana wondered how many of Abendson’s employees had quit over the Tess Doerner incident alone.
She yawned and rubbed her weary eyes. Maybe it was time to call it a night after all. She was about to suggest as much when a solitary name caught her eye, standing out from the others:
SIMONE TANAKA
Where do I know that from? The name definitely rang a bell, but, in her sleep-deprived state, it took her a moment to place it.
Rahmen Aziz’s assistant.
“I think I’ve got something!” Excitement dispelled the fog from her brain. Using her laptop, she quickly called up Simone’s profile from their 4400 database. The mug shot in the file matched the young woman she had met in Nina’s office two days earlier. “Listen to this. Simone Tanaka used to be confined to Ward 59, along with Gorinsky, but she was released six months ago.”
Marco saw where she was going with this. “Wanna bet they’ve stayed in touch?” He conjured up Simone’s file on his own computer. “Does she have any known abilities?”
“Not that we have on record.” She scanned the woman’s medical records. “But according to this, she complained that she could see through people and things, even when her eyes were closed. The doctors thought she was hallucinating.”
“Maybe not,” Marco speculated. “Where the 4400 are concerned, it’s hard to tell crazy from coherent.” He helped himself to the last slice of pizza. “X-ray vision . . . wow! That’s seriously retro. Remember those goggles they used to sell in the back of comic books?”
“No.” Diana was too busy trying to work out the full implications of her discovery to share Marco’s nostalgia trip. We’ve been assuming that it was Sondra Jonnson who enlisted Aziz on DeMeers’s behalf, but what if Sondra had nothing to do with it? What if Simone informed Aziz—and Gorinsky? Just how much has she seen with those eyes of hers?
“But I don’t get it,” Marco admitted. “Even if Simone and Gorinsky were in touch, why would she sic him on Cooper?”
“I wish I knew.” She stared at the phone on the wall. Was it worth waking Tom to get his input or could this wait until morning?
The phone rang unexpectedly, startling her. Did I do that? she wondered momentarily, before remembering that she wasn’t actually one of the 4400. She glanced anxiously at the clock on the stove. Phone calls at four in the morning were never good news. A horrible thought rushed through her brain. Has something happened to April? She had always feared that her sister would come to a bad end . . .
“You going to get that?” Marco asked.
His query jolted her into action. She snatched the phone from its cradle. “Hello?”
“Diana? It’s me, Tom.” Her partner’s voice briefly reassured her; this wasn’t about April. “I just heard from Nina. Cooper DeMeers has escaped from NTAC.”
“What?” Diana felt a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. This wasn’t over yet. “Are you serious?”
“Absolutely,” Tom replied, “but that’s not the weirdest part. According to witnesses, he was sprung by Gorinsky.”
She blinked in surprise. “William Gorinsky?” She couldn’t imagine that he was talking about the eighty-year-old brother in Puyallup. “But he’s dead.”
“Tell me about it,” Tom said. “I attended his burial.” Despite everything, he sounded slightly relieved that he apparently hadn’t killed the man after al
l. “I guess his ‘astral double’ is still on the prowl.”
“Is that even possible?” Diana was no expert on bilocation, but she found it hard to believe that Gorinsky’s consciousness could survive the death of his physical body. Where was it getting its energy from? Time travel and telekinesis she could accept, albeit grudgingly, but she was still too much of a scientist to believe in ghosts.
“Who knows what’s possible and impossible these days,” Tom said. “Ask Marco the next time you see him.”
Diana blushed, not quite sure whether she wanted to mention that Marco was sitting only a few feet away. It’s not like it was a deep, dark secret that they were dating, but still . . . “I’ll do that.”
“In the meantime, the NSA is throwing a fit. Their agents are already fanning out in pursuit of DeMeers and they sound inclined to shoot first and ask questions later.” She could tell from his tone that he was deadly serious. “If we want to keep Cooper alive, we need to find him first.”
Diana remembered the lead she and Marco had just uncovered. “I think I know where to start looking.”
Cooper had visited The 4400 Center before, although never quite under these same circumstances. Curiosity had drawn him to various open houses and fund-raisers sponsored by the Center, while his status as a returnee had entitled him to a guided tour conducted by one of the organization’s many perky volunteers. To be honest, the place had given him a slightly cultish vibe, especially back when Jordan Collier was marketing himself as the second coming of L. Ron Hubbard or whomever. While he appreciated the Center’s lobbying efforts, he had felt uncomfortable among the eager wannabes who flocked to the Center in hopes of achieving 4400 abilities of their own. He’d just wanted to get on with his life, not dispense cosmic wisdom to the masses. As if he’d actually had any such wisdom to impart.
