Kill Switch

by James Phelan

  “When?”

  “They’re moving me at midnight.”

  Walker looked down the hall at the cop, who was still staring at him. Walker considered giving him the finger again, to reinforce the one job the guy had . . .

  “Look,” Monica said. “Walker?”

  He looked at her.

  “I think you should go,” she said. “There’s really nothing you can do here. Nice to see you, though. Another time, perhaps? Say, another twenty years from now?”

  There was a moment of silence between them, then Walker said, “You know I had a hand in what happened at the New York Stock Exchange.”

  “I saw that. Are you trying to impress me?”

  “And St. Louis.”

  Monica paused, her hand on her glass of water, which she was looking at, and then she let it go and crossed her arms across her chest.

  She said, “That was you?”

  “I helped out,” Walker said.

  “For who?”

  “Us.”

  “Us?”

  “All of us. I’m doing what I was paid to do by the US government for nearly twenty years. This is all connected.”

  “It’s really been that long, hasn’t it?”

  “We’re getting old. But you’re missing my point.”

  “That this thing with Jasper is connected to New York and St. Louis? How?”

  “I’m working on the how. But yes, it is.”

  “Who pays you now?”

  “No one.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “No one,” he repeated. “I could cash a pay check, I guess. If I wanted to, if I said yes.”

  “Yes to whom—a check from whom?”

  “The UN.”

  “The UN?” Monica uncrossed her arms, her fingertips on the bench. “They’ve got no money. And they don’t have people like you on their so-called payroll.”

  Walker shrugged.

  Monica said, “Why are you here?”

  “I’m here to help.”

  Monica turned and looked out the window that looked into her backyard. Her arms crossed across her chest again, as though a shiver of cold had run through her. She looked fragile, in that moment. Walker wanted to hold her, but it wasn’t the time. She seemed distant. Resigned. Exhausted—not from today, but from memories of long ago, dragging her back, wearing her out.

  She said, “You can’t help.”

  “I think I can.”

  “How?”

  “Tell me about your brother.”

  21

  “Heads up,” Harrington said over comms in the hangar at Los Alamitos Army Airfield just outside LA. Two cars, big black Suburban SUVs, loaded with three men each, began to pull out of the building. “This is the op.”

  His teammates were silent.

  He passed around the printed photos. The three in the other car would be doing the same. The guy in the back seat glanced at them and went back to his screen and joystick. The drone he was piloting was high above, already on target, doing big slow circles and beaming the footage down.

  “Target is Monica Brokaw, the captive’s sister. She’s being protected by two members of LAPD’s finest. Currently at her home address, which is where we will pick her up.”

  “Cops going to be a problem?” the soldier driving asked.

  “They’re getting orders to leave,” Harrington said to them. “Remember, this is not a training op. We are to get Monica at all costs and render her to a safe location.”

  “Where’s that?” the big guy asked.

  “We’ve got three options, depending on how it plays out. Call signs are Tango, Whisky and Mike, and the GPS location of each is in your comms pack should anyone become separated. We are to get her there, keep her put, await further instructions. We good?”

  The men applied in the affirmative.

  “Then let’s do this. And remember, comms will go dark once we breach. You all know what to do. And no harm is to come to this woman.”

  •

  “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

  “I think you can help me find Jasper,” Walker said. “Your father thought as much too, that’s why he helped me get here. So, just tell me what you think is pertinent, about Jasper.”

  Monica paused, her eyes searching his, then she said, “How? How, exactly, could what I know possibly help you find my brother—my brother who the news is saying is being helped by criminals or terrorists or whatever. What could I possibly know that could help find him?”

  “Tell me anything that you think can help.”

  “I could talk about my brother all day. You want to narrow it down?”

  “He was taken from his apartment in Palo Alto.”

  “That’s been reported on the news, you don’t need me for that.”

  “Did the FBI tell you anything more?”

  Monica paused, then said, “There was a witness. A passer-by, who saw either three guys and one blacked-out SUV, or possibly six guys in two SUVs and something big being loaded, something that could have been a body. That person thought it was odd and called the police, who arrived an hour later. Apparently the car or cars and the men had vanished. Nothing. That’s not much to go on, right? One person as a witness to something nobody can find any evidence of. And that’s it—that’s all I know.”

  “Have you been to his apartment?”

  “In Palo Alto? No.”

  “He has another apartment?”

  “The FBI told me that he’s been based on the east coast. Maryland. They put up unmarried NSA staff in apartments there.”

  “They told you? You don’t know where he lives?”

  “We’re not close.”

  “He’s your only sibling.”

  Monica was silent.

  Walker said, “How close does a sibling have to be to know the other’s address?”

  Monica shrugged.

  “What was he doing back on the west coast?” Walker asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Best guess?”

  “It’s the weekend. Maybe he goes home some weekends. But that’s just speculation on my part.”

  “What did the FBI say?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You didn’t ask?”

  “No. Mine is not to question why. Does it matter why he was on the west coast?”

  “It might. You don’t want to know why?” He watched her closely. Nothing showing, but there was something there.

  “I just wanted to know what the FBI were doing—are doing—to help him. To find him. That’s it.”

  “Do you want him found?” Walker asked her, looking her straight in the eye.

  “Of course I do. Why would you say that?” Monica paused, then something in her voice changed as she said, “What—what did my father say to you?”

  “He said to talk to you about it.”

  Monica appeared wary. She seemed nervous. Standing a little different. Her mouth stayed open slightly, as though she was breathing faster than usual.

  “He said to ask you about Jasper’s time in the Army. Something from late in his career?”

  Monica didn’t look convinced, as though her father had shared more with Walker and she was playing catch-up.

  Walker said, “You didn’t ask the FBI who may have Jasper?”

  “They asked that of me.”

  “And?”

  “I know nothing.” Monica looked down at her hands, as though they were again betraying her with a near-unseen tremor of worry. “And asking it over and over isn’t going to change that, so I really don’t see the point in talking like this, not with them, certainly not with you.”

  “Certainly not me?”

  “They’re an organization with thousands of staff and billions of dollars behind them, agents and assets all over the place. You’re . . . I really don’t know what you are, other than a ghost from my past.”

  “I’m the guy who can help your brother,” Walker said. “But I’ll need your help to do it. You
r father believed in me enough to send me here. Do you?”

  “Do I what?”

  “Believe in me?”

  “I . . .”

  Walker felt himself being appraised. He was dressed in a jacket. Black. Over a shirt, unbuttoned to midway down the chest, black T-shirt under that. Not his usual outfit, which was jeans and a T-shirt and a jacket of any color, but it had been purchased for him in haste at St. Louis and had been laundered yesterday at his hotel on Sunset Boulevard and it fit well and he hadn’t had the time to shop for anything else. On reflection it made him feel invisible. Just another guy in a dark suit jacket. At least that’s what he’d thought when he’d first entered LAX this morning.

  “I’ve really got nothing to say,” Monica said. “Just as I told the FBI earlier.”

  “Your brother’s in serious trouble,” Walker said. “I know that, better than those at the Bureau know that.”

  “Because you have a connection to it.”

  Walker nodded.

  Monica remained silent. She went to a small coffee machine, put in a capsule, pressed a button and it hissed and steamed a brew into a cup.

  “We can find him,” Walker said. “We can end this.”

  “How?”

  “We follow any lead you can think of. The apartment. Any friends or associates. The Army thing. Any threats you may know of.”

  “Who’s we?” There was a noise at the back door. A sleek gray Persian cat slunk into the kitchen through the plastic cat flap and rubbed up against Monica’s legs.

  “You and me,” Walker said.

  Her cell phone rang. Walker knelt down and held out his hand to the cat as Monica answered the call. The cat wandered by him then brushed against his hand. Unafraid, inquisitive of the stranger in its house. Walker picked it up and it started to purr. It seemed old, weary, wary. It had a tattoo in its ear that denoted it had been de-sexed and micro-chipped. Walker looked to Monica, at the cell phone to her ear.

  “Right, that’s fine,” Monica said into the phone and ended the call.

  She had her coffee in one hand, and she scooped up her cat in the other. They both watched Walker.

  “That was the FBI,” Monica said. “They’re going to move me to the hotel, not these cops. And they’re moving me at eleven, not twelve. And from that time they’ll be taking over from the LAPD in my protection. Thanks to your arrival—one of these guys must have called it in. Happy?”

  “A little.” Walker glanced down the corridor. The cop in the hall was looking at his phone, as though reading something.

  “So, Jed, you have a few hours of my time.”

  “I can live with that,” Walker said. “Do you have the address of Jasper’s apartment in Palo Alto?”

  “I’ll write it down for you.”

  Walker nodded. He looked down the hall, to where the LAPD officer was leaning against the wall, still looking down at his phone’s screen. Maybe checking messages or playing a game. Or reading an update. Or any number of things. The front door was oversized, timber, thick. Two locks, heavy-gauge steel in big barrels going into a steel plate screwed into a hardwood doorjamb. Walker looked to the back door. It was nothing, in comparison. A bolt and the chain, light-weight stuff, more of a placebo than anything concrete in keeping out intruders. It had a timber frame painted the same shade of white as the house but in gloss, with double-glazed panes of clear glass but for the small plastic cat door. The small garden out back was a walled-in space, the walls brick, eight feet high. Topiary hedges, a small patch of grass, a steel-framed seat setting around a round table. There was no gate out there leading to an alley, which meant that the house backed onto the backyard of another, which he could see had a light on upstairs. All kinds of deep shadows out there. Better that she was being moved from here, to the type of big hotel with cameras and security and keycarded floor access.

  “When’s the last time you saw your brother?” Walker asked as Monica started to sort through a stack of unopened mail from the bench and then went through it while absently inserting a coffee capsule into the machine and pressing the button, refilling her cup and then making one for Walker.

  “A while,” she said, pushing the mail aside once she’d flicked through it all and evidently saw nothing of note or out of the ordinary. She passed Walker his cup of coffee, her hand moving away before his reached it. She wrote an address in Palo Alto on the back of an envelope, and slid it across to him. “I fail to see what you can do about my brother that the FBI can’t, but give it your best shot.”

  “It’s not what I can do,” Walker said, pocketing the envelope and sipping what turned out to be a strong flat white. It was some kind of hipster coffee blend, complex and nutty, and the milk was probably some sort of organic gluten-free fat-free protein-rich and vitamin-boosted non-dairy concoction. “But what you can tell me.”

  22

  Monica showed Walker photos that the FBI had left behind, of Jasper’s apartment in Palo Alto, in case Monica looked again and noticed something. There were near-on a hundred digital files on her tablet.

  He flicked through and saw a spartan flat. Nothing. A futon mattress on the floor, sheets rumpled. A folded blanket and pillow in a wardrobe. Diet sodas in the refrigerator. Pot noodles in the cupboard. A tin of coffee and a drip-filter machine and one mug. A tiny television on the bench. Bare white walls except for one that contained built-in bookshelves stacked with books. That was it.

  Walker said, “Do you think the FBI took anything?”

  “This is how he is.” Monica looked at her coffee. “He never hung on to anything of his past. Always moved forward.”

  “He’s living like a college student.”

  “He was hardly ever there, as far as I know. From what they said.”

  “So, why keep the apartment at all?”

  “Maybe he was keeping a toe in the commercial world, being near Silicon Valley.”

  “He wanted out of government work?”

  “That was just a guess. I don’t know. But he gets restless.”

  Walker looked through the pics, back and forth. “No computer?”

  “Laptop, I suppose. There’s a router in one of the pictures. Cable Internet, the FBI said.”

  “No storage devices on show. The world’s smallest TV.” Walker flicked back through the pictures. “A couple of long-life meals in his pantry, no bag of clothes—no clothes hanging up.”

  “The absence of something doesn’t mean anything.”

  “I think it can, and I think it does.”

  “How?”

  “He wasn’t there to stay. Where’s his stuff, even for a short trip? If he was going there for the weekend, he’d have a carry-on bag, right? With a couple of T-shirts and a toothbrush at least, because there’s none of that there. There’s nothing there. The wardrobe’s empty.”

  “You think the witness was lying, that he took his bag and went someplace?”

  “Or they took his bag. Maybe it had his computer in it.”

  “Maybe he’s gone all hikikomori.”

  Walker looked at her, wondering if she was trying to make a joke. He remembered that face. Those eyes. Those lips. A happy time. Long past.

  “It’s a thing in Japan,” she continued, matching his look with her own, taking in his blue eyes, his mouth, the lines of his jaw and neck. “People who, ah—they withdraw from the world. There’s more than a million of them in Japan who don’t leave their rooms, or apartments. Not ever.”

  So, she wasn’t joking. Hikikomori. “I’ve heard of it,” he replied, “but do you really think your brother’s like that?”

  “He may be. I told you, we’re not close.”

  “But you’re perceptive, Monica. You’re a professional at this. You know people. You’d know if your brother was like that.”

  She sighed. “I think he has the tendencies. I mean, look around, right?”

  “But that’s it. He has a job and he traveled on a plane from the east coast to here, so he’s not withdrawn from
the world.”

  “What, then?” she countered. “He comes here to enjoy a monastic lifestyle.”

  “Perhaps.” Walker looked at the FBI pictures that showed the view out the apartment’s windows. The sight lines. It was a corner apartment. There was a car park and apartment buildings opposite the bedroom side. Taller buildings in the background. A street to the other side. Apartments beyond. Nothing telling. But Jasper could have been observed, watched, by someone out there.

  23

  “I told the FBI everything I could think of,” Monica repeated.

  Walker said, “I don’t want to know what they wanted to know.”

  “Why?” Monica looked puzzled. “Why wouldn’t you want to know the same things as them?”

  “Because I know their type, I work with them,” Walker said. “They would have asked you when you last saw him, if you’ve had anyone contact you about him, if you’ve noticed anything out of the ordinary. They’re working all those angles.”

  “And they’re wrong?”

  “No. But they’re handling it from those angles.”

  “And how many kidnappings do they handle a year?”

  “A lot.”

  “Right. And you?”

  Walker was silent.

  “See my point?”

  “They’re doing what they do,” Walker said. “I’m doing what I do.”

  “Fine,” Monica replied, coffee in her left hand, the index finger of her right hand tracing a line across the granite bench top as though drawing an imaginary line through dust. The house was spotless. Designed and decorated with everything in its right place. “What do you want to know that can help my brother? Hmm?”

  “Anything that can help me in knowing your brother,” Walker said. “Start with your thoughts of him.”

  “It’s that simple?” Monica walked away from the bench, looked outside, settled by the sink, turned, said, “I’ve got nothing.”

  “Start at the start.”

  Monica’s eyebrows raised. “That’s a long Q and A session. Are you building a profile so you can find him through some kind of spiritual medium?”

  Walker paused, looked around, then said, “You don’t seem too worried about him. He’s being held by some dangerous people.”