Kill Switch

by Jonathan Maberry

  Dr. Shaw had swept everything off of her desk and was copulating madly with a male temp half her age. Her hands were locked around the temp’s throat and as she screamed herself into an orgasm she crushed his windpipe. The temp had made absolutely no attempt to resist her.

  Nate watched a moment. Dr. Shaw was wrinkled and fat and ugly. He picked up a wooden chair, hefted it, and very quietly and efficiently beat her to death. Then he took her keycard, which provided access to parts of the building that were off-limits to anyone but the most senior research staff. He took the stairs down to the high-security floor, using the keycard at every point, entered the lab, and went to the hot room. The lab staff was gone, but there were splashes of blood, broken equipment, feces, and torn pieces of lab coats everywhere. Nate used Dr. Shaw’s keycard to open the hot room.

  When he left the building five minutes later, the fire companies and police cars were screaming into the parking lot. Nate walked to his car, opened the trunk, removed a commercial Blade 350 QX3AP quadcopter drone that he had bought from Ace Hardware, opened a small metal container that he’d installed where a camera was usually affixed, placed sixty-five vials inside the container, sealed it, started the drone, and let it fly.

  A policeman saw it rise and came running over, yelling, his gun already in his hand. Nate Cross watched the drone go up and then saw the shift in vector as the drone’s controls were taken over by someone else. The drone rose and turned and vanished into the morning sky as the police officer wrestled Nate to the ground.

  INTERLUDE NINETEEN

  BALLARD MILITARY BOARDING SCHOOL

  POLAND, MAINE

  WHEN PROSPERO WAS EIGHTEEN

  The heat from the burning building chased them all the way to the fence.

  The two of them were flash-burned, dazed, caught off guard by the intensity of the blast. The school itself was dark, though, except for the fire. The God Machine had consumed the lights, the power, the alarms.

  Despite the pain of the burns, King and Prospero laughed as they ran.

  Behind them there were shouts. Yells. The deep-throated barks of the pursuing dogs.

  When they reached the wall, King pushed Prospero up, steadied him, helped him climb, shoved him over into the bushes on the other side.

  King was nearly to the top himself when he lost his footing. His sneaker slipped out of the toehold in the chain link. King wailed as he plunged backward.

  The sound he made as he fell was horrible. Like a wet stick breaking.

  “No!” screamed Prospero as he lunged toward the fence to climb back.

  The dogs were coming. Four of them. Big shepherds racing far ahead of the guards.

  “R—run…,” gasped King. He flapped one arm to wave Prospero away. “Go…”

  Then his arm and head fell backward as the dogs swarmed in.

  Prospero screamed.

  And screamed.

  And he ran.

  The gates opened.

  The dogs ran so much faster.

  But the fire ran faster still.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  THE PIER

  DMS SPECIAL PROJECTS OFFICE

  SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA

  SEPTEMBER 8, 8:05 A.M.

  “Give it to me without the candy coating,” I said.

  Church frowned. “You’ve been gravely ill, Captain. How sure are you that jumping back in is the best call?”

  My answer was a glare that boiled a few degrees above nuclear.

  “Fair enough. Where would you like to start?” he asked. “Gateway?”

  “No, Houston. How many of our teams are on the ground? Where are we with the investigation? I want to head out there as soon as we’re done here.”

  Church shook his head. “It’s under investigation. No one has taken credit, though ISIL is at the top of the list of likely suspects. The president convened a special task force that is currently being headed up by Harcourt Bolton. We are assisting as needed.”

  I shot to my feet. “Whoa, wait a goddamn minute … we’re assisting? Since when are we anyone’s water boys? I mean, even for Bolton.”

  “It’s fair to say that POTUS is less enthusiastic about the DMS than I’d like.”

  “Why? Because of Gateway? I already told you I made a judgment call and—”

  “No, Captain, Gateway is significant, but a number of our recent cases have had unfortunate outcomes.”

  I slumped down into my chair. “First I’m hearing about it.”

  “It’s been a busy week while you’ve been out of it.” Church tapped crumbs off his cookie. “I don’t much subscribe to ‘luck,’ but this has had the earmarks of a losing streak. Gateway is just one of several instances of coming out on the wrong side of a critical play.”

  I held up my hand. “Oh, really? And how exactly is Gateway an example of us dropping the ball? All that weird stuff that happened down there? Those clones or whatever they were? That machine? And the city? You saw the videos, man, you saw the photos, you have all of our field telemetry. What do you think was going on down there?”

  “Captain,” he said slowly, “there was absolutely nothing stored on any of your cameras. There was no telemetry from the body cams. There is not one shred of evidence to support what you claim to have witnessed.”

  I stared at him in open-mouthed shock. “What the hell are you talking about? We documented everything. Everything.”

  “It appears,” said Church, “that all of the data has been wiped.”

  “Wiped? No,” I said, rebelling at the thought. “No, no, no. No way. How’s that even possible?”

  “I had your verbal report following your departure from Gateway,” he said. “Since their recovery, First Sergeant Sims and Master Sergeant Rabbit have prepared extensive and detailed after-action reports. All three of you said there was a power outage of some kind, so it’s possible, however unlikely, that this is our culprit.”

  “It hit us like an EMP,” I said, searching my memories. “Knocked everything out, even the flashlights. But then the electronics rebooted without signs of damage. Doesn’t that ring a bell? You want to tell me the president doesn’t think that’s somehow connected to Houston? Or the NASCAR thing? Or the damn presidential debate?”

  “He does, in fact, think those events are connected,” said Church. “However, we have no proof of any kind that it is the same technology Dr. Erskine was working on at Gateway. Bug has not been able to find any records explaining what the Kill Switch project was.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I bellowed as I leapt to my feet, “it was called fucking Kill Switch!”

  Church waited for me to sit down. I did. “First things first. I had our tech team go over all of your equipment and it is in working order, so that rules out an EMP. Dr. Hu’s electronics team is working up some theories on how this might have happened. He has been following a few promising leads and his report is pending. So, let’s table that part of it for now. For the moment we are left without photographic or telemetric reference. There is nothing, in fact, beyond your own testimony.”

  I closed my eyes.

  “If this is too much for you, Captain, I can have someone take you home,” said Church, gesturing toward the door.

  “Don’t,” I warned him, and he nodded. We both knew that too much time had already passed. We had to get somewhere with this. I drank the tepid coffee and poured a fresh cup. “Okay, okay, then tell me what you think. Do you believe my account of what happened down there?”

  “I have no way of knowing what to believe.”

  “You can trust my word, for a start.”

  “This isn’t a matter of trust, Captain. I believe that you are telling the truth as you know it. The same goes for your men. I do not now, nor have I at any time, believed you were lying to me. However, all three of you were exposed to a virus and other biological and chemical agents that have yet to be identified. You were also struck by some kind of energy wave from the machine you discovered. There is no way to theorize o
n how these things may have affected your perceptions. The lack of corroborating information did not wash well with the president.” He paused and sighed. “The subsequent failure of several other missions by DMS teams hasn’t helped.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? What failures?”

  He briefly explained some of what had happened, and hearing it was like getting hit by a series of very hard punches.

  Broadway Team had gone after Somali pirates who were doing some contract work for an ISIL group out of Nigeria. The pirates were planting limpet mines on ships. Broadway went after them in what should have been an easy hunt-and-kill mission. Instead they got lost at sea and wrecked their Zodiac on a sandbar. Two bombs went off and two ships went down.

  Then Scorpion and Rattlesnake Teams signed on with an ATF squad to rip down a cartel that was using drug mules to smuggle military drone parts to a radical militia crew in San Antonio. One of the shooters from Rattlesnake accidentally discharged his weapon at exactly the wrong moment. The result? Nine dead, including three ATF agents. Sure, they got some of the bad guys, too, but not all of them. The drones made it to San Antonio and the FBI had to step in and stop the militia men from blowing up the Alamo.

  In Florida the Tiger Shark Team commander, Glory Price, apparently lost her mind in the middle of an operation. She turned her gun on her team, killing two and wounding four before finally shooting herself in the heart. Glory was a friend of mine and that was hard to hear. Damned hard.

  In Washington state Wolfpack Team fumbled a mission and let a semi loaded with stolen military ordnance slip right through their fingers. Within two days terrorist kill teams were firing rocket-propelled grenades at civilian targets in Seattle.

  Like that.

  It was insane. In all, out of the last seventeen DMS missions, there were only two that were successfully completed. The others failed in whole or part, and we were burying a lot of our friends. This is what had happened while I slept. It was so much. Too much. I sagged back against my chair, too heartsick to even throw something at Church to make him stop, but he told me all of it. Every case, every failure, every civilian death, every death or serious injury incurred.

  I wanted to laugh this off with a snarky comment and defuse it and make it go away. I wanted to dismiss it as another one of my bad dreams. But you can’t do that. Not when it’s this real.

  I gradually became aware that Church was staring at me with great intensity.

  “What?” I asked, my tone belligerent and defensive.

  “You have no comment? No observation?”

  “What the hell do you expect me to say? I was in a coma and—”

  “Stop,” he said, holding up a hand. “Don’t do that. Don’t make me reevaluate the decision to allow you to come back to work.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Church laced his gloved fingers together and said one word. A name. He said, “Rudy.”

  And then I got it. He saw me get it.

  I said, “Glory…?”

  “Something is happening, Captain. People we trust are acting in irrational and unpredictable ways. We don’t know why and we certainly don’t know how. I had asked Dr. Sanchez to study the recent reports to see if he could identify any pattern of behavior. Sadly he wasn’t able to complete that report. When possible I’ve had Dr. Hu perform a variety of medical tests on our people, including blood work from Glory Price and some of the others. So far there is nothing, no causation, no presence of chemicals or brain damage. We’re testing for parasites and other biological agents that might be affecting behavior. So far … nothing.”

  We sat there and stared bleakly at each other across miles of hurt and confusion.

  When I could talk, I said, “Six of those cases … they were against ISIL?”

  “Six confirmed, with three others as possibles.”

  “Since when are they players on this kind of scale?”

  “Times have changed,” said Church. “They’ve stepped up their game by embracing other kinds of weapons. Our allies in the global counterterrorism community—notably Barrier in the UK—have been tracking ISIL involvement in computer hacking, the sale and transport of bioweapons, and even multiple attempts to obtain nuclear weapons. And they’ve been forming dangerous alliances with small and large extremist groups in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and elsewhere. They’ve even buried their differences with al-Qaeda. They are growing at an exponential rate.”

  “How? I mean, how are they getting that kind of traction so damn fast?”

  “Unknown. Aunt Sallie’s analysis suggests that they have managed to either place their people in our intelligence services or they’ve turned some of our people. Ours and our allies. They have made a series of strategic moves that have been so successful that we have to accept that they have people inside. Nothing else can explain it. They’ve avoided traps, vacated before carefully guided drone strikes, and surged into areas of weakness, and they’ve done this over and over again. They are, in fact, winning this war.” It looked like it hurt Church to say that. “And the DMS is not contributing to a response in any useful way. In fact, as the president has taken pains to point out to me on a daily basis, we are functioning at such a low level of effectiveness that we are helping our enemies. It is not unlikely that our charter may be revoked.”

  “Can he do that?”

  “He is the president.”

  “Will he do it?”

  “If this trend continues to slide downward, then yes.” He looked away. “Perhaps he should.”

  I have never once heard Church say something like that. It scared the hell out of me. I expected my inner Killer to wake up and begin roaring for blood. He didn’t. For whatever reason that part of me was sleeping. Nice fucking timing.

  I shook my head. “How could all this happen that fast?”

  “It had to have been in motion for a long time,” said Church. “To have planted enough agents inside our intelligence services to do this much damage and provide that much information to our enemies speaks to a massive campaign. Something on the scale of the Seven Kings.”

  I jerked upright. “Is it them? Are they never going to lie down and die?”

  Church stroked Bastion’s silky fur. “No, Captain, I don’t think there’s anything left of the Kings. This is not them. This is almost certainly ISIL, and we are witnessing an evolution of that organization. Somehow they have put together a network of spies that rivals or exceeds anything we have ever encountered.”

  I sat there, numb, uncertain how to even think let alone sure of what to do.

  “I hate to kick you when you’re down, Captain,” said Church, clearly meaning to, “but there’s more. The president has officially given the power outage case to the CIA. It’s theirs and we are out except as intelligence support and some minor logistics.”

  “Why would he do that? The Agency is a dinosaur. Even if we’ve dropped the ball a few times, we still have the best overall record for success in cases like this. We even beat Harcourt Bolton’s clearance record. So how the hell does the CIA get put into play and we’re making coffee for them?”

  “The decision was made by the White House.”

  I slapped my palm on the table so hard it made Bastion and Ghost jump. “It’s a bad damn decision.”

  “It’s worse than that, Captain,” said Church. “Harcourt Bolton has been asked to step in as ‘special director’ for the duration of this crisis.”

  “Special director of what?”

  “Of the DMS. He is codirector with me and is now personally running the Special Projects Office.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  55 WEST B STREET

  SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA

  SEPTEMBER 7, 8:13 A.M.

  First Sergeant Bradley Sims stepped out of the Expedition and stood looking up at the high-rise. He wore a plain dark blue suit, white shirt, quiet tie. He was aware, however, that he did not look like a businessman. He looked like what he was. Or, at least some
thing like what he was. The people who passed on the street cut looks at him and then looked quickly away, some looking guilty or nervous. Or hostile. Same reactions from men who looked like him and who wore suits like that. Cop, they thought. Local or federal, but definitely cop. Which was close enough to the mark. Special operators sometimes did a few of the things cops did. They made arrests. They took down bad people. Top had taken down some very bad people over the years. A few went to jail. Some went to black sites from which they did not return. And a fair few went into the ground.

  The badge in his pocket gave him authority but it was a lie. He did not work for the FBI and never had. Nor did he work for the NSA, the Secret Service, the Supreme Court police, the Housing Authority, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Border Patrol, the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, or the U.S. Marshals Service, but he had badges and credentials for each in the glove compartment of his Explorer. Just as he had papers proving that he held both noncommissioned and officer rank in every branch of the United States Armed Forces as well as those of Canada, Mexico, Great Britain, and France. He could have a working set of credentials for virtually any police or military organization in the world with a phone call.

  The Department of Military Sciences, however, had neither badges nor ID cards. They did not officially exist except by a charter, the details of which were outlined in a sealed executive order.

  But he knew he looked like a cop. Nobody on the street smiled at him, which was fine, because Top wasn’t in a sunny mood. The job down in Antarctica had done him some harm. Not physically, and not where it showed, but he could feel it. The fear was there and he caught glimpses of it when he looked in the mirror. There was a slight tremble of the hand, a hesitation in the step that was never there before. Not even after the Red Knights and the Majestic Black Book cases. Not even after the horrors he’d seen in the tunnels beneath the Dragon Factory.