Dead Man Switch

by Matthew Quirk

  Politics revolted her, so she found the best approach was to draft off political animals like Tucker. He had the connections she needed. If he won this election and she kept Cold Harvest under control, he would set her up in a position where she would never have to answer to anyone again.

  Tucker ran his hand through his hair and stared into empty space for a half a second, then took a sip of his drink.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said. “That was awful. I’ve got twenty reporters camped outside my condo. I’ve got opposition researchers filming me every moment I’m outdoors. I’ve got Secret Service up my ass. You’re not recording anything?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Good,” he said. “I only have about a half hour. They think I’m exercising. What the hell is going on in Virginia? I hear Claire Rhodes is on the loose, and we have a dead body and local cops involved.”

  “Yes. I’m taking care of it.”

  “I’m asking people for million-dollar checks. I can’t have this come back on me now. There is too much at stake.”

  “It’s under control.”

  “Really? Because it sounds like a shit-show. We had a firefight on American soil, and Rhodes is running around like a five-foot-five time bomb. I just need it to go away.”

  Morgan had been at the meeting where they’d first conceived of Cold Harvest, seated against the wall while the principals ringed the conference table. Tucker was the one who had jokingly asked Gray who would pull the trigger. Gray put himself on the line, and Tucker had profited handsomely from the arrangement, but now the free ride was over.

  “This is why we should only kill with drones,” Tucker said. “People are messy. You can scrap a drone. It doesn’t go to the New York Times. It doesn’t come to your house and try to kill you.”

  “Calm down, Ken. I have a plan.”

  “You had better.”

  Nothing would be easier than shutting it down. Half the bad guys in the world would line up to kill the people in Cold Harvest. If they knew their names.

  “Understood,” Morgan said.

  She knew who she needed to stop this, to get the program back under control: John Hayes. Because he was the best they had, and because his name had never been cleared. If this all went south, there would be no one better to take the fall.

  She’d already sent two of her security team to get him. He was on his way.

  Chapter 17

  HAYES SAT IN the back of the Suburban as they drove in silence through the choked highways of Northern Virginia.

  He could see the towers, hundreds of them, springing up like kudzu along Route 66. Buildings with easily forgotten names. Little more than initials. The military-industrial complex was over, and this was the new iteration: the contractor renaissance. Satellites, bodyguards, interrogations. For a long time, the joke was that they had outsourced everything in war but the shooting. But then they outsourced that too.

  The driver cruised through an office park, pulled into a garage under a nondescript beige-and-glass tower, and parked beside the stairwell. Hayes and the two men entered an elevator, and the taller guard swiped a key card.

  They exited onto the seventh floor and crossed an empty lobby toward a door on the far side.

  The first guard placed his hand on a palm rest, and the lock chunked open. There was another door three feet in: a mantrap. The guard stepped into the small space, and Hayes watched the floor depress slightly—to check weight and make sure only one person passed at a time.

  The door closed, and the palm rest turned green, indicating it was ready for another entrant.

  “Go ahead,” the guard said.

  Hayes laid his hand on the cold glass. It glowed red while it scanned. The lock clicked open.

  They had his biometrics. No one was supposed to have that info.

  The doors slid back. His eyes went to the corners—doors with numbers but no name plaques. There was an open floor-plan office to his left, with young men and women at desks.

  This was supposed to be a one-on-one meet-up with Morgan, and he’d thought he was coming to a brass plate—intelligence shorthand for a cover office, typically empty or manned by a single communications officer. There were too many people here, too many seeing his face. Hayes was well aware there could be a leak from inside the program. This could mark him as a target.

  A woman with her hair back in a loose bun approached him, the catch in her stride from the lower-leg prosthesis barely noticeable. It was Kathryn Morgan. He caught the scent of cigarettes from twelve feet out.

  Hayes’s eyes didn’t move, but he saw two men rise to his right and then flank him on either side.

  Morgan stopped at the end of the row. “Derek, Will. What the hell are you doing?”

  They were flexed in an active stance. Derek’s hand hovered near his jacket.

  “Sit down,” she said.

  “Do you know who that is?” one of them asked.

  “That’s your new boss. Meet John Hayes.”

  “But he—”

  “That was a cover.”

  Hayes’s nostrils flared. He was barely able to hold down the anger at hearing his real name and the cover he had killed and almost died for being given away like a stick of gum.

  “I’m sorry, sir.”

  The young man bowed his head, and Hayes appraised him: West Point or Annapolis, former jock. Morgan looked at him.

  “And that is why you’re in a cubicle in Fairfax. You’ll learn,” she said.

  She led Hayes to an office marked 671. It was a corner suite with two windows, a desk, and a small seating area. By government-executive standards, it was practically Xanadu.

  Hayes walked to the far corner and put his back to the wall. He had a view of the door and the windows, a command of the room.

  “Is this your office?” Hayes asked.

  “It was Gray’s. Now it’s yours. We can get you some different furniture and a computer later.”

  Hayes’s eyes swept the room. They wanted his name and face all over this program.

  “No.”

  “Sorry?”

  A staff, an office, clout, and, above all, a budget. These were the marks of power in Washington. Hayes had spent years among killers. He could handle himself there. But politics put him on edge.

  “I’m sorry, Morgan. That’s the only way this works. The target is out there, and to do my job I need to be a ghost.”

  “Hayes. These people are all intelligence professionals. They can keep a secret. It’s fine if they know who you are.”

  “If I run into Derek two years from now on an operation, undercover, and he gives me a second look, we’re dead or shooting our way out.”

  It had happened before. Morgan surveyed the office, and her hand touched her pocket. She was anxious. She wanted another cigarette.

  “I get it. What do you need?”

  “Ten grand and clean papers.”

  “Of course.”

  “And two FASCIA techs at the National Security Agency who are on my call and cleared to work stateside.”

  FASCIA was a surveillance database. He was going to track the cell phones of all the members of Cold Harvest and find anyone who was following their movements.

  “But bulk collection of American phone records—”

  He cut her off with a Don’t bullshit me look.

  “Try to get a warrant from the surveillance court. If it was ever justified, it’s for this. I need the names. Everyone in the program. Living and dead.”

  Morgan began to protest.

  “If someone got their hands on that—”

  “It would be a road map for the killers. I know. That’s how I’m going to find them.”

  “Hayes—” She looked at Gray’s safe. Hayes knew what she was afraid of. Cold Harvest had become indispensable, a magic bullet to take down the most dangerous threats. If they lost those operators, there would be nothing between the U.S. and chaos.

  “The names have already leaked, Kathryn. Our people a
re getting murdered.”

  “The deaths can’t all be murders.”

  Hayes thought through them: a carbon monoxide leak, a fall on the California coast, a motorcycle crash…

  “Yes, they can.”

  Hayes knew exactly how. He’d spent a long time killing, and sometimes it meant leaving no trace.

  She walked over to the wall safe and twisted the dial, hiding what she was doing with her body. Hayes heard the dial reverse four times, and the bolt retracted.

  She pulled out a sheaf of papers with a red and black cover sheet: SPECIAL ACCESS REQUIRED—COLD HARVEST.

  “You think it’s one of us?”

  Hayes took it. “Very few others could pull off kills like this.”

  She reached in and grabbed a pile of used U.S. currency, twenties and fifties, and counted out ten thousand dollars. She placed it in his hand, a surprisingly small stack, and then looked up at him.

  “Claire Rhodes killed a man this morning, a mile from her home, and disappeared.”

  It came out like a confession.

  “Did she know the others who died?”

  “Yes. She was the common denominator.”

  “Who did she kill?”

  “A cleanskin”—someone with no trace in the databases—“we have no idea who. She’s gone.”

  Hayes knew Claire. He had trained her in surviving capture and torture and in operating undercover solo. They were close, though Hayes had always worried about her dark side. She looked like a very proper preppie girl from Connecticut, but when things went kinetic, she was capable of close-range, extreme violence. He’d seen her put an Army Ranger in the hospital. There was a deep anger there. Hayes didn’t trust emotion in tactics, but she seemed to be able to control it, to put it to good use. Seemed to, anyway.

  “You suspect her?” he asked.

  “She was the common link to the operators who died, and her husband was killed in a building fire a year ago. A fuel-oil tank let go in the garage at his office. It appeared to be an accident, leaking vapors ignited by his car starting up.”

  “You think she had something to do with it?”

  “Maybe they were aiming for her and mistakenly killed him, or maybe she was up to something and she killed him by accident or because he discovered something he shouldn’t have. We never found any evidence of foul play. But afterward, the Cold Harvest deaths stopped.”

  “Until now.”

  “That’s how it seems. She’s dangerous, Hayes. She can convince people of anything, convince herself of anything.”

  “Who’s tracking her down now?”

  “The FBI.”

  “And where’s this body?” It was the most recent kill, a place to start.

  “The local medical examiner’s office. Where are you based? Home? I can have a courier bring some more background info later today.”

  “I’ll take what you have now.”

  He looked through the glass at the open-floor-plan office. There was no way he was going to give them the place where his family slept.

  He thought of Claire as she’d been during the last phase of her selection, a week of hell meant to weed out the weak. He remembered her smiling at him after she’d finished a forty-eight-hour ruck march with a fifty-five-pound pack and a boot full of blood and saying, “All good, sir. What’s next?”

  She’d killed a man this morning, a man with no trace of an identity. She was at the center of this, though he didn’t yet know at which end of the gun.

  Chapter 18

  THUNDERHEADS ROLLED IN low over the Chesapeake. Thomas Gray watched them come across the silvery water and stack over Smith Point Light. He loved the Northern Neck, a long peninsula on the Virginia side of the bay. It was rural, and people kept to themselves, nothing like the scene of retired Washingtonians over in Maryland around St. Michaels. He liked the emptiness, the woods, the old churches. Being out here in nature was the only way he’d found to take his mind off all the ugliness he had seen.

  Small waves hushed against the rocks, and he heard something behind him. He pivoted around, steeled himself. It was an osprey.

  It was hard to lose the old habits.

  He walked toward the house. Children and grandchildren, husbands and wives, college friends. He could see them through the window sitting around the big farm table.

  So many names and faces. Gray couldn’t remember them all. He would stare blankly at a woman while she smiled over sadness. His son would whisper that she was his daughter-in-law. For a moment he had forgotten who she was. It was a common smile these days, patronizing but well-meaning, torture for the man, not old really, just sixty-two, who prided himself on his brain. It was his weapon.

  He opened the double doors that led from the garden to his library. A hi-fi from the 1970s sat on the cabinets. He had bought it in Japan when he was stationed there. He tilted a record sleeve, placed the vinyl on the turntable, then walked over to the pool table and put out a rack for nine-ball.

  A fanfare, then a soaring contralto. Mahler, a song about being forgotten by the world.

  Gray shook his head and smiled.

  It’s why he liked country music too. Listening to something so irredeemably sad, he always found it harder to feel sorry for himself.

  “Do you still listen to him, Claire?”

  He didn’t look back as he spoke. He tapped the edge of his glasses. “It’s darker in front of me than it is behind,” he said. “I caught your reflection.” In the corner of his glasses, he could see a mirrored image of his former student, the suppressed pistol at her side. He held his arms out and turned slowly.

  “The things I remember, and the things I forget. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “There,” Claire said, and she pointed to a low-backed chair.

  He sat while Claire circled around to the desk, rummaged through the drawers, and came out with an M1911 pistol, a gun that GIs had carried since the First World War and that was still favored by many for its stopping power. She slipped it into her waistband.

  “I’m glad they sent someone I know. Do me a favor, don’t let my kids find the body. The water is right there.”

  “That’s not what I’m here for, Gray.”

  He pointed to the gun. “Is that a housewarming present, then?”

  “I need to know what happened to my husband. It wasn’t an accident. Someone tried to kill me this morning. I don’t know who to go to, who to trust.”

  “They came for you?” He turned his head to the side and examined the cuts on her neck.

  “Did you kill my husband, Gray?”

  He kneaded his temple, as if trying to recall. “Claire, Claire, Claire,” he muttered, then he lifted his head up straight as if he had just remembered something.

  “Didn’t you?” he asked.

  He watched her knuckles turn white as her fist closed on the grip of the gun. She was broken; that’s why they had picked her, for that rage that had no bottom.

  During her training, another Cold Harvest candidate, an Army Ranger, had tried to haze her. She was a natural target, the only remaining woman. It was near the end of the diving phase, and sometimes the trainees would lock a newcomer in a storage trunk with an air tank and a regulator but no mask and then drop the trunk into the deep end of the pool for fifteen minutes.

  Gray talked to the man afterward, in the hospital. As the Ranger had come for her, she kept saying, “Please, don’t. Please,” with her fists balled at her sides. He’d thought she was begging for her own sake, but it was for his.

  She broke his nose and left him with both eyes swollen shut; she might have killed him if two others hadn’t pulled her off. She was like an animal, they said.

  Gray stared at her now, her jaw set, her eyes narrowed. As he watched the gun rise and the barrel aim square at his face, he thought maybe Hayes had been right. He’d always said it was too risky, trying to tame anger like that. Gray looked at her over the iron sights of the pistol and wondered, Did you ever find peace, Claire? Did
you ever get control?

  Chapter 19

  CLAIRE EASED HER grip on the pistol and took long, deep breaths.

  “Are you trying to provoke me?”

  Gray couldn’t help but laugh. “I know that’s a losing bet. I’m asking you, honestly, did you kill him? Didn’t I warn you back then? About not getting involved with that man?”

  “You did.”

  He had cautioned her against attachments when he’d first heard about Paul. Relationships with civilians usually ended badly. He encouraged operators to get together with people inside the teams.

  For all the silence directed to outsiders, there was openness with those in the brotherhood. Intelligence professionals bonded deeply and quickly. It was like putting your thumb over a hose: All that built-up pressure from not being able to talk to most people made relationships with those you could confide in all the more intense.

  But Claire hated the bubble, the same small circle of lies, of fake names in the same bars in the same war-torn towns, the same circuit of contractors and black units in their flannel shirts, beards, and ball caps.

  Cold Harvest had brought out the most dangerous parts of her, and living that life both at home and at work was too much. She had met Paul while using her cover in Turkey. That was all he knew of her: Carol, the innocent. He and that fake life were her escape from the killing.

  But Gray had warned her: “You can’t tell him who you are. It’s too dangerous. He’s a reporter.”

  “He’s a photographer.”

  She had understood, even then. His life was about exposing the truth. Hers was about hiding it. “Come on, Claire,” Gray had said.

  It didn’t take a genius to see the logic: That getting involved with Paul was a suicidal impulse. That it meant she wanted to expose herself, let the sunlight in. Kill everything that grew in the dark. She had nothing to be afraid of. She would stand up and answer for the death of every terrorist, arms trafficker, and dictator she had put in the ground.