Dead Man Switch

by Matthew Quirk

  Hayes took a knee next to Drew, tore open his shirt, and saw the entrance wound in his upper chest, near the collarbone. Blood spilled out, soaking into the carpet.

  “Any more?” Drew gasped.

  “I don’t think so,” Hayes said, and he pulled a compress from his first-aid kit. “Sit tight.”

  The whole thing had taken fifteen seconds.

  Michael came around the bed in a slow shuffling step, his hand on the mattress to steady himself.

  “Dad. Dad. Are you okay?”

  Hayes shifted the light away from the blood.

  “I’m good, Michael. Are you? How’s Danny?”

  “He can’t talk. He’s just staring straight ahead. I don’t want to look at them anymore. At the men.”

  “That’s okay, Michael.”

  “My hands won’t stop shaking.”

  “That was just your body getting ready for the fight. You did great.”

  “Okay.”

  “Sit down, bud. You did good.”

  Drew opened his eyes wide twice, like a man fighting to stay awake, and then his head fell back.

  “Is he okay?” the son asked Hayes.

  “He’ll be all right.”

  Michael looked at the broken mug and the dead body. “How did he know how to do all that?”

  “That’s his job. He saves people.”

  “He never told me.”

  “It’s not something you talk about, you understand? It’s safer that way.”

  Michael nodded, shut his eyes, and went quiet.

  Chapter 29

  TUCKER SPRINTED ON the treadmill. Sweat dripped down his face. His secure BlackBerry buzzed in the cup holder, but he ignored it until the third message.

  He lifted it up and read the text: Call me back. Another attack. John Hayes stopped it, killed four men in Virginia.

  Tucker mashed the button on the panel until the treadmill maxed out at fifteen miles an hour at a 15 percent grade. He ran all out until he was panting and it felt like his lungs had crumpled down to the size of walnuts.

  After ninety seconds, he stumbled, grabbed the handrails, and put his feet to the side.

  He stepped off the treadmill and wiped his face with the towel. He was in his condo in Georgetown during a rare respite from campaigning. He had an hour until the car would come for his next flight.

  The desk in his office was littered with binders and vitamin bottles. Tucker read the messages coming in about the lake-house shootings. A father, a civilian named Talley, had been killed. He waited a minute for his breath to even out and then lifted his phone.

  When Morgan picked up, Tucker wanted to know only one thing: “Is there press?”

  “Yes. But we’ve told them it was a home invasion.”

  “I can’t be in the news. You told me you had this.”

  “I do.”

  “A firefight in the middle of the fucking Blue Ridge. You do not. I need Hayes under control.”

  “I’m on it.”

  “No more mistakes.”

  Morgan put her phone down, unlocked the door to the hospital conference room she’d commandeered, and walked down the hallway.

  Hayes sat in a worn upholstered chair at the far end of the hospital wing with a saline drip in his arm. Some of the frag had cut him behind the jawline. He hadn’t noticed until he arrived at the hospital behind the ambulance for Drew and a nurse pointed it out; one of the doctors sewed it up.

  Morgan came down the hall.

  “How is he?” she asked.

  “Stable enough to airlift to Bethesda.” That was the military’s main regional medical center now that the Walter Reed campus in DC had been shut down.

  “And you?”

  “Fine.”

  “You’re home, John; this isn’t North Africa. A firefight in a house surrounded by civilians. We can’t have a war on the street.”

  “We already do. I’m trying to stop it. Four dead killers is a start. They’re getting more violent. Less concerned about stealth. They’re building to something. Any ID on those bodies?”

  “None yet.”

  “They were pros, Kathryn. They’ll hit us again.”

  The detonator was a custom fabrication with two modes. It had been set to work as a normal trigger at the lake house, but it could also have been armed as a dead man switch. Only a sophisticated group could make or acquire that kind of hardware.

  She looked at the tiles. “Someone shot Gray last night.”

  Hayes slammed his left hand against the wall.

  “At home?” he asked.

  “Yes. His family was okay. They found him. No suspects. I’m going to add some protection for you.”

  Hayes shook his head and laughed grimly. “No, thanks.”

  They’d failed these people and their families. Hayes had already called over to the Special Activities Division base at Camp Peary to set up security for Lauren and Maggie. There were a couple of lifers over there he had come up under when they were master sergeants. He trusted them absolutely, and now they were retired, working protective service and always looking for overtime.

  They called themselves the High-36 Hunting Club, an in-joke about how the military calculated pensions. They’d cut their teeth in Beirut and Central America. Hayes had assured the watch lead that he would work out the budgeting, and the man told him not to worry about it.

  Morgan raised her hands. “We’re trying here, John. Drew wasn’t on the list or we would have had people on him. I had two men detailed over from the FBI who will watch your back. They’ll be here in five minutes.”

  “No,” Hayes said. He wasn’t going to give Morgan the address of where his family slept. Not until he figured out how the killers were finding their victims and if there was a leak.

  “It’s not a suggestion. They’re downstairs.”

  Her phone rang. She raised one finger and stepped away. Hayes waited for her to clear the corner, then pulled the IV from his arm and started down the hallway.

  A drop of blood ran down his wrist as he entered the elevator. When the doors closed, he felt his phone vibrate in his pocket. He lifted his phone and saw the message. A question about your eBay item.

  Claire. He scrolled down to the text.

  Remember where you killed me? Come alone, 0200 hours. Don’t trust the bosses.

  He trotted out of the hospital and saw the unmarked Dodge Charger coming from the other end of the parking lot. FBI. They weren’t the best with fluid situations and coloring outside the lines, and Hayes didn’t have time to deal with them. He hugged the side of the building and ran a long buttonhook to his truck, going behind them as they parked.

  The men got out of the Charger, one of them with a radio to his ear. Hayes started the engine and drove over the curbs and grass. His tires chirped as he took off on the road.

  He saw them in his rearview, sprinting back toward their car, but he moved into a grid of residential streets. Three highways ran nearby. There were too many outlets for them to cover this quickly.

  He pulled onto a two-lane blacktop and checked his mirrors. Nothing. Claire was moving fast, using direct communications instead of the old protocol of hidden signals. She had no time for codes or subterfuge. They could trace the IP address of whatever computer she had used, but she likely would have run it through a proxy. Even if they could find it, she would be long gone by the time they got there.

  Remember where you killed me? It was a concrete ruin in a West Virginia no-man’s-land, an abandoned World War 1 munitions plant. He remembered it well, remembered aiming the gun at her heart and pulling the trigger.

  Two a.m. He might just make it. He turned northwest toward the mountains that ran like dark wavering lines across the sky.

  It seemed strange that a few hours away from these strip malls and tract houses, there was that old factory. But America still had its hidden corners, its wild places.

  It might be a trap. Or it might be the answer he was looking for. He hoped she wasn’t trying to
get him, for her sake as much as his own.

  Hayes had few fears. But one always haunted him: that at some point he would have to kill one of his own.

  He punched the gas.

  Chapter 30

  CLAIRE HEARD THE skitter of paws coming from somewhere above her. The roof of the mobile home had collapsed near the far corner. On top of one of the exposed trusses, two eyes flashed at her like blue coins in the night: a raccoon. It froze, then disappeared. She swept leaves and a quarter inch of dust from a folding chair and sat down.

  This base in the highlands was where they had been selected and trained for Cold Harvest. She looked out the window and could see the concrete pilings sticking out of the forest like strange Mayan ruins—twelve-foot-tall cylinders interspersed among the trees. The government had manufactured ordnance up here for the First World War, and there were ruins hidden in among the limestone cliffs and red spruce.

  The camp was a set of run-down trailers and Quonset huts and rarely used. It was meant to send out a forsaken vibe to the trainees. The only light in the room was the faint blue glow of her camping stove under a pot of water on the card table. She had a foil pouch of dehydrated vegetable lasagna open and ready to go.

  Her pistol lay beside it. She had different search alerts set up to notify her if anyone used any of her old emergency codes. She knew it was crazy, her hope that even after they’d cut her off, someone would call her up with an old signal like she was a superhero.

  And then she’d received the message from Hayes. Maybe he was in trouble. Maybe they had come for him too. She’d never trusted anyone in the program the way she trusted him, although he had been there only for her training. She needed his help, and he needed hers. Maybe together they could stop this. He might know more about what the politicians were up to. Why they were interested in covering up the deaths.

  Her stolen passwords for the intelligence intranets were practically useless. Anything that might shed light on what was really happening was in the special access files.

  There was a chance, of course, that this was a trap, that Hayes was involved. It was her training: trust no one. She ran her thumb over the grip of the gun. She was ready for him.

  She watched the first bubbles rise in the pot of water. Sitting in the dark, waiting to kill or be killed. She’d been here before, so many times.

  She knew Hayes was back with his family. He was trying to live both lives—violence and peace—and keep them separate. She’d tried that for years. And it was odd that she had learned it before her mentors: You can’t have both. You have to choose. Or else the people you love end up dead.

  Paris. That was the beginning of the end. It had been two years before. She’d been sent to kill a sixty-year-old terrorist logistics chief, code-named Tempest, who provisioned self-radicalized locals in France and Belgium.

  His shooters were local kids, petty gangsters who knew more about Grand Theft Auto video games than the Koran, but they were killing dozens of innocent civilians, taking advantage of Europe’s lowered guard and weak intelligence apparatus. Tempest was old-guard radical left. He had been letting other people fight his wars since the days of the Red Brigades, Action Directe, and the Baader-Meinhof group.

  They’d called her in for the trigger. No one was better at the up-close work. She knew how the other guys talked about her—she was the angel of death, the queen of hearts, standing over a man and savoring the sight of his life draining from him.

  But that wasn’t what she was doing. Even the worst targets, when they died, looked so afraid and so alone and called out, often for their mothers. She stood by every kill, looked cold-eyed at every death. But it creeped out her teammates, who often shrank from the gravity of what they did by joking around, distancing themselves. She wanted to see and face the consequences of her actions. She never wanted it to be easy. That’s when you made mistakes. Killing should be hard.

  That night in Paris, it was crucial to stay there, because they were using a drug to kill Tempest, and she had to feel the absent pulse.

  The locks to his town house on the Avenue des Gobelins had already been impressioned and a duplicate key made by the advance team. They were using a skeleton crew for this job. The French intelligence services and gendarmerie couldn’t know they were here. Tempest had a family, but he was usually in Paris alone. He liked to whore among the African girls on rue Saint-Denis, would pay extra to make them degrade themselves and each other. He didn’t take his security detail with him. His behavior in Paris didn’t quite fit with his brand as a tech-savvy old-guard friend to the Islamists.

  It was a stay-behind job. Claire entered while his security was out, forced the doors on the elevator, and rode on top of it for four hours until he returned. His security swept the house and then left.

  She pulled the doors open, settled the night optics over her eyes, and walked through his apartment like an invited guest. She entered his suite and stood there, perfectly still, in the hall leading to the master bathroom while he fussed in bed.

  For an hour and forty-five minutes, she was in that room with him, studying his breathing as it slowed and slowed and then, finally, picked up again. He’d entered REM sleep, the period of dreams, when the body’s muscles go slack—muscle atonia—so as not to act out the brain’s visions.

  It was time. She slid toward him and sprayed a small canister, like a perfume tester, up his nose. It partially paralyzed him, piggybacking on his own deep-muscle inhibition. His eyes opened. He could still see and hear everything. He tried to move, and she could see terror in his face as his body failed to respond. Maybe he thought he was dreaming.

  She pulled the sheets back and took one sock off, then removed a small syringe, normally used in microsurgery, from a zippered kit on her vest. She slid it under the nail on his largest toe and dropped the plunger. Then she stood beside the bed and watched as his face turned red, the veins in his neck became engorged, and his eyes scanned the room, lids fluttering in panic.

  When she touched his neck with her latex-gloved hand, she could feel the pulse going thready. He was almost gone when she saw lights cross the ceiling. Cars. Voices at the door. She glanced down to the street. Her secondary exit was blocked.

  The ground-floor door opened and slammed. Heavy footfalls reverberated through the house.

  Light spilled under the doorway into the room. There was only one chance, the master bathroom. Hide or attack? A woman’s voice came muffled through the door.

  The knob turned. Claire leaped behind the door as it opened and stood there in the narrow space between it and the wall. She pulled her knife with her left hand, a thin special operations dagger. It was designed to be used like an ice pick, and she slipped her index finger through the ring at the end of the handle so she could retain it no matter what. She held her silenced Ruger 22 in her right hand and waited.

  The guard whispered from the door to the dying man on the bed: “Êtes-vous éveillé?”

  No answer. The guard paused on the other side of the door. Eight inches away from Claire. She could smell cheap musk and cigarettes. He didn’t do anything.

  A minute passed, and then two. The guard’s weight moved from foot to foot; hesitation. He had his orders to protect this man, to check on him, but he didn’t want to piss him off.

  He called back into the living room, “He’s sleeping.” The other man responded with something she couldn’t fully make out, but she did pick up one word: réveille. Wake.

  She’d been waiting three minutes. It was too long, enough time for her to overthink, for the reflexes to rot, for worry to find leaks in her resolve.

  The silenced .22 she carried wouldn’t have much stopping power against two guards. She favored the knife, for stealth. A gunshot might draw God knows how many other guys. The guard crossed the room toward the bed. She was in plain sight. One glance and it was over.

  She moved toward him, knife out in her left hand, and drew killing-close before he heard anything and turned, spooked that sh
e was already almost beside him. He raised his gun, but she clamped her left hand down on that wrist, retaining the knife pressed flat against his skin. She yanked him to the side as she swung her right hand back just above his trapped arm and slammed the butt of the pistol into his trachea like she was driving a nail.

  His tongue shot out and he made a noise like a frog. She was slightly behind and to his left now, both of them facing the same direction. She kicked the back of his left leg; he was already off balance, and he fell to his knees, opening his chest toward the ceiling. She dropped his gun hand, let the knife come back into the ice-pick grip in her left, and drove it between his ribs and into his aorta.

  The pain paralyzed him and he dropped the gun. She swept it away with her foot. The man tried to stand, running on anger and shock, but he had only seconds left as the blood flooded out into his thoracic cavity. He took a stumbling step, bounced off the edge of the bed, and hit the floor.

  She resheathed her knife on the webbing of her vest and stepped through the door into the main room, checked the corner to her immediate right. There was a figure to her left, raising a gun at her. She braced her pistol and fired three rounds, two into his heart and one into his cheek, and he fell to one knee. Rather than keeping her eyes there, she scanned for other threats. It was the fairness principle of clearing a room: every bad guy gets at least two shots before you finish any of them.

  A figure appeared, and she aimed at the head, her front gun sight in focus, the target slightly blurred, but she could see it was a woman, and could hear the strangled cry—real fear. She lunged toward her, arm-checked her hard into the wall, and saw her flail, her hands empty. There wasn’t a lot of room under the clothes for a concealed weapon. Claire turned back to the first man she’d shot, a more pressing threat.