Dead Man Switch

by Matthew Quirk

  “You’re not asking questions,” Tucker said.

  “Tuesday,” Morgan said.

  He watched Morgan’s eyes as she glanced from his team members to her boss, thinking it through. A bloodbath on her watch, on American soil. It wasn’t a moral turn; it was a cold look at the optics. She’d misstepped.

  “You want us to call it off?” she asked.

  “No,” Hayes said. “It’s too late. We can use it to our advantage, set up a decoy to bring whoever’s behind this into the open. We’ll change the location to someplace far from population centers. Do a bad job concealing where it’s happening. There’s a safe house in the mountains near Ramapo.”

  It was an old business travelers’ hotel that the Agency had bought and fitted out with bulletproof glass and standoff barriers disguised as planters.

  “That will draw them out,” Hayes said, “and we can lure them into a trap and take them down.”

  “Who?”

  “Us. Cold Harvest. We’ll take that fight. We’ll win.”

  They were all solo operators, but they would meet this threat together, die together if need be. Let them come with everything they had. Hayes was ready.

  “You’re out of your mind, Hayes. You’re going to go to war on American soil?”

  “The war’s already started.”

  Two Secret Service agents stepped out from the double doors behind Tucker. They saw the men ringing Morgan and Tucker and drew their sidearms.

  “Vince,” Hayes said and gave one of the men a nod. He knew him well. They’d spent six weeks together working a detail through Southeast Asia.

  “What’s going on? Tucker, are you okay?”

  “No. These men need to be placed under arrest—”

  “Hold on, Tucker,” Morgan said.

  “You want to go to prison too?”

  “Fuck off,” Morgan replied, and Tucker stammered in indignation. “You don’t see it?” she asked her boss. “Whoever’s behind this could be on the way here now. I’m fine with politics, but I’m not getting any more of our people killed.”

  “Sir?” the Secret Service agent said to Tucker. The candidate’s face screwed up for a moment as he tried to process what he’d just heard.

  “What are you saying, Kathryn?”

  “The security on pulling everyone from the field was rushed. And there might be leaks in the office.”

  “The attackers could be coming to New York now?” Tucker asked.

  “Yes,” Hayes said.

  “Sir?” Vince asked again.

  “One second,” Tucker barked. He checked his phone. “I’m going onstage right now.”

  “Cancel it,” Morgan said. Tucker didn’t move.

  “She’s right,” Hayes said.

  The only thing that surpassed Tucker’s cowardice was his ambition. He was behind in the polls and running on his national security record. This was his big moment on foreign policy, the day before the Fourth of July. He couldn’t afford to look weak.

  “No,” Tucker said to Hayes. “Don’t move. I want you on security upstairs.”

  Tucker had been planning to lock up Hayes and the others, but now, suddenly, they were the best chance he had. He needed to put them between him and the violence.

  “We’re cut off, remember?” Hayes said. “We don’t work for you.”

  “Give him what he wants,” Morgan told Tucker. “This has to end.”

  “You’re on in two minutes,” the agent said to Tucker.

  “I need you watching out,” Tucker said to Hayes.

  Jesus, Hayes thought; he had him now. Tucker would go on, knowing that other men would catch his bullets for him. No matter. If the enemies of Cold Harvest were out there, Hayes would find them. He could keep watch while staying out of sight.

  “I will if you let Cold Harvest fight this,” Hayes said.

  Tucker rocked back and forth for a moment.

  “Fine. Come on.”

  Tucker turned, and Morgan, Hayes, and the other operators flanked him and headed toward the stairs and Rockefeller Plaza.

  Chapter 53

  TIMUR SAT IN the driver’s seat of the truck. They were staging for the attack from inside a prefabricated industrial building in Woodbridge, New Jersey. It was set on the back lot of a salvage yard beside the Arthur Kill, the snaking body of water that separates New Jersey from Staten Island.

  He ran his finger around the split ring on the dead man switch and let it dangle against the pin. Satisfied with his last inspection of the trigger, he handed it off to the man in the passenger seat, a younger fighter named Alex who had helped him with the preparations. He was nervous, Timur could tell. Timur would drive, and Alex would hold the switch.

  Everything was ready, though he was planning to go over the radio protocols one more time with Alex. Timur rested his head against the seat. He had worked through the night and was tired, so tired, but the end was coming soon.

  He stepped out of the truck and walked to the window, which had been covered with a tarp. He eased it to the side and looked out.

  Over the rusting fences of the yard, the sky glowed yellow in the distance: the lights of New York City.

  Soon. All he needed was the call.

  Chapter 54

  TWO BLOCKS NORTH of Rockefeller Plaza, in an underground garage, Claire sat in the back of the truck under the cap, cross-legged, sorting gear from the cache box into a backpack and a duffel. She stripped down to a tank top and pulled on a black form-fitting vest that held an extra magazine of .308-caliber rifle rounds. She clipped two mini-frags to the left side above her first-aid kit. They were Dutch hand grenades the size of golf balls. They’d been discontinued in the regular army because of their short fuse, but Claire always carried a couple on shoots like this in case everything went sideways.

  She slid the Remington concealable sniper rifle into the backpack. Broken down, it could easily fit into the schoolbag. Tucker would go onstage soon. She pulled on a light synthetic running jacket.

  She felt the pulse racing in her neck. She knew that her people were gathering in New York. She wanted to protect them, but there was no one she could trust. She had reached out to Hayes and been ambushed. They thought she was the killer. If she tried to get close, they would likely take her on sight before she had a chance to explain anything.

  She had to protect them from afar. If Tucker and Morgan were behind this, there really was only one choice: to take them down. Unsanctioned operations like the one Tucker and Morgan were running were easily stopped with one attack. Take the head, the body dies. The killers lose their patron.

  Assassination. American soil. It felt surreal to be making the call on her own, but the rest was just part of her job. She had killed politicians before, even a prime minister in West Africa. It could be done. As part of Cold Harvest, she had sniper scouting information on most of the major venues in Manhattan.

  Police response time was eight minutes. She would be gone in six at the most. The holiday crowds would help.

  It was doable. She slipped the thin dagger into her vest. The knife’s contour was slightly curved from resharpening over the years, the handle worn, the razor’s edge glinting in the light. It looked like an antique, but it was only six years old. It had seen a lot of use.

  She zipped the jacket up over her gear. Paul stood watch outside. She picked up a small pouch, then stepped out of the car and handed it to him.

  “Paul, I want you to take this. There’s money inside. I can get you out of the country. There are people I know. You shouldn’t have come back for me.”

  “I’m not leaving you alone surrounded by these people.”

  “I don’t want you to see me work.”

  “I can handle it.”

  She had continued to sound him out on the ride up. Not a word out of place. If he was playing her, manipulating her, provoking her into attacking her own people, her plan was to go along so easily that he would drop his guard. If she teased him with what he wanted most, she cou
ld find the cracks in his cover.

  She was beginning to trust him. The habits seemed stronger than her doubts. She even caught herself turning her back to him once. As her suspicions diminished, her anger grew about what her bosses might have done, tensing her muscles and driving her forward like amphetamines.

  He looked at the bag, the bulk of the broken-down sniper rifle. “Are you sure about this?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  She wasn’t. But her choices had been reduced to one option. If he was telling the truth, Tucker and Morgan and Hayes deserved to die.

  “You should go, Paul.”

  He picked up the backpack. “I’m staying with you. You ready?”

  She looked to a mid-rise on Forty-Sixth Street, the best vantage spot on Rockefeller Plaza. All roads led to that tower.

  She shook out her hands but couldn’t burn off that feeling, the unceasing push to move, to run, to break things. Was she lost in the lie again? Was she drawing him out? Was she really going to kill them?

  She didn’t know.

  Movement is life.

  She would decide in the moment, and trust her instincts.

  Chapter 55

  HYND SHOULDERED THE backpack that Claire had given him and scanned the crowd as they walked down Fifth Avenue in the dusk. Vera was nearby, unseen but watching, with a field team of five other shooters. As soon as they had the location where the Cold Harvest members were gathering, Hynd and Vera would take Claire out and then give the order to Timur to hit the site with the truck.

  He had exploited Claire’s trust in him perfectly and used her anger to master her. Everything he had told her—about his time in exile, and about Cold Harvest killing innocents—was a lie, but she believed him.

  For all the posturing and cynicism, she wanted to believe in something, like the rest of them. That’s what made them weak. She was his weapon now.

  “Hang here,” Claire said. Police vans were parked on the corners. Generators with tower lights stood halfway down the block.

  “What are you doing?” he asked, but she was already gone, holding a plastic water bottle in her hand, knifing through the crowd toward an idling delivery truck. She crouched slightly as she moved past it, then circled back to him, blending in with the tourists streaming by.

  “What was that?” he asked.

  “Go.”

  She moved with the crowd, ignoring him as he walked with her, his head craned back. “Lower your profile, Paul. Relax. It’s fine. No one’s going to get hurt. Not yet.”

  Claire slowed just past Fiftieth Street, then turned and walked down the plaza toward the main stage. It was barricaded off at the end.

  A low pop, like a small-caliber pistol, came from the far corner of the plaza. Murmurs of surprise came from the crowd as people flinched back, but Claire kept her eyes fixed on the stage. She watched the men in suits rush toward the noise, and among the people in the crowd, she caught the well-practiced reactions of the undercover Secret Service.

  “Good,” she said. She’d placed a sealed water bottle behind the truck’s tire. It popped when the vehicle backed up.

  “What was that?” Paul asked.

  “I have their security.” She scanned the rooftops and then started walking south again. It felt good to be operational, to let the thousand details of threat and defense fill her mind and block out the rage and the endless nagging doubts.

  They passed the Diamond District and cut around a few barkers offering deals on stones, then Claire turned right down a side street of discount clothes stores, Turkish and Brazilian restaurants, and ninety-nine-cent-pizza-slice shops. There were a variety of architectural styles, mostly buildings from the late nineteenth century. This was a part of Manhattan that the glass towers hadn’t touched.

  She stopped outside an electronics store.

  “Here?” he asked.

  “Yes. Mixed-use commercial. Non-jewelry. No central security. Best position on Rock Center.”

  She walked up to the metal door beside a loading dock and from her entry kit pulled a thin wire hook with a precise bend at the end. She could open most older commercial door locks with it by reaching all the way through the locking mechanism to pull the latch back directly. She popped the lock open and led him through the loading area.

  The freight elevator had no cameras, and its shaft offered access to her sniper hide: the elevator machine room on the top of the building. The roof itself was too exposed, too easy for countersnipers to see, but the small boxy room on top of it was perfect for a shot at the plaza.

  The elevator arrived on their floor. She stepped in, and when Paul tried to follow, she put her hand on his chest. “No.” She tapped a button on the panel inside, then slid out as the doors nearly closed on her arm.

  As the elevator descended to the floor below them, Claire pulled out a small metal cylinder with a hinged tab on the end, known as a drop key. There was a hole in the left panel of the closed elevator doors, and she slid the drop key into it and twisted it, releasing the lock. She stuck her fingertips into the crack between the doors and pulled them apart with little effort, giving them access to the open shaft and the roof of the elevator cab.

  Claire stepped on top. “Come on,” she said. “When this starts, it will cut you in half. Move.”

  He stepped in beside her. “Couldn’t we have gone from the inside?”

  “No. That’s a movie thing. The ceiling access is always bolted shut from the outside.”

  There were service controls on the top of the elevator, a standard feature. One of the basic approaches to embassy break-ins was to enter on business during the day, get on top of the elevator, and ride the damn thing until the guards had gone home. She’d used the tactic on the Tempest job in Paris.

  She pressed a button, and the elevator started to rise; the floors shot past them. Forty feet up, he started to ask a question but she seized his arm and pulled him toward her as a counterweight—two thousand pounds of stacked steel plates—came flying past them like a guillotine blade. People working in these shafts called those weights the silent killers.

  “Keep your eyes up,” she said. The concrete ceiling of the shaft seemed like a giant granite stone plummeting toward their heads.

  “Is there room?”

  “Yes.”

  It came closer and closer. Paul crouched down, eyes shut tight, as the car closed on two girders that ran across the top of the shaft.

  “Step back,” Claire said, and she moved toward the edge as the steel bars passed between them.

  She climbed onto the beam. A chime sounded next to Paul’s leg. The elevator was about to descend. “Here,” she said. She put her hand under his arm and pulled him onto the girder just as the elevator began dropping. They had to leave the elevator in operation or else it might alert the security staff.

  The girder was about four inches wide. Looking down at the elevator cab dropping away gave her the vertiginous feeling of flying into the air, and suddenly they were at the top of a hundred-and-fifty-foot drop. Paul was staring down. “Look at the wall,” she said. She didn’t need him puking or passing out.

  A small square access above them led to the machine room. She grabbed the ledge on one side, jumped, took it at the waist, and hauled herself up.

  “The bags,” she said, and he handed them up. She reached back down for Paul, clasped his wrists, and helped him up as he dragged his toes down the wall, trying for traction.

  She grabbed him under the armpits, and he managed to pull himself up on the ledge.

  The machine room was a concrete-block box on the top of the building with frosted-glass windows on four sides and a locked steel door that exited onto the flat roof.

  Claire slipped off her jacket. She pulled a small glass cutter from her bag, walked to the corner, and scored a rectangle in the pane. Using the metal ball on the other end of the tool, she tapped the rectangle twice, and the glass cracked. She worked the shard back and forth till it came out, giving her an eight-by-eight
-inch hole.

  This was known as a loophole. If the shooter kept back from it far enough for the muzzle flash to remain entirely inside the room, he or she could kill without ever being seen.

  “You can’t see anything.”

  “Not from there.”

  She unfolded the stock of the rifle and locked in the barrel. To her left, a four-foot wheel ringed with elevator cables spun vertically as the motors hummed beside it. In the center of the room there was an electrical box, a four-by-four-foot square platform about knee-high off the ground. When she climbed on top, the small sight picture through the opening showed only the sides of skyscrapers, but once she put herself all the way forward, she could see it, between two buildings and just over another beaux arts structure to the north—Rockefeller Plaza.

  Chapter 56

  IT WAS KNOWN as a keyhole shot, a small column of empty space reaching from her to her target. It was hard to make, and harder to spot. Through her scope, she could see the Secret Service ringing the stage. A woman sang beside the podium, readying the crowd.

  Paul stood to the side while Claire placed a sock filled with beans on the edge of the electrical box, placed the rifle barrel on it, and then started raising the stock inch by inch to line up her target.

  She popped a piece of gum in her mouth and snugged the rifle against her cheek as she lay prone. Different snipers used different things—gum, tobacco, seeds—to occupy them and keep the concentration up. Her instructors’ superstitions—and long-range shooters were a superstitious bunch—had rubbed off on her. Never change it up. She chewed Big Red.

  “That scope’s for you,” she said. “Up here.”

  Paul lifted the spotting scope. “Where?”

  “Lie beside me. I’m on target.” That was how it was done. She’d seen 240-pound Marines spoon for eight hours at a stretch. If the enemy was watching and one of them had to piss, he would just roll to one side.