Kill Switch

by James Phelan

  “Okay.” Walker glanced at the fridge. There were a few photos on it of a kid, a girl. He’d pegged her for a friend’s child, a god-daughter maybe. She had jet black hair and slightly Asian features.

  “You really know nothing of the NSA project that Jasper worked on?”

  “I heard from my father that he was doing a lot of trips to a big new complex they’ve built.”

  “Still at Fort Meade?”

  “No. In Utah.”

  “Utah? What’s in Utah? Does the NSA have something there?”

  “I suppose so. Why else would they send him there to work?”

  Walker wondered. He’d had a connection with Utah in the past. Back in the early days of anthrax threats, when he’d just started out in the Air Force and was doing a security detail on a team from the CDC to send anthrax samples to be rendered inactive by irradiation at the Army’s Dugway Proving Ground, near Salt Lake City. A few years later it turned out that someone had stuffed up that day, and at least twenty government, university and commercial laboratories around the country received suspected live samples of anthrax rather than inert. That place was secretive. Utah was the kind of place he could imagine the NSA hiding something away.

  “Okay,” Walker said. “How about his personal life? Was he married? Family?”

  “No.”

  “No one in his life?”

  “No one that I know of.”

  “Ever?”

  A look of pain passed her face before she recovered herself. “Not that I know of.”

  Walker looked across at the television screen. It showed the most up-to-date image that the Department of Defense was willing to part with of Jasper Brokaw: him in his BTUs at Ranger school. The Army Ranger School was an intense two-month combat leadership course oriented toward small-unit tactics, one of the toughest combat courses in the world and the most physically and mentally demanding leadership school the Army has to offer short of what Delta are put through. Walker had been through their Mountain component. It was tough. Jasper looked tough, for a young soldier. Slightly build, wiry, fit. The picture was ten years old.

  “As a head doctor,” Walker said, looking from the picture of Jasper in what had been his physical prime to Monica, who had also been watching the screen, “what effect do you think the helicopter accident had on your brother?”

  “He had to learn to walk again.”

  “I’m talking in his mind.”

  “It focused it.”

  “Focused it?”

  Monica nodded, looking back to the image. “Until the accident, he was aimless. Angry, driven, but aimless. He’d put off military service and gone to college and finally capitulated to my father, but rather than entering an officer school he enlisted in the Army, regular infantry, then the Rangers. Probably to piss off our father. After the accident, in rehab, being in all kinds of hospitals and physical re-education with veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, he changed. He wanted to contribute and do what he could for his country. Before that he was all short-term thinking. Reckless. The Army had lapped it up.”

  “And after? How’d it focus him?”

  “He was at home and in and out of rehab for the best part of a year and turned to his old hobby.”

  “Computers.”

  “Yes. And he became good at it. Really good. He’d found something that he could use to contribute—in a big way—something that could become his legacy, and a way to wage a war against opponents while protecting front-line troops from harm. He became obsessive,” Monica said. “Addicted. My dad, old neighbors and friends would tell me, and a couple of times I saw it too. After the accident Jasper went into his shell, and maybe six months later a different man emerged. It wasn’t just the limp—it seemed his leg didn’t bother him at all. But the change was in every fiber of his being. Irrevocably.”

  Walker said, “You really think people can change like that?”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “But you’ve changed your mind?”

  Monica nodded. “I had never been convinced. In my line of work. Through all the study I’ve done. Twenty years and plenty of case studies and firsthand observations, and the sum of that? People evolve, they adapt, they regress. But change? Nope. But with Jasper, I saw it. Sensed it. Knew it. He became different in almost every way.”

  “Better?”

  “Different. Driven. Purposeful. Obsessive.”

  “He made Special Forces selection and through most of Ranger School. You have to be obsessive to get that far.”

  Monica nodded. “But Jasper never was. Not even with the Army, not with Special Forces, not with anything I’d seen. He’d trained hard, sure, he wanted it. But it was nothing like what he became sitting at a screen with a keyboard at his fingertips. That accident, his new reality, it shaped him.”

  Walker saw the television’s ticker stating Cyber attacks—what’s next? Who is most at risk? and checked his watch. Just under thirty minutes until the Feds came to move Monica and he would leave for Jasper’s apartment.

  “Obsessive,” Walker said. “Legacy. Resourceful. Vengeful. Skilled. Capable. Wounded. Patriotic . . . Betrayed?”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Cut-up technique,” Walker said. “All the factors that are making up your brother.”

  “Cut up?”

  “Re-ordering. Looking for a pattern that isn’t obvious on the surface. My father does it. Bowie did it to write his lyrics.”

  “Oh, it must be good then.”

  “It helps you see things in different ways,” Walker said, looking at the granite bench top in front of him but his gaze a million miles away. “Jasper is resourceful and smart and calculated. Driven to leave a legacy. Determined to make cyber a new frontier of warfare—to make it all that it can be.”

  “You’re giving him too much credit.”

  Walker looked up to her. “Could he be cooperating with his captors?”

  “No chance. He may have been a misguided youth, but for all his faults, he loves this country.”

  “Leaking people’s personal data and communications doesn’t mean he doesn’t.”

  “But if we’re talking cyber attacks to force the President’s hand to enact the kill switch, then they have to be catastrophic in nature. Lives will have to be lost before the Internet is turned off by lawmakers. He wouldn’t do that.”

  Walker wasn’t so sure, but he didn’t voice this thought because at that moment the hallway cop’s phone chimed and two seconds later there was a knock at the front door.

  26

  “We have to go,” said the cop in the hallway. His colleague stood in the open doorway.

  “Where?” Walker asked. He headed down the hall, Monica a few paces behind him. The four of them stood in a circle in the entry way, where the hall was at its widest, before the stairs started and took up half the hall’s width as it continued back to the kitchen. Both cops looked torn. Walker had seen that look before: orders from on high that weren’t what they wanted to follow but they knew they had no choice.

  “It’s a Homeland Security code,” the cop said in monotone. “All officers of the law are to respond and report to their assigned stations for the protection of critical infrastructure and to ensure public order and safety.”

  “Jasper’s next attack,” Monica said.

  “Must be,” the cop replied as he checked the time on his phone. “Sorry. The Feds will still send someone within twenty minutes. Just hang tight and lock the door.”

  The two cops left without another word.

  Monica went to the door and watched them move quickly down the steps to the street and across the road to their unmarked Ford, which started up and tore off with a roar of rubber and the siren bleeping in the quiet of the night, the red-blue-and-white lights on the back parcel shelf and behind the front grille strobing in the dark. She closed the door and clicked the two locks, the bolt and the chain. She turned and faced Walker, but he spoke before she could.

  “This
isn’t right.”

  “Threats have been made,” Monica replied, “it makes sense. Maybe they’ve even seen a pattern emerge, noticed some activity online some place that’s alluding to the next attack.”

  Walker was looking at the windows in the front room, and then down the hall toward the flimsy back door. “Do you have a firearm in the house?”

  “No.”

  “I do,” Walker said. He tapped at the small of his back, where her father’s Colt .45 was tucked.

  “Great.” She brushed past him and headed for the kitchen. By the time he joined her she was seated on a stool at the bench, the side Walker had been on before. Her shoulders were slightly sagged, her forearms rested on the granite bench top, her fingers interlaced. She was waiting.

  “This isn’t about the next cyber attack.” Walker remained standing, facing the back window and door.

  “Then what do you think the cyber attack will be?” Monica asked.

  “No idea. But it’s not whatever those cops are responding to, it’s too soon. Too broad. I don’t like it.”

  “They must have received a threat. Or intercepted something. Maybe they’ve managed to hack into the computer Jasper is using, and seen what’s coming. Or detected a penetration on a network—that’s a thing, right?”

  Walker remained silent. It didn’t feel right. Not like this. There were still twenty-one minutes until the FBI was scheduled to show up. Unless they too had to respond to the Homeland Security threat, setting up security at LAX or federal government installations.

  “Why don’t you contact your FBI lady?” he said. “The Assistant SAC, and see what’s what?”

  Monica looked at him, then nodded and typed a text message. She hit send and placed the phone in front of her. They both watched the screen, waiting for a reply.

  “You’re not going to call her?”

  “She said to message.”

  Walker remained silent.

  Monica said, “Who do you think has Jasper?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  “You really think you can figure it out?”

  “I can try.”

  “You know what you haven’t asked me yet?”

  Walker looked at her. “Where your kid lives?”

  “What—oh . . .” Monica looked at the photos on her fridge. “She’s with her father, in Shanghai.”

  “It’s none of my business. But it’s good to know she’s out of harm’s way.”

  “Harm’s way?”

  Walker nodded.

  Monica said, “I was going to say, you never asked why I haven’t been worried.”

  Walker heard her, but he didn’t answer. He was looking out the back of the house. The yard was small, paved and just big enough to park a car in. Bordering on the back fence was another yard, and another two-story house. It was dark. Deep shadows were thrown by streetlights and neighboring windows. He was sure he saw something there. In the dark. The darkest part of the shadow. The umbra. Movement.

  27

  “Walker?”

  Monica was tense; she saw Walker’s face and body language and she knew that things had changed.

  “This place, it has an attic,” he stated rather than asked as he scanned the hallway to the front door. He could sense movement out there. A slight shift, of something. It came from being hunted before. A sixth sense. He looked to her.

  Monica saw the shift in his eyes. The danger. A call to action. “Yes.”

  Walker looked down at her hands. Her phone.

  Monica looked to it. Then she knew, too.

  “I didn’t call anyone—”

  “You didn’t have to,” Walker said, and headed for the stairs, taking her hand as he did, the phone clattering to the floorboards.

  They heard the noise at the front door as they neared the stairs. A knock. Three taps. Thumps. A heavy fist, gloved knuckles. Purposeful. A big, strong guy with a big, heavy fist, hitting the big, strong and heavy hardwood door. It might hold up to one or two decent shoulderings. Certainly not any kind of police ram. Certainly not against one or more big guys intent on gaining entry. And they’d be approaching via the back door too, and that would last less than a second against an attack.

  Walker didn’t stop moving. Up the stairs, as quietly as he could, Monica close behind. He scanned the scene, the landing ahead: four doors running off a small hallway. Three bedrooms and a bathroom, he figured. Windows out to the veranda. But not high enough, not far enough away. Too easily intercepted. They needed to buy time. Seconds would do, a minute or two would be ideal.

  Knocking at the door again. Louder this time.

  Monica let go of his hand, overtook him and headed for a pull-down cord near the end of the hall at the back of the house. It revealed a little trapdoor, with a ladder that folded down. She led the way up, Walker a step behind. He pulled the ladder up, and the trap door, taking a moment to pull the cord up into the roof space to impede anyone following.

  Inside the attic, Monica left the lights off without being asked. Smart; the light would have spilled out the louvers front and back. Instead, there was near complete darkness inside as Walker crept along a board to the louvers, which drew in a little light from outside. They were made of pine or Oregon, a soft timber, painted several times over the decades but currently light gray, like a dove. An inch thick and two deep, spaced an inch apart, maybe twenty inches square. Backed with screen-wire to keep insects out. Good enough to see through.

  Walker looked down at the rear courtyard. Looking from here out on to the dark space out there was different from being in the lit kitchen and looking out. From here, he could distinguish far more detail in the shadows. And there was movement. He made out three guys. Big. Dressed in black. Paramilitary types. Like a SWAT team. But FBI tactical guys didn’t wear black, not since Waco. One was at the back door, a few feet away, ready to breach, the other two scanning windows and ready to push through the door when it was blasted open. Impossible to know whom they represented, and he had neither the time nor inclination to find out.

  “What do we do?” Monica asked in a whisper.

  Walker said, “We wait.”

  “How long for?”

  “Not long.” Walker could no longer see the three guys at the back—they’d moved in close to the back door and were now crowded under the awning that covered the rear stairs. That meant the wait was pretty much over.

  Monica said, “Who are they?”

  “No one we want to meet right now,” Walker said, shifting his weight and ripping off the screen covering. It was quiet but made a cloud of dust.

  “You think they’ll go away?” Monica whispered.

  “No.”

  “Then why did you say—”

  The power in the neighborhood went out a split second before the sound of the front and back doors being smashed in reverberated through the house. The men would be inside now, hunting them with night vision. Monica stifled a noise—not so much a scream as shock, that someone unknown would enter her house in such a violent way, figuring that she was trapped up here in the attic space.

  Walker grabbed hold of two louvers at a time and pulled them out, leaving a pile of kindling at their feet. He pushed his torso through the open space and hauled himself up onto the roof. He got good purchase on the slate tiles and hung over the edge, dropping his arms down toward the access to the attic. He felt Monica reach up and he grabbed her wrists. He braced with his legs splayed wide apart as he felt her full weight; maybe just over half his weight. He used his core strength and legs and arms as one to pull her up, quickly.

  “Now what?” she asked, in a crouch on the ridge-line next to him.

  “I’m going to hold onto you, and you need to follow me, side by side, and keep going,” Walker said. “When I squeeze you jump, okay?”

  “What?”

  “That way.” Walker pointed to the house next door. “We run and jump and we keep going until we get to the side street.”

  A second’s hesitation
, then she said, “Okay.”

  They ran down the slope of her roof, Walker holding her left wrist, and near the end—

  They jumped onto the neighbor’s roof, the void maybe two meters. Monica landed easily, light on her toes, and was already running up the slope. Walker’s right foot dislodged a slate tile and got caught in the void beneath and he had to let go of her—he motioned her on.

  He glanced back as he freed his foot. Nothing to see.

  It took him a second to regain his balance and get up, scrambling up the roof after having to rebuild his momentum.

  They met at the ridge, and this time Monica grabbed Walker’s wrist. He nodded and they set off. There were six houses ahead, all similar in design and position on the block. This street and the two either side had been blacked out—streetlights too. And it was radial—a circle around the entire block, as though an eclipse of all power and lights had occurred with Monica’s house at the epicenter, about three hundred yards in all directions. Walker looked up. He couldn’t see it, but he knew that there must be a drone up there with an EMP.

  The Protecting Individuals from Mass Aerial Surveillance Act was supposed to protect private citizens from federal agencies conducting aerial surveillance, thus preserving some semblance of Fourth Amendment rights. But the sharpest end of the stick always had some leeway with such laws and rules.

  That meant that these guys were federal, military or intelligence, with unfettered access to the nation’s best toys.

  And the gloves were off.

  Walker and Monica continued their transit, and at the final house they stopped at the other side of the roofing ridge, crouching low, holding onto roof tiles.

  Walker looked back—he couldn’t see anyone out on any roofs. Nor the street. He could just make out a black Suburban parked out the front of Monica’s; it hadn’t been there when Walker arrived. And another at the far end of the street.

  “What now?”

  “We get to my car.”

  “Yes, but how do we get down from here?”

  “Drain pipe.”

  Monica looked at him, and even in the darkness he could read her expression. “What?”