Kill Switch

by James Phelan

  “Those cops didn’t bat an eyelid.”

  “That might have changed,” Walker said. “And those guys back at your house were Feds, and they have all kinds of surveillance capabilities. They’ll have dropped a net.”

  “So what—we’re not fugitives.”

  He opened his eyes and looked across at her. “You’re complaining about being here and resting a few hours while they do their thing? Believe me, if they get you, you’ll be babysat in a government building someplace—no more home detention.”

  “They can’t force me to do that.”

  “They can do what they want to. For your safety or whatever they want to call it.”

  “The Patriot Act.”

  “Something like that.”

  “You sound paranoid delusional.”

  Walker closed his eyes again and pinched the bridge of his nose, staving off a headache that had been threatening to knife him in the skull for hours.

  “I wondered how long it’d take you to diagnose me.”

  A minute of silence passed. Monica’s attention turned to the newscasters, and then she spoke. “I mean, really? The way these guys are talking about it—if this is all that they’re going to do with my brother, stuff like this, then who cares, right? I mean, come on . . . we’re the United States of Amnesia—this will be forgotten in days, if not hours. We all know that privacy is dead.”

  Walker sighed and sat up. He went to the counter by the television and started the little one-cup coffee filter machine. He waited while it hissed and steamed and filled the Styrofoam cup that he took and then sat on the end of his bed to watch the news.

  33

  They didn’t show up on records other than being listed as a Special Forces training outfit, loosely connected to Delta Force and the Rangers. When stateside they formed a Red Team used in specialist training operations, and when deployed they were a unit called upon to do the Army’s dirtiest jobs. They maintained among the highest operational tempos of any unit in the DoD. They were fighters, good at it—perhaps too good, given that each man was broken in some way.

  War did that, Harrington reflected. It broke and fractured and stressed until even the hardest of men reached a point of either no more, or no return. Most chose the former. These guys had chosen the latter.

  These guys were ex-Delta, each busted out for psych and disciplinary reasons. They were given a choice: you’re out of the Army, dishonorable discharge; with all the bad press that private contractors have got over two wars, the legitimate end of the spectrum won’t touch you—you’re nitroglycerin waiting to go off. But we can help. We’ve spent millions training you, and we’ve already lost enough of our best. We won’t let you stay in your unit, but we’ve created a solution: you can join D Squad. If you do that, you still get to ride around in twenty-million-dollar Special Forces helicopters, you can still call in air strikes and million-dollar-per-launch tomahawks from billion-dollar submarines. You still get to play with all the best toys that money can buy. But you do as we say, and if you stuff up just the slightest little bit—well, that’s it. It’s Leavenworth for life on charges not even thought up yet. If you don’t go for it, you’re on your own, to join some third-rate mercenary outfit in Africa. Your choice.

  So far it had worked out pretty well. In the three years D Squad had been operating, the DoD arsenal had held on to twenty-four of the world’s most highly skilled Special Forces operators. D Squad comprised four teams; each had six members. Two teams were currently on active duty in Afghanistan, the third was in Iraq hunting IS near the Syrian border, and team four was under his command. They had spent the last two months tasked to Cyber Command, testing the physical security of that division of the DoD.

  Captain Harrington had been in the unit since its formation two years ago. Four of the five guys he trusted with his life; the sixth should be in prison, no question about it, but he recognized that the guy had proved useful on more than one occasion in the field. Harrington had been busted out of Delta after disobeying orders one too many times. A couple of his guys had been caught smuggling. Only one, to Harrington’s knowledge, had murdered unarmed Afghanis and staged the scene to look like they had been an armed threat. Mistakes happened, he got that, but this guy felt no remorse, and Harrington knew that there was more than they knew about—there had to be with a guy like that who’d spent five years at constant war.

  These guys weren’t cops. They were never tested for doping. There wasn’t a guy on the team who wasn’t a juicer. Each had biceps the size of footballs, could bench their body weight in sets of twenty. They seemed to never stop moving, and never stop eating. Power bars and shakes; their mess room was like genocide for chickens.

  The sum of all this? Six of the most roiled-up, angry, trained and tooled-up operators in the world.

  And they were hunting Monica. And now Walker.

  Harrington had debriefed the plain-clothed LAPD officers who’d been on security at the house. The officers were sheepish, knowing that a basic phone hack had taken them off target. They assumed that the bad guys who were carrying out these cyber attacks had sent through the bogus Homeland Security alert to get them off station, but Harrington knew better. He’d organized that order to get the two cops out of the way before he and his men had gone in.

  Who was this Walker guy, Harrington now wondered as he headed to the two Suburbans parked at the police headquarters. The file bleeped through, and Harrington speed read through the file on Jed Walker, including the notes on his activities in New York and St. Louis.

  Great. A goddamned vigilante was out there.

  His phone rang. General Christie.

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  General Christie said, “I got your message.”

  “My message?”

  “What you just requested. On Jed Walker.”

  Harrington stopped himself from commenting. The General was monitoring his phone and email and his request for the file.

  General Christie said, “Walker is with Monica?”

  “It appears so.”

  “What’s his involvement?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Because you lost them.”

  “Not for long.”

  “How will you find them?”

  “You said we had any resources we needed.”

  “That’s true. Find Monica. Once you have her, call in and I’ll have a safe location for you to get to.”

  “And Walker?”

  “Just find Monica, whatever it takes.”

  The General ended the call.

  Harrington gave a hand signal for his team to get rolling. His crew had gassed up the cars and had eaten and were ready to roll. Caffeine tablets had been passed around. He suspected a couple of his crew may have taken something a little more aggressive in their quest to stay awake.

  The driver of his Suburban, a good soldier named Kent, said, “Where to?”

  “Southeast. Keep us rolling around there. We wait for an intel hit. They’ll show up soon. The way this town is networked makes it a small place to hide.”

  The driver took off and the other Suburban followed. Harrington turned up the radio to catch the news commentary. They were speculating about what could be driving the group holding Jasper Brokaw. But Harrington couldn’t care less about motivations. He had his own mission to worry about.

  •

  In the motel room the news had been turned to a low whisper. The lights were off and the television gave out a glow.

  Monica said, “I’m too wired to sleep.”

  “Give it time.” Walker was on his bed, on top of the bed sheets with the thin blanket over him. He could be asleep inside a minute, if she’d just leave him alone. He decided to give her another two minutes, then he was shutting her out. She could talk to his snoring.

  “What is it you thought about me?” Monica said. “Did you just reminisce? Or were you wondering about me, where I was and what I was doing, that sort of thing?”

  Walker
didn’t respond. A minute forty-five to slumberland.

  “I thought of you,” she said.

  A minute thirty.

  “Not often. And not for long. But the memory was there. It was a good time. A weekend. In summer. Over in four days but it felt like a lifetime, at the time. What do they call that? The summer . . . the summer of a dormouse?”

  Forty seconds. To shut-eye. Not the summer of a dormouse.

  “I waited, you know? That summer and nearly to the next. I thought once you finished at the Academy, that something might happen. With us.”

  Twenty-five seconds.

  “Then I knew I was being stupid, and then I had a career and it was busy and ten years passed and I kept asking my dad about you—where you were and what you were up to and he’d never really say but when I pressed him to at least find out if you were okay he’d do it for me and that’d keep me going for another few months.”

  Monica fell silent.

  Two minutes had passed.

  Walker was awake. And it wasn’t the coffee. He could sleep on caffeine as well as he could sleep on a Black Hawk going into a raid. The fact was, he’d thought about her, of course he had. But he’d had the on-off thing with Eve going on back then, the high-school sweetheart he married a few years after the Academy, before his first tour in Afghanistan. Had he thought about that Fourth of July weekend? Sure. On cold moments in the mountains with explosions tearing the quietude and bullets ripping the air and when the screams of men broke the night. It was one of his go-to memories when he needed to shut out the rigors of training against torture. When he had to replace in his mind’s eye what he’d seen on operations that went bad. When he needed to smile. It formed part of his happy place, which all soldiers had.

  “Yes,” Walker said, his voice quiet in the room. “I remember that weekend. And I have thought about you. I’d heard from a service buddy that you’d married. And I guess that was it—the end of my thoughts about what could have been. As nice as it was, it was a summer fling, right? Between a couple of college students. Before we were married and lived lives and all that. Simple. Fun. Carefree.”

  Monica was quiet. He heard her moving. The springs in her mattress as she shifted, trying to find a comfortable position, trying to find sleep.

  •

  Jasper couldn’t sleep. He was too wired. Jittery. Wondering, about the world out there. He could hear the television in the other, larger room, and he imagined the armed men seated around it. He was on a military-style cot bed, a kind of plastic canvas material over a collapsible metal frame. Every time he moved it squeaked and creaked. He looked up at the ceiling and wondered what was next.

  34

  Finally, Walker heard her breathing settle into a rhythm that signified sleep. He closed his eyes. Some rest before the sunrise.

  What Walker didn’t hear was outside. In the shadows. Someone watching. Waiting. Not concerned about resting at all.

  •

  Twenty-five miles away Harrington and his crew were driving a slow loop around where Trapwire had registered a sighting of Walker and Monica.

  “I’m calling it in,” Harrington said, looking at the screen shot of Monica in the Hemi Cuda.

  “That wise, sir?” Kent asked. There was no formality between them. Harrington was their leader, and they respected that, but they operated as a team of equals.

  Kent was a good man of a dirty bunch, busted out of the Army proper for much the same reasons as Harrington, although Kent had dropped a JSOC officer during a reprimand, breaking the guy’s jaw. Harrington liked Kent.

  “We need to find the car,” Harrington said. “I’ll give it to the LAPD and Feds. Get everyone looking for them.”

  “They may have switched vehicles.”

  “Would you dump that car?” Harrington showed the driver.

  “Nope.”

  “No. Me either. They’re in the car, and they’re headed someplace or bedded down for the night. We find the car, find them, get the girl.”

  “And this guy Walker?”

  “If he gets in the way we drop him. But let’s try and do this clean. Everyone copy that?”

  Harrington waited for all five guys to reply in the affirmative.

  “Right.” Harrington pressed send on an email to the tech department back at Cyber Command—the same crew who had hacked the LAPD officers earlier—to alert the LAPD to be on the lookout for the car; they were to watch but not approach the occupants. He then leaned back and looked out the window. LA may have been mostly asleep, but there were plenty of cars on the road: those headed home from parties and clubs, those with weird shift jobs, those simply passing through.

  Harrington didn’t really care. His mission for now was to find the sister. If it expanded beyond that—to find this group or take action against them—well, even then their motivation mattered little. His job was the sister. And he would succeed in his job.

  35

  Walker woke as dawn broke. The television was still on. Muted.

  The news ticker read: “The worst ever breach of US government data.” And: “Social media hack continues to reverberate.”

  Monica was asleep in her bed.

  Walker put the subtitles on so he could read what the news heads were saying.

  “The Office of Personnel Management claims the hackers accessed not only personnel files but security-clearance forms . . . Such forms contain information that foreign intelligence agencies could use to target espionage operations . . . Chinese officials have denied any involvement . . . The group that has Jasper Brokaw captive have remained silent . . . The Director of the FBI will address the President and National Security Council at eight am at the White House.”

  He filled the tiny coffee maker and set two cups under the spout. By the time it had boiled and turned itself off, Walker had showered and dressed. The sound had roused Monica, and she sat up in her bed, having slept in her clothes, and turned up the TV volume.

  Walker passed her a coffee and sat on the bed opposite.

  When they switched over to the local NBC news, they saw that Monica was on it. She was the headline.

  “The sister of captive NSA operative Jasper Brokaw is missing. Is she part of an extortion attempt to force him to work for them?”

  “I should call someone,” Monica said. “NBC, FBI, whoever. Anyone who will listen. Anyone who can help.” She stood up too quickly, her coffee spilling on the floor.

  “No,” Walker said. “This is okay. For now.”

  “What?”

  “Whoever has Jasper may now be wondering about you—about who has you, about where you are. It may, in some way, give your brother some leverage. An opportunity to do something.”

  “Like what?”

  “Maybe the group wants to know about you, and maybe they get him to hack a surveillance system to find where you are. And doing that, maybe he gets a chance to get a message out, to someone who can figure out his location.”

  “That’s a lot of maybes.”

  “It’s better than nothing.”

  Monica looked at him sideways, then back at the television, taking in the news, flicking channels and seeing her face on half of the major networks and cable outlets.

  “We should really call the police,” she said eventually.

  “It’s better we stay off the grid.”

  “Listen!” Monica said, looking down at Walker. “What the hell are you doing, anyway? Taking me to the world’s seediest motel? How does that help Jasper? And exactly what do you propose we do now to find him? Go to his apartment with a magnifying glass and look for clues?” Walker stood, and she pushed his chest with both hands. “How? How in the name of everything holy do you think this is helping?”

  Walker waited a moment. The television was on Fox News. They were talking about scandalous revelations within emails leaked from West Wing staff. It was clear that some jobs would be lost that morning, and that lawsuits would be in motion. The Senate Majority Leader was being interviewed and was t
alking about impeachment for all kinds of perceived improprieties that were being combed through.

  Monica froze as the news cut to a familiar scene.

  Jasper Brokaw, in his orange jumpsuit.

  •

  Jasper was filmed with that day’s LA Times, just as before. He was jittery and nervy, just as before. He was silent. The screen went black. Then the white lettering flashed up under his form—THIS IS YOUR SALVATION—and Walker thought briefly that he had left the subtitles on, but then he heard Jasper’s voice.

  “Guess we’ve got your attention,” Jasper said to the camera. “And you’re making noise, calling the President to turn off the Net. Good. Be loud. Forty million federal employees are now calling for the kill switch to be used. And that’s in addition to those already shouting about their social-media blues. After the next cyber attack, sometime over the next six hours? That noise, it’s going to be a cacophony. Of course, we don’t have to get to that point, to move beyond what’s already taken place. There’s one person who can make this end. Does the President have what it takes? Time will tell . . .”

  “More than the billion already affected?” Monica said. “What could be louder—”

  “An actual attack. An atrocity. A cyber-9/11.”

  “They’ll stop it.”

  “How? How do you stop what you don’t know is coming other than by pulling the plug?”

  Monica stared at the screen as her brother continued.

  “During his long tenure as FBI Director, J Edgar Hoover amassed a huge collection of information on American politicians, government employees, activists and anyone else he deemed important enough to probe. For decades Hoover wielded those dossiers to prolong his grip on power, impact public policy and distort American politics. That information remained tightly controlled, used only when Hoover thought it would benefit his agenda. When he died, his long-time personal secretary, Helen, destroyed most of those records before anyone else could get their hands on them.

  “Now, do you really think that the government doesn’t still store all your data? Of course they do. More than ever. They scoop it all up. And I’m going to prove it to you. And there’ll be no Helen to stop me. In six hours, I’m giving the world access to all the stored data of US citizens and foreign nations that is currently being held at data centers across the country. And there’s nothing they can do about it, because I’ve already accessed it.”