Dead Man Switch

by Matthew Quirk

  Now they used the Internet, secret signals that anyone could see, like this eBay listing. He added a photo from a vintage deck of cards: the queen of hearts; the boys had nicknamed Claire the Red Queen because she was so good with the knife. He entered a few exact coded phrases in the eBay description to confirm his identity, then posted it.

  Both eBay and craigslist had become so popular for coded comms that the Mossad had a team dedicated to hunting down hidden terrorist messages on the sites. A respondent could reply with a different code in a different posting. The messages never went point to point, never connected the senders. Each had its own hidden meaning: I’m safe or I need extraction or whatever.

  “Come on, Claire,” he said. He knew how the command could lash out when it panicked, how easily it could kill the wrong operator. He wanted to find her first.

  He wanted to get those steps in motion, and it was the next task that he wished he could avoid.

  He looked back at the faces on the desk. He needed to connect a string of murders that weren’t murders. He needed the pattern to find these bastards. That was the only way to get ahead of them.

  For every death he had to ask himself, How would I have killed this man? And for every living operator, he had to ask, Who would I kill next and how?

  He had to hunt them down, the people he loved most in the world beside his family, in order to save them. He buried himself in the work, and in his mind he stalked them. As he read through the medical examiners’ reports, he imagined himself downstairs in a house in Colorado loosening a hose clamp on the furnace that would flood the home with carbon monoxide or holding the mobile defibrillator to someone’s chest, a traceless way to stop a heart.

  Because there were times he had been given a kill-or-capture mission but he’d known there was only one choice. A death would start a regional war, rally terrorists. He knew how to kill without leaving a trace.

  “Daddy!” his daughter called up the stairs.

  The dead stared back at him from the pages. They had been found by their wives and kids.

  He looked at the dossiers on the living. There would be more deaths soon if he didn’t see it.

  He put his daughter down for her nap, and when she finally fell asleep, he shut the book. Then he sat there for a few seconds, watching her chest rise and fall.

  He tried to take her in, to fill his mind completely, a focus he had only ever found in combat. He had to go, but he gave himself this moment.

  He stayed there like that for some time, but soon the mission crept in again, unbidden, and he was back in that basement, back in the killer’s mind.

  Not here, not now.

  But the work called.

  He had made it back in time to see her blow out three candles on a cupcake. He’d never thought he would get to do that. She had been frightened of him for the first few months, watching, saying little, then one night she’d come out into the living room after they had put her to bed. Lauren leaned forward, but she went to Hayes.

  “What’s up, honey?”

  “Monsters.”

  Lauren gave him an amused look. Hayes was definitely the man for that. His daughter took his hand and led him down the dark hallway.

  He still never really slept, still woke in the middle of the night reaching for a weapon or shivering cold back on that ridge in Pakistan. They had hunted him for so long. Some part of him had never come back from exile. He couldn’t look at a man without weighing the threat he posed and deciding how he would take him down.

  “Don’t worry,” Lauren would say. “You’ll get over it. It takes time.”

  And Hayes could never tell her this: He didn’t want to lose those instincts. They kept him and his family and his people alive.

  He heard the phone in his office ringing and slipped away from his daughter. Cox had set up the line. If anyone traced it, it would show up as a Pentagon location.

  Hayes lifted the handset.

  “Is this secure?” the caller asked.

  “Yes. Go ahead.”

  “It’s Jonathan.” The analyst from the NSA. “We have preliminary results.” Hayes listened for a moment. The techs had been able to use Claire’s number and location and pattern-matching software to pick up the path of phones that had been following her and a couple others that they had called.

  “When’s the most recent fix?”

  “Twenty-four hours. That’s as close we can get in this case.”

  “Give me what you have,” Hayes said, and he mapped out the locations. They centered on a town about two hours from Hayes’s home.

  “There’s no record of any of your targets there, though.” Jonathan was referring to the target cell phones belonging to Cold Harvest members.

  Hayes knew that town. He remembered Drew Ochoa talking about it when they were deployed. He’d grown up there. He ran through the files, looking for a way to call Drew, to warn him. He found a landline number on a personnel file, but it was twelve years old.

  “Thanks, Jonathan. Can you get me a number for a guy in that town named Drew Ochoa? Might be under an alias, Martin Pruitt.”

  “Hang on,” he said, and a minute later he came back. “Forty years old? Born there?”

  “That’s about right.”

  Jonathan read out the numbers.

  “Appreciate it. Hit me with anything else that comes up.”

  “This pattern doesn’t seem to be active anymore, but I will.”

  Hayes dialed Drew’s number, but no one answered. A machine picked up. Hayes recognized his old teammate’s voice.

  Hayes hung up and stepped out of his office. Lauren was at the kitchen table reading a medical journal.

  “You’re heading out?”

  “Yeah. It’s work. Love you.”

  He kissed her on the top of her head and she put her arm around him. “You too.”

  He grabbed his assault gear on his way to his truck, threw it in the back, and took off.

  Chapter 22

  IN THE MOUNTAINS a hundred miles away, Ruben Olivares kept his rifle close to his chest as he picked his way through the gnarled roots of the hillsides leading down to the lake and his target.

  Million-dollar vacation houses surrounded the serpentine body of water, formed when a river had been dammed and flooded the valley behind it. An old village lay drowned somewhere at the bottom.

  He pulled his Mets cap down low, took a knee beside a tree, and slid a stick of spearmint gum from a pack.

  He offered one to his second in command, but the man declined.

  Olivares had had no trouble making his way through the woods. He’d lived in the jungle for months on end while in the Honduran special forces, the TIGRES. He and the man beside him had been indicted for killing four villagers outside an airstrip near La Ceiba while secretly on the payroll of a local drug trafficker. They’d fled.

  They were employed by Hynd, one of the few who would give them work and who even seemed pleased by their performance in Central America. The job was dangerous, but Ruben and his team asked no questions. It paid well enough that after this operation he could retire to a four-bedroom house in Chula Vista and buy the BMW M5 he had always wanted.

  Olivares couldn’t believe how cheap the cars were here. In Honduras, the prices were jacked up, and in any case, a nice ride only made you a target.

  He stopped and cast an appraising look at the vehicles in the driveway of the house below, then borrowed the rifle of his number two. It had the magnifying optic. He settled the crosshairs on the face of a young boy on a sofa, then another at a kitchen table, and finally he saw his target: Drew Ochoa, sorting through a tackle box at the kitchen island.

  “That’s him,” he said and passed the rifle back.

  They had first identified him at the Burke funeral and tracked him in the days after in order to understand his patterns of life well enough to kill him quietly.

  He was one of two targets picked up at Burke’s funeral. The other was a man with a slight limp, the one who h
ad killed Kashani. They’d seen him with his family, a wife and daughter.

  He would come next, but for now, they closed on the lake house with Ochoa in it, crossing silently through the trees.

  Chapter 23

  HYND WALKED BETWEEN the steel tanks towering overhead. The site had once been a brewery, but it had been abandoned for almost thirty years. He reached the main floor of the warehouse. Slabs of marble and fifty-five-gallon drums were laid out before him, along with the chassis of a truck trailer.

  The shooting near Claire’s house, the dead body on the Northern Neck. This operation was attracting too much attention for it to stay hidden much longer. His strategy of silence and close kills was coming to an end. Fair enough. He was getting tired of sneaking around. He had trouble letting go of control, but there was no way to be in two places at once.

  “The Hondurans?” he asked Vera.

  “In place. Ready to go whenever they see the chance.”

  He had two deputies, Vera and her brother, Timur Choriev, who was working the torch on the warehouse floor, helping a younger man reinforce the springs on the truck trailer to conceal its load. The siblings were the only ones given Hynd’s full confidence.

  Timur’s eyes and skin were tinged yellow. He looked skeletal, his cheeks hollow. It always surprised Hynd how much strength remained in him.

  His wife had left him long ago and took his children. He hadn’t seen them in sixteen years. Had given his life to the cause, and there wasn’t much life left.

  He had cancer of the stomach. Hynd would give his money to his children. Hynd was good at that sort of thing. Seychelles limited-liability companies and Guernsey bank accounts and hawala transfers.

  For a decade they had sought to infiltrate and destroy the inner ring of American operatives and, at its heart, Cold Harvest.

  Timur and Vera were both from the Fergana Valley, a lush region in Central Asia that for decades had been a war-torn crossroads known to few Westerners. It was a hotbed of radicalism and terror groups, but given the place’s lack of strategic importance, most powers just let it burn, the way they had once ignored Afghanistan.

  As the operation grew, Hynd brought on contract shooters, former military from the elite units of the Caucasus, the Balkans, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. They did work for hire, as simple as that. He took great care in recruiting, but there were plenty of applicants.

  Americans never fully appreciated how much they were resented around the world. When they left their little bubble of the United States and Europe and a few vacation spots, they were always surprised to find that much of the world hated the U.S. and considered the nation a bully. Most Americans were barely aware of the long history of ill-conceived foreign interventions that their government had orchestrated, going all the way back to the CIA-sponsored coups in Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s.

  The U.S. had put itself in charge of the world. There were states and groups that tried to resist its rule, tried to move weapons and money and people in defiance of its sanctions, to build their own nuclear arsenals, to project power through armed proxies. But all too often their attempts failed. The U.S. was too powerful. Its opponents had seen their men killed, shot dead by a superpower that could see in the dark. The Americans weren’t warriors—they were cowards, technological sucker-punchers.

  Again and again those opposed to the United States’ dominance were branded terrorists and stopped at will by this tiny cadre called Cold Harvest. By Hynd’s estimate, there were thirty-six men and women in it, perhaps a few more he didn’t know of. Such a small number.

  There were plenty of groups and governments that wanted to draw American blood, but they were too afraid of the consequences. That was Hynd’s niche. He collected bounties from all of them to finance a mission to kill off Cold Harvest.

  He knew the weakness, the arrogance of strength. The Americans believed they were invulnerable. Even while they battered down the doors of homes around the world, they believed their own homes were safe.

  Hynd watched Timur’s torch throw a rainbow of red sparks across the floor.

  “Trouble,” Vera said.

  “What is it?”

  “The team on Drew Ochoa. They might have company. Someone called his house. Do you want to pull them out now?”

  “No. Tell them to get ready to take it.”

  “But it will be ugly. The family’s there.”

  The time for stealth was over.

  “That’s fine.”

  Chapter 24

  HAYES FELT THE tires drift slightly as he rounded the corner and watched the speedometer rise: 80, 90, 100.

  His phone was pressed to his ear, connecting him to Jonathan. He had asked the tech for Drew’s mobile number and a location fifteen minutes ago.

  “Where is the number?” he asked again.

  “I’m working on it, but he wasn’t on the list.”

  Drew was a friend of Tom Gray’s. He might have worked for Cold Harvest without any record. Hip pocket, they called it.

  People always talked about what you owe to someone who’s saved your life, and that was true enough. But as Hayes thought back to the moment when he’d pulled Drew—rail-thin, his back covered in cigarette burns—off the floor of that cage in Syria, he knew it worked both ways. You never let go of the ones you save. Once someone trusts you with his life, you always feel responsible for it.

  “Okay, okay,” the tech said. “I have it. You ready?”

  “Go.”

  Jonathan read out the cell phone number and gave him Drew’s last location.

  “He’s at the lake?” Hayes said.

  “Yes.”

  Traveling away from familiar ground and resources. That’s where they would take him. Hayes ended the call and voice-dialed the number. One ring, two.

  “Come on, Drew. Come on.”

  The needle climbed toward 110 miles per hour, and the wheel shook in his hand. Still no answer.

  Chapter 25

  THE HAND CLOSED on Drew’s shoulder, and he sat forward with a start, then looked up at the man beside him. It was the other father on this trip, a short vacation for the Fourth of July. They would be at the lake through the weekend.

  Drew relaxed.

  “Sure I can’t get you a scotch or a beer or anything?”

  “I’m fine, thanks,” Drew said. The kids were in the basement theater room. Their wives were in town. Drew barely knew the other man, Greg Talley, though their wives were close. Drew was restless, had never been very good at sitting around doing nothing.

  “Check this out,” the other man said. He took a seat next to Drew and pulled out his phone. It was a shot of him kneeling next to the carcass of a black bear.

  “That was up in British Columbia. Top-of-the-line everything. Private chefs. It’s a long day. Up at dawn. Sitting in the blind, waiting. Hard work.” He gave Drew an elbow and a wink. “But they make sure you don’t miss. Baits, you know. You do a lot of hunting?”

  “Some,” Drew said.

  “When you see an animal like that, that could tear you apart, and you line up the shot and…bang!”

  He looked for some reaction from Drew, who remained calm. Greg stroked his own forearm. “It still gives me chills. It’s hard to explain the feeling.”

  “Sounds pretty unbelievable,” Drew said. “Excuse me.”

  He stood and walked to the top of the stairs, called, “Michael!”

  Greg liked to spend money. This place was too expensive, everything a cabin shouldn’t be—huge and full of electronic distractions. But Drew would do anything to have time with his kid, so he’d gladly chipped in his half.

  “What sort of work did you say you did again?” the other man asked, standing up from the sofa.

  “Personnel systems analyst,” Drew said.

  “I looked you up, didn’t really see much on LinkedIn.”

  Long-range reconnaissance, undercover time in arms trafficking, close-in lethal jobs. It wasn’t the kind of stuff you put on a r
ésumé.

  “It’s all about building a personal brand,” Greg went on. “Putting yourself out there. Promoting yourself isn’t a bad thing. It’s saying, Hey, I’m great, I’m passionate about what I do. I want to tell you about me.”

  “I’ll look into that. My brand could use some work.”

  Drew had once stood in a hangar at Bragg with the rest of his team and two CIA operators. They had killed the acting commander of al-Shabaab, and the president came down to congratulate them personally on the success of the mission. When he asked who’d fired the shot that killed the chief, Drew and the others remained stone-faced.

  The head of JSOC told the president, “The team did, sir.” They didn’t talk like that, didn’t seek out or take individual credit for successes.

  He was working in the local fire and rescue now that he had left Cold Harvest, but he still said “personnel systems analyst” when anyone asked him about his job because he didn’t like to talk about what he did—an ingrained habit—and that tended to bring the work conversation to a close.

  He was sick of killing and of being away from his family. He liked the straightforwardness of working in public safety. He came from a long line of cops and firemen. But money was tight. His wife had needed thyroid surgery the year before. There were plenty of jobs for a guy like him, security contractor work, but he was tired of telling his kid he would see him in a couple of weeks and not knowing if he was telling the truth.

  He was one of the lucky ones, though. He could still walk, still see his son play football.

  “I’ve been doing a lot of public speaking, actually—”

  Drew ignored Greg, walked downstairs, and saw his son, Michael, sitting on the couch next to Greg’s son, Daniel. Michael barely looked up from the TV. His long hair hung over his eyes. He was playing a video game, a military shooter, running and hip-firing without cover, like a jihadi. Inshallah shots, they called them, which meant God-willing shots, because they prayed they would hit something. It was almost hard for Drew not to say something about the tactics.