Kill Switch

by Jonathan Maberry

  “Um … yeah. I guess?” It came out almost like a question. “I … um … prefer Harry, though. Harry Bolt.”

  “What, is that some kind of cool superspy name? Bolt. Harry Bolt?”

  His face, already flushed with pain, burned a deeper crimson. “Pretty much the opposite.”

  Then a voice spoke from the open doorway. “He changed it because he doesn’t want to smear the family name.”

  Everyone turned to see Harcourt Bolton, Senior, standing there. Tall and good-looking, powerful, cultured. Annoyed and disappointed.

  “Dad!” cried Harry as he launched out of his chair and rushed to hug his father. Bolton endured the hug. That was the best thing you could say about it. Endured. Harry hugged him and Bolton gave him a single, small pat on the back, then he pushed his son away and appraised him.

  “What the hell happened to you?” he asked. I know he was asking about Harry’s disheveled appearance and flushed face, but there was an implication of a deeper, perhaps existential question. I caught it, and from the flicker of disapproval that pinched Violin’s mouth I saw that she did, too.

  Harry immediately began trying to smooth down his hair and straighten his clothes. “It’s been a little crazy, Dad. Violin and I had to go dark and—”

  “Your entire station was wiped out,” said Bolton coldly. “Your infil team was cut to pieces, Harry. I saw photos of their severed heads and yet you don’t have a scratch. How did you escape a team of Closers?”

  He leaned a little too heavy on the word “you.” As if such a thing was beyond understanding.

  As I believe I’d said, I’m pretty much captain of the Harcourt Bolton fan club, but right then I wanted to punch him. He was being a dick to his kid and he was doing it in front of other professionals. Not cool.

  “Your son has brought us valuable intel, Harcourt,” said Mr. Church. He rose and walked around the table to stand beside Harry. He never does things by accident, so that had to make a statement. Wish I’d thought of it.

  Bolton sniffed. It was a snobbish, fussy thing for him to do and I could feel some of my affection for him beginning to bleed away. He’d been kind and considerate to me, but I did not like the way he treated his son. There’s a saying that in order to understand someone you need to see how they treat their children. Or maybe it was their dog. Not sure. Worked out to the same thing in this case because Bolton seemed to treat Harry like a dog that had just shit on the rug.

  “What intel?” asked Bolton, directing the question to Church.

  “This,” said Violin. She placed a heavy suitcase on the conference table, opened it to reveal a bulky item wrapped in a thick comforter. We all crowded around to watch. Inside the comforter was a book. Very large, very old, covered in strange markings and sealed with iron bands and heavy padlocks.

  “Jesus,” I said, “is that what I think it is?”

  It was. One of the Unlearnable Truths.

  “Hate to break it to you,” I said to Violin and Harry, “but Bug thinks that there are complete scans of all these books in the Gateway records. He’s working on locating them now.”

  “Impossible,” said Violin. “This book has not been opened in years.”

  “Let’s see,” I said, and bent to pick it up, but Violin caught my wrist.

  “Joseph, don’t,” she urged. “It’s dangerous.”

  “It’s only a book.”

  “It’s much more than that, Joseph. It has power.”

  “I have a vault,” said Bolton. “Hell of a sturdy one. We could lock it away.”

  “I don’t think that would be our best choice,” said Church, and he surprised everyone by picking the book up. Violin and Harry gasped and stepped back. Bolton looked like he wanted to grab it out of Church’s hands and maybe throw it out of the window. Church turned it over, smiling faintly. “An ocean of blood has been spilled over this.”

  “You shouldn’t touch it with your bare hands,” cautioned Violin. “My mother says—”

  “Your mother is a bit more superstitious than I am,” he said. “I’ve found that things like this only have the power you give them.”

  Harry Bolt shook his head. “I picked that thing up and my head went blank. Like … a couple of times.”

  “You were probably hungover from partying,” said his father in a caustic and emasculating way. Harry’s face went beet red.

  “Please, Harcourt,” said Church. To me he said, “Remind you of anything?”

  “Too many things,” I said. “Apparently Project Stargate wasn’t a total failure. Imagine that.”

  “No way,” said Bolton, disgusted. “I told you that Stargate was scrubbed.”

  Church ignored him and gave Harry an encouraging smile. “Tell me everything that happened.” Tell me, he said. Not us. It was the right thing to say. After a moment’s hesitation, Harry told his tale. His report was hesitant at first, but I saw him visibly shift his focus from his father’s disapproving scowl to Church’s encouraging smile. When he got into gear he gave a clear, concise, and surprisingly insightful report of what he and Violin had experienced.

  Church nodded and placed the book on the conference table. We all clustered around, and as Church bent to examine the locks and the binding, I saw him frown. He ran his fingers over the parts of the cover not blocked by the metal bands, then he licked his fingertips and wiped at the leather. Church grunted and straightened. “Now, isn’t that interesting.”

  “What?”

  “Captain,” he said to me, “you’re good at this sort of thing. Do you think you could pick those locks?”

  “I’m better at kicking down doors,” I admitted, “but I can try.”

  “No!” said Violin.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t,” said Bolton.

  “I can do it,” suggested Harry. We all looked at him. He produced a small leather toolkit from his pocket and opened it to show as sweet a set of lock picks as I’ve ever seen. “Really, I’m pretty good with locks. I opened the chest this was in.”

  “You opened a chest sealed by the Ordo Fratrum Claustrorum?” said Bolton, his skepticism evident and intense.

  “Um … sure.”

  Church stepped back. “If Captain Ledger has no objections.”

  “Knock yourself out, kid,” I said to Harry, clapping him on the shoulder in a way that pushed him a couple of steps toward the table. “It’s all yours.”

  Actually I didn’t want to touch the thing. If it was going to explode or open a gateway to a hell dimension or whatever, better him than me. Selfish, I know, but there it is. I’m a good guy but I never claimed to be a nice one.

  Harry Bolt set himself in front of the book, selected his tools, stuck his tongue partway out of his mouth the way some people do when they’re concentrating, and set to work. The kid was good, I have to give him that. He had each of the locks open in seconds.

  “Easy-peasy, Mrs. Wheezy,” he said. Bolton made a disgusted grunt. Violin blew Harry a little kiss. The dynamic in the room was getting kind of strange.

  Church placed a flat palm on the book to prevent Harry from opening it.

  “Here’s the issue,” said Church. “I have some experience with ancient books. Perhaps not as much as Circe O’Tree, but enough. From what you’ve told me, Violin, and from what your mother has said, the Brotherhood and the Closers were both after this book because it is the last of the Unlearnable Truths. All of the others, according to the inventory sheet we found among the Gateway papers, have been accounted for. They were all obtained by Gateway, and it is presumed they were destroyed along with the lab.”

  That earned me a few chilly looks but I managed not to fall down. That bell was already rung and couldn’t be unrung.

  “Apart from some aspects of their subject matter,” continued Church, “one of the few things that each of those books shares is that they are all examples of anthropodermic bibliopegy.”

  “What the heck’s that?” asked Harry, beating me to the question.

  It was Vi
olin who answered. “He means that each of those accursed books is bound in human skin.”

  “Okay,” said Harry, “I may throw up.”

  “Be a man,” his father said under his breath.

  “This book,” said Church, tapping the cover with a forefinger, “is bound in leather. Ordinary bovine leather.”

  Harcourt Bolton pushed past his son and peered suspiciously down at the book. “I don’t understand.”

  “People have gone to great lengths to obtain De Vermis Mysteriis,” said Church. He flipped open the cover and then fanned through the pages. They were all blank. “This is not it.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE

  HUMPHRIES-BELMONT ELECTRONICS SOLUTIONS

  THE ABSALOM FOGELMAN BUILDING

  6082 CENTER DRIVE

  LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

  SEPTEMBER 9, 9:29 A.M.

  “And that, sir,” said Dr. Kang, “is the long and short of it.”

  Across the desk from the director of the computer lab sat a man with a visitor’s badge clipped to his lapel and an NSA identification card hung on a lanyard around his neck. The name on the card was Special Agent Stephen Priest.

  “You’re entirely confident in your computer and Net security?” asked Mr. Priest. He was slim and tall, and even in his bland black suit and plain dark tie he seemed to exude a tigerish strength. It made Kang as uncomfortable now as it had when they’d begun this tour.

  Kang was certain that Mr. Priest was a very dangerous man. He had the look. His smile was warm but his eyes were cold. Very, very cold. And though he always laughed in the right places—even at Kang’s lamest jokes—there was something creepy about it. As if the laughs were faked to present an air of affability instead of being genuinely good-natured.

  “Our security team is second to none,” said Kang. “We’ve worked very closely with DARPA since the beginning, and, after all, DARPA invented the Internet.”

  “Not Al Gore?” said Mr. Priest, smiling.

  They shared a laugh.

  “Hardly. My predecessors here at the AEL, along with their colleagues at MIT’s Lincoln Lab and in our main offices in Virginia, developed the prototype military networks—ARPANET, MILNET, and then the Defense Data Network—before—”

  Mr. Priest held up a hand to stop him. “Please don’t take this the wrong way, Dr. Kang, but that was decades ago. I don’t need a history lesson. My concern is how your research is being protected right now.”

  Kang took a breath and nodded. “With the Russians, Iranians, Chinese, and North Koreans working so hard to hack our systems, as well as the power grids and everything else, it’s—” He paused and twirled a finger as he fished for the right word. “It’s encouraged us to make some radical jumps forward in cybersecurity to protect our vulnerabilities. We have whole teams dedicated to protecting us against malware, worms, viruses, and targeted attacks, as well as soft-probe and no-footprint intrusions. We’ve built firewalls, counterintrusion software packages, alert systems, and more. We’re impregnable.”

  “‘Impregnable’ is a risky word choice, Doctor,” said Mr. Priest. “It smacks of hubris.”

  Kang felt himself stiffen. Mr. Priest had been smiling when he said it but now there was no trace of evident humor. Certainly no affability.

  When Mr. Priest’s visit had been arranged, Kang had made sure his people did a thorough background and authority check, and the pingbacks had come from deep inside the intelligence community. Everything had been triple verified and memos had been sent by all the right people to grant Mr. Priest an unusually high level of clearance. That meant he was allowed to ask these kinds of questions and make these kinds of statements. Even the uncomfortable ones.

  Kang felt his face redden and swallowed nervously. “I can assure you, Mr. Priest, that I’m not overstating things. Our system is ultrasecure. It’s updated all the time. Even our own design and cybersecurity staff have to go through special procedures in order to log on. Codes are changed randomly, we have filtering systems, self-monitoring security subroutines, and—”

  Mr. Priest held up his hand again. “What’s to stop a terrorist from breaking in here, putting a gun to your head, and forcing you to log on and download one of your research projects?”

  “Can’t happen.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the master control programs require typed and verbal codes, and a retina scan and thumbprint.”

  “All of which could be coerced from you.”

  “No, sir,” said Kang, shaking his head. “If any of our team were under coercion we would input a false command that would appear to access the system, but which would really only access a self-limiting clone. At the same time it would send out a system-wide alert that would result in all other users being asked to verify their status. They also have fail-safe codes. If two or more users indicate that they’re under duress, the fail-safes crash the network.”

  “Wouldn’t that take crucial services offline from the defense community? If you’ve seen the news you know that we are in a time of national crisis.”

  “Under those circumstances, key individuals would have to input today’s command codes. Very similar to the way missile codes are handled. The codes are sealed in snap-cases that send an alert when opened, and the codes must be input only after thumbprint, personal code, and retina scan verification.”

  “Cumbersome,” observed Mr. Priest.

  “Necessary,” countered Kang. “Otherwise a coordinated terrorist attack could overwhelm the system by physical force.”

  Mr. Priest nodded and picked up the teacup that had remained untouched on his side of the desk. He sipped, nodded again, and set the cup down. “And you don’t see any holes or soft spots in this process?”

  “No. If I did they’d be fixed immediately. We have our own team of cyber-hackers whose only job is to try and crack our security. Every time they do, we use that as a guide to upgrade.”

  “Ah,” said Mr. Priest.

  “Excuse me, sir, but what does that mean?”

  Mr. Priest sighed. “Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I can see at least two major holes in this system. I’m rather troubled that you don’t.”

  Kang leaned forward and rested his forearms on his desk. His nervousness was quickly being trumped by irritation and anger. “I wasn’t aware that you are an expert in cybersecurity.”

  “I know my way around. However, I’m surprised someone with your limited skill set has been given control over so many sensitive projects.”

  “What is that supposed to mean? What do you know about what I do?”

  Mr. Priest spread his hands. “You’re an electrical engineer and a mathematician. Essentially a glorified code-breaker who also writes security system code under contract to the Department of Defense. You work on operational systems including firing controls for missile systems, nuclear plant security regulation codes, and so on. How am I doing?”

  Kang stared at him, lips parting in surprise, shocked that Mr. Priest knew all of this. And he did a very fast reevaluation of this man and his potential status in the intelligence network. He cleared his throat. “The security of this office and my teams is, naturally, of the highest concern.”

  “Naturally,” agreed Mr. Priest. “However, I’m sure you’ll agree that ‘concern’ is a quality of intention rather than action.”

  “I—” Kang stopped himself and tried again. “I would value any input you have, Mr. Priest. If it’s your opinion that there are problems with our system, then please explain. Maintaining the strictest security is absolutely crucial.”

  “I’m delighted to hear it.”

  Kang nearly winced. He said, “If you wouldn’t mind explaining our faults, as you see them. Perhaps walk me through them?”

  “It would be my pleasure,” said Mr. Priest. He raised his hand and pointed his index finger like a gun. “You say that under direct coercion you would input a false entry code, correct?”

  Kang looked at the pointed fi
nger. The gesture was borderline rude, but he dared not say anything. “That is correct,” he said.

  Mr. Priest nodded and then moved his hand slowly over to the row of framed photographs on the right side of Kang’s desk. There were five pictures in unmatched frames. His wife, Mary; their wedding picture; three school photos of fifteen-year-old Ashleigh, nine-year-old Kimmie, and three-year-old Jason.

  “And what if someone pointed a gun at someone you loved?” asked Mr. Priest.

  Kang did not answer. Such a question, such an action, even in a discussion of hypotheticals, was appalling. It was incredibly rude and violative.

  “Sorry, Doctor,” said Mr. Priest, “I didn’t hear your answer.”

  “This is hardly a proper—”

  “Doctor, I want you to answer my question. I know the lengths I would go to to protect my brother, and he is something of a disappointment to me. By all accounts you genuinely love your family. So, my question stands. If there were guns pointed right this minute at the heads of your wife and each of your three very lovely children, are you going to sit there and tell me that you would still input a false code? Would you actually risk such appalling harm coming to your entire family? Could you stick to your protocols and let them die?”

  Kang said nothing. He was far too horrified to risk saying the things that rose to his tongue. And he was also trying to determine exactly who he should report this to. National security spot checks and unscheduled evaluations were all good and well, but this interview had crossed a line. Anyone would see that.

  “I’d really like an answer, Doctor,” insisted Mr. Priest.

  “This is ridiculous and I think we’re done here.”

  “No, I don’t think we are.”

  Kang stood up. “Yes, we are. If you want to file an official report, then please do so, but this discussion is closed and this interview over. If you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.”

  Mr. Priest lowered his hand and leaned back in his chair. “Dr. Kang, if you don’t sit down right now I will kneecap you.”

  “I’m sorry—what did you say?”

  Mr. Priest opened his jacket and produced a pistol. He did not point it, but instead laid it on his lap. “Do you know what ‘kneecapping’ is? Can you imagine what it would feel like? A bullet punching through your knee, through bone and tissue. The shock of the entry wound, the red splatter as it exits the back of your knee, carrying pieces of tissue and nerve and tendon with it. The pain, Doctor. The searing agony.”