Kill Switch

by Jonathan Maberry

  Bug and I studied each other through the digital magic of the teleconference screen, saying nothing for a long time. Then he cleared his throat.

  “You ought to talk to Junie, she’s into a lot of this weird stuff.”

  “I know, but I’ll have to get clearance from Church. In the meantime, all we can do is work on this. So let’s work it. What have you dug up on Erskine?”

  Bug tapped a few keys and scanned the data. “A lot and not much. Erskine was rich and well connected. His whole family is made up mostly of industrialists and defense contractors. They’ve been making all kinds of dangerous toys for the government going back to the Civil War. They were heavily into Pittsburgh steel before that went south, then they moved into advanced R and D.”

  “Doing what kind of research?”

  “You name it. Radar and sonar systems. Anti-radar and sonar systems. Control systems for tanks and fighters. Aerodynamics for stealth aircraft. New hull designs for attack and missile subs. Composite materials for fighter craft hulls. Erskine had a couple of dozen subsidiary companies, but he directly oversaw the electronics division.”

  “Particle accelerators?”

  “Not Erskine, but his partner, Raoul San Pedro, worked on some of that. He was down at Gateway, so I guess he’s dead. Pretty much everyone on Erskine’s team was there.”

  “San Pedro? Isn’t that the guy whose office Top and Bunny were at today?”

  From Bug’s expression it was clear that he knew about the encounter with the Closers. “San Pedro worked on several accelerators. His great-grandfather worked on the nine-inch cyclotron at UC Berkeley back in the early thirties, and contributed to the eleven-, twenty-seven-, and thirty-seven-inch versions. His grandfather helped build Berkeley’s Isochronous cyclotron in 1950. And his dad is on the patent for the super proton synchrotron they built at CERN.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, barely following. “Bunch of brainiacs, got it. What about the machine we saw down at Gateway? Was that an accelerator?”

  “I did image comparisons of the drawings you, Top, and Bunny made of the one you saw at Gateway and that thing you saw looked like a hadron collider, but it wasn’t exactly the same. Maybe that’s because your sketches are kind of, well, sketchy. Anyway, I talked to a bunch of eggheads and the thing nobody understands so far is that the one down there was built more like a tunnel that curved down into the earth, right? It wasn’t a circular loop?”

  “No, unless it was unfinished.”

  “Still wouldn’t make sense. You wouldn’t build one at that angle. These things are circular with no sharp bend, and never upright. And they are massive. We’re talking thousands of tons of material, and they build them flat so gravity doesn’t warp the structure. That’s how they get the particles up to speed, by running them in a circle as close to the speed of light as you can manage, and then you collide them with particles going in the opposite direction. The machine you saw isn’t configured for that. You said that the one down there blew air at you?”

  “Real damn hard. That’s how we all got sick.”

  He shook his head. “Yeah, that’s not making any kind of sense.”

  “If it’s not an accelerator, then what was it?”

  “Beats the crap out of me, Joe. And so far it’s beating the crap out of everyone I talk to.”

  “Other than Erskine and San Pedro, who else are we looking at?”

  He leaned close and dropped his voice again. “Look, Joe, I, um, might have looked into Mr. Bolton’s computer records. A bit. You know?”

  “Why? Has he done something naughty?”

  “What? Bolton? God, no. It’s just that he has a higher clearance than Mr. Church right now. At least as far as the Kill Switch thing goes. But … well, I guess I got nosy.”

  “I ought to hit you with a rolled-up newspaper,” I said. “Did you find anything?”

  “Not sure. Mr. Church showed you the stuff I got before, right? The black budget report? Did you see the mention of a project called the God Machine? Well, I don’t know what it is, but there were two names in a footnote. One marked with an ‘I,’ which means inventor, and one with a ‘D’ for developer. Both had the same last names and I think I know who they are. The inventor is P. Bell, and that’s got to be that weirdo Prospero Bell.”

  “Who?”

  “Son of Oscar Bell? He’s the other name, the developer. O. Bell.”

  “Again I say, who?”

  “Oscar Bell is Erskine’s brother-in-law. Or he was. He was married to Erskine’s sister. She’s dead, though.”

  “There was no Oscar Bell on the personnel list at Gateway.”

  “Uh-uh. Oscar’s a private defense contractor. Or he used to be. His company went bankrupt a few years ago and he started drinking. After that he fell off the public radar. I’m running a deep background on him to see if he’s anywhere.”

  “What about the son?”

  “Oh, man, that’s a really sad story,” said Bug. “Prospero was this genius kid that was supposed to be smarter than Stephen Hawking. Super-freak intelligence. Way off the scale. Incredible inventor, though. Published papers on particle physics and quantum theory when he was a teenager, and from what I can tell from the people I’ve talked to, Prospero was as crazy as he was smart. Some of his theories are groundbreaking and other scientists have been trying to catch up because it’s apparently going to open all sorts of new doors in research. Other stuff he came up with was nutty. But Prospero also had a lot of emotional problems. His dad sent him to a military boarding school to try and straighten him out, and even paid to have a state-of-the-art lab built for him. But that backfired. First he blew up the lab, and then a couple of years later he set fire to the whole school and tried to break out.”

  “Tried? What happened to him?”

  “Died in the fire. Him and a friend.”

  “So how’s his name on a black budget request for Gateway?”

  “From the dates on the report, the God Machine is apparently something Prospero came up with when he was still a teenager. From the way I’m reading this, his father took the design, whatever it was, and sold it to the government. At first they paid him for it, and those are pretty big numbers; but then something happened and they took it away from him and sued him to recover the monies paid. That’s what broke him.”

  I chewed on that for a moment. “Jesus, Bug, this is the first solid lead we have. Do whatever you have to do to find this guy.”

  “Sure, but like I said, you should talk to Junie.”

  “Why?”

  “Remember that conspiracy theory podcast she used to do when you guys first met? I used to listen to it all the time. She had Oscar Bell on her show once. If anyone knows where he is, it’ll probably be her.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  THE PIER

  DMS SPECIAL PROJECTS OFFICE

  SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA

  SEPTEMBER 8, 1:43 P.M.

  I picked up the phone to call Junie but before I could even push a button it rang and it was she.

  “How are you?” she asked.

  “Wishing I was still in a coma,” I joked. She didn’t think that was funny. “Look, baby, any chance you can drop what you’re doing and come to the Pier? Mr. Church and I have a few things we need to talk to you about.”

  “Is it urgent?”

  “Depends. I can hear a helicopter. Where are you?”

  “About to fly inland. There’s an environmental engineer I need to see. Linda Higdon. She has a water reclamation process that might work with something we’ve been developing here at FreeTech. Linda’s going to be at a testing facility out by the Salton Sea but only for the rest of the day and then she’s on a flight to Kenya. I’ve been trying to arrange this for months. If her process is compatible, we could maybe reclaim five million gallons a day once it’s up and running. Think about what that would mean to the farmers who are being crushed by the drought.”

  “That’s actually kind of amazing,” I said, not joking.
r />   “Do you need me to cancel with her, or—?”

  I could tell she wanted me to say no, so I said no. The DMS was warming the bench right now, and even the stuff Church and I were banging back and forth was by-product. It’s not like the president was letting us do our jobs. Damn it.

  “No, it’s good. Go talk to your scientist. Will you be home tonight?”

  “Yes, but late. If you don’t feel like you can be alone, go over to Sam’s place. He has a guest room.”

  “It’s all good,” I assured her. “I have plenty of people to hold my hand.”

  She paused. “I hate to do this. You’ve only just come home.”

  “I love you, too. Go save the world.”

  And she was gone.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  SCRIPPS MEMORIAL HOSPITAL LA JOLLA

  9888 GENESEE AVENUE

  LA JOLLA, CALIFORNIA

  SEPTEMBER 8, 3:47 P.M.

  Top and Bunny were still at the crime scene, Bolton wasn’t back yet, Church was on the phone being yelled at by the president, and I didn’t have any beer in my fridge. So I checked out, leaving a request for Lydia-Rose to call me the second Top and Bunny got back.

  With Ghost trotting beside me I got into my car and went to visit Rudy.

  And immediately wished I hadn’t. Rudy looked small and shrunken, paled to a ghost, wrapped like a mummy. He had bandages over his face with a metal brace to hold his nose in shape. He wore a soft cervical collar. His leg was hung from straps and framed by a postsurgical sling. The broken nose had given him two black eyes.

  His wife, Circe, had been very reluctant to let me in. Even though it had been Rudy who attacked me, she seemed to regard me as a thug who had attacked and brutalized her husband. Mind you, she didn’t actually call me a thug. That was the word Rudy had used and it hung in my head.

  Thug. Weird, but the shadowy figure in my dreams had called me that, too.

  It took some time and a lot of promises, but Circe agreed to let me in. She sat on the far side of the bed, holding one of Rudy’s hands in both of hers. Circe is a beautiful woman with masses of curly hair and olive skin. A fierce and uncompromising intelligence glittered in her dark eyes. I was godfather to her son but in that moment I was the man who crippled her husband. I sat across from her and held Rudy’s other hand. The room was silent for a long time. It wasn’t a chatty moment, and it was maybe forty minutes or an hour before I felt Rudy’s hand twitch. His fingers curled to grasp mine. He was weak but there was a desperate strength in those fingers. I got to my feet and leaned over him.

  “Hey,” I said gently, “hey, brother…”

  Rudy has one real eye and one glass. Another souvenir of violence that came his way during our time at the DMS. Another unfair mark on a good and decent man. Both eyes look real, and I swear both were filled with a pain born of the awareness of what had happened.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “God, Rudy, I’m so sorry.”

  He started to shake his head, then winced as the bruised muscles and tendons in his neck protested. He hissed. A tear gathered in the corner of his good eye and fell down past his cheek and ear before melting into the foam of the cervical collar.

  “J-Joe…,” he breathed, his voice weak and faint.

  “I’m here, Rudy.”

  “Joe … that … that wasn’t me.…”

  “I know, Rude, it’s all—”

  “No,” he said with more force. Circe stood up and he saw her, his eyes ticking back and forth between us. “No … that was not me.”

  “I know,” I said.

  It wasn’t him, of that I was certain. But who—or what—was it?

  The pain of his injuries—physical and psychic—began to scream at him. Circe called the nurse and they added something to his IV and Rudy went down into darkness. Like a coward, like a fool who knows nothing, I left him there and went out into the bright sunshine of a day whose rules I had utterly failed to grasp.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  CENTRAL POLICE DISTRICT

  211 S. CARROLL STREET

  MADISON, WISCONSIN

  SEPTEMBER 8, 5:29 P.M.

  “Why did you do it?”

  Senior DMS field agent Captain Allison Craft asked the question for the fiftieth time. Maybe the hundredth. She’d lost count. The man in the chair, Mr. Nathan Cross, said the same thing he’d said each of those times.

  “I don’t know.”

  They were in an interview room at the Central District building. Captain Craft, topkick of Rimfire Team, the DMS field office in Milwaukee, had commandeered the room and the prisoner. Craft had flashed Homeland credentials and Aunt Sallie had cleared the red tape. The police, who were seldom generous when it came to sharing their prisoners or yielding jurisdiction, seemed happy to let this case go up the food chain. There were seventeen dead at Bristol Labs, and virtually everyone else employed there was either in the hospital—many critical—or in cells. Only a few had escaped without going crazy. Jerry Spencer, the DMS forensics chief, had brought in his team and it was clear that a powerful hallucinogen had been introduced to the staff, likely through the coffee and tea urns. Tests were being conducted, but the nature of the drugs used to cause the outbreak held less critical importance than what Cross had stolen from the lab and sent flying off on a drone.

  The drone had been found two miles away in a field near the entrance to the highway. There was nothing in the metal container bolted to its undercarriage.

  “Why did you do this?” demanded Craft, who was both scared and frustrated.

  Nate Cross sat there, shocked, horrified, tears and snot running down his face, skin blanched white, cuffed hands trembling with a palsy born of realization of what he had done.

  “God … God…,” he said, his words tumbling out, lips shiny with spit, “… I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.…”

  He could describe some of what had happened, and Craft was confused because the man seemed to want to help. He was desperate to help, but there were huge gaps in his memory.

  “It was like I was watching it,” said Cross. “Like it wasn’t me. I could feel it … see it. All of it. But it wasn’t me doing it. I swear to God.”

  “You’re going to have to do a whole lot better than that,” snarled Craft. “Do you want to see the video again? Do you want to see what you did? I’ll show it to you again.”

  “No!” he wailed, and he looked from her to Davis, her partner, and back again. Sobbing, pleading, begging them to believe what he was saying. “Please, God … it wasn’t me. I swear to God Jesus it wasn’t me.”

  Craft’s phone rang. She glanced at the display. “Auntie,” she said.

  “Go ahead,” said Davis. “I got this.”

  Craft stepped out into the hall to take the call. “He’s holding to it,” she said into the phone. “We’ve been at it for hours and he hasn’t budged. And, I don’t think he’s feeding us a line. Something happened to him and—”

  “Listen to me, girl,” said Aunt Sallie in a voice that could blister paint, “you put on your big girl panties and go get me some answers. I’m going to call you back in one hour and I want to hear something useful, do you hear me, sweetcheeks?”

  “I—”

  The line went dead.

  “Bitch,” breathed Craft, resisting the urge to drop her phone and stomp on it. The interview room door was closed and she stood for a moment glaring at it, willing the situation inside to be different than what she’d left a moment ago. She took a breath, squared her shoulders, and reached for the knob.

  That was when she heard the gunshot.

  Through the door it was a muffled pok.

  “Oh, shit,” she cried and tore the door open, drawing her own gun, fearing what had happened. Fearing that Cross had somehow gotten free and …

  She froze in the doorway. Nathan Cross sat there with his head thrown back, mouth open, eyes staring up at the ceiling. There was a small black hole above the bridge of his nose. Behind him the wall w
as splashed with bright red that was speckled with bits of gray and knots of hair.

  Phil Davis stood beside Cross’s chair, his Sig Sauer in his hand.

  “Jesus Christ, Phil … what have you done?”

  Davis turned to her and smiled. “Sorry, Phil’s not here at the moment,” he said. And he shot Allison Craft twice in the face.

  He was still smiling when he put the hot barrel under his own chin and blew the top of his head off.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  MISSION BAY DRIVE

  SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA

  SEPTEMBER 8, 5:44 P.M.

  I’d left my car with the valet people with orders to keep the engine running and air-conditioning up high. Ghost sat in the front passenger seat, head erect, brown eyes watching me, and there was a weird spark of suspicion in his eyes. He even bent to sniff me when I slid behind the wheel. He made a noncommittal huff sound.

  “The fuck’s with you?” I demanded.

  Ghost flinched back from the severity of my tone and I immediately felt bad. The dog was scared and confused. Maybe it was the smell of the hospital. Maybe it was the stink of my own fear and shame. Either way I had no reason to bark at him. So I twisted in my seat and bent close to press my forehead against his. We do that. Junie calls it a mind kiss. For me it’s a pure animal thing, a communication between members of the same pack. Only this time Ghost pulled back. He turned and looked out the window as if I wasn’t there. Or, as if he was looking for his real pack leader. I stroked his fur but he did not respond at all. It made me strangely sad and disconnected. I put the car in gear, pulled out of the parking lot, and began heading back to the Pier.

  I was on Mission Bay Drive behind an old De Soto woody with surfboards on the roof and stickers all over the back from great beaches all over the world. I could see a pair of shaggy blond heads in the front, broad brown shoulders—one set bare, one in a dark tank top. An old Del Shannon tune floated back at me from their open windows. “My Little Runaway.” Ah, it must be great to have nothing to do and be able to surf the waves, work on your tan, romp with the sun bunnies, hoist cold ones with your crew, and listen to that old-time rock and roll That’s what sunny Southern California days are made for. If you have troubles, go drown them in the big blue Pacific. Feed your worries to the fish.