Kill Switch

by William Hertling

  Sharp knocks at the door startled everyone. The lock turned on its own, the door opened silently, and Shadow Cat poked her head in. “Um, Igloo, all these lights started blinking.”

  Igloo glanced at the smartphone that Shadow held out. Oh, fuck. She snatched the phone away.

  “Multiple cars with encrypted radio signals heading this way.” Igloo looked up. “Can you come down with us, help us get our bags fast?”

  Shadow nodded.

  “Let’s go everyone.”

  They ran out the door in a line, everyone’s eyes suddenly wide with fear.

  “Hold onto your plans,” Igloo called out, as they ran downstairs. “If you get caught or stopped, claim you’re following Angie’s instructions that she gave you the week before she died.”

  They rounded a corner and Igloo yelled back up the stairs. “You don’t know what the overall purpose is. If they believe you’re just following orders, and those of a dead person, they’ll be less harsh.”

  At the first floor, Shadow Cat ran ahead of them to the bag check desk. She and Igloo passed out bags to everyone. “Good luck,” Igloo said to each person as she handed over their suitcases.

  Then suddenly she was handling her own suitcase, and she realized it was only her and Essie. She wondered where everyone else had gone already. She made the mistake of glancing at her phone. The agents were close, really close. She pinched and zoomed…they were around this block. Fuck.

  Shadow Cat saw the panicked look on Igloo’s face.

  “You need a car?”

  Igloo nodded.

  Shadow handed over her keys. “A white Volvo 240. On the employee level, third floor down.” She pointed them toward the parking garage. “Go.”

  She looked to Essie, who nodded, and they ran together. Into the garage, down three flights of stairs. They emerged, breathing hard. “Split up. Look for it.”

  Essie called out a second later, and Igloo ran to join her at the old station wagon.

  “Let me drive,” Essie said.

  “I can drive.”

  “You’re a biker first, driver second. Let me drive.”

  Igloo nodded and tossed over the keys. They shoved their bags into the back seat, and Igloo turned off the radio scanners in case they were emitting a traceable signal. As she settled into the car, she wondered how the government had tracked them to Powell’s, and exactly why their interest had been piqued at this moment. Did they know the T2 team was getting together for the first time? And if so, how?

  Essie pulled out onto the street slowly and drove slowly. “Don’t fault me, I’m trying to blend in.”

  “Your driving is good. No worries,” Igloo said. She turned to look at a black SUV with tinted windows. A man in a windbreaker, shirt and tie stood out front. Igloo didn’t recognize him in particular, but he was dressed just like the agents that picked her up this morning. Igloo wondered again whether Agent Forrest was telling the truth about working with Angie.

  Essie turned the corner, and a few feet later hit the brakes. The old Volvo screeched to a halt, and Igloo looked up, startled, to see Ben and Diana on the sidewalk next to them being confronted by two of the federal agents.

  “Why the fuck are they together? They were supposed to split up.”

  “What do you want me to do?” Essie asked.

  “I can’t afford to lose them both. Drive to the next block and keep an eye on them in the mirror. Let me think.” Igloo pulled her hat a little lower as they drove past and tried to watch out of the corner of her eye.

  She reached into the back seat to grab her laptop. She couldn’t overpower the agents. Would a diversion of some kind help? Make them forget about Ben and Diana? No…there’s no way they’d sacrifice the bird already in their hand.

  She looked back using the visor mirror. “Where’d they go?”

  “The agents made them get into that vehicle at the curb,” Essie said. “The black one with the tinted windows.”

  “Did any of the agents get into the car?”

  “Not that I could see from here,” Essie said. “But they could already have someone in the SUV. Should I drive away?”

  “No. I can’t lose anyone this early in the game. Give me a few seconds. I’ve got to load some software. Keep an eye on them.”

  Essie pulled the car into a loading zone a quarter of the way down the block.

  Igloo decrypted the secondary drive, full of tools she and Angie had accumulated. She had to pray they still worked. The thing about exploits is that they got closed. Years ago, she and Angie had made do with a combination of cheap, weird exploits that Angie had bought, in combination with backdoors Angie had through her job at Tomo. But in the last year, they’d had the money to buy first class exploits on the darknet, stuff that no one else had. Which meant, in theory, they’d work longer, because if no one used them, then no one would know to fix the holes that made them possible.

  She’d need to compromise everyone’s phones around her…a lot of phones. Luckily they still had the backdoors in Tapestry. Part of her cringed, because these backdoors weren’t going to be in T2. If they succeeded, in a week or two, even she wouldn’t be able to do this.

  The process took a few minutes…waiting for phones to get online, receive the control packets that Igloo sent, connect to the secret backchannel where Igloo could issue more commands.

  “They still there?” Igloo asked, without looking up.

  “Yes,” Essie said. “One of the agents is talking into a phone or a walkie-talkie or something. But as far as I can tell, Ben and Diana are still in the car.”

  “Okay, drive around a few blocks. We want to come up alongside that car, but we have to do it when no one is in front of us. You need to time it just right.”

  “Got it,” Essie said, putting the car in gear.

  As they circled, Igloo readied the script she needed. She looked at the car they were in. The ancient Volvo they were driving wouldn’t have anything wireless in the car, so that made things simpler.

  Essie waited at a corner longer than she needed to, waiting for the cars to clear the block ahead. “You ready?”

  “Go for it. Pull up alongside them with enough room for their door and ours to open. Quietly if you can.”

  When the Volvo was a few car lengths behind the black SUV, Igloo ran the script. Igloo’s script connected to the local network of smartphones, using their wireless radio transceivers to rebroadcast the necessary commands to trigger a half dozen different car computer exploits. A few seconds later, a cacophony of car horns sounded from vehicles all around them. Less visibly, a second command simultaneously unlocked every car door in the vicinity.

  Angie would have freaked over the waste of so many exploits at once, but Igloo had no time for finesse. She had one shot at getting this right. Igloo couldn’t see the agents from here, but she had to believe they were distracted.

  A few seconds later, the SUV’s rear passenger side door opened. Diana peeked her head out, rushed to the Volvo and got in. Ben followed a step or two behind her.

  “Go quietly, slowly.” Igloo said to Essie, as Ben cleared the doorway. “Don’t slam that door, Ben. You two get down so no one can see you.”

  Ben nodded and eased the door shut as Essie pulled away.

  Igloo glanced over her shoulder. One agent appeared to be talking on the radio. The other opened the car door, then glanced around. Igloo was already half a block away, and everyone was driving erratically, both looking for the source of car horns coming from everywhere as well as trying to stop their own horns from sounding.

  “Where to?” Essie said.

  “Head north, toward the St. Johns Bridge. I need a minute to think.”

  “Disguise your faces,” Diana said from the back seat. “I think they found us with some facial recognition software. We were a block away in the middle of a crowd, and they zeroed in on the two of us.”

  “Why were you two even together?”

  “I don’t know,” Ben said, his voice rou
gh, like maybe he was crying. “We do everything together.”

  Igloo shook her head at their stupidity. She looked around the car. She came up with a first aid kit in the glovebox, and pulled out the biggest bandage she could find and tried to stick it across Essie’s face.

  Essie pulled away. “What are you doing?”

  “Obscuring your face. The infrared emitters only work indoors. The traffic cameras will still be able to pick us up. Stay still.” She put the bandage across part of Essie’s lip and nose.

  “Ouch. Jeez…are you trying to give me a harelip?” Essie tried to look in the rear view mirror.

  “Don’t fuss.” Igloo did the same thing with three smaller bandages to her own face. “It’ll fool the automated facial recognition software. For now. You two keep down in the back seat.”

  Igloo sat bolt upright. “Shit, shit.”

  “What?” Diana asked.

  “If they caught you two coming into our car, then they’ll know what car we’re in, and they could be tracking us by satellite right now.”

  “Tracking us by satellite?” Diana said. “Look, it’s one thing that they tried to arrest us in person, but being tracked by satellite like the world’s most wanted terrorist? It just seems crazy.”

  Igloo bit back an angry reply. Oh, good grief. She was becoming Angie. Now she realized how Angie must have felt when Igloo continuously doubted her. She hoped that everyone wasn’t going to subject her to the same never-ending criticism.

  “Just trust me. No matter how paranoid I seem, your safety depends on you incorporating paranoid thinking into everything you do. Now shush, and let me think.”

  But the thoughts she needed wouldn’t come over the unending panic and infinite recursion of negative thoughts. What if the government was tracking them? What if they were just around the corner? What would happen if the four of them were caught? Would there be enough critical mass for the rest of the team to finish the V2 release? Would—

  “Hey, look at me!” Essie called from the driver’s seat.

  Igloo looked up, barely able to even see Essie through the haze of negativity swarming her head. She felt frozen in time, impossibly sluggish.

  “You’re panicking,” Essie said. “Stop thinking about whatever it is that you’re thinking about. We need to ditch this car. You and Angie have safe houses and cars all over the city. Where’s the closest one, and how do we get from this car to that car, without them following us?”

  “Yeah. Right. A car.” Igloo knew she needed a car but couldn’t remember what came next.

  “Where can we find a car?” Essie sounded like the epitome of calmness, and vaguely Igloo realized Essie was carefully calming her down.

  “Kelly has a conch shell she painted white and blue and it’s in her bed.”

  “Um, what are you talking about?”

  “A mnemonic. There’s a car in St. Johns, near Pier Park. We go in one side of the park, we get under tree cover, and we go out the other side. Park on the south end.”

  “Where do I go? I’m used to GPS and maps.”

  Nobody answered. Igloo struggled to remember how to get there, and realized she needed a map, too. It’s funny. How did her parents know how to get around? She recalled the geographical data Angie had downloaded into their devices.

  “I’ve cached the map data for the whole region,” Igloo said, scrambling for her phone. “The GPS doesn’t require transmissions, so maps I can provide.”

  Chapter 41

  Igloo got them to the vicinity of a safe house on her list. She had Essie parked the vehicle under a carport at a nearby home for sale.

  Ben and Diana and Essie followed along as Igloo led the way to a small row of storefronts bordering the residential neighborhood. They went around the back where Angie had leased a storeroom in the rear of an upholstery shop. Igloo rushed to get online, eager to check in with everyone, but they’d barely been inside for ten minutes when she detected nearby encrypted radios. By the time they got outside, they heard the thump of an approaching helicopter.

  That started a process of continual evasion that lasted hours, as the government chased them from one safe house to the next. Igloo scanned all four of them repeatedly but found nothing that could be betraying their position. They swapped vehicles several times, tried switching cars under the cover of trees, but nothing fooled their pursuers.

  It was the middle of the night before the pattern finally changed. Igloo decided to stop using her safe list, and instead picked a random residential street. She walked down the block checking garbage cans, looking for an empty one, and hoping that meant no one was home. She finally found one, and broke a basement window. After carefully picking out the glass, she watched the street as Ben, Diana, and Essie entered. She followed them, descending into a dingy basement packed with boxes and old furniture. They hadn’t been bothered again for hours, although Igloo still heard an occasional circling helicopter, which kept her on edge.

  The others eventually fell asleep. Essie had pulled her coat over her head and was curled up in a ball on a musty couch. Diana slept in a ratty, cat-scratched chair, while Ben snored on what looked like a dining room table.

  Igloo couldn’t sleep. Where had she gone wrong? The government had chased them from one safe house to the next. They’d burned three locations and four vehicles, and every time they thought were safe, the government closed in again. She’d scanned everyone multiple times and found no evidence of trackers. Near as she could tell, their electronics were not leaking any details. And they were using good, untraceable digital connections.

  Agent Forrest had said there was a mole inside Tapestry. Angie had said the same thing. Igloo found the idea plausible enough, but she’d assumed the mole would be somewhere inside the larger company, not right here on the T2 team. And yet…she’d leaked nothing to the larger team about their location. But that left just the four of them: Ben, Diana, Essie, and herself. She was tired, exhausted actually…they’d been on the go for almost forty-eight hours, and she wanted sleep desperately. But she was afraid to sleep, like the characters in that movie she’d watched with her mom when she was a kid, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. If she fell asleep now, she was sure that one of them would turn into a government agent, and when Igloo woke up, she’d find herself under arrest.

  She needed to figure it out herself.

  Could any of the people in this room actually be working for the government? She couldn’t see it. Ben was one of the early employees. They’d hired him with the first big round of Tapestry funding. He’d worked on an open source web browser before that. Igloo had even been on his hiring committee and reviewed his git history.

  Diana had come a few months later, a University of Washington grad, who worked at two big corporations before she punted to find work with meaning. She and Ben had been inseparable since, and they were subversive even by Tapestry’s standards, bucking HR rules and refusing to be pinned down by management or marketing.

  That brought her to Essie. Thinking of Essie this way made her feel palpably sick, her stomach roiled with unease. The problem came when she tried to face the facts with any sort of cold rigor. She’d known Essie less than a year. Essie was her dream partner, the yang to her yin, the perfect complement to bring Igloo out of her shell and make her live life fully. But could she be too perfect? Could a mole really get that close to her? Would it even make sense for the government to implant someone, not inside the company, but as the partner of a key employee? If so, what would Essie be doing for them? She couldn’t make sense of it.

  A tear rolled down her cheek, and she forced herself to look over at the Essie-shaped bundle curled up asleep next to her. She was the perfect person to get Igloo to let down her guard and trust another human. She always imagined a life together with Essie, as cliché and corny as that sounded. The irony was Essie had gained her trust by submitting so totally to Igloo.

  A part of Igloo felt like a brittle building cracking apart in the tremors of an earthquake. If
Essie was a government agent…really had violated her trust…then everything was a lie. Everything. This made even considering Essie an agent of the government almost impossible to stare in the face. If it turned out to be true, she would never be able to trust anyone again.

  And yet, who else could it be? Why would the perfect person just happen to come along at the perfect time?

  She ground her hands into her eyes, trying to fight the exhaustion. She had to be crazy right? This was sleep deprivation talking. Essie was there for her every time. And yet, of course, she would be, if that was her assignment.

  There had to be a way to figure it out. Angie would know how, or maybe not. After all, she didn’t know who the mole was either. If even Angie couldn’t figure it out, then Igloo was wholly inadequate.

  But Angie would never have let anyone get as close as Igloo and Essie had grown. Angie simply didn’t allow herself to be that vulnerable. She didn’t let anyone in. Not Igloo, or even her husband, not totally. Even the small amounts she’d let Igloo and Thomas in had only been under extraordinary circumstances.

  Agent Forrest had been the one to confirm that there was a mole but said nothing as to who that mole might be. Shit, it was like playing werewolf with Ben and Harper at SXSW. There was no real information to go on. Everything was guesses.

  If both Angie and Essie were taken from her, she would have no one. No support left in the world. She’d be utterly alone.

  She toyed with the phone in her hand. She had Forrest’s number, and she could route the text message over secure channels. Fuck it, she couldn’t hide here in the basement while helicopters made yet another pass. She might not have Angie any more, but now she needed to be Angie. Cold, functional, calculating. Doing what was necessary, no matter the cost.

  She could do this.

  She set up the encrypted tunnel, routed through a call center in Seattle.

  “You know who this is?” she sent.

  The reply came less than a minute later.

  “Yes. You’re very hot right now.”