Dead Man Switch

by Matthew Quirk

  “Does Paul check out?” she had asked him then.

  Of course Gray had done the background workup. He ran checks on his pool cleaner.

  “Does he?”

  “He does. Are you going to get married as Carol? Live as a cover?”

  That had been her plan: The lie would become the real life, and the person she had been before would become an odd variation, locked away in her work. It sounded wrong to say yes back then. But the more she thought about it, the more she liked it.

  “Who could imagine?” she’d said. “A woman getting married and losing her name.”

  “Those bonds are dangerous, Claire. People can exploit them. They give the enemy a way in.”

  “I can take care of myself.”

  “I know. But what about him?”

  She hadn’t had an answer for him then. But he had been right. And now her husband was dead.

  Chapter 20

  CLAIRE BROUGHT THE gun down to her side and took two steps across the library toward Gray. “Why did you freeze me out after Paul died? Do you remember?”

  “We went to the memorial. I remember that.”

  “That was bullshit. You knew what was going on and you and the rest of them cut me off.”

  “Every death in Cold Harvest. Do you know what they had in common?” Gray asked.

  “They were made to look like accidents.”

  “You. You were the common factor. You worked with them. You saw their reports. We did a network analysis and all the signs pointed to you. And there was no indication of foul play.”

  “Because it was done by professionals.”

  “You’re one of how many who can do a job like that? A half a dozen in the world. Maybe it was you, or maybe they were just accidents.”

  She’d never understood why they’d dropped her. She had access to some of the national security intranets. Stealing passwords was an old habit of hers, and she still had a few working credentials she had lifted from the intelligence staffers. But they gave her only low-level permissions, glimpses of calendars and meetings, some travel plans, nothing of use. The real secrets were much more closely held or not recorded at all.

  “But why would I kill my husband?”

  He let out a long, pained exhale. “You want the headlines? You sure?”

  “I’ve been torturing myself not knowing for a year. Anything’s better than doubt.”

  “Doubt is all we had. The deaths stopped after Paul died. Let’s say you were the one targeting our people. Maybe an incendiary device went off at the wrong time and killed him. Or Paul found out who you really were and threatened to expose you.”

  She remembered that morning, the first time she’d told her husband her real name. And she remembered wondering what she would do if it came down to a choice between him and the job.

  In the room with Gray, she felt her throat working, acid at the base of her tongue, like she was going to be sick.

  “Claire? Are you okay?”

  “Fine. That was it? I killed him deliberately or accidentally? Then why would you let me walk?”

  “You know I give the bad news first. Maybe it was whoever was killing our people. They came for you and missed. Paul was in your car. Or maybe it was actually an accident.”

  No. That was the first thing he had taught her. Accidents don’t happen. Every coincidence is suspect.

  “Why didn’t you come to me, Gray?”

  “There was no evidence. The explosive tests came back negative. These were all just theories. With nothing firm, why would I tell you that, directly or indirectly, you might have harmed your family? Tucker and the politicians wanted it to go away. Think of the optics. Bystanders killed on American soil. Blowback from an unsanctioned program. It could have exposed the whole thing. So it went away.”

  “Best for everyone,” she sneered.

  “You know the game.”

  “How badly did they want to keep the program a secret?”

  “What did you do to keep it a secret?”

  She killed people. And once, with a loaded gun in her car, she’d sat watching her husband and thinking through how she would take him down if he threatened the work.

  “Are they cleaning house, Gray? Are they killing us all?”

  “It would be easy, wouldn’t it? No one knows who we really are. Unrelated deaths, anonymous civilians, scattered around the country, around the world. And after we’re gone, the only ones who could connect the dots would be the killers themselves.”

  “Who put an end to the investigation of Paul’s death?”

  He reached into his pocket.

  She raised the gun, and their eyes met along the sights. He looked down, unfazed, as he brought a pill bottle from his pocket. He shook two out and swallowed them dry. She lowered the gun slightly.

  “Kathryn Morgan. Right before they shoved me out.”

  “Jesus.”

  “The wilderness of mirrors.”

  The music had ended, and the needle spun in the empty space at the end of the record, giving a soft pop with every turn.

  He pointed to the suppressor. “Is that wet?”

  “Wire-pulling gel.”

  “Good stuff. You think they’d hear it?”

  “No.” Filling a silencer with a liquid or gel made it vastly more effective.

  “I think you’re right.” He seemed sharper now; canny, dangerous. The master she remembered. He was the father of the program. And even with him cornered, she could feel a trace of the fear she’d had when he was her teacher, evaluating, judging. She and the other candidates had been so desperate to earn his approval.

  Was he still working with Morgan? Luring her into a trap?

  “Why would you start talking to me now?”

  “Margaret’s dead, you know.” His wife. “We had a deal. I would give my life to the Agency for thirty-five years, and then she would be waiting. There would be time for everything. I put in my papers, and we bought this place, and she died.”

  “I know, Tom. I sent flowers.”

  “When was it?”

  “What?”

  “How long ago?”

  “What do you mean? It was last year.”

  He looked down. She scanned the room and saw the stacks of paper, the empty pill bottles on the shelves, the used coffee cups. Gray had always been so precise.

  “Are you okay, Gray? Are you sick?”

  “I feel fine, but I’m…I’m disappearing. A little at a time.”

  He shut his eyes and cleared his throat. Claire wanted to extend her hand, to comfort him, but the training wouldn’t allow her to let him within ten feet of her gun. She had seen him put on better deceptions. He had taught her how.

  He opened his eyes, and they went to the pistol. “The worst part is, I can’t remember the good things. My wife’s face is fading. But the bad—every shit town and every dead body—they won’t leave. I gave everything to the job. I’m paid up.”

  “You trust me?”

  “No.” He coughed, a deep rattle in his chest. “But you get tired of the mirrors. Of thinking everything is a lie. Everyone is carrying a knife. I’m too old for these games. Sometimes you just want to believe in someone, even if you think it’s a mistake. It’s either you or these telemarketers.”

  He smiled, and Claire looked at him, tried to measure the truth in the smile, and for a second it looked as fake as a mall Santa’s.

  All Gray had to do was keep up his ally act, get through this moment, get her out of there, and make a call, and she would be dead.

  Unless he couldn’t warn them. Unless she used that gun. She took a step toward him, then lifted the pistol.

  His face fell, and he shut his eyes. She studied the gray stubble on his chin, the old-man hairs of his ears and nose.

  She took his pistol from her waistband and laid it on the table beside her.

  “I’m not going to hurt you, Gray.”

  “Poor girl. It wasn’t you who killed them, was it?”

 
“No,” she said. “Were you going to let me shoot you to find that out?”

  “I didn’t have much say in the matter. I’ve worried about you, Claire. I’ve picked up the phone. I haven’t called. At least for those few seconds, I would have known.”

  “So you believe me? Anything you want to add?”

  “I wish I had gone to the memorial for Paul.”

  “You did, Tom.”

  Anger and frustration came across his face. Footsteps drummed in the hall. Claire stepped to the side. The doorknob turned, and the hinges creaked. Gray’s pistol was on the table, out of reach. She jumped behind the door as it opened, and held her silenced handgun down by her leg.

  “Dad, are you okay? I thought I heard you talking.”

  He smiled at whoever was at the door. His gun lay on the table, in plain view if the visitor looked to her right.

  “Just doddering. I’m fine. What are you all doing?”

  “Playing Catch Phrase. Do you want to join?”

  “I’ll slow you down. I can’t remember the names of anything anymore.”

  “Come sit with us. You can’t stay in here by yourself all night.”

  “I will. In a moment.”

  “Okay. It’s just us, Matthew and Scott and me.”

  “Thank you.”

  She shut the door. Claire stepped forward.

  “I’m sorry, Gray. This is your house. Your family.” It was the ultimate violation: to bring the violence home. It had happened to her, and now she had brought it to him. She put his pistol back in the desk drawer.

  “Claire. When did you—”

  She looked at him for a moment.

  He glanced at her gun. “I’m fine. I remember now. I’m fine.”

  “I have to go.”

  She could see the concentration on his face as he tried to hold on to the thread of what was happening.

  She put her hand on the French doors. “Thank you, Gray.”

  Voices rose from deeper in the house. Laughter echoed down the halls.

  “You’re welcome.”

  She slipped out and shut the doors behind her. And as she crossed the yard, she looked back and saw him standing over the pool table, holding his head in his hands.

  She couldn’t bring him into this. He had done his time, and she wasn’t sure if she could trust him, or those memories of his. This could get ugly, and she couldn’t have someone holding her back.

  But what he’d said about Morgan rang true. Morgan and Tucker. They had never trusted Cold Harvest, were always ready to cut it off. She didn’t know if or why they would go so far as killing its members, but she was going to find out.

  Claire clambered over a rock wall. Cool air hit her with the brine smell of the channel as she moved unseen around the back of the house.

  In the library, Gray drove the cue into the white ball. A run. The game absorbed him, the angles. He lined up the last shot on the nine ball.

  A faint shadow crossed the table. He turned. A figure stood before him. Good tactics, moving from dark to light. Only the glow of the desk lamp had given the gunman away, and by then it was too late.

  Gray looked up from the suppressed pistol to the face. Gray shook his head, like a man finally let it on the joke.

  The intruder remained silent.

  “She’s in on it,” Gray said.

  “Drop the cue.”

  Gray rested it against the table, leaned back against the carved oak.

  “Was that all stagecraft, Claire’s tortured act?” Gray asked. Despite the fear tightening up his spine, he had to admire his pupil. She was the best student he’d ever had, and he was proud of her. He’d known that one day she would surpass him, leave him behind like a kid going off to college.

  The man gestured with the gun for Gray to move away from the table. Gray obliged and watched the man study him, fix on the chalk in his hands. He stood next to the corner pocket and picked up the nine ball with his free hand.

  “Come out with it. What do you want? Talk to me,” Gray said. “You know the game.”

  “The game is over.”

  Gray understood and lunged for the desk drawer where he kept his gun. The other man drove the ball in his hand down on top of another. The crack filled the room and covered the report of the pistol.

  Crack-crack.

  He put the ball back, and it rolled, tapped softly against a cushion, and came to rest.

  After he shot Gray, Niko Hynd left the property, and walked through the woods near the inlet. He had been right. Claire had done her job, led him to another target. She would be so valuable. Killing Gray was crucial. If Hynd played it right, he could draw all of Cold Harvest into his trap. He heard sirens in the distance and moved faster.

  By nightfall the normally quiet peninsula was a carnival of police and emergency response vehicles. Patrol boats circled, hunting over the rocks with million-candlepower floodlights.

  But Hynd and Claire were both long gone.

  Chapter 21

  HAYES HAD COME home for his assault kit. If he was going after these killers, he had to be ready for a fight at any moment. He usually carried a Glock 19 pistol and kept the rest of his gear in a concrete outbuilding at the edge of the property. He had paperwork in his office that technically declared it a remote JSOC facility, because possessing this stuff in the United States would land someone in prison for several lifetimes.

  His basic load-out was a rifle, pistol, ammo, and knife, along with grenades—fragmentation, smoke, and flash-bang—and some basic door-breaching explosives. His night optics had been wrecked on an op—an eighty-thousand-dollar piece of gear—and he was waiting on the replacement.

  The military was generally not allowed to operate within the U.S. because of the Posse Comitatus Act, but exemptions were routinely made for the classified units to assist on critical cases and presidential security. Cox had a legal finding that exempted Hayes while on the job. “Congratulations, you’re a walking war zone,” he had said, but now that he was part of Cold Harvest, Hayes didn’t know if that protection still applied.

  He finished packing his gear, then locked the outbuilding door with the bag inside and went back to the house. His daughter, Maggie, was looking at the floor, miserable. They’d just come back from soccer.

  “She all right?” Hayes asked Lauren.

  “She had to take a time-out. She knocked over another kid.”

  Hayes waited for the whole story.

  “He wouldn’t let anyone else play. He was a year older.”

  Hayes put his hands on his hips and looked at Maggie as Lauren went back out to the car. Then Hayes crouched so he was eye to eye with his daughter.

  “Nice work,” Hayes whispered. “Someone has to stand up to those guys.”

  Upstairs in his office, he spread the files out across the table. They were Cold Harvest operators, but they were also mothers and fathers, friends and former students of his. They stared back at him from the pages.

  The killers were moving fast. Hayes couldn’t find them from the body of the man Claire had killed any better than the FBI could, and he wasn’t going to outdo a law enforcement manhunt solo. He’d already told Morgan to set up security on the Cold Harvest people and to warn them. They were their own best defense. The higher-ups had been in denial about the Cold Harvest murders and hadn’t taken the necessary steps until now.

  He hoped for a hit from the signals surveillance. He had spent a half hour on the phone with an NSA tech named Jonathan Baer. FASCIA was a database that collected location information on millions of mobile phones and it was never “intentionally” set to collect Americans’ information. But in fact the NSA used it to scoop up whatever the hell it wanted.

  The NSA could use that information to locate phones or any other communications devices that were traveling together. Normally, it was deployed to track groups of bad guys, but if the bad guys were following Cold Harvest members, Hayes assumed it could pick them up too.

  Hayes knew the NSA and its c
apabilities. He’d spent years evading it, and it was so odd to think of their lethal ever-present gaze and then go meet the computer kids—comic-book and fantasy geeks at Fort Meade—who wielded all that power but were so wrapped up in the technical details they didn’t understand the gravity of what they were doing.

  Given the complexity and speed of the operation, the killers would have to be using real-time communications, but given the sophistication, they would be dumping phones every day. He wouldn’t be able to get their present fix through Jonathan, but he could find patterns. If he knew which Cold Harvest members they were targeting, he could at least warn the target and hopefully use that information to draw out and kill his bad guys.

  There was another piece of the operation he needed to get rolling on: Claire. The killers were on to her, or she was the killer. He could find her because he had trained her. He doubted she was anywhere near her home.

  “Movement is life.” It was a motto of his old unit, one he taught his students. Never stop. From the time he had spent training Cold Harvest members, he knew some of their old communications and escape-and-evasion plans—instructions on how to reestablish contact with an operator stuck behind enemy lines.

  Alone, hungry, and hunted; Hayes had been where she was, and he didn’t figure her for the killer, although his own biases worried him. He opened his laptop, went on eBay, and started writing up a listing for a vintage pack of playing cards. It was a coded emergency signal to Claire.

  When he had first been trained to find an agent in hostile terrain, the technique was to broadcast a wide radio signal. It was an emergency instruction, encrypted, so that only the recipient could understand it. The enemy would know that someone was carpeting their territory with messages but they wouldn’t know the contents.

  Back then, replying was what got the agent killed. Even if he used a burst transmitter, the enemy would be listening and could zero in on the source and then circle and kill the sender. Hayes remembered the hours spent waiting in silence for a message that never came, never knowing what happened to the agent, never knowing how much had been compromised.