Free The 4400® Promises Broken by David Mack

breaks.”

FOURTEEN

    July 23, 2008

    M OST PLACES IN the daily life of Marco Pacella deserved to be called lonely, but none so much as the NTAC Theory Room.
    Sequestered in the basement, behind a door decorated with a sign that read WHERE THE RUBBER MEETS THE ROAD , the miniature think tank had always been sparsely staffed. At its peak, its roster had numbered three: Marco and his colleagues P.J. and Brady. Then, in the span of a few months, P.J. had gone to prison for using an ability that he had gained by illegally injecting promicin, and Brady had died after being exposed to the airborne promicin virus released by the late Danny Farrell.
    P.J.’s successor in the Theory Room had been an attractive young woman named Abigail Hunnicut. Her tenure at NTAC had come to an abrupt end a few months ago, when it had been revealed that she was illegally creating clones of Danny Farrell in an effort to replicate his fiftypercent lethal promicin virus. A converted “true believer,” she’d hoped to use her own promicin-based ability for rearranging DNA to complete Jordan Collier’s now abandoned mission to unleash airborne promicin around the globe, killing billions in the name of “progress.”
    Instead she’d succeeded only in getting herself killed while holding Tom and Diana hostage, and that had left Marco at a bitter crossroads. He had been deeply smitten with Abby, which had made him blind to her deceits. Now he desperately wanted to hate her for betraying him and NTAC in the name of some apocalyptic ideology, but he had a deeper need to mourn her.
    Two peers dead, one in jail
, Marco brooded.
And now there’s only me
. He sipped his lukewarm Diet Coke and studied the hash of numbers projected in high definition on the room’s back wall.
This would’ve gone a lot faster if Brady were still here.
    He heard the doorknob turning behind him, and the soft groan of the door’s hinges as it swung inward. Glancing over his shoulder, he lifted his chin in greeting to Tom and Diana. “Hey, guys. Thanks for coming.”
    “Sure thing,” Tom said. He and Diana navigated their way through the room’s labyrinth of computers and other high-tech gadgets. Diana hovered over Marco’s left shoulder. Tom loomed behind his right and inquired, “What’ve we got?”
    “Bad news, and lots of it,” Marco said. He pushed himself up from his chair and strolled toward the projection on the wall. “The NSA sent over a mountain of raw data yesterday. I ran a difference filter to see what they had thatwe didn’t.” He picked up a remote control off a table and clicked a button to advance the presentation. “Here’s what I found.”
    A new screen of data snapped into focus against the wall. Marco pointed out details line by line as he continued. “Most of what got blanked from our servers had to do with transfers of high-tech components, state-of-the-art composites and materials, and—here’s the fun part—a radioactive sample from CERN.”
    That item raised Diana’s eyebrows. “CERN? As in the Large Hadron Collider?” That hint of excitement in her eyes reminded Marco of the days—not so long ago but now gone—when Diana had seemed to be excited about him. Ending their brief romantic relationship had been her choice. It was one that he had always respected but in truth had never really accepted, not even now.
    “Yeah, that CERN,” Marco said, keeping his personal feelings and professional duties strictly segregated. “The protocols used to move that sample had the hallmarks of a nuclear fuel shipment.”
    Tom wrinkled his brow in confusion. “Wait a second,” he said, pointing at the screen. “Why would anyone ship nuke fuel into the U.S. from Europe when we can make our own at Livermore and Los Alamos?”
    Before Marco could answer, Diana replied, “If it’s from the LHC it might be antimatter, or a new transuranic element—something heavier than we can produce.”
    Horrified understanding shone through Tom’s