Kill Switch Read online

  “This is a look-see,” I told them. “This gig is a handoff from our friends in the CIA.”

  “We’re all going to die,” said Bunny.

  “There’s a bright side,” I told him. “The quarterback who handed it off was Harcourt Bolton.”

  Both Top and Bunny came instantly to point, grinning like kids.

  “Seriously?” said Bunny, wide-eyed. “Wow. We made it to the pros.”

  “I thought he retired,” said Top. “Glad to hear he’s still in the game.”

  Guys like us don’t much go in for hero worship. The exception is when the hero in question is someone like Harcourt Bolton. If America has ever had an agent on par with the movie version of James Bond, then it’s Bolton. He’s the spy’s spy. Cool, suave, sophisticated, incredibly smart, and very capable. I may be one of Uncle Sam’s top shooters, but Bolton is the Agency’s sharpest scalpel. And it’s not too much of a stretch to say I’m captain of his fan club. Harcourt Bolton, Senior, was someone I knew very well. Or, should I say, I knew of very well. His role as a semicelebrity gazillionaire philanthropist, entrepreneur, and notorious playboy was tabloid legend. He was like Tony Stark or Bruce Wayne—a rich man who always seemed to be caught in a paparazzi photo with this year’s supermodel while spending his days investing in worthy causes to better humanity. It was the kind of superstar status that never seemed quite real, because how could someone be that rich, that lucky, that smart, and that generous all in one lifetime?

  That’s the Bolton the general public knew. I’ve heard my lover, Junie Flynn, talk about getting him involved in some FreeTech ventures in developing countries. Using money and technology to save whole villages.

  My guys and I knew the other side of him, however. We knew that the Bruce Wayne cover was just that. A cover. A brilliant cover, actually, because just as Bruce Wayne had that darker vigilante side with an obsession for flightless mammals of the family Chiroptera, there was a hidden side to Harcourt Bolton. He was, by anyone’s estimation, the greatest spy who has ever worked for the Central Intelligence Agency. That is saying a lot. No matter what the public perception is of the CIA, they are not, on the whole, a clown college. There is a very effective little office within the CIA that makes sure the Company is regarded from a skewed perspective, because it lowers the expectations of the bad guys.

  The other side to Bolton’s career was the above-top-secret operations, the real 007 stuff. Like infiltrating and destroying a secret North Korean missile base that was primed to detonate the Cumbre Vieja volcano, which would have sent five hundred cubic kilometers of rock into the Atlantic Ocean, resulting in a two-thousand-foot-high tsunami. It would have wiped out the African coast, Southern England, and then the eastern seaboard of North America.

  Then there was the bioweapons lab buried four stories beneath a Siberian work camp. Bolton went in alone, killed sixteen people, and blew the lab pretty much into orbit.

  And the time he ripped apart a coalition of rogue Saudi princes who were financing ISIL. Bolton wore a disguise, spoke flawless Arabic, forged perfect credentials, and once he had ingratiated himself with the group, he shot all seven of them and uploaded a computer virus that stole their data and destroyed the target computers.

  I could go on.

  And on. I could obsess and go full-tilt fanboy on him. I would buy an action figure of Harcourt Bolton and, yes, I would take it out of the package and play made-up adventures with it. If someone told me he could turn water into wine, my only question would be whether it was red or white. And the answer would probably be the 1982 Pichon Longueville Comtesse de Lalande. Not because it’s the most expensive, which it’s not, but because while the 1982 is not a classic Bordeaux, it has an over-ripe, exotic quality that he’s discovered would make any woman on Earth instantly disrobe. That’s how Bolton would do it. Guys like him walk on water and make the rest of us look like grubby amateurs. Even my personal hero, the late, great Samson Riggs, couldn’t hold a candle to him.

  Bolton was the top field operator for a lot of years. Much longer than most guys manage it. He never seemed to want to retire and I could understand that. When you’re at the top of your game—especially this game—there’s a real fear that if you head to the showers and let a newer, younger, and less experienced player step up to bat, then he won’t know better than to swing at fastballs and sliders. You stay in the game because you know it better than the other guys. Or at least you think you do. Maybe it’s an ego thing—and that’s got to be a chunk of it—but you know how far you’ve gone in the past to take the bad guys down, you know the tricks that worked for you time and again, and you don’t want to take that skill set out of play. It’s why so many guys like us die out there, caught in the moment when age and experience can’t make up for the fact that you’ve lost a step getting to first base. You fall, and maybe your arrogance and fear drags someone else down, too. Maybe a lot of people. But how can you not risk it?

  Bolton risked it, and he had a couple of missions go south on him. Luckily the DMS was there to back his play when things fell apart. I was the relief pitcher on the last two of Bolton’s operations. I got the saves and the DMS got the credit, even if it was only an off-the-radar pat on the back by the president.

  Bolton was done as a field op, though. His team was reassigned and he was given a nice desk in a nice office and people were very nice to him. Which must have been hell for a guy like him.

  However, anyone who thought Bolton would just walk off the field and go sit on a porch at the Old Spies Retirement Home was sadly mistaken. Because he’s a class act, and maybe an actual superhero, he shifted his gears and over the last few years he’s worked his old network of contacts to get mission intel for younger CIA turks, and even for the DMS. Serious intel. If he’d been regarded as a superspy before, you can double that since then. His network was so deeply embedded in the global underworld that none of us could figure out how he did it. Someone hung a nickname on him that got some traction. Mr. Voodoo. If Harcourt Bolton says something hinky is happening—even if no one else has heard a peep about it—then you lock and load. So if he passed along intel on this job, it was on us to nut up and earn that level of professional respect.

  “I’ll give it to you the way I got it,” I said. “The mission has two layers. Our cover story is a surprise inspection to evaluate the status of a research base designated ‘Gateway.’ This is a repurposed facility. The original Gateway was an old radar station from the early Cold War era. Satellites made it mostly obsolete so it was closed up. Operative word is ‘was.’ The base was built at the foot of Vinson Massif, the tallest mountain in Antarctica. The Russians and Chinese both have research stations in the same region.”

  “What’s the hurry for us to get down there?” asked Top. “The neighbors getting cranky?”

  “Not exactly,” I said. “Our intelligence says that in the last twenty-eight hours the Russian and Chinese bases have gone dark. No radio, no communication of any kind. Nineteen hours ago our facility also went dark. We’re about six hours ahead of the Russian and Chinese investigative teams. Bolton got wind of this from his network but he’s in the middle of something else so he called Mr. Church.”

  Top grunted. “Do we think it has been taken?”

  “Unknown, but on the list of possibilities,” I said. “Gateway isn’t a radar outpost anymore and hasn’t been for over a decade. But that’s where things get muddy. Bug had trouble finding out who actually opened it and what they’re doing. We know it’s some kind of black budget thing, but we only know that because of how well the details have been hidden. Very little of it is in any of the databases Bug and his geek squad have infiltrated. And like all of that kind of stuff there are lots of things named only by obscure acronyms, and projects identified by number-letter codes instead of names. That makes it tough to find, because something labeled A631/45H doesn’t exactly ring alarm bells. Bug needs to have something to go on.”

  Top and Bunny nodded. This was familiar—and de
eply frustrating—territory for us. Our own government is so large and so compartmentalized, and there’s so much bickering, infighting, and adherence to personal and political agendas, that one hand truly does not know what the other is doing. And that gets even murkier when you factor in illegal operations, of which there are many.

  “Do we know anything about what they’re doing down there?” asked Bunny.

  I shrugged. “Not much, and what we do know is because Bolton brought us into the loop. Not sure how he found out.”

  “He’s Harcourt Bolton,” said Bunny.

  “Fair enough. Anyway, we now know the Gateway base is active and apparently serving as a research and development shop. Mr. Church had Bug do a MindReader search on Gateway and so far he’s only come up with a few things, but not as much as we’d like.”

  “How’s it possible we can’t find out everything?” asked Bunny. “MindReader can go anywhere.”

  “In theory,” I said, “but a lot of people in Washington know that we have MindReader and some of them are pretty stingy with their stuff. Can’t blame them. It’s not like we are actually allowed to poke our noses everywhere.”

  “Yeah,” said Top dryly, “been a whole bunch of stuff on the news the last few years about government overreach. Maybe you read something?”

  I ignored him. “The point is that more and more departments are using intranets instead of the public or military networks. Closed systems that can’t be accessed from outside. MindReader can’t go and hardwire a tap, you know.”

  Top punched Bunny on the arm. “That don’t mean your browser history is safe yet, Farm Boy, so stop looking at all those naked pictures. Gonna grow hair on your palms.”

  “Blow me,” said Bunny.

  “There are other ways to hide from MindReader,” I told them. “Paper files instead of computer records. That sort of thing.”

  “Still got to be paid for,” said Top. “Operating a research base way down here? Even if it’s coded, something like this has to be expensive. Got to be mentioned in the budget somewhere.”

  I nodded. “That’s what Bug’s looking at now, but it’s time-consuming.”

  “If they ain’t a radar station, then what are they doing down there?” asked Top.

  “That’s the problem,” I told them, “we don’t know for sure. The intel is thin. Bolton said his sources believe they’re working on some radical technology for renewable energy. Nonnuclear but with a lot of potential. Far as he could tell it was sold to the black budget people as the thing that will take us away from any dependence on foreign oil. Don’t ask me what the science is because I don’t know and neither does Bolton.”

  “If this is energy research,” said Top, “and it’s non-nuclear, then why go all the way the hell down to the rectum of the world to develop it?”

  “That’s what I asked,” I said. “Almost the same words. The short answer is we don’t know. Bolton and Bug both found some oblique references to—and I quote—‘side effects resulting in pervasive power outages of limited duration.’”

  “EMP?” suggested Bunny.

  “Maybe. Dr. Hu said that there have been a number of new energy technologies that have had side effects, and EMPs are on that list. What confuses us all is the ‘limited duration’ part. EMPs fry electronics. There’s nothing limited about that effect. You have to replace the damaged parts.” I sighed. “So you see our problem—we have bits of intel and the pieces don’t fit together. We’re not even sure if any of that intel is reliable or even relevant, and we can’t get anyone up here to admit to knowing anything about it, and no one down at Gateway will pick up the damn phone. Bug found a code name in the same partial data file that referenced the power outage side effect. Kill Switch.”

  “Cute name,” said Bunny, not meaning it.

  “If the power outage thing is a reproducible effect, then they may have isolated it in order to develop it into a new classification of directed-energy weapon. Maybe some sort of portable EMP cannon.”

  Bunny whistled.

  Top frowned. “EMPs,” he muttered in pretty much the way you’d say genital warts. “Been hearing nothing but trash talk about portable EMPs for ten years now.”

  “I know,” I said, “but that’s the next new technology for the good guys and bad guys. We want them to use as the next generation of missile shields, and to protect against small drones launched by hostiles. The bad guys want to use them against us because everything we put in the field or in the air has a microchip, motor, or battery.”

  “That sucks,” said Bunny. “Couple guys sitting in a cave with a portable EMP weapon and suddenly our gunships are dropping like dead birds.”

  “Won’t just be caves, Farm Boy,” said Top. “Portable is portable. Put those same assholes in a UPS truck in Manhattan and it’s lights out for the whole damn city.”

  “Well, for some of it,” countered Bunny. “One cannon’s not going to flip the switches on a whole city.”

  Top spread his hands in a “we’ll see” gesture. To me he said, “Washington send us down here to see if the Russians or Chinese been stealing our toys?”

  “Unknown,” I said, “but that’s an obvious concern.”

  Top made a show of looking up and down the otherwise empty hull of the transport. Except for our gear and a modified snowcat we were all alone. “Small team to start a war with a couple of superpowers.”

  “Not the plan. There’s some concern that a strong military presence might send the wrong message and draw attention when it might not actually be needed. Send in a lot of soldiers and people start wondering what you have to hide. That said, though, Boardwalk and Neptune Teams are five hours behind us. They’ll hold back unless we call for them, and the USS California is in range in case we need to open a can of industrial-strength whoop-ass. However, the president has asked us to go in first, quick and quiet. No one except the Gateway staff are supposed to know we’re here. We don’t want anyone or anything connected with Gateway to make the news, feel me?”

  Top snorted. “The Chinese and Russians probably have every eye in the sky they own looking at this. This whole area’ll probably be featured on Google Earth before we’re wheels down.”

  “Got to love the concept of ‘secrecy’ in the digital age,” said Bunny. “Ten bucks says that some hipster blogger will be there to meet our plane.”

  It was almost true, and that was somewhere between sad and scary. With the vertical spike in digital technology, anyone with a smartphone had greater capabilities of discovering and sharing sensitive information with the world than the combined professional world media of ten years ago. Social media could be used for a lot of good things, but it’d turned everyone into a potential spy or source. And, yeah, I really do know how paranoid that sounds, but it is what it is. I’m a cheerleader for the First Amendment except when I’m in the field, at which point I have the occasional Big Brother moments. My shrink is never going to go broke.

  Top asked, “We have thermal scans of our base and the others?”

  “They’re next to useless,” I said. “The mountains there are thick with metal ores, so that screws things up.”

  Top sat back and folded his arms. He had dark brown skin crisscrossed with pink scars. Most of them earned since he’s been working for me. “Seems like they’re throwing us into a situation about which we have shit for intel.”

  “Pretty much,” I said.

  “The day must end with a Y,” muttered Bunny.

  I opened my laptop and called up a few random images of Gateway that Bolton and Bug had each found. There were some preliminary floor plans that might as well have been labeled GENERIC LAB, and some photos taken by satellite showing unhelpful pictures of prefab buildings nestled against a snow-covered mountain.

  Bunny made a face. “We could give an Etch-a-Sketch to a rhesus monkey and he’d come up with better intel.”

  “No doubt,” I said. “Bug found some shipping manifests that at least tell us what’s been brought out
there. Lab equipment, drilling gear, six generators—two active, two emergency backups, two offline in case—and all of the other stuff necessary for establishing a moderately self-sufficient base. Staff of seventy. Ten on the science team, twenty support staff that includes cook, medical officer, site administrator, and some engineers. The rest are military but we don’t know what branch, so I asked Bug to run a MindReader deep search to find out. We’re waiting on additional intel now.”

  The whole DMS was built around the MindReader computer system. Without it we’d be just another SpecOps team. MindReader had a superintrusion software package that allowed it to do a couple of spiffy things. One thing it did was look for patterns by drawing on information from an enormous number of sources, many of which it was not officially allowed to access. Which was the second thing. MindReader could intrude into any known computer system, poke around as much as it wanted, and withdraw without a trace. Most systems leave some kind of scar on the target computer’s memory, but MindReader rewrote the target’s software to completely erase all traces of its presence. Bug was the uber-geek who ran MindReader for the DMS. I sometimes think Bug believes that MindReader is God and he’s the pope.

  Bunny asked, “What happens if we knock on their door and some goon from the People’s Liberation Army Special Operations Forces answers?”

  “Then all of us become a footnote in next year’s black budget report,” I said.

  Bunny sighed. “Like I said … this only happens to us on days ending in a Y.”

  I wish I could call him a liar.

  INTERLUDE TWO

  OFFICE OF DR. MICHAEL GREENE

  EAST HAMPTON, NEW YORK

  WHEN PROSPERO WAS ELEVEN

  “Why do you hate your father?” asked Dr. Greene.

  “You’ve met him,” said Prospero. “You tell me.”

  “Let’s focus on your feelings.”

  Prospero Bell sat cross-legged on the couch. He’d spent time setting the angles of his knees and ankles just so. He still wore his green jacket with the gray hoodie underneath. Each time he showed up for a new session there was more detail in the monster on the hood, and he’d begun adding colors to indicate light through water, as if the monster were submerged beneath a sunlit sea.