Kill Switch

by Jonathan Maberry

  “I thought that case was taken away from you,” she said.

  “Church said he was going to talk to the president about that. Maybe he’ll have some good news for me tomorrow.”

  She touched my face. “I know you want to get back into this, Joe, but you have to give yourself time to rest.”

  “I’ve had enough rest, thanks,” I said. She didn’t like that answer, but she knew how to pick her fights.

  The evening rolled on toward night. We talked about Majestic and Gateway. We speculated about Prospero Bell. What was he like? Did he know about her and the other hive kids? She said that Greene seemed to suggest that maybe Prospero wasn’t dead, that his death had been faked. It was only an impression, though; she had nothing to base it on. My middle-aged marmalade-and-white tabby, Cobbler, came and sprawled in my lap. Junie was still on her first glass of wine because she had no tolerance at all. I forget how many glasses of bourbon I’d put away. More than my share, but on the whole not enough. Junie wore one of my flannel shirts over a skimpy top and leggings. Her feet were propped on the rail, toes touching mine. We were drifting toward a lazy, let’s-go-to-bed silence when my cell phone rang. I grunted in surprise when I saw who the caller was. He wasn’t someone who called me except in very rare cases when he couldn’t otherwise find Junie. Bemused, I punched the button.

  “Toys,” I said.

  “Ledger,” he said.

  There was a moment of silence, which is how a lot of our conversations start. A moment to assess. I hated him for a long time, and with very good cause. Last year, when the Seven Kings—led by that monster Nicodemus—invaded a hospital in San Diego with the intention of killing Circe O’Tree—Rudy’s pregnant wife and Church’s daughter—Toys nearly died to protect her. In doing so he helped save Junie’s life. Toys was nearly cut to ribbons by broken glass. His body is covered with scars. Afterward, when he was leaving the hospital, I told him that while I still didn’t like him and would never forgive him for the crimes he’d committed, he and I were no longer at war.

  “Junie’s right here,” I said, “hold on and—”

  “No,” he said. “I didn’t call for her. I called for you.”

  “For me? Why?”

  “I need your help. I just killed four people,” he said.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO

  CATAMARAN RESORT HOTEL AND SPA

  3999 MISSION BOULEVARD

  SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA

  SEPTEMBER 8, 10:51 P.M.

  Toys was sitting on a deck chair outside of his room but stood as we approached. He was dressed in jeans and a Hawaiian shirt, looking exactly like a vacationing tourist unless you looked into his eyes. If eyes are the windows of the soul, then beyond those panes was a bleak and wasted landscape that was devoid of all hope.

  “Are you okay?” asked Junie as she hugged him and kissed his cheek.

  “I’ll live.” He looked at me. “Ledger.”

  “Toys.”

  No handshakes. We weren’t touchy-feely with each other and probably never would be. He didn’t try to pet Ghost, either, because Toys is not that stupid.

  On the chair next to him was his ragged-looking cat, which eyed Ghost with such obvious disdain that the dislike between them was immediate and palpable. Ghost barely tolerates Cobbler, but his general opinion of cats is that they are chew toys. The cat on the chair probably considered all dogs to be scratching posts. Ah, love.

  Toys introduced the cat as “Job,” explaining that the scruffy animal had been through the wringer.

  “Lot of that going around,” I said.

  Junie reached out a hand to Job, which he sniffed and then rubbed his head against. Ghost looked disgusted and walked over to the closed door of Toys’s apartment, took a sniff, and immediately began to growl softly.

  I drew my gun and nodded to the door. “Shall we?”

  “You won’t need that,” said Toys. “All of the drama is past tense. It’s not pretty, though.”

  “I promise I won’t faint,” I said as I reholstered my Sig Sauer.

  He gave a half smile. “I meant that for Junie.”

  Junie patted his arm. “I’m pretty sure I’m unshockable at this point.”

  Even so, Toys shifted to stand in front of the door. “Let Joe go in. Even if you are the Iron Lady, you don’t need to see that. I had to, um, encourage one of them to talk to me.”

  “I got this,” I said, and pushed past him. The door was unlocked, the lights turned low. I stepped inside and stopped, with Ghost lingering on the threshold, a ridge of hairs standing up along his back. The entire room was a mess and there was blood everywhere. He said that he’d had to encourage one of them. I spotted who that unlucky bastard was right off. He was the one who didn’t look human anymore. There was only a small patch of unbloodied rug to stand on and I went no farther in. Everything that could be read was splashed on the walls and written in the taut lines of pain etched into four dead faces. The distinctive freshly sheared copper smell of blood was masked by three burning sticks of temple incense.

  The men were dressed in dark suits. On the bed were four microwave pulse pistols.

  Closers.

  “Ah, shit,” I muttered. I squatted down beside one of them and tore open his shirt, then repeated that on the others. As I suspected, this guy and his chums weren’t wearing the super-skivvies. If they had been, Toys would probably be dead. Without touching anything else I withdrew and closed the door behind me. I took a moment to breathe the fragrant night air.

  “I told you,” said Toys quietly.

  “Tell me what happened,” I said, and he went through all of it, speaking quickly and in low tones. When he got to the part where he questioned the last of the four assassins, he paused and looked down at his hands. They appeared to be very clean, the way flesh looks when it’s been scrubbed with furious vigor. My own skin has had that glow a few times over the years. When Grace Courtland died in my arms it took weeks before my hands felt clean of her blood.

  “They’re Closers,” I said.

  Toys nodded. “New to it, though. They hired on a few months ago.”

  “Hired by who?” I asked, but then my cell rang. It was Bug.

  “Kind of busy at the moment,” I told him.

  “Unless you’re taking fire, Joe,” he said, “this is more important. I’ve been searching through all those papers for more on that book inventory. The Unlearnable Truths. And I think I hit gold.”

  “I am definitely listening,” I said, holding my hand out to Junie and Toys to be quiet. “Hit me.”

  Bug hit me. “This kid Prospero Bell believed that there is a mathematical code hidden in the unlearnable books, right? Well, he wasn’t joking. That code is there, and it tells you how to program the power flow so that the God Machine works the way it’s supposed to.”

  “To open a dimensional gateway,” I supplied, and Toys stared at me, eyebrows raised so far they nearly vanished into his hairline. Junie put a finger to her lips.

  “Right,” said Bug, “but it does more than that. With the sequencing code you can regulate any of the Kill Switch devices on the same network. I ran this by Bill Hu and he says that what this means is that if you made a bunch of the Kill Switches, you could position them around an area, switch it on, and everything inside is switched off. Hu thinks that they’ve been doing this already. Houston and the debate and like that. But Dr. San Pedro’s records indicate that these smaller devices are single use. They melt down completely after a few seconds. Now, if you have the master control sequence code, those devices won’t overheat. You can place them around, say, New York City, switch them on so that everything goes dark, switch them off again, and keep doing that as much as you like. No one has to even be there to run them. And you can keep doing it when the emergency responders get there. You can make this go from bad to worse with the flip of a switch, but only if you have the sequence code.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I said. Sweat had begun to pop out all over my body. The implicatio
ns were … well, staggering. I actually felt the floor tilting under me. And I immediately knew—absolutely 100 percent knew—that we hadn’t seen how bad this could get. Not even close.

  “You okay, Joe?” asked Bug.

  “Not even a little.”

  “Well, it gets crazier,” he said, his excitement raising his voice to a mouse squeak. “We’re eighty percent sure that Gateway had a spy in Oscar Bell’s organization. A guy who Bell hired to obtain the Unlearnable Truths for Prospero but was actually on the payroll for Erskine and company. He used ‘Mr. Priest’ as his cover name, but we were able to lift prints from reports he filed, and even though the prints were degraded we ran them through—”

  “I don’t need the science,” I said. “Give me the damn name.”

  “Esteban Santoro. Joe, he’s Rafael Santoro’s brother.”

  Rafael Santoro was the chief assistant—the Conscience—to the King of Fear, Hugo Vox. Santoro was one of the most brutal, sadistic men I’ve ever encountered. A man who raised coercion to a dark art form. He was also the man who formed and personally trained the Kingsmen, the elite special ops fighters who worked for the Seven Kings. I’d fought the man and he’d nearly killed me. Church made the guy disappear. Not sure if he was alive or dead.

  Now we had to deal with his brother.

  I said, “You’re going to hurt me, aren’t you, Bug?”

  He cleared his throat. “Esteban Santoro, or Mr. Priest, used to be one of the field operators for the Ordo Fratrum Claustrorum. And when he left them he went to work for Howard Shelton. He was a Closer.”

  “Shit.”

  “And this guy Priest apparently acquired all of the books on Prospero’s list.”

  “Right, but they were destroyed along with Gateway.”

  “The books maybe,” said Bug, “but not the scans.”

  I stiffened. “What scans?”

  “That’s what we found. Priest oversaw a complete scan of the Unlearnable Truths. It was part of their search for the sequencing code.”

  “Where are those scans?”

  “I’m working on that now. It was outsourced to one of the contractors who worked with Erskine, but we don’t know which one. Nikki thinks she’ll have that figured out by this morning. Noon at the latest.”

  “That’s incredible, Bug. You’re amazing.”

  “No, I’m not. I’m slow. I should have figured this out before now.”

  “No, you’re amazing. I could kiss you.”

  “Please don’t.” He paused. “But that lady who works for you…? The one with all the stuffed pandas on her desk? Lydia-Rose? Maybe you could put in a good word for me…?”

  I laughed. “Done.”

  “Just so you know,” said Bug, “I called this in to the Pier. Mr. Church was busy so I told Mr. Bolton. He’s already working on it, too.”

  “Nice. Thanks!”

  I disconnected the call and turned to Toys. “You were the Conscience to the King of Plagues. You knew Rafael Santoro.”

  He flinched and went pale. “Yes.”

  “The name you were about to give me when Bug called … was it Esteban Santoro?”

  Instead of being surprised he merely looked old and sad. “Yes.”

  “What I don’t get,” said Junie, touching his arm, “is why they went after you.”

  “They wanted my laptop.”

  “Right, but why?”

  Toys said, “The Closers were supposed to look for any files related to Majestic.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE

  CATAMARAN RESORT HOTEL AND SPA

  3999 MISSION BOULEVARD

  SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA

  SEPTEMBER 8, 11:46 P.M.

  I ordered a team to come and clean up for Toys. The bodies were taken away in discreet laundry hampers and everything was smoothed over with the night manager. Then I called Church to bring him up to speed.

  “First Junie’s office was robbed, and now they came after Toys’s laptop, looking for anything connected to Majestic,” I said. “Our bad guys know a lot of stuff they shouldn’t know and it’s pissing me off. I mean, how do they know?”

  “That is perhaps the most important question we need to answer,” said Church.

  “Boss,” I said, “that Project Stargate stuff. I’m beginning to think we need to take a closer look at that.”

  “To make a bad joke, Captain, you’re reading my mind.”

  He hung up. My next call was to Harcourt Bolton and I woke him from a sound sleep. He was drowsy and grumpy, but he perked up when I explained why I was calling. Like Church, Bolton said that he needed to make some calls.

  Junie called Christel Sparks, the former cop who now ran security for FreeTech, and gave her a rough idea of what happened at Toys’s place. Christel was smart and capable, and Junie trusted her. Security would be doubled around all FreeTech facilities and senior staff.

  Toys came home with us and stayed in our guest room. Job came with him, which Cobbler seemed to like and Ghost did not. The two cats sat on the balcony and looked at things only they could see in the darkness before dawn. I tried to get some sleep, but I was too wired, and barely closed my eyes. So I got up early and left Junie and Toys at home. There’s good security at our place, but I called Brian Botley and asked him to swing by and camp out until Junie went into work.

  Church told me about his call from Lilith, and about the Mullah of the Black Tent. I asked him when POTUS was ordering a full-team hit on the Mullah and got punched by the news that the president did not believe Lilith’s intel was real. Balls.

  So, I spent the morning working my own networks and calling in favors with my friends in the other intelligence services trying to find out something—anything—about the stolen vials of SX-56.

  But everywhere I went I hit walls, too. Friends were being cagey and evasive. Others were treating me like a leper. Or like the DMS was itself a leper colony. A few truly good friends confided that they had nothing to share because no one had a clue, and they warned me to stay out of it. Word had come down that Church and all of his people were politically toxic. We were being shut out and we were being blamed. It made me feel sick and lost. I ached to be back in a coma.

  It wasn’t much better when I trolled for information inside our own group. Bug’s team was still wading through the papers and, after the first news, had found nothing else new. And Hu was getting absolutely nowhere with trying to understand the effects of the mind control. He’d obtained some of the old Stargate records, but they were incomplete and, as he phrased it, “as useless as hairy nipples on a velociraptor.” Dr. Hu is weirdly specific.

  At eleven Lydia-Rose buzzed me to say that Violin had arrived and that she was in with Mr. Church. I didn’t bolt and run to the conference room, but I’d have won a speed-walking competition. Once upon a time Violin and I had something very special going on. We weren’t a couple, but what we had was pretty steamy. Very intense. But then I met Junie and the course of my romantic life shifted gears and changed lanes and that’s the only road I’ll ever take. Not sure that’s a good metaphor for falling in love, but it’s what I have. Violin did not take it as stoically as she’d have liked, and for a while I was almost afraid for Junie’s safety. Violin isn’t often like her mother, but she has her moments.

  Then an assassin went after Junie and Violin was there. Junie was hurt, though. A bullet that destroyed any chance we’ll ever have of having kids. Even though Violin killed the assassin, I knew she blamed herself for what happened to Junie. It was a special kind of blood debt that is entirely self-imposed. The way I see it, Junie is alive because Violin was there, and that’s a debt I can never repay.

  Life is so very complicated for those of us who live out in the storm lands. Maybe it’s that way for normal people, too. I wouldn’t know. It’s been too long since I’ve been normal. I wouldn’t even know how to breathe in that world.

  So now Violin was here. She’d been on the run from killers, fighting for her life while I was in a coma. May
be if I’d been awake there might have been some way for me to reach out, to help her come out of harm’s way. An egotistical male chauvinist thought? Not as much as it sounds. It’s one member of a family wishing he could have been there for his dearest sister. Ghost, a member of our pack, was right at my heels, excited because he had heard Violin’s name.

  I whipped the conference room door open and rushed inside. And immediately tripped over someone who was bent down in front of me. We both went tumbling and clunking down onto the floor in a comedy-act sprawl of arms and legs. I landed better than him, but also on top of him, and the back of one of my heels thumped down into his crotch.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR

  THE PIER

  DMS SPECIAL PROJECTS OFFICE

  SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA

  SEPTEMBER 9, 9:22 A.M.

  No one makes an entrance as graceful as Joseph Edwin Ledger. Seriously, folks, hold the applause until after the show.

  We got ourselves untangled and I reached over and grabbed a fistful of shirt from somebody I had never met and wanted to punch. “Who in the wide blue fuck are you?”

  The guy was ten years younger than me, a little chunky, with a round face and bright blue eyes and a mouth that was puckered with pain. He said, “Eeerp.” Very faintly.

  I hugged Violin. Ghost jumped all over her and got kisses on his furry white head. Violin reached down and pulled the kid to his feet and helped him into a chair. He moved with the kind of delicacy men use when a brute my size heel-kicks them in the wrinklies. Too bad.

  “Joseph,” said Violin, “meet Harry Bolt.”

  “Why’d you frigging trip me?” I demanded.

  It took him a moment to get his voice back and it came out as a mouse squeak. “I … dropped my … cell phone. Bent to pick it up. You … attacked me.”

  “If I’d wanted to attack you,” I began, and then caught identical looks from Church and Violin and snapped my mouth shut. Violin patted the groaning stranger on the shoulder.

  “Harry is with the Agency,” said Church. “I believe I mentioned him earlier.”

  I gaped at him. “Wait … you’re Harcourt Bolton, Junior?”