Kill Switch

by James Phelan

  “She is. How about your guy? Smart?”

  “Yeah, he was smart. Successful. Charming. I got pregnant. We had a girl. Sally.” Monica looked out her window. “It worked for a while, and then it didn’t. None of it was planned, but it’s worked out now. Better, maybe. Sally goes to an international school, comes here each holiday. And we all get along.”

  “Who is he?”

  “A guy.”

  “I thought as much. What does he do besides big business?”

  “Why that question?”

  “I’m wondering.”

  “Wondering? Why wonder? What’s my marriage got to do with anything? What—because you’ve already mined every part of my job history, this is all that’s left to know?”

  “I’m just trying to better understand you. Your motivations. Goals. Ambitions. Needs. Fears. Desires.”

  “Because you’re Oprah now?”

  “You’re the shrink,” Walker said, glancing at her. “Why do you think?”

  “Because you’re suspicious.”

  “That’s my general disposition. It’s served me well.”

  “No, it’s not your general disposition,” she replied. “It was trained into you. Honed over a lifetime of work. And your work became your life.”

  “The American dream in action.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Work hard, get lost in your work, you become your work, and you forget all the other stuff that’s important in life, then you grow old, alone, and die.”

  “Maybe you should have a talk show.”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “It’s training. Like you train a dog. You were just smart and obedient. And you know what? You’re a product. The end result. Air Force. CIA. State Department. Whatever. You’re it. Probably about the best we’ve produced. In certain ways. In the ways we needed. You’re a tool of the state. Sharp when you need to be, blunt when required, brutal and calculated at a whim.”

  “Now you’re flattering me.”

  “No, it’s not flattery, Walker.” Monica looked out her window and stared at the landscape. “It’s sad, really. What we made you. What you became in every level of your life—because that’s what it does. It’s not a switch, it’s not on or off. It’s what they train you to become. And you can’t ever let it go, because you were too adept at it. That’s sad. For you, and for anyone who will ever care for you.”

  “Don’t be too beat up about it,” Walker said. “That’s a short list.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Because people can’t change, right?”

  “No. People change all the time. In tiny ways. Adaptation. Learning. Evolving. You choose not to.”

  “I didn’t choose this. The here and now.”

  “Of course you did. Come on. You’re no longer CIA. You’re no longer anything, really, and that’s what makes this sad. You’re a stateless tool of the state. Roaming around, still trying to find a purpose, something that you can fix. A knight errant of the old world, looking around for problems to solve.”

  “Sounds like you may be talking about yourself.”

  “You were interrogating me just before, about my life, my husband. That’s not conversation. See? You can’t switch it off. You’ll never let it go.”

  “And what’s this you’re doing now?”

  “Conversing.”

  Walker glanced out his side window, said, “Hard to imagine why you’re single.”

  “It’s not hard to imagine why you are.” Monica nodded, looking straight ahead, her mind and mouth racing. “Let’s see. Divorced. Took her a while, she had hope—delusional—but hope, that you’d change. But she’d had enough. She realized that you can’t walk away. It’s a family thing, isn’t it? Ingrained. It’s all you know, from your father. You’ve grown up with it. It’s not all you know now but it’s an imprinted behavior that stuck and came easily and you followed it to the nth degree, drinking every last drop of the Kool Aid that the government was dishing out. It’s habitual, addictive, and you ‘chose’ not to let go. You chose this life over a life with her.”

  Walker was silent again.

  Monica looked at him and said, “What was her name?”

  Walker didn’t reply.

  Monica started to speak and then stopped herself.

  They drove in silence for five minutes. Just the sound of the engine and the tires on the road.

  Then, Monica said, “Look—I’m sorry, okay? Not for you, not for who you are. For what I said.”

  39

  The big block V8 engine was a beautiful thing, one of the great contributions to the world from the United States. But it was thirsty. Walker had pulled into a gas station and was filling up a third time in twenty-four hours. He tried to work out the mileage but gave up. It wasn’t bad on the highway, but around the city it was like he could watch the gauge going down with every minute that passed.

  Monica had gone to the restroom. It was the type of non-chain gas station that had a decent diner that catered to truckers and road users who didn’t have company cards. And, Walker figured, less of a chance of being plugged into a network of cameras available to the prying eyes of the NSA.

  “Still filling up?” Monica said. She’d brought them both coffee in Styrofoam cups.

  “Emptying a shale oil deposit all on my own.”

  “They really should build that pipeline.”

  “Or this car should just be driven around on Sundays.”

  “It’s a nice ride,” Monica said, leaning on the front fender. “Yours?”

  “What, you think I stole it?”

  “It does look like something from Grand Theft Auto.”

  “Well, look out hookers and pedestrians,” Walker said. The pump handle tapped out and he holstered it. He pulled out a wad of bills.

  “You didn’t pre-pay?”

  “They’ll track it,” Walker said, flicking through the cash and pausing as he saw Monica deliberating in some kind of internal reprimand. “You paid with a card?”

  She nodded, then cringed. “It’s all I had on me when I left the house,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Then we have to get moving,” Walker said, heading into the gas station, where he paid for the fuel and a couple of trucker caps and a pair of sunglasses for Monica. Outside, she was in the car. She’d tossed her coffee, her distaste not at the drink but at her actions. His was on the roof of the Cuda. He took it, slung himself inside the car and started it up, checking his mirrors as he did up his belt.

  Then he stopped. The silver Crown Vic with the middle-aged driver was on the shoulder of the freeway just before the gas station, doing its best to be hidden behind a road sign.

  “Hang on,” Walker said. He drove out of the station and planted his foot entering the highway. The Crown Vic made a show of keeping up.

  “What is it?”

  “We’ve got company,” Walker said, checking his rearview mirror.

  Monica looked over her shoulder.

  “The guys from my house?”

  “No.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know, but I saw him near our motel. Maybe he was out there all night, watching us—there was a Crown Vic in the lot.”

  “Really?” Monica watched out the back window.

  Walker eased off the accelerator and sat on sixty-five. Better to see what this was about, than lose the chance. The Crown Vic wasn’t government. It was ten years old and dinged up. The driver wasn’t schooled in making a tail that would go undetected, or maybe he had been once but now didn’t have the energy or inclination to do it right. And he was alone. So, whoever it was, he didn’t fit into this scenario with Jasper Brokaw. At least, not from the outset.

  Walker signaled to turn off at the next town.

  40

  The next town was Beaumont. The decade-old silver Crown Vic was two vehicles behind. Walker eased through the main street. This was the kind of town that didn’t do or make anything, likely never did. A
weigh station of old, built up slowly to cater for a community, a single option for everything. One gun shop. One grocer. One bar. One gas station. Sprung up to serve locals, and those on the road. The same shops and stores as thousands of other towns just like it dotted across the United States. Half the places boarded up. The courthouse. The lawyer’s office. The video store. Maybe vibrant, once, for what it was, then the highway skipped around it and the through-traffic stopped and with it went all those who made their living from transient customers. And as each service provider became redundant, there was neither the life nor the inclination to adapt. Hence the shuttered buildings, the shutters mainly plywood boards that had been there a decade or more, buckled and bent and distorted by the elements and time.

  Progress.

  “He’s still back there,” Monica said.

  Walker nodded. He knew exactly where the car was, and what he’d do about it. He took the next right-hand turn, a side road with a hamburger joint and barber shop and ten empty places, and then pulled into an alley and told Monica to get out of the car.

  •

  Harrington returned to the airfield just as the message came through: a hit on Monica’s credit card at a gas station.

  Outside Beaumont, eighty miles east of them. No security cameras but he knew that the tech team back at Fort Meade would now be bringing to bear anything that they could to get a sighting—traffic cameras on the highway and all offshoots would have analysts poring over them to double-check any likely hits on the car.

  “Wheels up,” Harrington said. “And get the others rolling.”

  41

  Walker was on foot. He tucked his cap down over his eyes, and was wearing just his T-shirt and jeans and boots. He headed back up the dead-end alley, and around the block. He’d left the Colt in the car. It would be overkill to bring it. From what he’d seen of the guy, glances at a distance, he was around fifty and heavy-set, the kind of jowls that suggested a long-time desk man. Sure, he might well have a firearm, but Walker would not give him the time or room to use it. He crossed the street.

  Monica was in the burger joint; trucker cap and sunglasses on, in a booth, out of sight.

  Walker watched the road from a seat on the stoop of a double-story townhouse. The Crown Vic did a slow pass. The driver clocked the Cuda parked down the lane and pulled over to park halfway down the street. He stayed in his car, the quick flick of the reverse lights signaling that the transmission had gone into park. He watched the laneway from his mirrors, waiting.

  Walker gave him a few minutes to settle. The engine was running, vapor trickling out the exhaust. The guy hadn’t got out of the car for at least a couple of hours, from outside the motel to the diner to where Walker had seen him near the gas station to here. He would be well formed into that seat, probably with the aircon set to a comfortable temperature: high sixties or so, for a guy of such girth. He wore glasses, large and silver- or gold-rimmed. He squinted against the sun hitting his windscreen. No seatbelt.

  Walker used that sun. The street ran east–west, and he skirted around the block and approached from the east, the guy facing him but his eyes on his mirrors, looking behind. Walker put his sunglasses on. No shirt or jacket. A different silhouette from how he’d appeared earlier this morning. The last few paces came quickly.

  The driver didn’t know what hit him. Literally. By the time he did, it was far too late.

  Walker gripped the metal NASA key ring of the Cuda in his left fist and smashed the driver’s window out with one sharp blow that made a cracking, popping sound as the safety glass shattered into a million pieces. The guy reeled to his side, away from the onslaught, hands up to protect his face. Walker opened the door and dragged him out and up to the stoop, sticking to the shadows. A truck rumbled by. The man in his grasp was five-nine and 190 pounds and Walker had him pinned up against the door of the stoop, a hand at his throat and the other patting him down. He came up with a snub-nosed .38 from a leather holster under the guy’s jacket.

  “Talk,” Walker said, the pistol up under the man’s chin. “Now or never. Who are you and what are you doing?”

  42

  “We changed our minds,” Jasper Brokaw said. “You’ve seen what we’ve just done. The federal attack will be later. This one . . . it was just there, and we couldn’t say no to it. With all that you’d been saying on the news, about us, about the threatened attack—you’re all so smug, but not anymore, right? What better way to get the population onside than to air all of their dirty little secrets, right?”

  The camera closed in slightly to Jasper. His bruised cheek was angry now, his eye above the bruise swelling and weeping.

  “Failure to act will have significant ramifications,” Jasper read from a piece of paper. It seemed as though his hands had trembled, briefly. “Starting small. Every person’s Internet search history is now available to be read online. Their social-media accounts are all open, readable to all.”

  Jasper gave a URL address.

  “Moreover,” he said, “all Dark Web addresses, and all intercepted and stored correspondence stored at the Bluffdale complex in Utah are also available for all and sundry to read online.”

  He looked at the camera. “That’s it. Our third cyber attack is . . . think of it as a warning shot. Your time is running out, Mr. President, to shut down the Net. Failure will result in action being taken. You’ve seen what we can do to breach security and publicly release data. By the next attack, you will know that no network is safe, no matter what you try to do. Turning off individual servers will only force our hand to something else.”

  The screen went black.

  43

  “I can’t,” he said. Southwestern accent. The other side of fifty. Looked like an old cop, or any number of ex-NCOs Walker had bumped into since leaving the military. A man who knew what to do in a tight spot. No-nonsense. But he was drawn and tired. Not just from being stuck in his car since at least Monica’s house last night and then the motel and then the drive here; he was like someone who had not given up on life and living but had come close a few times. Too much greasy, salty food and too many cases of beer. No exercise and no compulsion to do much of anything but a dead-beat job.

  Walker pulled back the hammer on the pistol. It was an old thing, well used and well maintained. The wooden stock was worn to a smooth shine. Walker could see semi-wadcutters loaded in there. A useful weapon, up close. At the base of the chin it would be devastating, equivalent to a small explosive boring up through bone and tissue and detonating inside the brain pan and exploding out the back of the skull.

  “I can’t, I really can’t,” he repeated. “Please—I’ll go away. Give me a chance. Please. You won’t see me again.”

  Walker turned the guy about and pushed him along the footpath to the alley, the snub-nosed revolver dug hard into his back. He halted them a few paces before the parked car.

  “Silence here isn’t an option,” Walker said. “But I will let you go, unharmed, if you tell me who you are and what you’re doing following Monica Brokaw.”

  The man looked up and down the alley; Walker could almost see the wheels spinning in his mind, trying for options but finding none. No chance to run. Can’t outrun bullets.

  Instead he said, “How do you know I’m not following you?”

  “If you were following me you’d have to be one of the greatest trailers on the planet, and I’m not feeling that,” Walker said.

  “Oh.”

  “I saw you from the motel. But you must have seen us sooner, which means you were at Monica’s house.” Walker looked him up and down. “There’s no way you’re involved with the crew who entered her house. And they’ll be headed here now with their machine guns and the stun grenades, because they’ve made Monica, back at the gas station. So, either I tie you to the welcome sign coming into town and let them cavity search you until you talk, or you talk to me. What’s it going to be?”

  Monica was walking down the laneway toward them.

  “
You wanna talk now?” Walker said.

  “I really can’t. I shouldn’t—” The guy looked up and saw Monica approach. “Oh . . .”

  44

  “Doug Granger,” Walker said, passing the guy back his wallet. The ID was a Private Detective license issued by the state of California. He was seated on the front fender of the Cuda, his pistol still in Walker’s hand. Granger had just given a four-word answer to explain why he’d been trailing Monica. “Your ex hired me.”

  Monica said, “It can’t be true.”

  “Believe me, Monica, I’ve heard that before. But it’s the truth. Don’t feel bad about it. Happens every day, and then some.”

  “My ex?” Monica was shaking her head. “He’d never do that. I mean—why? We get along. He’s more than fine with the custody arrangement we have—I should be the one casing him, so why? Why would he?”

  “Not mine to ask why.”

  Monica took a few paces away, headed up the lane toward the street.

  “How long?” Walker asked him.

  “Two months,” Granger said.

  “Two months?” Monica turned back, looking suddenly ill. She paced the alley next to the car.

  Walker said to him, “So, you do this a lot?”

  “Yep.”

  “Plenty of spousal stuff.”

  “Yep.”

  “What’s her ex like? Compared to others?”

  “No idea,” Granger said. He got up, pocketed his wallet, looked at the snub-nosed .38 in Walker’s hand. “I’ve never met him.”

  “Do you do that often, with clients?” Monica said. She looked from him to Walker. “This could be bullshit. It could be someone posing as him.”

  “Don’t meet clients often,” Granger said. “Sure, if they live outta state. It’s not ideal, but a job’s a job, and he was paying me for 24/7 surveillance, and that’s not cheap. Not for two months. I had to outsource.”

  Walker said, “You’re sure it was her husband who hired you?”

  “Of course.” Granger looked offended at the prospect. “He was only interested to see if there was infidelity. A custody thing, he said. I saw all his ID, the marriage and divorce papers, spoke on the phone a few times to hammer out the details.”