Kill Switch

by Jonathan Maberry

  That was bad, but it was fixable. Erskine had anticipated some kind of problem along these lines, though not as massive. The null field was the golden egg at the end of this hunt. A controllable, predictable, reproducible electrical null field was the whole point of Gateway. Erskine had been putting increasing pressure on Bell to obtain the last component for safe management of the device—the crystal firing regulator—but so far even though Prospero now had three of the Unlearnable Truths he had failed to discover exactly what that was. Prospero said that it was a numerical code for passing the God Machine’s power through transformers attached to each of several large gemstones, but there were thousands of possible patterns, and experimentation to try and crack the code had resulted in damage ranging from explosions to true electromagnetic pulses that fried the machines at Gateway. It was becoming cost prohibitive to do anything more than keep the God Machine in idle mode, and the whole program was millions over budget. Erskine and his superiors were looking to hang the blame on Oscar, and there had been thinly veiled threats about consequences. Bell could lose the contract and there was an outside chance that if it all failed Gateway would require Bell to pay penalties to the government. That would ruin him. Bell had coerced Stark and his staff at Ballard to turn the screws on Prospero and he’d railed at Mr. Priest to find the rest of the books. He was bleeding money.

  And now Sails was here, talking about how much she hated the God Machine.

  Oscar Bell wanted to scream.

  “What’s the problem?” he asked cautiously.

  “Side effects,” she said.

  “What are you talking about? This whole thing is about exploiting the side effects. The whole Kill Switch project is a fucking side effect.”

  “No,” she said. “Not that. It’s the dreams. Those terrible dreams…”

  Bell’s heart nearly jumped into his throat. Memories of what Stark had told him after Prospero’s machine blew up the first lab at Ballard. Oscar had never shared that part of the God Machine with Sails. Until now he’d thought it was only tied to that one test. “What dreams…?”

  “It started that night,” said Sails. “Bad dreams. Jesus, Oscar…”

  She told him about a problem that was not reported at first, and not taken seriously even after people started talking about it. Everyone put it down to stress and grief over the disaster. It was only after the second machine was fired that Dr. Erskine and his staff started paying attention to those dreams. And to their effects. The second machine ran for three weeks before failing. The Gateway scientists had done a lot of work on the sequencing of the power regulators, and though they were far from perfect, they seemed to allow the God Machine to run in idle mode, at 5 percent capacity.

  The night of that first day erupted into screams.

  “Why?” demanded Bell. “What was happening?”

  That night several members of the staff reported extremely strange and unusually vivid dreams. It took the base psychologists nearly a week to put together a cohesive story and even longer to cross-check it. The upshot was that during the time the energy from the God Machine was active in low idle, several staff members claimed to have been inside the dreams of their friends and coworkers, and two of them swore that they had been home. One in Saratoga Springs and the other in Cheyenne. During those dreams they were able to see things at those locations with incredible clarity, and one of them remembered what was on TV. When this was checked out, the substance of those observations matched reality with eerie precision.

  So far they determined that one in eleven people tended to have dreams while the machine was idling. However, two in fifteen had the kinds of vivid dreams where they appeared to have “traveled” to other locations and witnessed events there.

  At first Sails couldn’t believe it. No one could. Until they had no choice. The machine was left idling for a week, and during that time several members of the team, including Erskine, went “dreamwalking,” as it came to be called. Occasionally their dreaming selves roamed far away from Gateway, but more often inside the dreaming minds—or even the wide-awake minds—of other people at the base. Everyone was rattled. Sails could understand that. Everyone down there had secrets. Everyone who worked in that program had made compromises and decisions that perhaps they did not care to have scrutinized.

  One industrial spy was outed and was shipped off to a black site for fun and games. One of the soldiers was discovered to have committed two rapes of women during his time in Afghanistan. One of the women was a local, the other was a female soldier. The rapist was scheduled to return home for court-martial but was found outside in the snow with his ankles and wrists tied. It was seventy below.

  Paranoia ran high at Gateway. People began taking sleeping pills, which seemed to work pretty well as a block against invasion. Unfortunately the quality of work product dropped. The pills were banned; everyone’s locker was searched.

  The suicides didn’t start for nearly a month.

  Bell kept his face bland. He’d heard of this sort of thing before. At Ballard after Prospero’s machine blew up, and elsewhere. Howard Shelton of Majestic Three had said that they were working on something like this for the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency. That line of experimentation was labeled Project Stargate and had ultimately failed. It was subsequently handed off to the CIA for evaluation and then terminated.

  Bell thought about his son, and about Prospero’s complex genetics and parentage, if that word could even apply. Prospero was born in one of the M3 labs. The connection couldn’t be coincidental. That offended logic.

  “This dream stuff is real?” asked Bell, careful to keep his excitement out of his voice.

  “Yes,” she said. She sipped more of the bourbon and set the glass down. “They’ve been doing exhaustive tests.”

  “Have you done this? Dreamwalking, I mean.”

  Her eyes slid away. She said, “They sent someone down to interview everyone at Gateway.”

  “Who?”

  “Someone from the CIA,” she said.

  “Christ. Have they reopened Stargate?”

  Sails’s head whipped around and her eyes flared with suspicion and shock. “What? How do you even know about that?”

  “I don’t know much,” he lied. “Howard Shelton’s people were working on it before the project was terminated.”

  “Oscar … has anything like this ever happened with Prospero?”

  “Of course not,” he lied. “I would have told you about that.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Don’t lie to me.”

  “I’m not.”

  It took a while for the doubt to drain away from her eyes. Then she sagged back against the cushions. “I’m afraid to sleep,” she said.

  “Because you’re afraid of dreamwalking?”

  She shook her head slowly. “Because there are so many places you never want to go.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Without turning, Corrine Sails said, “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”

  * * *

  Which is when Oscar Bell woke up.

  He was in his bed. Alone. In a silent house.

  He stretched out a hand to the other side of the bed, but the sheets were smooth and cool, the pillow undented.

  Bell got up and went through every bedroom on that floor, opening doors, looking for her. Calling her name. Then yelling it. He called the guard at the front gate and asked when Corrine Sails left.

  “Left, sir?” asked the guard. “I don’t understand. I can check my logbook, but I’m pretty sure Major Sails hasn’t been here for three or four weeks. Do you want me to—?”

  Bell hung up. He pulled on a robe and ran downstairs to his office. The fire had burned down to a few orange coals. The couch was empty. However, the bottle of Pappy Van Winkle stood on the edge of his desk. There were two glasses on the tables on either side of the couch. His, drained down to a last sip.

  Hers. Filled nearly to the brim with four fingers.
/>   Untouched.

  Oscar Bell stood there for a long, long time.

  In the morning he called Commander Stark at Ballard and told him that he was upping the budget for Prospero’s lab.

  “Sir,” said Stark, “your son seems to have found a comfortable niche, even made a friend. He isn’t spending as much time as he used to in the lab.”

  “Listen to me, you stupid motherfucker,” said Bell in a nearly inhuman tone, “I’m not paying you to make my son comfortable. I don’t want him fucking comfortable. I want him in that goddamn lab. I don’t care what it takes, I don’t care what you have to do, but you get him in there. You do it today. And if his productivity ever drops again, if I don’t hear about a jump in his productivity, then I will come down there and rip your fucking lungs out. Do you hear me, Stark? Am I making myself crystal clear?”

  “Y-yes…”

  “Yes … what?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Bell slammed down the phone. The glass of bourbon was still where he’d found it. Bell went over to the couch, sat down, picked up the glass, and stared into its depths.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  ARKLIGHT SAFE HOUSE

  UNDISCLOSED LOCATION

  BUDAPEST, HUNGARY

  TWO WEEKS AGO

  Harry Bolt caught up to Violin half a block from the library and dogged her heels as she ran down a side street, zigged and zagged through alleys and courtyards, followed her into hotels and out through different exits. When there were people around the woman slowed to a very casual and convincing stroll. She took Harry’s arm as if they were old friends or lovers and she laughed as if he’d said something clever. Once, when a police car was passing, Violin took his face in both hands and kissed him with such fierce intensity that when they were clear and began walking again he had a large and very inconvenient erection.

  After fifteen minutes of random changes of direction, Violin stopped by a parked two-year-old Ford Modeo, produced a key, unlocked the car, and when they were both belted in she drove away at a sedate speed.

  “Where are we going?” he asked.

  “Shut up,” she said. Twenty silent minutes later, when they were at the very fringes of a middle-income residential district, Violin pulled into a garage beside a pleasant two-story home. The house was furnished and clean, but empty. Violin brought the book with her and went upstairs with it, leaving behind an order for him to sit down on the couch and touch nothing. He obeyed.

  She came back fifteen minutes later without the book. She had cleaned herself up and changed out of her black clothes. Now she wore a soft crimson wool sweater over charcoal slacks. No shoes. Her long dark hair was still wet and hung loose down her back.

  She carried a pistol in her hand. “There is a guest bathroom through there,” she said, pointing to a hall that ran between living room and kitchen. “There’s some clothes in a closet. Don’t take long.”

  “But—”

  She sat down with the pistol on her thigh. Violin didn’t say anything else.

  Harry went into the guest bathroom, checked it for bugs and cameras and found nothing. The window was block glass and could not be opened. He peed, then got undressed and started the shower. While he waited for the water mix to adjust, he stared at his face in the mirror. He was not a bad-looking man, he decided. Like a slightly chubby Matt Damon. Not actually fat, but not built for the kind of things he’d had to do tonight. Not built for running, that was for sure.

  He saw that his thighs, buttocks, and back were stained dark with red from the pool of blood he’d fallen into. Olvera and Florida’s blood. Harry’s stomach did a few backflips and he thought he would hurl. He didn’t.

  When the nausea ebbed, he climbed into the shower and dialed up the heat to see if he could boil this all out of his brain and off his skin. Even though his skin glowed pink and spotless when he toweled off, he knew that there were some things that can’t be scrubbed away. He folded the towel and looked through the closets for something to wear.

  He found a pair of bright yellow bike shorts and a concert T-shirt advertising the 2012 This Is Desolation Tour for the Hungarian heavy metal band Shell Beach. The shorts and the shirt were one size too small. He studied himself in the mirror and decided that he looked like a black and yellow sausage.

  When he returned to the living room, Violin was tapping away on a small laptop. She looked up with her stern face.

  And burst out laughing.

  “Bite me,” Harry mumbled as he crawled onto the couch, his face burning. He snatched up a decorative pillow and placed it over his lap.

  Violin dabbed at a tear at the corner of her eye. “I’m sorry, Mr. Bolt, but I know your father and I suppose I’m guilty of being unfair to you by expecting you to be like him.”

  He frowned, uncertain as to whether that was a compliment or a slam. Either way he didn’t like it. “You know my dad? How? Have you been on a case with him?”

  There was a flicker of something in her expression. Distaste? That’s how it looked to Harry. “Harcourt Bolton is an intense individual. He is a hero of your country.”

  “Yeah, he’s the cat’s balls.”

  Violin frowned. “I do not know that expression.”

  “Doesn’t matter. He’s not here and I am, even if that’s a disappointment. Can we focus on what just happened instead of who I’m not living up to?”

  She shrugged. “Certainly, let’s do that. Tell me what you know.”

  “Um…,” he began, and suddenly realized that he was in a conversation with someone who, at best, was an agent of a foreign power. Even if her government and his agency were allies, that seldom formed an invitation to be chatty. She nodded, clearly aware of the speed bump he’d just hit.

  “Then let me tell you what my people found out,” she said. “You are hunting a black marketer named Ohan who you believe is smuggling a portable EMP weapon called Kill Switch into the United States on behalf of ISIL. How am I doing so far?”

  “Go on,” he said in a voice that cracked only a little.

  “Your intelligence,” she said, leaning on the word hard enough to make it bend, “is faulty. But not entirely. The materials Ohan is shipping do, in fact, originate with ISIL. But these are not, as we’ve seen, materials to support new ISIL recruits in the States.”

  “So it’s what? The Islamic State Book-of-the-Month Club?”

  She laughed. “You know, you remind me of a friend of mine. Another American agent.”

  “Oh, and is he a figure of fun, too?”

  “Hardly. He is the single most dangerous man I have ever met.”

  This time she leaned on the word “man,” as if the fact that this guy was dangerous did not mean that he was the most dangerous person. After what Harry had seen back at the library, he was willing to bet that whoever was at the top of her list had two X chromosomes. Fair enough. Harry considered himself a progressive modern male. He was the last guy to try and prove that men always had to be tougher than women. He knew better.

  “Who killed my team? Was that ISIL? Because none of them looked Middle Eastern to me.”

  “They are not. They had nothing to do with the shipment. They do not work for either the black marketer or for the ISIL team involved in this project. In fact they were there to make sure that shipment was never delivered.”

  “Yeah, but who are they?”

  “I told you who they were.”

  “Right, something about a bunch of locksmiths who burn books for fun. I don’t know what that means.”

  “The Fraternal Brothers of the Lock,” she said. “The Ordo Fratrum Claustrorum. They were a kill team sent by the church to destroy that book.”

  “Whose church?”

  “The Catholic Church, of course.”

  “Why ‘of course’? Last I heard the Catholics weren’t sending kill teams out.”

  She snorted. “You don’t know much about the world, do you, Mr. Bolt?”

  “It’s Harry … and what do you mean?”r />
  “The church is a political organization as well as a religious one. It is ancient and very powerful and the Vatican has many rooms. Many ‘cells.’ Not even the pope knows a tenth of what goes on inside the church.”

  “So these guys are, what? Militant censors?”

  “A bit more than that, Mr. Bolt. The agenda of the Brotherhood runs very deep,” she said. “It is their belief that certain books contain more than heretical or blasphemous writing. They believe—truly believe—that these books have actual power.”

  “Power? Like what kind of power? Are we talking magic here?”

  She pursed her lips. “‘Magic’ is an imprecise word, Harry. It suggests the supernatural, and my people do not agree. This is not a world of ghosts and goblins. Not in the way most people think. Think of it more like science. What most people consider to be supernatural is actually an aspect, or perhaps many aspects, of science that has not yet been properly studied, measured, or named. Are you familiar with science at all? The belief among certain quantum physicists that there are other dimensions? Possibly many others?”

  “I may have read something. Saw a few specials on Discovery Channel.”

  She made a mouth of mild disapproval. “You do realize that science and technology are the major stakes in all important espionage, don’t you? This is the twenty-first century, Harry. The key battles of our age will be fought in cyberspace and in labs.”

  “Fine, and when you’re done blowing Neil DeGrasse Tyson maybe you can explain what the frak you’re talking about.”

  She laughed. “You really do remind me of my friend. A shorter, dumpier, less intelligent, and less attractive version of him.”

  “Hilarious.”

  Then he saw the laughter in her eyes and realized she was actually making a joke rather than directly mocking him. It pulled a small, faint smile from him.