Dead Man Switch

by Matthew Quirk

  She looked for the rifle, for her pistol, for anything. But there was only broken glass. The guns must have fallen on the far side of the box and were lying under the shattered window where the shot had come from. If she went over there, she would be in the open, an easy kill. All she had were the two mini-frags.

  She could hear the gunman moving outside. The north and south windows were blown out. Another shot, and the window to her side shattered in. It sounded like a silenced pistol. Bullet by bullet, he was eliminating any cover, readying for the final kill. She had to get out. She had seconds. She pulled the ring and dropped the grenade through the window above her head, just outside the machine room.

  She threw herself through the low broken window on the other side of the room and landed hard on her shoulder on the building’s roof. She rolled over, feeling the sharp edges of glass bury in the meat of her back as the frag shook the air and chunks of metal rained down.

  She saw the shooter coming. It was a woman. Claire pulled the pin on her second and last frag and rolled it toward her, then stumbled around the corner of the machine room, so the wall was between herself and the bang.

  She looked around for better cover as the sulfur smoke of the explosion drifted toward her. Fifty feet away, there was another concrete-block box sticking out from the roof, the stair access, and beyond that just a parapet and the hundred-and-fifty-foot drop to the street. She started to run toward the stairs, long unsteady strides, trying not to puke from pain.

  The grenade blew behind the machine room. She listened for cries but heard only silence. After a moment, there were footsteps, the crunch of glass. The other woman was still alive, and armed. And Claire had only her knife and nowhere to go but down.

  Chapter 60

  HAYES MOVED AGAINST the crowds of tourists heading toward the river as he approached Forty-Sixth Street on Fifth Avenue. The sound of small explosions echoed off the building facades rising above him. It made it hard to fix a location, but he was sure from his initial sight of the sniper: they were coming from that tower.

  The Secret Service counterassault team had swarmed Rockefeller Plaza. This was the part of the Secret Service you didn’t see until something went very wrong. They waited in the SUVs with the heavy guns and full assault gear and covered the protection detail as it hurried the principal out of the way.

  Hayes was up on the communications network shared by the Secret Service and NYPD. He keyed his radio. “We have a shooter on top of the art deco midblock with the shields in the parapet. Between Forty-Seventh and Forty-Sixth Streets.”

  “Two emergency service unit squads rolling in now,” the commander responded. Those were the NYPD’s tactical teams.

  “I’m heading in on the north side,” he said, and described his clothes. “Don’t kill me, all right?”

  “Rog.”

  As he neared the building, he watched the crowds hunkering down in front of the storefronts, some people crying. He crouched in front of a woman and helped her to her feet, then directed the others to keep moving.

  A man passed him, head down, and Hayes went twenty feet before a detail called back to him: the lean jaw and bulk around his waist—it didn’t match. Hayes turned, but the man was already drawing his weapon, and Hayes dropped him with two shots.

  “They have shooters on the streets too. They’re blending in with the civilians,” he radioed.

  Hayes knew the textbook response to a scenario like this. His former unit used to work closely with the Secret Service—whenever the president deployed overseas, a Delta team was there. The police would block off the surrounding streets and search the people within the area one at a time while the SWAT teams closed on the building the shots had come from and cleared it room by room.

  But the enemy was using their tactics against them. Hayes put himself in that tower, watched the crowds fleeing like ants.

  What would you do? How would you kill yourself?

  If he were the sniper, he would already be running from that building. That was the standard guerrilla tactic: shoot and scoot. And then what? A mass attack, the bigger the better—suitcase, backpack, car. A cordon would lock in only innocents, agents patting each one down, searching every bag. It would corral Hayes, his team, and a lot of civilians close enough together for them to be taken down in one blast.

  “I think our sniper is probably already on the move. We need more people. Keep the perimeter a quarter mile out, no choke points. Cue on vehicles, maybe large backpacks. Get every explosives dog and detector you can in here.”

  He told them to keep the searches fast. Pros would ditch anything incriminating anyway. The idea was to get bystanders away from the target and inspect every vehicle and trash can for a bomb.

  He neared the front entrance of the building the shot had come from and scanned the doors and the street ahead. Had she already run?

  Where are you, Claire?

  A woman stumbled as she ran, and he helped her up, rushed her along. Then a man across the street craned his head to the sky, and his mouth fell open. Hayes looked up but saw only a blur: a person plummeting from the tower that the sniper had been using. Then the ground shook with the impact, and blood splashed along the concrete and onto the hem of his pants.

  Hayes ran toward the body, and he could tell it was a woman. He knelt down beside her—dead in an instant—and reached down to check if the face was recognizable. His fingers touched the blood-matted hair, and then the shadow crossed him, and he looked up to see a pistol aimed at his head.

  Chapter 61

  MOMENTS BEFORE THAT body hit, Vera, up on the roof, ducked behind the corner of the machine room as the second grenade blew. The shock wave punched her in the lungs. She heard what she thought was another one landing, and she ducked down. She counted to ten, but there was no blast.

  She lifted her phone and used the reflection on the blank screen to look around the wall. Where she thought the grenade had landed, there was only a chunk of concrete.

  Smart. Claire was out of bangs, so she’d thrown that rock to trick her and buy extra time. It had worked. Claire might be defenseless now, but Vera wasn’t taking any chances. She raised her gun and stepped out.

  There was only one place for Claire to hide, the stair access near the edge of the roof. Vera followed the trail of blood toward it and then came around the corner. Claire wasn’t there. Vera’s radio earpiece crackled.

  “What’s happening? The truck’s forty minutes out, coming up on Newark.”

  She ignored the voice and crept to the far side of the stair access, the last place Claire could have taken cover.

  On top of the stair-access structure, Claire wrapped her fingers around the handle of the knife, and moved her weight onto the balls of her feet. Just as the woman rounded the last corner and saw the ladder leading to her perch, Claire threw herself forward, at the shooter’s shoulder. She brought the blade down, aiming for the soft triangle between the clavicle and jugular. The woman turned at the last instant. The knifepoint dug into her clavicle and was deflected away. Claire hit the ground hard, slamming her knees and cracking her teeth.

  The knife slipped to the end of her fingers as the woman took a long sidestep and turned to aim the pistol at Claire, but Claire was already rising, moving toward her, settling the knife into an ice-pick grip. She came at the woman’s side, knocked the gun away with her left hand, and drove the blade up to its hilt into her back with her right.

  The woman, stunned by pain, dropped the pistol, and it came down hard on its rear sight. Vera jumped away from the blade by reflex with a long stumbling step. The shock was too much. She lost her footing and hit the low wall at the top of the cornice, then went over.

  Claire picked up the gun, scanned behind her, and came to the edge. The woman’s body was hung up in the cast-iron ornaments: Greek shields sticking up from the lower part of the cornice like twists of wire at the top of a chain-link fence. Her torso draped over them, and her legs hung in empty space.

  �
�What are you planning?” Claire shouted. She reached out with her left hand. Her blood was up, and all she wanted was to kill, but answers mattered more than revenge.

  The woman tried to raise her arm. Claire closed her fingers around the blood-slicked palm. For a second the woman managed to grip it, and Claire dug her feet in and began to pull her from the narrow ledge.

  Then the woman’s hand went limp and slipped from Claire’s. Her eyes were open but showing only the whites. Dead.

  Claire leaned out and took her radio, a push-to-talk handset with an earpiece dangling from it, then saw the emergency service unit truck nosing through the panicked crowds. She put in the earpiece to pick up on whatever they were planning and walked to the stair access on the other side of the roof. It was open.

  She returned to the machine room for her backpack. The rifle lay on the ground near Paul’s body but she didn’t see her own pistol. She didn’t have time to look for it, so she would have to use the woman’s silenced handgun. She went back to the stairs and took the steps down in a sprint, then stopped, grabbed the rail, and retched on the landing.

  She counted backward until it passed and then kept on, slower now, until she reached the ground floor. She washed off the blood with water from a plastic bottle she had in her bag, then pulled on a Yankees cap and a jacket to cover her crimson-stained shirt. She pushed open the emergency exit bar and hit Forty-Sixth Street. The tactical teams’ vehicles blocked both ends.

  She tried to think. When she was being chased in a city, she liked to run fast in one direction and then slow and circle back. Pursuers would just keep going on their initial course, and she would either pick them off on her back trail or disappear in the opposite direction. The grind of a police helicopter echoed between the buildings. Claire felt warm blood soaking her shirt near her lower back. The cuts from the glass must have opened up.

  She watched Hayes help a woman along near the front of the building.

  “Stay down,” he said. “Go! Go! Go!” Claire ducked into a doorway. He was coming her way. In the glass vestibule, she could catch his reflection.

  She felt the ground shake with a thump behind her. She turned and saw the body, destroyed on the sidewalk. It was the woman from the roof. Her body had finally slipped loose.

  Then she saw Hayes reach down to check it. Behind him, a woman moved closer, another scared tourist. But then her manner changed, and she reached into a tote and came up with a pistol, aimed it squarely at Hayes’s head. She was part of Paul’s backup.

  Claire strode toward her and took aim. She pulled the trigger smoothly twice as Hayes turned and trained his weapon on the attacker. Claire’s shots hit the woman in the chest and head, and she fell. Hayes pointed the gun at Claire, looking back and forth between her and the woman on the ground, clearly trying to make sense of what had just happened. He decided in an instant and took his aim off her.

  “Claire, your eight o’clock. Twenty-five meters.” She turned and saw the gunman coming at her, but Hayes already had him—three shots to the chest.

  Hayes moved toward her with the controlled quickness of a well-trained shooter. Without talking, Hayes and Claire went back to back, scanning sectors, searching for other threats to materialize from the crowd.

  “Mag,” Claire said. Hayes pulled one from his waist holster with his nondominant hand and reached it back without looking. She dropped hers to the street—one round left—then drove the fresh magazine in and racked the slide.

  “I’ll cover the corner on the right,” Hayes said. “What the hell is happening?”

  She felt cold all of a sudden, and the street seemed to tilt and move far away. The adrenaline had been the only thing keeping her going.

  She had heard Paul’s team talking on the radio. There was an attack on the way. She needed to tell Hayes, to warn him. “There’s a truck coming. I’m sorry, Hayes, I’m sorry.”

  She had pushed too far, lost too much blood, and her hand went limp on the gun. She watched it as the world shrank to a pinpoint. She tried to stand, but her legs seemed like they were far away, unattached to her body.

  She tried to hold on but couldn’t. At least she had warned them.

  Her skin felt cold, and as she fell back, Hayes caught her with his left arm, keeping his gun out with his right.

  “Medical! Medic up!”

  Chapter 62

  HAYES KNELT BESIDE Claire while Drake covered the street to the east. Blood pooled beneath her on the sidewalk. She was cut on the back somewhere.

  He rolled her over as her clothes stuck to the concrete and put pressure on the wound. “What truck, Claire? What did you do?”

  “I heard them. It’s coming from the south. The turnpike. Trace it.”

  Her fingers reached for her pocket, but her arm began to shake as two medics arrived, and one took a knee beside Hayes.

  “Where is the truck?”

  “A half hour away,” she managed to say. “They said it was on a dead man.” Hayes saw the push-to-talk radio sticking out of her pocket, under her fingers, and put one hand on hers. He took the radio with the other. She tried to talk, but the words were slurred. She licked her lips.

  The EMTs put her on the stretcher.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know who to trust.” She grabbed his hand. “Do you…” She trailed off.

  Hayes thought of the woman Claire had shot. Claire had saved him. He’d been doubted before. And he was alive only because one man had trusted him.

  “I believe you,” he said. But she couldn’t respond. Her eyes closed, and her head slumped to one side. “BP’s tanking!” the medic shouted. “We’ve gotta move!”

  Hayes stood and searched the street, saw the police and emergency responders filling in. It was just what the killers wanted, to pin them down and take them in one go. He lifted the handset, walked back to the communications truck, and approached the Secret Service agent who had stayed behind to coordinate with the NYPD.

  “I need a trace on this handset. There’s a truck bomb coming in from the south.”

  “Where?”

  “The turnpike. We might have time to cut it off before it hits the city.”

  Hayes needed to run straight at that truck. He was facing a mass attack in the middle of the most densely populated stretch of the United States, a truck bomb on a dead man switch that was almost impossible to disarm.

  The agent lifted his radio and called to the operation center. It was a bunker in midtown, with eight-foot-thick concrete walls, positive-pressure ventilation, and radiation shielding, where commanders from different agencies could oversee the incident response. Morgan and Tucker had been taken there. He could hear Morgan’s voice in the background.

  The agent turned to Hayes. “What do you need?”

  Hayes looked at an NYPD helicopter circling overhead. There might be a way.

  “A ride.”

  Chapter 63

  TIMUR KEPT THE truck going steady at fifty-five miles an hour and handled the push-to-talk.

  Alex sat beside him in the passenger seat, a hinged piece of aluminum in his hand: the dead man. Wires from it ran underneath the seat.

  The refineries near Linden rose to his left, a thousand yellow lights spread across the pipes, and red burn-off flames flared into the night.

  Alex looked in the side-view. The slanting headlights to the right looked like they belonged to a late-model American sedan, maybe unmarked police. He saw another farther back.

  “They’re coming for us,” he said.

  Timur checked his mirrors. “Arm it.”

  Alex took a deep breath in and exhaled. He dried his left hand on the cheap upholstery of the passenger seat, lifted the switch with his right hand, and held it tight. Then he put his left index finger inside the split ring and pulled.

  He laughed nervously. “It’s hard.”

  “Go again,” Timur said.

  Alex pulled again, and the metal squealed as it came out. The pin hung from Alex’s finger. Timur looked over Newa
rk Bay toward the Manhattan skyline. He could pick out the Freedom Tower and the Empire State Building.

  Hynd had told him, and he wasn’t sure whether to believe it, that the Americans would come to him. That they would sprint toward their own deaths. They would know somehow that it was suicide, but they wouldn’t be able to help themselves. Honor, sacrifice: they called futility by other names.

  Chapter 64

  THE EAST RIVER heliport didn’t look much bigger than a tennis court. It was a stretch of asphalt right on the river, tucked in beside FDR Drive. As the NYPD helicopter touched down, its rotors came within feet of a billionaire’s Sikorsky on the next pad over. The pilot didn’t even throttle down as Hayes and Drake ran in a crouch, holding their rifles on slings across their bodies, and climbed into the cabin.

  Hayes pulled a headset on and sat on the deck with his legs hanging out the open door.

  “Ready?” the pilot asked.

  “Ready,” Hayes said.

  The turbines pitched to a high whine. The pilot pulled back on the collective, and they lifted off.

  “You guys were briefed?” Drake said. “We’re running straight into the fire.”

  The copilot looked at him, unimpressed, and tapped the NYPD emblem on his shoulder. “That’s what we do.”

  Hayes’s belly went heavy as they climbed and spun. The skyscrapers whipped to the left, and they banked hard over the water and rose above the Manhattan Bridge.

  Hayes had never had good luck with helicopters. He tied a piece of webbing across the handles of his open door as the wind buffeted him. It would form a rest for the sniper rifle he carried, an SR-25 semiautomatic. It was an update on a classic rifle, and he’d used the military version extensively in the Marines and Delta.