Kill Switch

by James Phelan

  “I’m not saying it is.”

  “But you think that’s clouding my thoughts?”

  Walker remained silent.

  Monica turned and headed down the overgrown track they had driven in on. Walker figured she wouldn’t venture off the track, and that she wouldn’t wander far. A wind from the north fluttered the first leaves of the fir trees. There were no other obvious paths, but he knew there would be more fire tracks snaking through the mountains, and that none would take her to a dead end. He found the continuation of this track on the other side of the container. It was more overgrown than the lower section.

  He turned down the gas stove as the chili began to bubble and went back inside to look for bowls. He found some near the jerry cans in a stack of junk on the shelves. There were a few bottles of cheap-label booze as well. And a cash box. He pulled out the box and opened it. It contained a small bag of weed, some cigarette papers and little foil packs. The dust on the box told Walker it hadn’t been touched in a long time. But maybe that just meant that Paul hadn’t visited here in a long time, which seemed probable with the overgrown track leading up the mountain.

  “That you, Walker?” Paul called out.

  “No, it’s a bear,” Walker replied. He put back the box and went to the computer room.

  Paul said to him, without looking up, “I need more speed—gotta try a different sat link. Can you tilt the dish ten degrees up and thirty to the right?”

  “On it,” Walker said, heading outside.

  “My mistake,” Paul called out a minute later. “Another ten to the right!”

  Walker made the shift. “That good?”

  “Checking . . . little more . . . yep.”

  Walker returned to the stove and turned it off. He looked around and saw a world of brown-gray-greens around him with a light blue sky that punched through the trees. No sign of Monica.

  54

  Paul and Walker ate chili and drank water while the computer screen ran down lines of code. Paul was in his element, fingers and mind working fast whenever the terminal needed his input.

  “I’m piggybacking off the network at the University of California in Berkeley, giving us more grunt to slam through all this,” Paul said, eating and watching the code run on the screen.

  “It’s been twenty minutes. Are you seeing anything in there?” Walker said as he finished his food.

  “All kinds of things,” Paul said. “Where’s Monica?”

  “Out there. Clearing her head. What do you see?”

  “Good place for it. Out there.”

  “Better than in here.”

  “What’s wrong with here?”

  Walker leaned forward, into Paul’s space. “How long have you been coming here?”

  “A while,” Paul said, edging away as he resumed eating. He watched his food and then looked around the spartan space. No windows, just the light from a bank of fluorescent tubes above and what spilled in from the open doors. “Before I got my house. A guy inside told me about these places. How he camped out in one when there was heat on him, and that he was only found when he went to town a few too many times.”

  “But you were out, not on the run. Or were you hiding from someone?”

  “Not anyone in particular. But I was used to being in a small space. Away from out there. Away from home.”

  “Home, in San Fran?”

  “Yeah. I tried that. My parents turfed me out after two years—I couldn’t get a job and I was using. That’s something I can thank prison for, right? I went in a guy against the system, never took anything stronger than beer and whisky; came out of the joint chasing highs wherever I could. Anyway, my parents sent me to rehab a few times. I ran from the last one, some place in Pasadena where they think if you just eat bananas and talk about Jesus you’ll be cured of all your sinning.” He exhaled, put his food down, leaned back. “I took all I had and put it into that truck, and a computer and generator, and I drove out here. I set up for . . . four, five months. Did some online trading. All legit. Made some coin and used it to get my new ID. I checked into a motel in Palm Springs, showered, shaved, bought a suit, and got the first job I went for. Of course, the economy being what it was, I picked up that house for near to nothing. I feel more guilty about that than anything, you know? That someone got screwed out of their life savings and lost their house because of stupid decisions that rich guys in Wall Street and Washington made.”

  “You could track them down online, transfer some cash to their account, if that’s how you feel about it.”

  “I did. And I quadrupled their money over the past five years. They’ll be okay now.”

  They were silent for a moment, and Walker watched as Paul checked over his machines.

  Walker said, “Tell me about Jasper.”

  “There’s not much to tell.” Paul picked up his food again, glanced at the computer screen, and continued to eat as he spoke. “You know it. Techie. Obsessive. A guy who started out like me and went a different way.” Paul looked away from the screen briefly to Walker, then back again. “Nine-eleven changed him,” he said. “He believed in the anthrax. Believed in what was being said and that we had a duty to take a stand and band together to work for America.”

  “So, he changed before you got busted.”

  “Yep. He started spending time hacking Iraqi shit—emptying Ba’ath Party bank accounts, donating the funds to the veterans, that sort of thing.”

  “No surprise that they offered him a deal—and that he took it.”

  “Right.”

  “Did you resent him?”

  “For not doing time? No. He . . . turns out he never grassed on me. He just said he’d work for them. I had that deal on the table too. I declined it.”

  “He told you that?”

  “Yes. I asked him. When we first met up after I got out. I turned up at his place full of rage and instead I found the brother I’d known when we were kids. He was still okay then.”

  “Okay?”

  “He changed for good around 2010, 2011. He was . . . how can I put this . . . wrecked? Beyond disillusioned.”

  “Because of the work they had him doing?”

  “That, and what he’d seen others do. I mean, with 9/11, he was all for making us the biggest and best on the block. He had no qualms hacking other governments and dropping in malware to watch their every move. So long as it took America forward, protected us. But then in 2010 he did his first overseas posting. He’d already done about a year and a half in Hawaii, some big data center run by the NSA in a former torpedo bunker from World War Two. But in 2010 they sent him off to Berlin. It was a plush posting, on paper. Meant to be a reward for him. I visited him there. Man . . . that apartment he had? It was badass. His expense account, the girls, the bars . . . that’s when he started drinking. Not for fun. Because of what he saw.”

  Paul sat up as his computer stalled and he typed in a new request over a couple of lines and it resumed its search.

  “Jasper was working closely with CIA officers in recruiting agents in business and governments that would pass through town—it was a mecca for all kinds of summits and conferences. Jasper was tasked with intercepting all local comms in and out—reading all emails, putting local cell-phone traffic through keyword filters, hacking networks and getting the inside on trade negotiations and inter-consular chatter. But it was the human targets that got to him. The CIA officers’ usual MO was to get the targets drunk and—well, you probably know all this, right? They’d get them in compromising situations, like caught with hookers or drugs, and arrested, and then they’d come in using some kind of diplomatic cover and pull strings and it’d go away—in return for all kinds of secrets.”

  “Right. Though not just a one-off—ideally you want to run agents to the limit of their clearance, until they’re no longer useful.”

  “Did you do much of that in your time at the CIA?” Paul’s tone was somewhere between condescending and knowing.

  “No.”

&nb
sp; “What did you do?”

  “I destroyed things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Whatever needed to be destroyed.”

  “Right.”

  Walker watched as Paul checked his screen. The lines continued to blur by.

  “Did Jasper know about you and Monica?” Walker asked.

  55

  Walker looked at Paul. Paul looked back, his blank stare quickly fading to one of being caught out.

  “She told you?”

  “No,” Walker said. “But you just did.”

  “Damn.” Paul turned back to his screen, and stared absently at the running code. “Yeah, he knew. Kind of. He knew I liked her. He knew we’d hooked up. It was—it started out a kid thing, you know? We hooked up once in high school, at a party—I mean, she was a freshman, I was a senior, there was booze, and I was a teenage guy, right—I had sex on the mind the whole time. And, well, she was bangin’. Still got it, too, but I don’t think about that much anymore.”

  Walker let that slide. He didn’t much care what Paul felt these days. He wanted to know as much as he could about Jasper, and the relationships that he had. Walker was looking for patterns. Behavioral traits. Choices made in the past that might influence decisions taken in the present and the future.

  “Then,” Paul said, snapping back to reality, “a few years later, in college, we went out for a semester. She was doing her masters in psych. Jasp and I were doing computer engineering. It was before our stuff took off. Before we ditched college. It didn’t work out.”

  “What was Jasper’s reaction?”

  “He didn’t know about that.”

  “Just high school?”

  “Yep.”

  “You kept a six-month thing secret?”

  “Yep.”

  “And you were dorming with him?”

  “Yep. I’d visit Monica.”

  “What did he think you were doing?”

  “Going to the gym.”

  “Really?” Walker didn’t see it.

  “Fencing, okay? I was pretty good too. I sparred with the Olympic guys and had my share of wins.”

  “And you’re sure he didn’t know?”

  “I never communicated with her electronically.”

  “What—you think he’d keep tabs on your comms?”

  “Not mine. I know he watched hers. He’d read her emails and phone messages. This was pre-Facebook, right? Times were simpler, it was easier to be discreet. Now, no one can hide anything.”

  Walker nodded, not quite believing that Paul had managed to have a covert affair with his best friend’s sister right under his nose with no way of traditional communication. If Jasper really hadn’t noticed it, either Monica and Paul had been very good, or Jasper wasn’t as good at deciphering patterns and behavior as his job and clearance would suggest.

  “How did you communicate?”

  “We had some set times. Plus we’d made an arrangement to go to the library each day, between two and three, I think it was; if the books in a certain section were arranged a certain way, it’d mean a day and time and place to meet up. And I’d ride by her apartment off campus late most nights, and if there was a lamp on in the window . . .”

  Paul sat up. The code had stopped. He tapped away at the computer.

  “Oh . . . oh,” he said, smiling. “Oh, you’re good.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s Jasper. He’s left crumbs—and chucked a few in front of him.”

  “You know the next target?”

  “Not yet, but I will. I think.”

  “Where?” Walker said, leaning forward. The random letters and numbers meant nothing to him.

  “When the—” Paul stopped.

  “Is it . . .” Walker prompted; all he could see was that the data had stopped streaming down in a ceaseless waterfall of information.

  “Yes,” Paul said. He highlighted a number at the end of the code. “This is it. It doesn’t belong here—it has no purpose. Numbers.”

  “And?” Walker said. “It could be random.”

  “It means he’s leaving us crumbs—breadcrumbs, you know, like the nursery rhyme.”

  “Fairytale,” Walker said. “Hansel and Gretel.”

  “He was obsessed with fairytales,” Paul said. “That and Greek mythology. Anything where the forces of evil were big and complex but overcome often by an everyman-type character.”

  “Where do the breadcrumbs lead?” Walker asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Can you track them?”

  “I wouldn’t be as good as I think I am if I couldn’t.”

  Fingers whirred over the keyboard.

  Paul hesitated, then said, “You want me to find where Jasper is being held captive?”

  “I doubt they’d have let him see where they took him,” Walker said.

  “It’s more like where the next planned attack is occurring—whether they’re keeping him alive to stop the attacks, or they made him code them all and then they killed him, he’s letting us know where the next is. It’s somewhere on the west coast.”

  “Look it up on a map of—”

  That’s when he heard the scream. A woman. Monica.

  56

  Walker was outside the shipping container in seconds. The screaming had stopped the moment he’d emerged into the clearing around the site. He couldn’t see Monica, but from what he could figure from the direction of the sound, she was down the path.

  He ran. Paul too. They were both unarmed. Walker wondered about the kind of threat they might encounter—Monica didn’t seem the type to twist an ankle or fall. And the scream was different from that; it was a scream that cut into the skull and spelled danger and help me and save me.

  “Could be an animal,” Paul called out behind Walker. “I’ve seen bears and snakes around here.”

  Walker trekked down an overgrown bank to cut off a switchback in the road, and saw a flash of Monica’s pale skin where she lay on the road, curled in a ball, her arms around her head. By her side was an e-cigarette.

  “Oh, shit,” Paul said. “Shit. Damn. Look, she’ll be fine. It’ll just take time.”

  Walker picked up Monica, put her into a fireman’s carry and started up the road as fast as he could. She was limp, and sweating, and murmuring. Paul was next to them, sniffing the e-cigarette.

  “What did she take?” Walker barked at him.

  “DMT,” Paul said. “Hallucinogen. She must have found it in my truck. It’s an odorless powder. There wouldn’t have been much in there, residue maybe, but even tiny amounts of it can produce extremely strong effects. It was from months ago, I’d forgotten about it—I’m clean now.”

  “What’s it doing to her?”

  Monica was squirming in Walker’s arms, her limbs moving slowly, as though she were swimming in thick fluid.

  “Right now, her whole world is dancing,” Paul said. “She’s seeing fantasy. She’s going through something very serious. Beyond consciousness—but she’s conscious, if you get me. She’s trying to flee this physical realm. I . . . I used for a couple years, and went through so many dreams and so many scenarios. It’s basically a concentrated dream. She’ll be okay, it’s a clean come down and then it’s just over. She’s spinning geometric shapes like a screensaver, or cartoons. Her reality is running 4D, time and space bending. She’s moving like that because of a falling sensation.”

  “How long is it going to last?”

  “An hour, maybe. Maybe more.”

  “We don’t have an hour.”

  “I have a needle in the truck—Narcan, for ODs. Sublingual injection will work fastest, or in a muscle it’ll take maybe twenty minutes. It’s in the glove compartment.”

  “Is that safe?” Walker caught sight of the cabin and the truck. He picked up the pace. “Sublingual? Like, under the tongue?”

  “Yep.”

  “Have you done it before?” Walker asked as they neared the truck.

  “Never tried it.” />
  Great.

  “She’ll be okay. Let her ride it out. She can’t make the dreaming stop. She feels physically heavy. She can’t do or say anything until it passes. Time has slowed down for her. But it’ll be a little less intense and then a little less intense until she’s not high anymore.”

  Walker carried Monica into the container and laid her on the camp bed.

  “Sorry,” Paul said.

  Walker nodded. “Okay. We need to keep an eye on her, and in the meantime you tell me about the hacks. Social media. Why?”

  “Social media? Nope. The hell with that. That’s just a means for them to get all of your data. Whatever they want. It’s a good thing for Jasper to hack to make noise, that’s all.”

  “What if the Net’s shut down?”

  Paul looked at Walker. “Do you know how the Net works?”

  “Not really.”

  “Well, you know about search engines, right? Well, they show maybe one percent of the Net. The rest is hidden. Deep Web. You need specific URLs to find those sites. Or Tor networking to keep the servers anonymous. Jasper and I started off by hacking a gym teacher at high school. He was running some perverted thing, broadcasting pictures from the change rooms, using a Deep Web address to share them around. We made it so that his and his buddies’ computers’ cameras turned on them. This was early days of everyone having cameras that were an add-on to their computers, but it was easy enough for us to do. That was the first thing. No one ever knew who did it. The teacher and two of his sicko buddies went to jail, and they were all placed on sex-offenders lists. It felt great. We wanted more.”

  Walker looked back to Monica moving around; she was slow and languid but seemed content to remain on the bed. At least it was low to the floor if she decided to get more active.

  “Then we hacked a place just near USC, a business that made no sense in terms of their computer power,” Paul said, pacing around in front of his computer screens. “Why would that place have such fast-speed Internet? We looked closer. It was a front. It was government. The more we dug into their network and came up against secondary and tertiary firewalls, the more addicted we became. It turned out to be a manufacturing plant, some kind of chips we use in cruise missiles, designed and owned by an Israeli outfit.”