Kill Switch

by Jonathan Maberry

  “This is what I need you to do,” he said. “Go home and get some sleep. Get plenty of it. Then report to work tomorrow and take over this investigation. I am telling you this as your boss and as your friend. You need to stop being a bystander. You need to refuse to be marginalized. You need to be the cop that you are. You need to solve this.”

  The phone went dead in my hand.

  I put it in my pocket and walked over to the parking garage window. It looked directly out over the surf. How long did I stand there watching the waves crash down on the sand?

  Maybe five minutes. Maybe ten.

  There are times I’m afraid of Mr. Church. There are times I hate him. Right at that moment, though, I’d have walked through fire for him.

  I looked out at the tumbling waves, listened to the hiss as the frothy bubbles popped, watched starlight glisten on the wet sand.

  Then I went home and went to bed.

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  SEAHAWK PLACE

  DEL MAR, CALIFORNIA

  SEPTEMBER 8, 7:23 A.M.

  In the morning I got up and kissed a sleepy Junie who had gotten in late and didn’t look like she was quite ready to face the day. I showered hot enough to boil all of the sickness, indolence, and self-pity off my skin, then I shaved, dressed in jeans and one of my more sedate Hawaiian shirts—this one had tropical fish on it—put down bowls of glop for Ghost and Cobbler, washed down a fistful of vitamins with my first cup of coffee of the day, and then set off to work.

  On the way I called Bug, who was East Coast time and was already up and at the Hangar.

  “You have anything for me?” I asked.

  “Yeah-h-h-h-h,” he said, but he stretched the word out so long that it sounded like he wasn’t sure what it was he had. “You won’t believe how much stuff we got. We’re talking seventy-one file boxes, each one crammed with stuff. That’s something like three hundred thousand pieces of paper. Auntie had them bring it all back here and we’re using the high-speed bulk scanners. But that’s just scanning. Then everything has to be processed through MindReader and—”

  “Bug,” I said, cutting him off, “I don’t care. Tell me if you actually got something.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Maybe.”

  “Try harder than that.”

  “Well, first, we got a slight hit on one of the Gateway projects. Freefall. It’s vague and it seems to be tied into the Kill Switch thing. Our best guess so far is that it’s some experimental way of knocking down drones, but really, that’s all we have on it so far. The good news is that we have a line on four previous addresses for Oscar Bell.”

  “That’s something. I’ll send someone to run that down. What else?”

  “Okay, first, Oscar Bell is dead. Murder-suicide. After the DoD sued him he went totally bankrupt and broke. The IRS froze every penny of his assets and he lost his house and everything else he owned. And he drank, too. He apparently went crazy and killed three people at a diner in some Podunk town in Washington state, then turned the gun on himself.”

  “Why didn’t MindReader pick that up?” I asked.

  “Not sure. We have a copy of what looks like the original handwritten police report and another that looks like it was printed out, probably at the police station where it was filed. But when I checked with the local police department they have nothing at all in their computers. Nothing in hardcopy, either. I’ll send you what I have.”

  “Okay. What else?”

  “Some of this is freaking me out because one of the other file boxes contained an inventory list of restricted documents. But get this, Joe, I’m not talking like military top-secret stuff. I’m talking Catholic church sort of restricted.”

  “Not following you. What kind of stuff are we talking about? Holy Grail? Ark of the Covenant? Jesus’ birth certificate?”

  “It was in Latin,” said Bug. “Index Librorum Prohibitorum. I had to look it up. It means ‘List of Prohibited Books.’”

  “Okay. So…?”

  “So, I called Circe because this is her sort of thing, and she said there were two of these lists. One was stuff that was against church policy or critical or like that. Pascal by Voltaire, Monarchia by Dante Alighieri, Casanova’s memoirs. Like that. Naughty stuff. But when I read some of the titles on the inventory sheet she said that none of them were on that list. She thinks that list is one that was supposed to be a big church secret. Circe knows about it because … well, she’s Circe. She knows that kind of stuff. She told me that there was a group of these psycho monks who used to go around taking these books away from people and sometimes killing them. Like if the Inquisition and the library police had a cranky kid. She called it the Ordo Fratrum Claustrorum. Anyway, here’s the really freaky stuff. Half the books on the list are ancient books of magic and alchemy. The Greek Magical Papyri, Arbatel de Magia Veterum, the Pseudomonarchia Daedonum, The Black Pullet, Ars Almade, which is book four of the Lesser Keys of Solomon, The Ripley Scroll, The Book of Soyga, an Icelandic book called the Galdabok, and—here’s one you’ll recognize—the Voynich manuscript.”

  Yeah, I recognized that one, all right. It’s a weird fifteenth-century text written in an unknown language and kept at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. Experts had tried for centuries to decode it, and even doubted that the language was real. Circe cracked the code, though, with the help of some additional pages we found. As it turned out, the language was that of the Upierczi, a race of very bad people living in caves beneath the Arabian sands. The Upierczi are genetic offshoots, a splinter line of evolution that showed how perverse science can be. They are the reason we have legends about vampires.

  “There’s more,” said Bug. “Those books were only half the list. There was a separate part of the list preceded by a long list of warnings and prayers about how the world will end if these books are ever read or even opened. Really wild stuff.”

  “I’ve found extreme religious orders, as a rule, are prone toward general nuttiness,” I said.

  “No, this is worse than that,” said Bug, “and this is where we run right into the whole Mountains of Madness–Elder Gods stuff.”

  I nearly sideswiped a kid on a bike. “Shit,” I said. “Tell me.”

  “In those books by H. P. Lovecraft and some of the other writers—August Derleth, Robert E. Howard, Henry Kuttner, and like that—there’s a bunch of books of ancient dark magic. You heard of the Necronomicon?”

  “In movies, sure.”

  “Right, those were movies based on, or inspired by, Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos.”

  “What about it?”

  “The Necronomicon is on this list,” said Bug. “Actually … almost all of those books are. Joe … I don’t think they’re fake. I think all of this is real.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  THE PIER

  DMS SPECIAL PROJECTS OFFICE

  SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA

  SEPTEMBER 8, 10:14 A.M.

  The things Bug told me about those creepy old books gnawed at my nerves all the way into work. How could they not? But I tried to put them into perspective with what Bolton and Bug had both said yesterday. Maybe it really was a matter of many of the things we believed to be supernatural were actually unclassified aspects of very real science. After all, in my years with the DMS I’d encountered the Upierczi, who were the flesh-and-bone basis for vampire beliefs. And I’d been on a case in the small town of Pine Deep in Pennsylvania where I’d taken down a genetics lab that was trying to create a kind of supersoldier based on another genetic anomaly—lycanthropy. Did this explain all of the stories of werewolves and vampires around the world? Maybe not, but it made the darkness at the edge of town less of a place of magic and more of an area of mystery. The Cop part of me wanted rational answers, and to achieve that I needed a lot more information than I had.

  I got to the Pier as fast as I could.

  A sleepy Junie called me at ten and I asked her if she could come in, explaining that Church and I wanted to ask her so
me questions. She said to give her an hour. When Junie arrived she looked apprehensive.

  “You’re being very mysterious,” she said.

  “It’s been that kind of week.”

  “You’ve only been back to work less than two days.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said as I opened the door to the conference room. Church was in the same chair but in a different suit, looking fresh and rested. He stood up and gestured to a chair.

  “Ms. Flynn,” he said, “thank you for coming in. Please sit. I apologize for the inconvenience but I believe that when you hear what we have to say, you’ll understand.”

  As she sat she glanced from Church to me and back again. “Is this about ISIL?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “It’s all over the news. That’s all anyone’s talking about. The power outages. Everyone thinks Houston was because of them.”

  “I am going to share some information with you,” began Church, “that is of a highly confidential nature.”

  She nodded. Church has never asked people to sign nondisclosure agreements. If he doesn’t trust someone he doesn’t tell them anything. And Junie was family.

  “There are a number of things we want to share with you, and some of them may be unpleasant,” said Church. “I don’t think you’d thank us for sugar-coating it, so let’s start with the one that most affects you. We believe the Majestic program may still be active.”

  Her face went dead pale beneath her spray of sun freckles, and she put a hand to her throat. “No … oh, God, are you sure?”

  “Sure enough.”

  We took turns laying it out for her. I started with the Closers who attacked Top and Bunny at Dr. San Pedro’s office. Church told her about the extreme cult of secrecy built around Gateway and how it was hidden in almost the same way as Majestic Three. We told her one of the things Aunt Sallie had learned last night, that the late Oscar Bell had worked on projects for Howard Shelton. Those ties, plus the exotic nature of the Gateway project.

  As we laid it out, Junie’s shock was replaced by a critical intensity. Her body became less rigid but her eyes were as sharp as a hawk’s. She is not an ordinary person by any stretch. She has very high intelligence and an eidetic memory—she cannot forget anything she’s learned. Makes it really fucking hard to have an argument with her. Trust me on this.

  During our info dump, Harcourt Bolton came in, exchanged silent greetings with Junie, and sat to Church’s right. Bastion jumped into the man’s lap and began cleaning himself. Pretty sure that did not endear either him or Bolton to Ghost, who gave them both the evil eye.

  For Bolton’s benefit, Church even filled in some of Junie’s background, after first assuring her that Mr. Super Spy was there on the orders of the president and that all information shared in that room was confidential. I could tell Junie didn’t like it, and there was a damn good reason.

  I’d met Junie when the DMS was looking for the Majestic Black Book. At first I thought she was nothing more than a smart and pretty lady who was half airy-fairy hippie and half conspiracy theory podcaster. Even split of both. She’d talked about the Black Book and Majestic Three on her podcast, so I went to see how she knew about them and to see how much of it was, in fact, conspiracy theory bullshit. Turns out … not much at all. Majestic Three had been building advanced weapons of war, including a new generation of ultrasophisticated stealth aircraft, using technologies recovered from crashed vehicles. They had also recovered some biological materials from those wrecks. Nothing alive, but they managed to sequence the DNA. Let’s just say that the DNA was exotic. M3 ultimately discovered that in order to use the technology of these vehicles they had to include an element of that DNA into the mix. That was a big problem for a long time, but they solved it by genetically grafting the alien DNA to human embryos, creating true hybrids. They raised thousands of them in groups called hives. Most of the hybrids died off. A flaw in the DNA made them exceptionally prone to diseases, particularly brain and bone cancer.

  When I met Junie she was battling brain cancer.

  Yeah. Run with that and you’ll get into the right end zone. Not a comfortable place to be. Does that mean she has antennae or any of that stuff? No. Her DNA is more than 85 percent human. But along with the cancer—which she’s beaten twice now—she got an exceptionally high IQ, perfect recall, and higher than normal aptitude in science, mathematics, engineering, and other related sciences. She had been in one of the last batches of hive kids, and in order to breed more socially adept children, M3 seeded many of those kids into foster homes. Most of the foster parents were employees of M3 or in some way associated with it. Howard was the mastermind behind this whole thing. He’s dead and, hopefully, burning somewhere. Sick bastard.

  “And that brings us to the God Machine,” said Church. At that point he turned it over to Bolton, who told Junie what he’d told me. I have to admit, she took it better than I had and she asked smarter questions.

  She glanced around at each of us. “You realize that this is not a new theory, right?”

  “Please explain,” said Church and Bolton at the same time.

  “The God Machine, it’s been around for a long time,” said Junie. “I mean, a device that can open a doorway between our world and another, that’s not a new concept. It’s a scientific twist on the conjuring circle. And, please bear in mind, I said ‘circle.’ It’s always been a circular doorway. Nearly every culture has some version of it. Nikola Tesla was working on something like this, maybe exactly this. There’s a story that’s been floating around the conspiracy theory world for over a century about Tesla building an interdimensional doorway at his laboratory at Wardenclyffe Tower in Shoreham, New York. According to the story, he was approached by a very rich old man who paid him to build a machine called an Orpheus Gate. The description matches the God Machine, even down to the gemstones, which, according to the story, were somehow used to regulate the power. Tesla told a colleague sometime later that he built two of them. The first one vanished as soon as it was turned on, and it blew out all of the power in the entire region.”

  “Well, well,” said Bolton.

  “Orpheus Gate,” murmured Church, nodding. “I’ve heard of that, but I did not make the connection. I should have. Apparently we’ve all been off our game.”

  Bolton nodded. “Agreed. None of us are at our best right now.”

  Junie picked up her story. “When the Orpheus Gate was activated there was some kind of intense energetic discharge—something he called a ‘God Wave.’ It knocked Tesla out and he was sick for weeks afterward. He had a high fever and hallucinated badly.”

  “If there’s any more precise description of his symptoms,” I said, “I’d like to share it with Dr. Hu. Maybe match it against the symptoms of what Top, Bunny, and I had. After all, we got sick after an energetic discharge from the Gateway machine.”

  Church nodded and asked Junie to continue.

  “The whole experience shook Tesla’s confidence,” she said, cutting me a quick look, “and it changed him. That was when he started shifting his focus from sustainable energy and communication systems to weapons of war. Death rays and that sort of thing. Some historians say that he went mad, and maybe we know why.”

  “‘Mad’ is a relative term,” observed Bolton.

  “There’s more,” said Junie. “In 1918 a constable in a small fishing town in Spain reported that a strange machine appeared in a farmer’s barn. Actually he said that it looked like it exploded through the side of the barn. He found a naked old man near the machine who claimed that he was a traveler who was trying to find his way home. The constable got sick shortly after that, and so did everyone in the town. That’s where the first cases of the Spanish flu were reported.”

  Well, yeah, that hit us all like a cruise missile. Junie looked around at our stricken faces.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Ms. Flynn,” said Church, “did anyone tell you what kind of virus Captain Ledger and his men were aff
ected by?”

  “No. Just that it was a rare mutation of the flu.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “The Spanish flu.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  THE PIER

  DMS SPECIAL PROJECTS OFFICE

  SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA

  SEPTEMBER 8, 12:38 P.M.

  Church immediately called Dr. Hu and Bug and brought them up to speed, and ordered them to run down this information. Almost immediately Bug came back with hits. Even for MindReader, a Net search required the right keywords. The hits he got were not on the “God Machine” but on the “Orpheus Gate.”

  He even found pictures.

  “On the screen,” I told him and Bug sent them to the big flat screen on the wall. We stared, dumbfounded. It had been there all along but we were looking for it the wrong way.

  The Orpheus Gate. Orpheus descended into hell to rescue his love.

  “What is hell anyway,” mused Junie, “but a name for another dimension that’s inhospitable to life as we know it? Couldn’t that just as easily be another dimension, another version of the world rather than something supernatural?”

  No one told her she was crazy. Incredulity was a boat that had already sailed, caught fire, hit an iceberg, and sank. Even Hu, who tended not to believe in much of anything, wasn’t trying to knock this down anymore. Want to know why?

  There was a photo, a crisp black-and-white, of a bunch of stern-looking men standing in front of the same goddamn machine I’d seen down in the Antarctic. Same thing. The guy who stood in the center of the front row was shorter than the others, with black hair and a Charlie Chaplin mustache. We could see him very clearly because the Nazis always did take good pictures. The accompanying caption told us that we were seeing Hitler inspecting the development of a new weapon being designed by top scientists of the Thule Society.

  A second photograph was in color and was grainy and poorly framed, suggesting that whoever took it hadn’t been allowed to snap that shot. It was of an underground chamber filled with clunky old computers of the kind used in Europe in the 1980s. The photo showed workers installing small dark objects into a panel. Gemstones. The photograph was taken at an underground lab in the Ukrainian town of Poliske. Just a few miles from Chernobyl.