Kill Switch

by James Phelan

  “Name?”

  “I can’t—”

  Walker spun the .38 around. He wouldn’t shoot the guy, but he’d happily knock a few answers out of him.

  “Dan Kong.”

  Walker said, “Monica?”

  Monica looked away.

  “Chinese national,” Granger said. “Based in Shanghai. Hence no face-to-face meeting. That’s it. A simple job. My bread and butter.”

  “Right.” Walker looked at Monica, who was pacing at the end of the lane, looking at the ground and thinking hard.

  “Look,” Granger said, “I’ve got photos of you two leaving the motel this morning. But I gotta say, this isn’t a relationship, is it? I’m not reading it. And you’ve showed no signs of being in any kind of relationship at any point—no offense.”

  Walker said, “You used to be a cop?”

  “Oklahoma City, twenty-six years.”

  “You were outside Monica’s house last night?” Walker asked.

  Granger nodded. “I saw you arrive. I was parked down on the same road you were on.”

  “Yet you saw me enter?”

  “Via a camera in the bush across the road. Close-area transmitter. Then I saw those guys roll up—then the camera went dead. I was about to get out of my car and proceed around to eyeball the situation when I saw you roll past me, in your car, down the hill—and I followed.”

  Monica said, “Do you have any idea who those guys were?”

  “Nope. Feds of some sort.”

  “Why do you say that?” she asked.

  “I mean, gotta be, with tech like that?” Granger shook his head. “I mean, they had the means to shut down everything on the block—even my battery-powered surveillance package—battery powered, so it’s not like they cut the grid. Who could do that? What could do that?”

  “An EMP,” Walker said.

  “What—like a nuke?”

  “There are other ways to generate an electro-magnetic pulse and deploy it. This one was on a drone.”

  “Damn. A drone airplane? Damn.” He looked hesitant. Looked at the .38 in Walker’s hand. “This is about you, isn’t it?”

  “No.”

  “Her?”

  “Her brother.” Walker watched Granger’s face for any sign of recognition, any little tell. There was nothing. Maybe he hadn’t seen the news, but it was unlikely. Maybe he hadn’t heard the name Jasper Brokaw and put two and two together, but it was unlikely.

  “Look, mister, whatever this is—wait . . .”

  Then Walker saw him make the connection. Of the two names, one he was being paid to tail, and one that had been mentioned repeatedly on the news.

  “Oh shit,” Granger said. “Shit. Your brother? That NSA guy that’s captured? Oh . . .” He looked at Walker. “Oh. You’re a Fed? Am I in trouble? Is this about—is this related to the Chinese? Oh shit . . .”

  Walker looked to Monica. She was shaking her head and went back to pacing about.

  “I’ll drop the client, okay?” Granger said. “Just leave me out of it. I’ll walk away, right now. Just give me a chance to walk away, with my license and reputation. That’s it. I’ll hand over all surveillance, all correspondence, everything.”

  “You’ll stop following us,” Walker said, unloading the .38 and putting the six semi-wadcutters in his pocket. He knew from the pat-down that Granger didn’t have reloads; this old ex-cop wasn’t in the business of drawing his gun, let alone getting involved in shoot-outs. Walker passed the .38 over. “And you’ll do something for me.”

  Granger holstered the gun and moved off the fender.

  “Anything.”

  45

  “Yes?” Special Agent Fiona Somerville said. The number of the incoming call on her cell phone was blocked. “Sorry, who is this?”

  Doug Granger repeated his name, and explained that he was representing a friend who could not be named over the phone but had once given Somerville a ride on a motorbike through the midlevels of Hong Kong.

  “Oh, right, I know who you’re talking about,” Somerville said. “And?”

  “He says you need to make sure the FBI looks into an Army case that Jasper Brokaw worked. And to look into Dan Kong. I’ve just sent you a link to a wireless hard-drive, and the password, and you can read up on who he is.”

  “Okay.” Somerville stood next to Zoe and opened the link that had been sent through.

  “The Army case,” Granger said. “He wants you guys to look into Jasper’s old Army service, the early case he did liaising with the 110th MPs.”

  “The 110th?”

  “That’s what your friend told me.”

  “Is that friend of mine still there?”

  “He told me I can’t answer that.”

  “Right. He seemed okay?”

  “I don’t know what he’s normally like,” Granger said, “but he seemed like he could stop a freight train with his bare hands, if he had to.”

  “What’s your connection with this?”

  “Nothing. I don’t want any trouble.”

  “We’ve just accessed the file. You’ve been looking into . . . Dan Kong’s ex-wife.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Like I said, I don’t want any trouble here. Not with the government or anyone else.”

  “Right. Is that all?”

  “That’s all he told me to tell you, ma’am.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “You’re sure this friend of mine is okay?”

  “Ma’am, it’d take an atomic bomb to do that guy much harm. Goodbye.”

  The call ended and Somerville smiled. Walker was okay, and she had work to do that would help him—and this situation—out. She tapped a text message to McCorkell stating that things were progressing, and sat down next to Zoe.

  “I’ll work on the FBI, see where they’re at,” Somerville said.

  “We just got a tap on that call’s location,” Zoe said. “Beaumont.”

  “Where’s Beaumont?” Somerville said.

  By way of answering, Zoe zoomed out on the map. “Near Palm Springs, about thirty miles west.”

  Somerville said, “What’s near there, I wonder . . .”

  “Maybe Walker made the guy travel away from LA to make that call?”

  “No. I think that the caller stayed there, and that Walker has moved on. I think someone’s closing in on Walker, and he knows that, so he’s leaving breadcrumbs and obstacles to tie them up a little.”

  “Who would be after him?”

  “We need to find out.”

  •

  Walker gave the PI back his .38 rounds and nothing more was said between them as the older man headed away from the laneway, his mood and demeanor higher now that Walker had given him another job; clearly he was energized to be involved in something beyond following an ex-spouse around.

  Monica remained silent, sitting in the passenger seat, as Walker started up the Cuda and feathered the gas, dropping into gear and taking a right onto the side street before looping back around the block to the main street in the direction of the interstate: east, toward Palm Springs.

  The entire altercation with Granger had lasted fifteen minutes. Walker figured that if that team were back in LA, and they made Monica’s credit-card purchase just over twenty minutes ago and were mobile, on the road, to the east of LA, then he and Monica had maybe a half-hour window. He pushed the gas pedal down.

  “You want to talk about it?” Walker said as they merged onto the highway. The time for being cautious was disappearing and he shot the engine up to a hundred miles per hour in seconds.

  “Not really.”

  Walker let it be. For now. But he wondered. Custody was no big deal and seemingly not relevant. But something else had occurred to him in the conversation with Granger. Monica’s husband, being a foreign national, raised some interesting questions about her clearance level.

  Any employee of the US government, or holder of a classified and above security clearance, who came into conta
ct with a foreign national from any country had to report it. If you traveled overseas you were quarantined from that clearance-level work for six weeks, relegated to general duties where you didn’t touch anything sensitive should you be compromised.

  How had that worked out with regards to their marriage? Did he travel back and forth to China during their marriage? Did she? Did she come into regular contact with his Chinese friends and associates? If she did, then her clearance was virtually null and void, because she wouldn’t be able to access or use it for extended periods, while security analysts pored through all her calls and emails and looked into the background of each and every individual she met.

  This wasn’t necessarily a problem, but there were some questions that could have answers relevant to this situation. What did her ex-husband do for work? Whom did he work for? What was his relationship like with Jasper? Did he know who Jasper’s employer was? When did they marry and when did it end—and at what stage in the relationship did he know that she had such high security clearance? Why did the marriage end? All these questions would come to the culmination of: Could your ex-husband have targeted you for a relationship to get to either your clearance or to Jasper?

  But Walker let it be, for now. He gave the car a spurt of gas and overtook an eighteen-wheeler. The engine sounded good on the freeway when wound out. Heading east. Fast. Half an hour to go. They would meet this friend of Jasper’s and see what he had to say. It seemed the hotter lead; whatever the guy may currently feel about Jasper, he’d have some background and he’d be a resource for the tech side of things. He might even have some good ideas about what might be coming. Maybe even how to track Jasper through the broadcasts.

  Walker looked at his watch. The hours were counting down to the next attack.

  46

  That text message from Somerville to McCorkell went over the cell-phone network via local towers.

  There was nothing they could do about being clandestine. Somerville was being watched by the NSA, and they had her phones and emails monitored by computers and presided over 24/7 by a flesh-and-blood agent. That tech agent tracked the last call to her phone to the town of Beaumont.

  He passed that intel along the chain.

  It pinged in the control room in Fort Meade, from where copies were sent out to the NSA and the military’s Cyber Command. The two-person team handling the tracking of Monica Brokaw and Jed Walker brought up the map of the pay phone’s location and then tapped into Trapwire.

  Footage from all the cameras and photographs taken in the town were downloaded. There wasn’t much. The facial-recognition software took two minutes to scroll through several terabytes of data and come up with a match on Monica’s face crossing a road. Then it found her again, a side profile, in the passenger seat of a car, the picture taken from the dash cam of a courier vehicle.

  Harrington in the helo, lifted off, the nose tucked down as the Black Hawk raced east.

  His starlight communications bleeped. He checked the message. The car was a black Hemi Cuda. It was headed east.

  •

  When Walker entered the outskirts of Palm Springs he realized that he didn’t know where he was going and he slowed and said, “You know Paul’s address, right?”

  “Well . . .”

  Walker looked across at Monica.

  She gave a shrug.

  Walker pulled over at the first non-chain diner he saw and killed the engine, which was steaming from the quick sling along the highway into town. The car park was near-empty, but inside seemed a decent trade. The locals from the neighboring businesses, in getting breakfast. He looked back at the road. He knew that those Feds would not be far away now. He hadn’t noticed any fixed cameras on the highway into town. But time was running out. They needed to keep moving. The engine pinged and hissed with the heat of exhaustion.

  “What do we do?” Monica asked.

  “How’d you get his address before?”

  “I Googled it. Crept around online for a while until I found it.”

  “How long?”

  “What?”

  “How long was that while?”

  “Several hours, over a few days until I found it.”

  “Great. We don’t have that time. We have several minutes.”

  “It wasn’t easy the first time, but it should be now.”

  “Because you didn’t know his new name before?”

  “I knew it, I’d seen it on that email on Jasper’s tablet. But I was starting from scratch—there’s a couple thousand, maybe more, Paul Conways in the United States.”

  “But only one in Palm Springs.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay,” Walker said, getting out the car, then talking to Monica over the roof as she got out. “I’ll order coffee, you do your best to charm some guy to use his cell phone to Google Paul. Fast as you can.”

  “In there?”

  “In there. You really don’t like diners?”

  “It’s just . . .”

  “What?” Walker asked, locking the car.

  “Nothing,” Monica said.

  “Tell me,” Walker said, walking in step next to her, headed for the entry.

  “We could go to the local police,” Monica said. “Talk to them, tell them what we’re doing. They could help us.”

  “They’d look you up and see an alert in the system and detain us until those armed guys in black arrive.”

  “You think?”

  “I know.”

  “Okay.”

  Walker opened the diner door and was steered by a waitress to a booth. He watched as Monica found her mark: a bald guy in a suit with a nervous energy about him. She leaned over the table, her hands on the laminate top, her head tilted slightly, her mouth moving slowly as she spoke.

  The guy nodded, and passed his phone to her. She sat down opposite, and started to tap away.

  Walker’s coffee arrived. It came with a doughnut on the house. He cracked open the California road-map book and studied the roads of Palm Springs. Five minutes and a coffee refill passed. Monica was still on the phone, sitting across from the bald guy, who kept looking up from his laptop to steal glimpses of her. Walker looked out the window. The sky was clear, just some wispy clouds at the edges of the valley, fingers of vapor pouring over the mountains, toward them. The grip of inevitability.

  “Got it,” Monica said, drinking her lukewarm coffee that had been sitting there for nearly ten minutes. She brandished a note on a napkin: Paul’s address. “Not ten minutes from here.”

  •

  What Monica didn’t know, and what Walker didn’t know, and what most would be surprised at, is that any camera on any personal digital device can be turned on remotely by those in the know and capture pictures and video. If the device has a microphone, it can grab sound too.

  The cell phone that Monica had held was a popular model smartphone, designed in America and largely manufactured in China. It had enough computing power to word process documents and render images and play movies and games. Its microphone was good for conference calls, either in the car or lying on a table between a group of people. There were two built-in cameras, pointing front and back, and the one pointing to the front, to the person looking at the screen, was rated at three megapixels.

  The NSA called the program Brighteyes. An evolution of the Trapwire system, which covered all fixed cameras as well as the footage on people’s social-media accounts. With Brighteyes, they could turn on any camera or microphone on any phone, even if it was off. And the beauty of the program was that it would search for a facial recognition of all in its field of view.

  The NSA tech had the phone’s image of Monica locked and confirmed within five seconds of her picking up the phone. Her location was tagged, and all the details of that phone’s owner were now being worked over by the analysts at Cyber Command. State troopers were already moving to begin surveillance of his work and his home in Anaheim. His phone would be tracked until an agent declared it no longer necessary. He w
ould be questioned until it was proven beyond reasonable doubt that he was not involved in impeding a federal investigation.

  The microphone was on and recorded whatever it could pick up, and that was sent as a digital file to the analysts, along with all of the keystroke data and details of what Monica was doing in the phone’s Internet browser.

  The Cyber Command heavy hitters in the form of Harrington’s Blue Team were on their way, by road and air, halfway from LA to Palm Springs, rolling fast.

  47

  The house was a squat stone construction of a sprawling Californian Bungalow meets New Mexico stucco . . . something. Walker liked it. It was homely and masculine and looked like it belonged there, and wouldn’t be going anywhere inside of a century or two. The timber beams holding the roof were from big trees, reclaimed from another project, hewn maybe a century before. The split stone echoed the shades of the desert. The yard wasn’t anything like those of its neighbors, with brilliant green turf and European trees that needed a small town’s water supply to keep growing. This was a product of its environment but constrained by man: cacti and prairie grasses, spindly trees that grew between rocks.

  “Coming?” Walker said. He was out of the car and put his head back in through the door. Monica still had her seatbelt on. She looked at the house like it was a mirage in the desert.

  “Monica?”

  She turned to Walker. Nodded. Undid her seatbelt.

  The street was deserted. A two-lane blacktop with grass verges but no front fences, just manicured lawns and the occasional shady tree and clipped hedge. Too manicured; alien to this environment. Except for Paul’s. His place seemed like it had bobbled up from the ground, a tumble of rocks and dirt and old wood and stone. They walked up the driveway. It was concrete with a pattern, oxidized the same earthy red-brown as the gravel that made up the garden beds. A double garage was set back from the cascade of the house, out of view from the front doors by a wall of yuccas, the spiky green leaves standing out in the built landscape.