Kill Switch

by Gordon Bonnet

  Deirdre nodded, and turned back to Chris. “I was lucky. I left for work one morning, but had to turn back because I realized I’d forgotten my cell. I went into my apartment and found a guy in the process of poisoning the milk in my fridge. I’m a fourth degree black belt in karate.” She grinned. “Once I’d broken his arm in three places, he decided to quit struggling. To make a long story short, he spilled his guts about what was going on.”

  “Pain causes people to make unfortunate choices, sometimes.” The old man frowned disapprovingly.

  “Bet you gave him a bit of a reminder,” Chris snarled.

  “Oh, he was not one of our operatives, you may be sure of that.”

  He stared at the man, not following. “You mean—”

  Deirdre supplied the answer. “He was working for the other side.”

  “But he was trying to poison you.”

  “Indeed.” The elderly man gave Deirdre a chilly little smile. “I believe that Mr. Franzia is about to have the other shoe drop.”

  She snickered. “He never was very quick on the uptake.”

  “You’re—” Chris swallowed. “You’re not the ones who murdered…” He trailed off, unable to complete the sentence.

  “Correct. We are not the ones who killed your friends.”

  “Who did, then?”

  “The ones who are behind what you stumbled upon in that cave.”

  “But then Deirdre—how did you end up here?”

  She picked up the thread of the tale, looking as relaxed as if she had been telling them what she’d had for breakfast. “So anyway, after the wannabe poisoner was out of commission and tied to one of my kitchen chairs, I used his cellphone to get a hold of his boss. He told me how to unlock the phone as soon as I threatened to break his other arm, and if that didn’t work, to surgically remove his genitals with a steak knife.”

  “Sweet talk always was your specialty.”

  “Damn skippy. So the boss picked up, thinking it was her flunky reporting in. She was a little surprised to hear my voice. I told her I knew what was going on, that they wouldn’t get another chance to kill me because I was going to disappear. My first plan was to go into hiding, but before I could get my shit together I got a call. One from my friend, here. He and his people found out what I’d done. I’m not certain how. But they made me what I believe is called ‘an offer I couldn’t refuse.’”

  The elderly man gave her a courteous nod. “Dr. Ross appeared to be an ideal ally. Let us say that the way she handled the situation impressed us. We could guarantee her protection from further attempts on her life. For our part, the value of her medical expertise was immediately obvious. And we gave her our word that she would be entirely safe, as long as her allegiance to us was unequivocal.”

  “And you trust these people are telling you the truth?”

  Deirdre shrugged. “I made sure I had a guarantee of safety. Once I made up my mind—which didn’t take long—I high-tailed it down to a bank that I will not reveal the location of, took out a safe-deposit box, and wrote out enough damning evidence to blow the whole thing open. Including a list of all of the contact numbers on Mr. Broken-Wing’s cellphone, and a detailed description of the deal I’d been offered by my friend here. Then I gave instructions to a friend, who will also remain anonymous, that the box should be opened, and the contents given to the FBI, should I ever be killed, unless no body was found.”

  How cloak and dagger dramatic. “Then you arranged your disappearance.”

  “Yep.”

  “And here you are.”

  “And here I am.” She smiled smugly. “Safe and sound. They kept their end of the bargain, and I kept mine.”

  Another genteel nod from the elderly man. Weren’t they just the pinnacle of polite deference around here? Deirdre doing whatever it took to save her own ass was certainly in character for her, but trusting these assholes? Chris hoped she realized she’d better not slip up. He wouldn’t want to be in her situation. She was playing with sharks. If they ever figured out how to get to her safe-deposit box, she’d be dead.

  “So you were the one who figured out Elisa’s code.”

  “Of course. Good thing I was here. You were right that no one else but us knew the key. It was a good idea and would have worked had I actually been drowned.”

  The old man had finally had enough. Snapping the pocketwatch closed with a snap, he stuffed it back in his pocket. “And now we proceed. I recognize the pleasantries must be observed, but there is critical information my superiors need. Dr. Ross?”

  “Whatever you say, chief.” She looked down at Chris. “Sorry, old buddy. Kind of sucks that it’s come to this, you know?” She went to the other side of the room and came back pushing a small metal cart that carried an electronic device with a variety of dials and plugs. To the side was a horseshoe-shaped loop of metal, trailing a pair of wires. From the inside curve of the loop were regularly-spaced posts, each ending in a small metal disk.

  Chris moaned and began to struggle again, pulling away from her. Shit! He remembered how they had tortured Drolezki. He wouldn’t be able to stand pain that severe. He’d tell them anything.

  “Oh, c’mon, just hold still. This won’t hurt a bit.” Deirdre retrieved a handful of wires from one of the lower shelves of the cart and began to plug them, one by one, into sockets on the machine. The wires ended with electrodes surrounded by sticky pads, and despite his thrashing she deftly placed them on his skin—two on either side of his neck, two right above his nipples, two on his abdomen. She then turned to the machine, flipped a switch, and slowly turned a dial.

  There was a fluttering sensation at the contact points, and Chris felt the fight drain from him. He’d never been so scared in his life, but his ability to react to it physically—to fight back— abruptly slipped from him. His body, which had been taut as a guitar string, went completely slack, and he fell to watching his old classmate, unable to do anything to thwart her.

  The halo of metal was placed around his forehead and secured to the table. She twisted the posts until the disks they carried were securely in contact with his scalp. She worked calmly, unhurriedly. He heard the click of another switch, and then another. He could no longer turn his head to see what she was doing. Jesus, he would have preferred a good old-fashioned flogging over this shit.

  Then there was a hum emanating from somewhere within his skull, like an internal itch. It was profoundly annoying. A heat slowly spread throughout his body, accompanied by a tension in his belly that was mildly uncomfortable but not really painful. He heard Deirdre’s voice saying, “Okay, you can interrogate him. I’ll keep track of his brain wave output and adjust the settings as needed, and you control everything else, as we’ve done in the past. I’ll let you know if I need you to stop.”

  “Very good.” The man had evidently moved close to Chris’s left ear. He could feel the man’s breath on his face, and a shiver ran through his frame.

  “What do you remember from the cave?”

  He blinked. The itch became more intense. “Why should I cooperate with you?” Immediately the itching sensation doubled, tripled. He squeezed his eyelids shut, tried to lift his hands to rub them over his face, but the straps stopped him. If, indeed, the lethargy would have allowed him to move them that far. His arms felt like they weighed a thousand pounds each.

  “Because I can reward you for answering,” came the man’s voice said, like a gentle breeze in Chris’s ear.

  “I can’t remember. I told you that earlier.”

  “Perhaps you might assist him, Dr. Ross?”

  A vibration from the disks ran across his scalp, and causing a visual sensation, like blue lightning radiating outward from him, illuminating everything in the room. Suddenly and astonishingly, he found he could remember. Whatever the halo was doing to his mind, it had jarred free his memories. His eyes widened as the images came flooding back, as clear as if they had happened just moments before.

  “So, I believe that you actuall
y can remember, can’t you? As I told you, nothing is ever truly forgotten. Now answer the question. What did you see in the cave?”

  “Fuck off.” His own voice sounded alien to him. Tired, powerless. Instantly the crawling sensation inside him went from irritating to maddening to actual pain. He struggled feebly against the straps. “Stop. Stop it! Make it stop!”

  “As you wish.” Just as quickly, the intensity dropped back to an annoying internal itch. “Now answer me. What did you see in the cave?”

  Chris’s chest rose and fell in an irregular, jittery rhythm, but he didn’t speak.

  “Do you need another bit of urging?” the man asked in a menacing voice. “You may want to know that what you just experienced is perhaps five percent of what this machine is capable of. And the reward, should you cooperate, could be equally intense.”

  He knew he couldn’t face the pain. His only chance was to stall—give him little pieces—and hope it would be enough to satisfy his curiosity. The rational part of his mind knew this wasn’t true, but the thought of avoiding the torture again overrode it.

  “We went into an opening in the hillside.” He said it quietly, in a soft monotone. Instantly the itching subsided, replaced by a pleasant warmth radiating from his solar plexus. He sighed.

  “We know that much. Once you went in, what did you see?”

  Chris closed his eyes. His forehead creased. “A long, dark tunnel. We thought… Glen thought it was too dangerous, that we shouldn’t keep going. Lewis was worried, too, about drop-offs, holes in the floor. But we kept going, and it opened out. Then we realized we could see. It wasn’t quite as dark. Elisa said she was scared, wanted to turn back. She was holding my arm…” He smiled at the memory. “Why do you want to know all of this? Don’t you already know what was down there?”

  “If we knew, we’d hardly be going to the trouble of asking you, would we?” The itch came back, slowly ramping up, still tolerable but unpleasant. Like bugs crawling inside his skull, inside his stomach, under his skin. “We know some. We need to find out more. And what you might have told others. Continue.”

  “We kept going.” The itching diminished again, the warmth returning. They were manipulating the pleasure and pain circuitry of his brain. He knew enough neuroscience to understand it. Still, it was hard to resist, even knowing what they were doing. Even knowing he should not respond. He hoped he’d have the strength to refuse to answer if it was something important, but he simultaneously realized that he didn’t. If they turned up the gain on the discomfort enough, he would cooperate. His mind might rebel, but his body would do what it was told, like a rat in a cage pushing a lever to activate the reward centers of the brain, doing it over and over, to the exclusion of everything else, until finally it died.

  “We saw there was light ahead. It looked like artificial light. So we kept going. There were lights in the ceiling. Glen said he was scared, wanted to go back, but he didn’t want to go back down the tunnel alone. Mary was terrified, but curious. She loved novelty, loved anything out of the ordinary and exciting, so she made a big act of being scared but was near the front of the group of us. And we came into a big, hollowed-out room, brightly lit.” .

  The prompt came quickly. “And what did you see there?”

  He frowned at the image in front of his closed eyes, and then he opened them wide, but he could still see it, as if it was there with him. For a moment, he was mute with sheer incredulity.

  How could something this momentous have been buried for thirty years? Here was the answer to the link between him and his six friends, why all of them had been obsessed with outer space. Here was the link, however it had been suppressed. “It’s a spacecraft. A huge spacecraft. My God.”

  “Ah.”

  “It’s not made by humans.”

  “No,” the man breathed in Chris’s ear. “No, indeed it was not.”

  There was a sudden, sharp increase in the warmth in Chris’s belly. He was being rewarded for cooperating. The warmth spread across him, rippling like waves across the bare skin on his chest, then down, down into his groin. He felt his penis stiffening.

  “What did you see then?”

  He gave an involuntary moan of pleasure, and the warmth spiked again.

  The voice became insistent. “Answer me. Or I’ll make it stop. I’ll bring back the discomfort. Be quick.”

  “It’s damaged. It looks like it crash-landed. Mary went up and touched it. There doesn’t seem to be anyone there, but it must have been brought underground… somehow… Glen said the cave was a lava tube. There was no way the spacecraft had gotten there on its own.”

  “No, he was right about that. What happened then?”

  “Gavin has a camera. He’s going to take some photographs.”

  He paused, swallowed, and suddenly he realized that what he was seeing was only in his mind, that it was all something that had happened thirty years ago. Between the pleasure, and the vividness of his memories, he had felt for a moment like he was actually back there, standing in that cool, dimly-lit cave, Elisa still with her hand still on his arm, all of them staring at the wrecked vehicle of an alien race. “Gavin was excited. He took his camera out, and fiddled with it, then started snapping pictures. When the flash went off, someone must have seen it, because people came in. We got caught. They took us away, deeper into the cave complex. We were interrogated.”

  “Tell me what you were asked, and what you answered.”

  “We told them we had found the cave by accident. And we told them where the cave mouth was. They didn’t know about that. Not until the seven of us stumbled in.”

  “How could they not have known that?”

  “It’s a huge cave complex.” His eyes were still closed, but he could see it clearly. “And the tunnel by which we came in was narrow. We heard them say the opening in the hillside must have only recently been exposed by erosion, and they would fill it in, to prevent any other hikers from finding it.”

  “Ah. I see. A sensible precaution. What happened to you next, after you were caught?”

  “They separated us. I was taken into a small room by two men. One was a young guy, not much older than I was. Athletic-looking, tough, with red hair. The other was an older, heavy-set swarthy man who seemed to be in charge. There was-— it looked like alien technology. They punished me when I refused to answer.”

  A faint laugh. “Just so. The same is true here. Cooperation is rewarded, refusal is punished. It is a remarkably simple system. That much both ourselves and our enemies have realized.”

  “There was some kind of lab. They had all sorts of devices laid out on tables. It looked like the same material the ship was made of. I don’t know what they were for.”

  “They didn’t discuss any of them with you, I presume.”

  “No.”

  “A pity. But I feared as much. It was too much to hope for that you’d have details about what they’d recovered.”

  “But you know some of it, don’t you?”

  “Some. Not enough. We would like all of it. One day soon, perhaps.”

  But Chris was pulled back into memories, and his eyes opened wide. “They were going to kill us.”

  “Yes. I would imagine so.”

  “But then they changed their minds. They said they’d wipe our memories, instead. Seven college kids disappearing would raise too much suspicion. There’d be search parties. So they put a gun up against my head—”

  “Not a gun, I am certain, although it may have looked like one.”

  He swallowed again. “I thought they were going to kill me. I felt a cold piece of metal touch my forehead. Then there was a shock, like touching an electric fence. My ears were ringing.”

  “And they led you out, back to the cave mouth.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you remember anything else?”

  Chris didn’t answer for a moment. The itch returned, a prickling beneath his navel, behind his eyes. His erection dwindled, and he squeezed his eyes closed.r />
  “What you’re doing to me now—” It was an effort to talk. Much easier to cooperate, to let them stroke his pleasure centers, to relax into it. Much harder to fight back… “What you’re doing to me now. It’s alien technology, isn’t it? This halo, and the way it’s making me feel things…”

  “Oh, indeed it is.” The old man laughed as the prickling intensified. “But you’re not answering the question. Do you remember anything else?”

  “From the cave?”

  “Anything else connected to what you saw.”

  “No. Nothing. I really can’t think of anything else.”

  The intensity of the discomfort rose, just slightly, like a warning. “One more thing, Mr. Franzia. Who is Iktomi7979?”

  “Who?” He, frowned. Again, only a hint of an increase, like insects crawling in his abdomen, making the skin on his belly flutter.

  “Oh, don’t play coy,” the man breathed in his ear. “You know perfectly well who I’m talking about.”

  “I…” Chris stopped, licked his lips. What could he say about this without betraying Elisa? Or was she right now in a different room, also strapped to a table, and undergoing the same interrogation? The idea filled him with rage. That he might die, even that he might be tortured to death, he could accept. That they would be doing the same to Elisa was intolerable. “I have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about.”

  “Oh, I think you do.” The intensity spiked, crossed into actual pain. Chris groaned again, then clamped his mouth and eyes shut. “I think you know exactly who I’m talking about. Ms. Reed mentioned him in her email to you. He knew Mr. McCormick. That much was clear from the outset. But we have strong reason to believe that he knew all of you, Mr. Franzia. He knew every one of the seven. And we need to know his identity. So I will repeat my question again… who is Iktomi7979?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The pain became a burning, searing sensation, like he was being torn apart by red-hot pincers. He strained against the straps, muscles burning with exertion. Didn’t they do that, for real, back in the Dark Ages? Heat metal spikes in the fire, drive them into the feet, into the belly, into the eyes. His mind fought to convince his body that the pain wasn’t real.