Dead Man Switch

by Matthew Quirk

  Paul stretched out next to her.

  “That button on the side is the range finder. It’s just like shooting photos. I need you to spot the targets. Aim at the middle of their faces.”

  They waited in silence for fifteen minutes. An opening speaker took the stage.

  After a moment, behind a partition, hidden from the crowd’s view, she saw Hayes appear and, on the other side, Josh Drake.

  “Who is that?” Paul asked.

  “You recognize him?”

  “On the right behind the barricade. He was following me the week before the fire.”

  He was talking about John Hayes. Good tactics, keeping his face out of sight. Only this God’s-eye view would reveal it.

  Her even breath hitched. She counted three more Cold Harvest operators that she could see, all out of sight of the audience and the press. Tucker and Morgan stood offstage with Hayes, behind the partitions.

  What the hell was going on? Hayes and Drake were protecting those two traitors like a Praetorian guard.

  She didn’t want to believe what Paul had told her. Didn’t want to believe that Hayes had drawn her into that ambush. But why else would he be there with Morgan? She knew he had met with her. Was he working for her? Doing her bidding in order to clear his name once and for all? Was he Morgan’s assassin? The insider killing his own brothers? How many others had he co-opted?

  Claire’s finger rested on the trigger, and she moved the scope from one face to the other. The first kill would be easy. The supersonic bullet would hit a moment before the suppressed crack of her rifle could even be heard down there. Give them half a second of reaction time, generously, to grasp that they were being taken out. She ran the numbers in her head, and, given the spread and the recoil, she figured she could take those three—Tucker, Morgan, and Hayes—before they could reach cover.

  Morgan and Tucker moved to the side behind the partition. She wanted to wait for them all to get closer together so that she could definitely take them in one go. The calculations, automatic and long-practiced, soothed her. It was so much easier than the doubts.

  Hynd couldn’t believe it as he lay next to Claire and studied the faces in the spotting scope. He had thought that the assembly of Cold Harvest members would take days, but they seemed to be gathering here, now. He could take them. He needed to signal the others to call the truck bomb into the city. He had the open mic. Vera would understand.

  “Those are your team members,” he said. “They’re here now with Tucker. What’s going on?”

  Claire didn’t respond.

  “I see. I see. Fair enough,” he said.

  The open mic picked up every word, and on the corner of Fifth Avenue at Forty-Fifth Street, Vera listened, stunned. Fair enough; that was the code to kill Claire. And he had given the location of the targets as well and said I see twice, which meant he was calling in the truck bomb now. But this was too soon. It didn’t matter. She lifted her microphone to relay the order to Timur.

  “Roll.”

  “What?”

  “They’re here. In Manhattan. Near Rockefeller Plaza. Are you ready?”

  “Now?” he asked. She heard him moving, heard voices echoing in the garage. “Is it all of them?”

  “I’m not sure, but Hynd gave the order and the location. They must be close. Get that truck into midtown and we’ll give you further instructions. We can hit them where they are hiding or draw them out. They’ll run toward a threat. It’s how they are trained.”

  “I’m on my way,” Timur said. “I can take the Lincoln Tunnel. The middle tube is open to trucks.”

  “Get moving.”

  The engines started. She killed the radio and pictured the truck picking up speed, moving toward the heart of the city.

  Chapter 57

  ENOUGH OF THIS madness with Claire, Vera thought as she walked quickly up Fifth Avenue. The woman had given them what they needed, the Cold Harvest location. Now they could get rid of her.

  Vera had left the rest of her team closer to Rockefeller Plaza. They were dressed to blend in with the crowd and could keep an eye on the rally and track the Cold Harvest members there. She would see to Claire personally. She checked the GPS she had on Hynd and turned toward the building where he and Claire were set up on the roof.

  Vera buzzed the door. As she waited outside the loading dock, she loosened a button on her blouse. Her face seemed to melt from a hard old-world glare into something soft, inviting.

  And just as she buzzed again, the heavy steel door opened.

  “Yes?” answered the guard, a South Asian man with a mustache.

  “Oh, thank God, someone’s here,” she said as she stepped inside and glanced at the building directory behind him. “These goddamned servers picked the absolute worst time to go down.”

  It was a perfect Midwestern American accent, with a slight gravelly inflection at the end of each sentence, as she had heard the younger women use in this country. She barely paid attention to him as she rummaged through her purse.

  “My client called me in. Their website is down. He’s on five. Of course he can’t make it out here himself on a weekend, so he said the building manager could let me in. I can get you his number. It’s GTR Engineering.”

  She cursed and lifted a pack of tissues out of her purse, searching for her phone. A set of keys fell to the floor and skittered farther in.

  The man, of course, reached down for them, and as he did she slammed the door shut behind him, timing it to cover the suppressed report of her 9-millimeter Glock.

  He dropped to the ground, clutching his genitals. It wasn’t a fatal shot, but the pain and shock had caused him to fall, cracking his head. He dragged himself along the floor with his free hand and the only leg that seemed to be moving.

  “What are you doing? Oh God!”

  He crawled toward the desk with the office phone, but he couldn’t reach it.

  “Keys. I need the keys.” The suppressor hovered a few feet from his face, aimed straight at his eye.

  His lower lip shook as he tried to speak. He pointed to a box on the wall. “Th-there.”

  She reached for them with her left hand, barely looking away, keeping the gun level.

  “The roof?”

  “The key hanging at the top left. The Medeco. The access is at the top of the west stairs.”

  She lifted it up. “This?”

  He nodded his head. She fired twice and turned away as he fell and his skull cracked against the linoleum floor.

  She locked his body in the office, took the elevator to the twelfth floor, then went to the stairs and climbed up to the roof access. The key worked. As she crossed the flat roof, she could hear the low buzz of electric motors inside the elevator room. It matched the background noises in her earpiece. They were inside.

  Hynd had said that he let Claire live to use her, but Vera had always wondered if maybe he didn’t have the strength to kill her himself. She needed to be up there to make sure he put her down.

  She raised her pistol and moved toward them.

  Fifty feet away, inside the machine room, Hynd adjusted the focus on his scope.

  “They’re getting ready,” he said, and he watched a pair of tall Secret Service agents step toward Tucker, one on either side. Claire rested her cheekbone on the stock. Hynd knew that her attention was absorbed entirely by the shot; she would be an easy kill.

  “I have them,” she said.

  Hynd thought of letting her pull the trigger. The chaos afterward would bring all those heroes into the open where Vera’s ground team could engage them and hold them down long enough for the truck to arrive and take them all.

  More than that. He wanted to watch her kill, to see his years of work realized, his mastery confirmed. He felt their bodies rise and fall together. Some part of him even thought that the anger, the killer in Claire, was stronger than any allegiance. Her country had burned her. He thought he could turn her, bring her over to his side openly. They were so much alike.
/>   No. Prudence. Better to take her now. It would take only a quarter of a second to get control, to put his arm across her throat while she stared through the optic and clamp it from the rear, a naked choke that would crush the arteries on both side of her neck and cut off all blood to her brain.

  It was a shame. She’d been one of his favorite girls.

  Claire slowed her breathing. It all looked so simple through that sniper scope. Her anger was a strength, not a flaw. The trigger made problems go away. All she ever wanted, she could have with a single pull: the old life, with her husband back beside her.

  The rifle felt so right in her hand. The actions came without thinking. The endless hours of drills took over.

  Her life with him was a lie, but she’d never been so happy as she’d been in that lie. Afterward, when he was gone and she was alone with nothing to hide behind, she’d had to look at herself as she was.

  She didn’t like the woman she’d met. She’d choose the lie. One more act of killing. A last sacrifice. And then she was done.

  “I know, Paul.”

  “What?”

  “I know you’re not what you say you are.”

  She turned her head, and their eyes were a few inches apart.

  “I don’t care,” she said.

  He started to say something, then stopped. Claire put her finger on the trigger and let the act speak for itself, an offering to him, a proof of her faith.

  Three targets. Three shots. Two seconds.

  She could take them all. She scanned with the rifle, fixing their position in her muscle memory, timing the countdown with her breaths.

  Three, two, one, fire.

  She eased the trigger straight back.

  Chapter 58

  TUCKER SCANNED THE crowd, picking out faces at random, looking deep into each one’s eyes as he spoke. He pointed to the art deco facade of Rockefeller Center rising high behind him.

  “In this building, seven decades ago, a small group of Americans started working in secret. It was the beginning of the Office of Strategic Services, the forefather of the CIA. They operated in the shadows, sent men and women behind enemy lines, and rolled back the Nazis and the Soviets.

  “We may never know the full extent of their sacrifice, but they kept us safe.”

  Hayes walked behind the partition and scanned the crowd through a narrow gap. He could pick out the undercover Secret Service officers. Their eyes never stopped moving, and they held their gun arms slightly out to the side to keep anyone from bumping into their concealed weapons. Tucker had ordered them to loop Hayes in on their communications, and he carried a radio with an earpiece.

  The enemy could have two shooters in the front row right now. The people behind the attacks had been able to operate untroubled in the United States for so long. They knew their baselines, how to camouflage.

  Tucker’s voice rose and he moved his hand like a blade, cutting through the air.

  “I know what it takes to keep us—”

  The air cracked, a sound like dry wood splitting.

  Without even thinking, Hayes started counting as he moved to cover.

  A low boom echoed off the buildings.

  Crack-bang, countersnipers called it. The first sign of a bullet was the supersonic crack as it passed by. An instant later, the bang from the gun barrel caught up, because the sound moved more slowly than the bullet. With a fast count, each second meant a hundred yards. Hayes reached four. Expert distance. Or maybe an amateur at expert range. Why the miss?

  The agents swarmed the stage, pulled Tucker down, and rushed him off.

  Crack-bang.

  Another shot, another miss, but Hayes had already slipped to the side of stage. He wasn’t running away. He was trained to always move toward fire. He dropped under the stage. The panicked footsteps beat the boards over his head like a bass drum.

  Light streamed through a hole overhead where the bullet had punched through the flooring. Rock Plaza was relatively well protected—it was set back from the long avenues and surrounded by tall buildings with few decent sniper positions, all of them requiring difficult high-angle shots.

  He saw the shattered concrete to his right and lined up the hole through the stage. It pointed to a roof with a low parapet and a boxy machine room on top: his shooter’s location.

  The high-angle shot, the narrow band between surrounding buildings, the perfectly disguised hide; it could easily have been Claire’s work. She’d done one just like it in the Republic of Georgia.

  Hayes came out on the far side of the stage and sprinted across the long exposed distance between him and the southern end of the plaza, heading toward the sniper.

  Chapter 59

  IN THAT MOMENT before the shot, Claire counted down: Three, two, one, fire.

  She pulled the trigger.

  Her words to Paul had made him hesitate as he thought through just what he was hearing. He started to say yes. He had gone along with the whole plan too easily, without the nervousness she would expect from a man unaccustomed to violent work. Then she caught the tension in his body as he prepared to move on her, and through the frosted window, she saw a shadow moving outside. It was all she needed to understand what the truth was.

  The stock of her rifle was raised slightly, and she dropped her shoulder before she fired.

  Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. It’s a shooting lesson that becomes paramount as you move into the heavy calibers: the more lead you throw downrange, the harder the stock of the gun comes back at you.

  The blast was deafening in the small space, and the muzzle flare was a tongue of fire reaching for the hole in the glass.

  She missed. She’d wanted to miss. The stock flew into Paul’s jaw and the side of his neck as he was moving in to choke her.

  Her words before the shot had been the last lie. She’d had to believe it herself to sell it to him. Paul had thought she would play along. He thought he could control her. Thought the anger would control her. He was wrong on all counts. And in his arrogance, he’d tipped his hand, and now he was going to die.

  In the half second of chaos after the shot, as the gun drove into the side of his neck, she threw her right elbow into Paul’s windpipe, and he started back in a long choking inhalation.

  He grabbed for the rifle, and it kicked back, sending a bullet flying. She went for his hand to lock up his arm, but as she rose up, he drove his thumb into her eye. The dusty nail dug into her tear duct. As she flinched, Paul shoved her back and drew her pistol.

  She ignored the pain and clamped her hand down on his on the gun. The barrel was aimed at her face.

  She twisted her hand around the meat of his thumb and the grip of the pistol and shoved it away as he pulled the trigger, deafening her with a hot breath of flame.

  The bullet went wide, but she couldn’t hear anything except a high whine at the center of her skull.

  He stood and brought his left hand onto the grip of the gun. She was kneeling on top of the box, and he easily forced her wrist back.

  If she were standing, she could have tried blows with her knee, but she was stuck on top of this goddamn box and watching as the bore of the pistol came toward her. There was nothing she could do. He had thirty pounds on her. Slowly, slowly, he wrested control away from her.

  “Claire!” he croaked. “What the hell are you doing?” A long shallow gasp. “Let go of the gun.” He brought it around, put both hands on the grip. She looked down the black eye of the barrel.

  Then she dropped to one side, toward the edge of the box. With all his effort pushing the gun toward her, when she changed direction suddenly and added her strength to his, it was enough. She drew the gun toward her head and over and threw him to the side. He landed on his ribs, and the gun fell from his hands.

  He leaped to his feet, and Claire was already off the box, closing in on him. She pulled a slender metal blade from her vest, and as he stood she lowered it slightly, then drove the knife into his belly.

  It
tore through his diaphragm and entered his heart as she raised her arm like someone hoisting a glass for a toast. He came off his feet, then slumped over her shoulder as she pinned him against the wall.

  He’d believed what he wanted to believe: that she was weak, that he understood her, that she needed him. Even to the end, he’d needed to know that he could control her. Maybe he even wanted to be with her somehow, to have the old life back. He never committed, never chose a side. He wanted it all, believed in nothing but himself. He thought it made him stronger than the men below, men whose convictions were so strong they would sacrifice themselves and run toward gunfire without a second thought. But he was wrong.

  “You have no idea who I am,” she said as she dropped him to the ground and moved toward the pistol.

  A gunshot popped outside, and the window blew in. Stinging pain tore across her face, her eyes. She fell back, reached up, and felt the edges of skin, flaps along her eyebrows.

  Blind. I’m fucking blind, she thought before she even hit the concrete. The glass had cut her. The blood pooled in her eyes. The shot had come from her left. She scrambled across the broken glass until she hit an electrical box.

  She crouched behind it, the last cover she could remember. But she had no idea if the gunman had already come around to the other window and was now staring down at her helpless form.

  Her fingers found the pouch of her first-aid kit, always within reach, even with one hand. She moved past the tourniquet and felt the gauze impregnated with QuikClot.

  As she blinked, she could make out shapes, a dark swirl, like the room reflected in night water. She pressed the cloth to her forehead. The clotting agent burned, smelled like rusting steel. She ran her hand gently across her eyelids, fearful of making any cuts to her eyes worse, but now she could see. She blinked away the blood.

  Her fingers touched the bandage, and the pain made the whole world waver; she was on the edge of blackout. It was a deep laceration around the orbital bone, but at least one of her eyes was okay.