Dead Man Switch

by Matthew Quirk

  Her head ached. The broken blisters on her foot sent out a stabbing pain with every step. She needed sleep. She looked down the ridge at her home in the hollow. She had left it in switched-on, full-assault mode, indifferent to herself or the past. Never mix lives. Always be willing to let the cover die, to let your old self die. Never get attached.

  She didn’t know what came next, but it meant prison, exile, or death. Her old clothesline wavered in the breeze. Paul was such a cheapskate, hanging his laundry out on principle, like a pioneer’s wife.

  His face—sometimes she had trouble remembering it. The chin wouldn’t be right. She’d forgotten her mother’s a long time ago. She had a photographic memory for license plates and train schedules. The faces of her targets never left her, their bugged eyes and lolling tongues as they died. But she couldn’t remember the only good people in her life. She wanted a scrap of them, some light to take with her into the dark that was coming.

  This was going to end badly. That she knew. Everything changes. Everything disappears. The earth moves under your feet. She wanted to see them again.

  They wouldn’t be watching the house anymore.

  No. It was a bad idea. She had a gun, money, her target. Never cross lives. Leave the dead behind and go. Remember what happened, Claire.

  But the end was coming soon, and this wasn’t about success on an op, then a homecoming. This was her last chance, her last self. And she didn’t know who she was, but she knew that if she cut out the part of herself that wanted those memories, the good in her was already dead. And that would mean they had won, the men who had taught her how to kill and the men trying to kill her now.

  She started down the hill toward her old home.

  Chapter 47

  CLAIRE STOOD INSIDE the open screen door, looked down, and saw the torn corner of a maple leaf on the ground. She’d wedged it between the door and frame before she left so she’d know if someone had entered.

  Whoever it was could have come yesterday or five minutes ago. She listened, heard only the cicadas, and opened the back door. She moved fast in the dark, going from memory. Lights would bring attention. She stopped at the door to Paul’s office and ran her fingers over the fake wood grain.

  She had shoved all the photos in there, most of them in boxes. Her mother, her husband. She hadn’t been able to look at them. Every time she did, she would hear their voices, hard and accusing, calling her out on her guilt.

  Her pulse throbbed in her fingertips, and for a moment it was all she could think about, her heart and lungs slamming in her chest like a train’s engine.

  A low pop from the attic. The house settling with the evening cold.

  She put her hand on the knob. It felt almost warm, like someone was inside, but that was nerves, just the flush of blood in her skin.

  Love cut with dread; she knew this feeling from her last week with Paul. She’d told him who she was after they returned from Chania. There was no other way. She’d told him her real name for the first time.

  He stormed out, mute with anger. He was gone for two hours in a cold drizzle. She was in bed, awake, when the front door opened. He came home, sat with his back to her, and asked if she was okay. Then he lay beside her. Accepted it. He was worried about her, even after all those lies. That night, she slept better than she could ever remember.

  She had let the truth in, and they were still there, and alive, and safe. She was just Claire, a woman with a husband and a house and a garage full of crap and no more lies. They would be okay.

  The next morning arrived like a hangover.

  She woke before him, and the realizations came in as clear as the sunlight.

  What if he talked? He was a journalist, for Christ’s sake. Getting the truth out was in his blood as surely as hiding it was in hers. What would she do to protect her secret?

  She followed him for four days, went operational against her own goddamn husband, lying through her teeth to him every morning and every night, feeling more insane every day, until the fifth, when she trailed him all the way to Washington, and he parked in front of an eight-story building on F Street a few blocks from the Treasury. It housed the DC bureau of the LA Times. He had friends at the Times, had shot photos for them in Iraq.

  He was going to talk. People in Cold Harvest were already dying. If he talked, he might get her or her teammates or himself killed. What would she do to protect them? Who would she choose, her brothers or her husband?

  The reaction came automatically. Her mind went to the suppressed .22 under her seat, the stick of M112 plastic explosive in her assault kit, and the impossible choice.

  He died that evening.

  She didn’t do it, but she might as well have. She’d killed him when she brought him into her world, because she was weak and selfish and thought she could have both lives.

  Chapter 48

  SHE OPENED THE door. Her legs threatened to fall under her, collapse like stacked cards, but she took a long breath in through her nose, exhaled through her mouth, four counts, four times, then she straightened herself up and stepped in.

  The faces looked at her from a dozen different angles, a dozen photos, on the walls and piled in boxes.

  And in an instant she was back in the nightmare, in that fire with Paul. The close air of the room was the burning fuel oil dripping over her body, flames twining red and yellow, and the hitch in her chest was a joist, forcing the air out of her lungs. She closed her eyes.

  And then she was in her childhood home in Singapore, paralyzed with fear, as she heard her mother cry out and the crack of the belt.

  Open your fucking eyes, Claire. The only monster is you. The only one hurting anyone is you. They’re dead and no one is here.

  The carpet felt like sponge under her first unsteady step. She opened her eyes and took four more deep breaths.

  She picked up a photo from their wedding day, a candid of her fixing Paul’s collar. Then she lifted a faded shot of her mother, pregnant with her, twisting the spiral cord of a telephone around her finger. Claire ran her thumb over the cool gloss finish of the print and studied her mother’s face.

  No one reached for her. No one cried out, Why did you let me die?

  She was just alone, in a home that she felt nothing for, with salt tears running down her face.

  Eeee.

  Hallway floorboard. A long nail. She knew that noise. The house wasn’t settling. She wasn’t alone. The training saved her. She shot across the room.

  The photo fell to the ground as she drew her pistol to her chest and hauled open the door. She moved as if on invisible rails through the dark.

  Whoever was in here was moving just as fast, must have had night-vision on, the way he was navigating through the house.

  She closed on the thudding footfalls, heard the sound of the bedroom door ahead of her creak open, then shut. As the lock rattled, she threw her shoulder into it and blew the frame out in splinters.

  A black figure turned, silhouetted by the window, almost beside her, in too close for shots.

  “Claire, no.” But the gun was already driving toward his temple. She pistol-whipped him and landed with her full weight on his chest as he slumped to the ground.

  She gathered a fistful of the man’s shirt and pulled the body toward the light. She kept the pistol trained on his eye, an easy kill. Blood dripped from his temple across his face, onto the carpet. She smeared it away.

  Her hand tightened on the grip of her pistol as her teeth buried in her lower lip and her eyes grew wide with shock. No. That body was burned and buried.

  Her whole arm trembled. She let him fall back and brought her left hand to the pistol to steady it.

  “Claire,” the man said.

  She moved closer to him. The blood smelled like cast iron. There was no mistaking that face.

  “Paul?”

  Chapter 49

  IT WAS HER husband. Joy edged in, and she stopped it. No. Too many questions. She had been taught that any doubt meant a trap,
meant death. If there was any question, she should simply execute the target and go.

  Her mouth drew tight, her eyes barely open. “No.” She said it over and over and the gun shook in her hand.

  Kill him, she thought. And that cycled instantly into guilt that made her feel more insane, like her skin was too tight and hot, like she was drying out in a kiln.

  PTSD? No. She’d had visuals before, waking dreams. This was different. This was real.

  “Oh God,” he said. “I was wrong to come here. It was you.”

  “Paul. What’s happening?”

  He looked straight at her over the gun, didn’t flinch, didn’t plead.

  “You started that fire. You tried to fucking kill me then. I shouldn’t have come back. Go ahead. Shoot. At least now I know it was you. No more secrets.”

  “I didn’t, Paul. What is going on?”

  He didn’t say anything for a long moment, calculating, looking from her face to the barrel. She took her finger off the trigger, then stood over him and ran her left hand over her mouth. Her palm felt cold, clammy; shock coming on. But she kept breathing deeply, fell back on the training. One mistake could cost her life, cost her everything she had thought she had lost.

  Careful, Claire, your emotions.

  “Paul. You need to explain what’s happening because I don’t want to harm you but I need to understand what’s going on or we could both get hurt.”

  He nodded.

  “You understand?” she asked.

  “I think so. Is that one reason you might let someone live? For answers?”

  “Yes, it is. But that doesn’t matter now. You survived the fire?”

  Interrogation. This was her domain. She’d spent weeks patiently running through questions, teasing out answers, outplaying the world’s great liars. The thought of it as work felt comfortable, brought her down.

  He looked around the room, seemed to be having trouble focusing. She reached down to the laundry basket to her left with her free hand and tossed him a clean T-shirt. He pressed it to the cut at his temple.

  “We can take time and talk through all this later,” she said. “But right now I just need the straight story of what happened. Okay? It’s important.”

  He started to object, then caught himself. “Fine.”

  “Were you in that fire?”

  He touched the fingers of his left hand to a patch of scar on his neck. “Yes. But would you put down the gun?”

  “No. Soon. But I have to be sure. What happened? Just answer the questions.”

  He looked at the gun, then relented.

  “I ran once the car started burning. I got away. Some debris—” He pointed to his neck. “Then I saw two men coming. I’d seen them following me before. I thought they had something to do with your job, that they’d set that fire, that they’d try to kill me. I thought they were with you, Claire.”

  “Why?”

  “I saw you watching me that week. I know how to keep an eye out. You wanted to see where I would go, who I would tell. I thought you were all working together.”

  “I was following you to protect you. If you told anyone, it could have gotten us both hurt.”

  He laughed deep in his throat.

  “Sure. And what if I were going to break your cover? What would you have done to stop me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Was it an accident, Claire? A warning?”

  “I didn’t set it off.”

  “You had me in the crosshairs, Claire. You were stalking me, like…like one of the people you kill. So I ran.”

  “Then why are you here? Why did you come back?”

  “I heard about the shooting, the man you killed off the forest road. How you disappeared. I thought they were coming for you. I realized that you were a victim too. I thought you could help me, that we could help each other.”

  “Where have you been?”

  “Outside Bozeman.”

  “What did you do for money?”

  “Swung a hammer. Landscaping. It’s cheap out there.”

  He’d been a rafting guide, a river bum until he was twenty-eight. It was possible.

  “Who knows you’re alive?”

  “You. I didn’t trust anyone.”

  “How did you find me?”

  “You found me. I came here after the police left.”

  “Looking for me?”

  “I thought you’d come back, for guns or money or something.”

  He wanted her caches, her help. “You needed money?”

  He dabbed at his temple and looked at the blood. “Yes.”

  “There’s nothing in the house.”

  She ran her thumb over the pistol’s grip.

  “Whose ashes did I scatter?”

  “I don’t know.”

  A faint glow passed left to right across them. A car engine echoed up the hollow.

  “We need to go. Someone may have seen you, or me. We can’t be found.”

  “Where are you taking me?” Paul asked.

  “I’m not forcing you.”

  He glanced at the gun, then shook his head, looked to the ground. “Not even a word.”

  “What?”

  “‘Glad you’re not dead. Good to see you. Sorry for ruining your fucking life.’”

  “I am glad, Paul. I am. But I’ve been taught to assume every word is a lie, every identity a cover until proven otherwise, and this is all too much. So we need to go, and you need to tell me the story from beginning to end. I just have to be sure, Paul. God, I hope it’s true.”

  Or else…

  She brought the gun down to her side.

  “An interrogation?” Paul asked.

  “I just need to know.”

  “And how can I trust you?”

  “Because you’re still alive,” she said.

  “Is that what passes for trust in your world?”

  “Yes. It’s the only thing you can believe. And you can’t always believe it. I told you, I’m done lying to you.”

  A ringing bell filled the house: the landline in the kitchen. Claire spun, the gun braced in both hands. Then she held her left arm out to him and helped him to his feet.

  “Now,” she said, and she gestured forward with the pistol. She covered him as he left the bedroom.

  Chapter 50

  VERA STOOD WITH her back to a tree on the ridge above Claire’s home. She set her cheek against the cool polymer stock of her rifle and watched Hynd and Claire climb through the woods behind the house. The red dot in her optic danced on Claire’s back, circling her heart and lungs as she tracked her through the pines. Claire stopped near her truck and turned to the side, and Vera centered the aim just behind Claire’s jaw, on the brain stem.

  Six pounds of pressure on the trigger, and the woman would be a carcass on the hillside, a bad memory.

  Her finger reached inside the trigger guard, felt the curved steel, as she watched. She couldn’t pull, not without Hynd’s orders, and he was still standing beside Claire, still playing this insane game.

  It was reckless for him to resume his old cover as Claire’s husband this far along in the operation. Vera had tried to talk him out of it.

  But they needed to know where the members of Cold Harvest were gathering. And so far, Claire had been an unerring, if unwitting, guide. She had given them both Gray’s and Hayes’s locations. But they had no time left. The rest were meeting soon. They needed to provoke her, send her straight after her teammates.

  It made sense that Hynd would want to go back. He thrived on risk. He had started this operation years before as an ambitious outsider bent on revenge against the West’s elite killers, simply hoping to gain access to a member of the program. He’d used Claire’s neediness, her psych profile, her thirst for decency to get close to her. He’d succeeded far better than he could possibly have imagined. Another man would have panicked when things moved so quickly, when he got in so deep, but he rode it out and lived the lie with her in the heart of the enemy nati
on.

  He went inside Cold Harvest, and that was what raised his profile to where it was today. The man who knew the names, faces, and addresses of those in a program so secret that most other countries’ intelligence services were unaware of its existence. The man you would seek out if you wanted to eliminate that program.

  That penetration was his greatest success, so of course he would want to return to it, like an actor reprising his signature role.

  She kept the gun pegged on Claire as the woman put down the truck’s tailgate. She could hear every word. Paul’s phone was modified to have an open microphone, constantly broadcasting audio as well as a GPS beacon. She could hear and follow him and know if he was in trouble.

  The bitch was going to kill him. She was sure. Every fiber urged her to take Claire down. But that wasn’t how this worked.

  Hynd gave the orders. There was a simple code to tell Vera to take the kill shot. All he had to say was “Fair enough.” And as soon as he learned the location where the members of Cold Harvest were gathering, he would say, “I see. I see,” and she would call in Timur and the truck. The bomb was done, waiting in an abandoned salvage yard in northern New Jersey, ready to move on New York as soon as they had the site.

  Claire had been an excellent guide so far. While posing as her husband, Hynd had been able to follow her and find her caches, and he had fitted every device he could with GPS trackers. She had led them to Gray and to Hayes and to her old home tonight.

  Even with backup and all the tech in the world, he was putting himself in the hands of a killer. Vera thought it was reckless, but he had proved her wrong before. Vera had warned him against coming to the United States under cover as Claire’s husband, against staying in the role even after the first killings of Cold Harvest members seemed to point to Claire or him.

  But he had a way out. He always had an exit before he committed to an operation. She remembered the prisoner whose remains they’d used to stand in for Paul’s body in the car fire.