Dead Man Switch

by Matthew Quirk

  “It’s Cox.” A pause. “Burke is dead.”

  Hayes let out a long breath as the coldness spread through him, that strange instant of numbness whenever he heard of a fellow teammate down.

  “How?”

  “Fell off the cliffs near his house.”

  “Foul play?”

  “No clear evidence. He might have fallen, or he might’ve taken his life.”

  “I can’t see him doing that.”

  Hayes and Burke were members of a small community of special operations soldiers. They had cross-trained with the CIA and acquired the intelligence tradecraft needed to perform operations undercover and alone.

  The line between spy and fighter had blurred to the point where it disappeared. The CIA would borrow or hire the most experienced military shooters from the classified units for its direct-action branch, and spec ops would temporarily use CIA authority when it needed to go into nations where there was no state of war, a practice known as sheep-dipping. There were even cases where the legal authority was written so that teams could switch back and forth between military and CIA control as they moved across borders on a single mission.

  Some of the best graduated to Cold Harvest, and they had no legal authority. Their only protection was their own tradecraft. There were no more than fifty.

  Ever since Hayes had come home, it had bothered him, the number of Cold Harvest deaths over the past couple of years. Five that he knew about. One member had died from a heart attack, another in a motorcycle accident. The latter was depressingly common in the military. Motorcycles killed more good soldiers than enemy fire. But now Burke was gone, so soon after he had come across Kashani’s plans.

  “Was he involved with Cold Harvest?” Hayes asked.

  “He worked with them on a few operations.”

  Maybe they had ID’d him somehow while he was in custody in Pakistan and traced him here.

  “This wasn’t an accident. I told you to protect those covers.”

  Hayes heard a scratching on the hardwood floor outside his office.

  “We did everything we could,” Cox said. “We don’t know how they found him.”

  “But this isn’t the first death.”

  “I know,” Cox said.

  “It can’t be a coincidence. Do you think someone has gotten inside the classified programs, inside Cold Harvest? That our enemies have the names somehow?”

  For a moment there was no response except for the sound of Cox’s breathing, and then finally he said, “Yes.”

  Hayes’s first instinct was to drop the phone, get his Mossberg shotgun, take Lauren and Maggie and put them in an interior room. But he had always been careful; he lived here at home with as much caution as he had abroad, undercover. He never stopped watching for surveillance.

  No one but Cox and a few other friends he’d had for decades knew where he lived. Every time he went out to a base, he ran a countersurveillance route when he returned to make sure no one was tracking him to his home.

  He had Lauren take precautions as well and taught her how to spot someone following her. He knew she resented it, the air of paranoia, as she should, but it was to protect them all. Even when Hayes left the war behind, the war never left him.

  “I didn’t want to call,” Cox said.

  “It didn’t stop you. You want me on this?”

  “I thought it should go to you first. A lot of these people came up under you. And…” He hesitated.

  “I can think like a killer. You’re not going to hurt my feelings.” Hayes had never actually been part of the program, though he’d helped train its first members.

  He heard rustling from the door.

  “We need you on this. It’s Black One.” Code for the highest priority, from the president, although there was never any recorded link between the White House and Cold Harvest.

  “This is ugly, Hayes. Someone might have penetrated the program. I want you to have open eyes. If you take this job, you’ll be a target as well.”

  The scratching grew louder.

  “When is Burke’s funeral?”

  “Two days.”

  “I’ll have an answer for you then.”

  He ended the call, went to the door, opened it, and quickly buttonhooked around the door frame. Old room-clearing instincts, drilled into him in the training facilities known as kill houses. A cardboard box sat in front of the door, shaking left to right and giggling.

  Then his daughter jumped up and screamed, “Surprise!”

  Hayes rubbed his forehead and took a few deep breaths. Lauren came up the stairs and stood at the end of the hallway, stifling a laugh.

  “I had nothing to do with it. I swear.”

  He picked up his grinning daughter. “Did I scare you?” she asked.

  “You sure did, sweetie.”

  Nothing better for a man with poorly managed low-grade PTSD than a preschooler who loved surprises.

  Hayes lowered her to her feet. “Why don’t you go pick out a story.”

  She ran down the hall.

  “Work?” Lauren asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You’re going back?”

  “I haven’t decided.”

  Half his toes were still black, the skin continuing to come off in pieces. He had just taken off the knee brace.

  “I won’t tell you what to do. That was never our arrangement.”

  She knew what it meant to him, to protect the people he worked alongside. They were as close to him as brothers and sisters.

  Maggie came out with a Dr. Seuss book.

  “Daddy!”

  Black One. The highest priority.

  Hayes lifted his daughter.

  No, not the highest.

  Chapter 8

  HAYES KNELT IN front of the casket. It looked like Burke. They had done a good job, all in all, but there was something off about the hands, like they were two wooden paddles. They never got the hands right. Hayes had buried a lot of his boys. He hated funerals, hated the way the dead men’s faces always looked old and tranquil, at peace. He’d never seen Burke rest easy. Even asleep, he’d been like a coiled spring.

  Hayes rose from the kneeler. The funeral would take place at Arlington later that day. Burke’s father and grandfather were buried there. This was an early visitation being held for classified personnel at Fort Belvoir, a base on the Potomac south of DC with a long history of black army intelligence work. Lauren and Maggie were in the sitting room just outside. As Hayes waited to speak to Burke’s widow, he saw an old teammate, a man named Drew Ochoa. He had come up to Team Six through the navy’s explosive-ordnance disposal programs, and he and Hayes had worked together hunting down high-value targets and chemical weapons in Syria.

  “Good to see you,” Drew said, then he took Hayes’s hand and wrapped his arm around him. When Drew stepped back, Hayes glanced down at the man’s fingers. Drew flexed them and smiled slightly.

  Drew had been taken by the enemy while on a patrol in the eastern deserts, and Hayes had pulled him half dead out of an al-Nusra cell, literally a metal cage, twelve days later. His captors had bound his wrists so tight with battery wire, they’d nearly cut the radial nerve on one hand. The medic thought he might never be able to use it again. Hayes hadn’t run into him since, so he was glad to see it was working.

  “Thanks,” Drew said.

  “Of course.” Hayes reached up and squeezed his shoulder.

  That was it. They didn’t do much talking about the past. Drew dipped his head toward Burke’s wife, Tara, who sat at the end of the front row of chairs on the far side of the coffin. It was Hayes’s turn to offer his condolences. He walked to her.

  “I’m John Hayes. I worked with Connor. I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  “Thank you for coming,” she said, and then she looked at him more closely. “You were with him…” She raised her hand to her eyes.

  “I was.”

  “You were one of the men he saved.”

  “Yes. I’ll never b
e able to repay him.”

  Her gaze drifted toward the casket. Hayes looked at the last few mourners behind him, waiting. But Tara reached out and touched his arm, raised her face to his. There was something about Hayes that made people trust him.

  “People are saying that he jumped,” she said.

  “That doesn’t sound like Connor.”

  “Then why would he go near those cliffs?”

  “I don’t know. But he never gave up and never backed down from anything.”

  Five other men had been killed. Burke had been murdered too. He wanted to tell her that he would hunt down whoever had done this. But there was nothing Hayes could say. He had sworn, and sharing these secrets was dangerous.

  Hayes hated the evasions, hated holding information back from Lauren, disappearing, waking covered in sweat and not being able to talk about the memories that stalked his sleep. The men he had killed, the men who had left him to die. Deceiving the ones he loved seemed colder than the violence he faced downrange. He could never get used to it.

  Tara Burke’s eyes narrowed and she looked at Hayes with something like disdain.

  “I know that face. What aren’t you telling me?” She shook her head and looked at his wedding ring. “You men and your lies. Honor isn’t going to raise my kids. You were supposed to protect him. Get out now. Be with your family. The rest is just—”

  She buried her face in her hands and took four long breaths.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what I’m saying.”

  Hayes laid his hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay.”

  “He was a good guy,” she said.

  “The best.” Hayes put his arm around her and she cried quietly for a moment, then straightened up.

  “Thank you for coming,” she said in a flat tone. She was bottling everything up, pushing him away.

  Hayes left her with the next mourner. In the entry hall, outside the viewing room, one of Burke’s boys was playing with Hayes’s daughter. He slipped his arm out of the sleeve of his small blazer and then started turning in circles, trying to get it back in.

  “How many kids does she have?” Lauren asked Hayes when he joined her.

  “Three.”

  She shook her head slowly.

  “I know. The team wives will take care of her out there, though she might come back to the East Coast to be closer to her family.”

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Lauren said. She had been to too many funerals, seen too many young widows. “What’s happening, John?”

  He took her to the side.

  “Someone is hunting us down. The command wants me to come back,” he said. “To find out who’s behind this, to stop them.”

  Hayes had been in exile when his daughter was born. He didn’t see her until she was two, when he was finally able to return home. It took him months to break through with her, for her to stop hiding behind her mother’s legs when he came into the room.

  He knew the risks; he didn’t want to leave his wife a widow, like Tara and the others. But he couldn’t stay at home and wait for another silent kill. What if they came for his family? He’d lost the closest thing he had to a father to the network behind the DC attack, and they had threatened his wife and daughter.

  Now the enemy was inside the United States. Hayes couldn’t protect his family by sitting on his hands at home. He could protect them by closing on whoever was behind this and putting him in the ground. He knew it would make him a target, that the killers might never stop coming after him. So be it.

  His wife was strong. She had family not too far away. She and Maggie had been okay without him. He might not get to see Maggie grow up, but he was willing to pay that price to keep her safe.

  “I’m going after them,” he said.

  She pressed her lips together tightly and, after a moment, nodded. “All right. I get it. I’ve been to too many of these things, seen too many of these girls wearing black. I can handle it…”

  She trailed off, but he knew. She could handle the family solo—for now, forever—if it meant that no more of these young women would have to go through this. Her strength was his.

  “Do what you do, John. They need you.”

  His daughter walked toward him, and he took her hand. He saw Tara, Burke’s widow, through the open doors as they left.

  In the parking lot, Lauren and Maggie went to the car while Hayes hung back. He watched Lauren lift Maggie into the car seat as he took out his phone.

  Cox answered on the fourth ring.

  “It’s Hayes. I’m in.”

  The morning sun was still low in the sky. As Hayes spoke, there was no way he could see the man in the woods on the far side of the highway, watching him and his family through a long lens. He worked for Niko Hynd.

  Chapter 9

  KILLING IS DRUDGERY. Hours of scouting, of learning patterns.

  Hynd stepped silently down the hall. Carpet. That was good. A patch of moonlight from the living-room window angled across him. Water ran at the end of the corridor. A toilet flushed. He heard her spit out toothpaste.

  She wasn’t ready for him. Soon. A few more minutes. She was a widow, and this was unfinished business. The key to Cold Harvest lay with this woman.

  He eased the door open in silence and examined the third bedroom. It was set up as a guest room and home office. Dust swirled in the light edging around the blinds and settled on the desk, a photographer’s workspace. Racks of hard drives, cameras, and lenses in Pelican cases stacked against the wall. He looked over the photos; there was one of a man fly-fishing in a river under aspen trees and another of a group on touring skis making their way across the top of a snow-covered cliff. The room was empty. It had sat untouched for a long time. He stepped out.

  Light leaked from under the door of the master bedroom, then disappeared. He heard the creak of springs. He lingered in the hallway.

  The house was an L-shaped ranch set back in the woods off a country road that snaked through the mountains outside Charlottesville. The nearest neighbor down the street went to bed at 11:35, after the nightly news. The newspaper was delivered by a man in a rusted-out Mercury wagon at 5:30 a.m. There were no late-night guests, no sexual partners. She slept alone in a home built for a family. He had bugged her phone, a process as simple as clipping into the telephone wires on the outside of the house.

  He opened the door to the second bedroom. It would have been good for a child. They’d wanted roots here, had never planned to leave.

  Did she know how her husband had died? Did she suspect the truth? Did she hope, in these long nights alone, to join him?

  He checked his watch and returned to the hallway. Toe, heel, toe, heel. He stepped carefully, keeping the weight on the trailing leg, slowly applying it to the front, almost like a toddler’s walk, in order to remain silent. Awkward, but he had grown used to it, could do it quickly. He stood outside her door, listening to her breathe, waiting however long was necessary for her to fall fully asleep.

  Hynd had others helping him. An operation this complex required many hands. Most were already inside this country. He had backup nearby, but he and his team were still working through stealth, disguising the murders, and stealth was easiest with one man.

  Killing was his profession, and this job was simple: eliminate everyone in Cold Harvest. But he was more than a gun for hire. This cause was personal, and there was nothing he enjoyed more than the flush of adrenaline in his veins.

  After so many hours of surveillance, he would begin to feel invincible: The woman down the street would walk the dog, the trash trucks would trundle by, the lights of the other houses in the valley would go on and off, all by his cue, and all the work would be rewarded. He would know the secret script of this environment, and soon he would feel like he was summoning it all, controlling it all himself.

  Until this moment.

  Because at some point, you have to put yourself in danger.

  It was time. He twisted the knob and stepped into th
e room where she slept. The hardwood floor flexed gently as he shifted his weight to his forward foot. He leaned back, tried a spot a few inches over, and proceeded in silence.

  When he came around, he could see her face, the mouth tight as if in anger. This was his next target, Carol Duncan, an executive recruiter. Her hands rested near the pillow, and she lay on her side. Her chest rose and fell, rose and fell, beneath the covers—deep sleep.

  He took a breath in and could smell her: a clean, lotion-y fragrance. He put his hands on the foot of the bed. She turned slightly, more on her back, her face toward him.

  There were easier ways to kill than this approach.

  When you first teach soldiers to shoot, you make the target an abstraction. It’s not hard to fire at someone from a distance, to aim at a man or woman who might as well be a paper target.

  When fighters get up close, the instinctive human revulsion at killing paralyzes most of them. They won’t take the shot even if their own lives are in danger. But the intimate work was his specialty. It took decades to unlearn every moral instinct.

  This was the moment he loved, after all the silent watching. To get so close to that time where there was no script, only danger, only death, breathing the same air.

  His shadow moved up the bare skin of her arm, toward her chest and neck.

  He knew her now as well as anyone. He’d been watching her for days and had seen patterns she might not recognize herself. He’d gotten close to her, so close that he knew her mind, her reactions.

  That was the hardest thing. You had to open yourself to the targets, to understand them at the most intimate, human level; in a way, to love them.

  And then you had to kill them without hesitation or remorse and stare into their eyes while their lives drained away.

  He felt the latex glove, clammy against his skin, as he closed his fingers around the barrel of the syringe. She whimpered and rolled onto her back, and then he reached out toward her.

  Chapter 10

  IN THE BED, Carol Duncan was dreaming of the cop in town again, a deputy sheriff named Tim. She imagined them together in this room as he lifted her, laid her on the bed, and kissed her. But as she lay back, she saw her husband’s photo on the nightstand.