Kill Switch

by James Phelan

  “Flight plan has him headed for San Francisco.”

  Harrington nodded. “Gotta be Brokaw’s apartment. He’s headed there. That server he touched, all that extra text that our tech guys at Meade said was on there—that’s a goddamned code.”

  “A code for what?”

  “Get the team in the air in five minutes,” Harrington said, already loading up his gear. “And get the drone over Brokaw’s building.”

  70

  The favor that Walker asked of the Master Chief worked. The Air Force man, with his two NCO door gunners from the Huey, were dressed in their Airman Battle Uniforms, the Air Force equivalent of the Army’s BDUs, complete with their body armor and helmets, secondary weapons of holstered 9-millimeter Beretta pistols, and M4 assault rifles. They looked a mean, serious outfit.

  They approached the two uniformed Palo Alto police officers who were standing sentry on the footpath by the stairs that led up to the front door of the four-story apartment block, and Walker watched from a block away as Doolan did as instructed.

  “You really think this will work?” Monica asked, standing next to him and watching intently.

  “Yes,” Walker said. And it did work. Doolan had instructed his two guys to stand sentry, with M4s at the ready across their chests in a defensive stance. They stood at the top of the stairs, by the wooden doors into the block, while Doolan spoke to the two cops and walked them up the street toward their cruiser, keeping in front of them so that the cops looked forward, toward him.

  “Go,” Walker said to Monica, a hand on the small of her back to guide her in front of him. They crossed the street and made for the apartment building. He could see that Doolan was keeping the cops facing the opposite way, keeping their attention as he explained how this was becoming a military situation, at the very least buying some time for Walker and Monica to enter, look around and find the book, and bug out.

  Up the stairs they ran between the two Airmen standing at attention, and then took the lift to the fourth floor.

  “What if we can’t find the book?” Monica said.

  “We’ll find the book.” Walker was confident, but this feeling faded as the old lift clanged and banged its way up the shaft and the door rattled open onto the fourth floor. The building was old and dank, and the light at the end of the hall, above Jasper’s apartment, 408, was flickering and blinking. There was police tape over the door. Walker tried the handle—it was locked. He gave it a shoulder and the wood splintered from the jamb and the door gave in and yawned open.

  He reached in and flicked on the hall light. He went inside, Monica close behind him. The wall was painted light blue, maybe thirty years ago, and that paint covered several other layers. The floor was made from the same worn floorboards as the passageway outside. The apartment was dark. All the blinds were drawn, and the sun was almost set.

  The first room, to their right, was a bathroom. It was empty—devoid of everything but the toilet and basin and shower over a bath. There were no towels, no toiletries, nothing. The next doorway was to their left and was a bedroom. It contained a mattress on the floor. No sheets, no pillows, no wardrobe, no side tables or lamp or books or clothes. Nothing but a small window, the blind drawn.

  Next the hallway opened up into a kitchen and living area. The only furniture was a beanbag, a tall lamp and a small television on the floor. Nothing in the kitchen but a small bar refrigerator. The only thing suggesting any form of a home was the wall the door was set into, lined entirely with bookshelves, and on those bookshelves were not hundreds but thousands of books. Rows stacked neatly, standing up, spines out, and then above each were stacks of books in every possible nook of space.

  Walker held the note containing the code in his hand. “Where do we start?”

  Monica shook her head. “I have no idea.”

  •

  General Christie placed a call to her team. It was a secure satellite link, protected by the best cryptography that the NSA could create.

  “Sit rep?”

  “All good here,” her guy said. “I’ll have good news for you soon.”

  “There’s just over four hours to deadline.”

  “Will the President order the kill switch?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Better for us that he does, so make sure you get done what you need to get done. But the plan is playing out—that guy is headed there. Be ready for him.”

  “Yes ma’am, you can count on us.”

  There was a knock at General Christie’s door. Her secretary entered and said, “Visitor, ma’am.”

  “I’m not to be—”

  The door behind the secretary was pushed open and Bill McCorkell entered. “General Christie. We need to talk.”

  “Continue with your mission,” General Christie said into the phone, then hung up and turned to McCorkell. “Okay, Bill, take a seat. I’ll give you exactly two minutes of my time.”

  71

  Walker looked out the window of Jasper Brokaw’s apartment. He imagined someone watching the place, casing it, looking for the patterns of his trips home. Maybe they had him flagged at the airport in Utah, when he got on a plane and headed here. If Walker had more time, he would talk to the neighbors, see what they noticed back then and now. The witness to the abduction. Find out exactly how it had happened. There was no sign of a struggle in here. Nothing was tossed. The books were neatly stacked. The futon mattress was neatly tucked against a wall.

  It didn’t seem right. What time was Jasper taken? Did his abductors drug him? Walker thought back to the needle in his neck back at LAX yesterday. They were missing something. It wasn’t right.

  But he didn’t have the time.

  The books.

  Monica found a can of peaches in a cupboard and ate them with her fingers because there was no cutlery. She sat on the floor in front of the television. “Another attack coming in . . . six minutes.”

  Walker was looking at the shelves for patterns. But there was no obvious pattern. It was a mix of fiction and non-fiction, recent and old. They were not ordered alphabetically. Nor by genre. Not color coded by spines. There seemed to be no obvious hierarchy of organization. Autobiographical, maybe? Stored in the order in which Jasper bought them? Walker lifted a book. Foucault’s Pendulum.

  He imagined the books off the shelves and scattered over the floor. Cut-up technique. Look for a pattern in there. A favorite book. Something worn? Or something preserved, well kept? It had to be popular and generic enough to be used for the code. Something that each man had, Jasper and Paul, the exact same edition, so that they could use the same . . .

  “This isn’t right,” Walker said.

  “What’s not right?”

  “I don’t think they have the same book.”

  “That’s impossible. That’s how a book code works. Like the particular edition of the road atlas that you told Granger to get, to match my father’s.”

  “I think it’s a book that’s here, and here only. I think he wanted Paul to come here to decode the message. And like you said, he already had it memorized.”

  “How? And why?”

  “It makes the code even harder to break.” Walker tapped the novel in his hands. “Think about it. If someone saw it as a book code, then they could crosscheck which books were at both locations—here, and at Paul’s house.”

  “I didn’t see any books at Paul’s house.”

  “Me either. But I think it’s here. And while your brother might have remembered them, Paul wouldn’t be able to. And because they’ve been out of contact for so long, there’s no telling, from Jasper’s knowledge, if Paul still had that book in his possession. So, the code has to be cracked here. He wanted Paul to come here. And I bet Paul knows exactly which book to look in.”

  “Okay . . .” Monica leaned back, her hands behind her on the timber floorboards. “So, what do you look for? There’s got to be three or four thousand books on this wall.”

  “How about a book that they had enjoyed together. One that th
ey would have used back in junior high. A favorite.”

  “Okay, okay. So, that rules out anything published since.”

  “Right.” Walker looked at the spines. He recognized many of them. “Okay, that takes out about a third of them.”

  “That’s a start.”

  Walker nodded as he kept looking.

  “When did they meet?” Walker said. “When did they start the book codes?”

  “High school.”

  “Years?”

  “I don’t know. Jasper’d been doing it for years with Dad . . . but I know they were doing it by university. And probably before. I think anything from 1999 to 2003.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay. So it could be anything pre then—but let’s concentrate on that range first, as a sweet spot. A book they enjoyed together, and probably used back then for codes.”

  “Ah, okay, let me think . . . you know what, I have no idea. Why would I know that?”

  “I thought you might remember it . . .” Walker trailed off, then turned to Monica. “Sorry.”

  “Greek myths!” Monica said, suddenly animated. She sat forward and started to tap the floor with one hand while making a whirling motion with the other. “He was obsessive back then. He brought Paul into it too. They read them all. Let me think . . .”

  Walker scanned the shelves. He came up with three titles. “The Odyssey, The Iliad . . . there’s texts on Achilles, the Trojan War, Alexander the Great . . .”

  “Publication dates?”

  Walker opened each to its imprint page.

  “All in the right time frame,” he said. “All have his name written in the front. Same handwriting, seems like a young person’s writing, messy and unsure.”

  “He’s always had terrible handwriting.”

  “Does that mean something, psychologically?” Walker asked as he took the piece of paper with the code written down.

  “It means he has crappy handwriting.”

  Walker began to go from page to page through The Iliad, matching the pages and lines and words and reading them out.

  “Not that,” Monica said. “Next.”

  Walker moved on to The Odyssey.

  Cut-up technique. How Bowie wrote his lyrics. Look for new patterns.

  Then, Jasper came on the screen.

  72

  “So, the GPS system is down,” Jasper said. “And that’s just the start. Now, I’m going to conduct hourly cyber attacks, and you have just four hours until the main event. And I’ll tell you what . . .”

  The camera zoomed in to Jasper’s face.

  “If you think you can stop me, you can’t. It’s happening. It’s happening and I’m showing you just how vulnerable you are. For all the protections you’ve put in place over the years, for all you’ve done over the past twenty-four hours, you can’t keep me from doing it.

  “Well, there is one way. One.

  “So, I ask you, will the President do what must be done?”

  The camera’s view widened out again, showing Jasper sitting in his orange jumpsuit.

  “Three more hours, three more cyber attacks. First, GPS is down. Then, you know those drone things you like to fly about and kill people with? News flash—I’m now commanding them. How many are there over US air space? Where will they be flying? Are some of them armed? How will you stop them? What will you use to intercept them when every weapons system you can deploy, whether jet aircraft or missiles, are redundant, because I can own their computer systems. If you aim a missile at my drones, I will redirect that missile at a hospital. If you launch jets to fly sorties to gun down the drones, I will commandeer the controls of those jets and smash them into the ground—or maybe fly them at the fading sun or the moon, just to see how far they can go.

  “Ask yourself: at what point do you pull the plug? You have a solution to this. Use it. I dare you.

  “You have less than four hours. Tick-tock.”

  •

  Walker still had a book in his hand as they watched the latest threat. Monica had finished eating. Her hands seemed steady, the effects of the drug mostly abated with the adrenaline and the time and the food and water.

  “What do you think?” Monica said, her eyes still on the tiny screen.

  “GPS is a big deal. It’s going to wreak havoc on all kinds of transport and logistics. It’ll hurt in all kinds of ways.”

  “Surely they can work around it.”

  “In the next few hours?”

  “They’d have contingencies.”

  “Would your brother have factored that in?”

  “You talk like he designed these attacks.”

  “I think he did,” Walker said, voicing the thought that had been building. “The way he’s been talking. From the first presentation to what we just saw. Much heavier with the ‘I.’ ‘I’m now commanding them.’ ‘I will redirect.’ He’s owning it, don’t you think?”

  “You’re saying they took him and forced him to make all this stuff up, or else?”

  “Or else . . . what?” Walker said. “What kind of leverage could they be using? He’s not tight with family or friends, and those he was close to are you and your dad and Paul and none of you were taken. Unless he has a significant other you don’t know about, who is being held captive.”

  “I really doubt that.”

  “Okay.”

  The newscaster crossed to a correspondent on Pennsylvania Avenue, the most famous landmark in the world behind her. With a gaggle of other news crews jostling for real estate, the reporter gave a serious précis of the events that had just transpired, as well as those threatened, and then crossed to inside the White House, to the Press Room, where the President stood with the Director of Cyber Command, General Christie.

  “We are confident that the Department of Energy,” the President said, “in conjunction with the Department of Homeland Security, have made every effort and taken every measure they can to safeguard the national energy grid. We ask for calm as we work toward fixing this. And given the global severity of this situation, I have authorized an executive order, giving the military, under the direction of General Christie of Cyber Command, authority to act on US soil in this matter of national security. General Christie.”

  The General nodded to the President and took her place at the lectern, and then—

  A noise, in the apartment. Someone was in the bedroom and the door to the living area pushed open.

  Paul. He was wearing a climbing harness, and held a silenced pistol in his hand.

  He said to Walker, “Put the book down.”

  73

  “Don’t do anything stupid,” Walker said to Paul. He kept the book in his hand.

  Paul looked from them to the television. The General was fielding questions.

  “What did she say?” Paul asked.

  “Who?” Walker glanced at the screen. “The Cyber Command Director?”

  Paul nodded. The pistol was still in his hands, and he was jittery, looking at the screen, occasionally glancing at Walker.

  “She was responding to the latest threat,” Walker said, gauging the distance between them. Three paces. Too far. Paul’s pistol was a Glock 17. Walker could try to draw the Colt from the back of his jeans where it was tucked into the small of his back, but the time it would take to clasp the weapon, take off the safety, aim and fire . . . too long. Paul may or may not know how to shoot, but as inaccurate as pistols were, at three paces it was an irrelevant argument.

  “How’d you get here so fast?” Monica asked.

  Paul said to her, “You okay?”

  “Fine,” Monica said. “As well as I can be. How’d you get here? We had serious help.”

  Paul again glanced at the television. The President had joined the General in taking questions from the press.

  Walker inched closer to Paul.

  “I flew,” Paul said. “Like you two obviously did.”

  Monica asked, “Where’d you get the climbing gea
r?”

  “Same place I got this gun,” he replied. “The Internet’s good for things like that, if you know where to look.”

  “On your Tor sites,” Walker said. “The Deep Web.”

  Paul nodded.

  “Why didn’t you tell us about the book code?”

  “I—” Paul caught himself. “You two should go.”

  Walker said, “Where would we go?”

  “Anywhere,” Paul said. “I’ve got this.”

  “You’ll let us leave?” Monica asked.

  Paul said, “You shouldn’t be here.”

  “What are you going to do?” Walker said. “Translate the code? Then what? Go find your old buddy and shoot it out with whoever is holding him captive? You think you might have this, but no matter what you can do on a computer, at the end of the day we’re talking guys with bullets. Trained guys. You haven’t got that covered.”

  Paul was silent.

  “Solve the code,” Walker said, sitting down next to Monica and tossing the book at Paul’s feet. “Solve it and tell us and then do whatever you want to. But we’re not going anywhere without knowing what’s next, and you’re not going to be able to do anything to help Jasper on your own, so pretty soon you have to realize that we’re in this together.”

  Paul looked to the book by his feet. “You won’t do it with that book,” he said. He tucked the pistol into his climbing harness and looked at the shelves. He went from left to right, top corner along, then the next shelf down, right to left, scanning, then the next down, left to right . . . and stopped.

  “This,” Paul said. He retrieved a copy of Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton. “Our favorite book. I went to two second-hand places before coming here. And besides, think about it: if he’s left a message about the hacks or cyber attacks, you’re not going to find references to computers in those old things.”

  Walker looked at the stack of books on Greek myths he’d piled up.

  “Okay, start reading out numbers,” Paul said. “It’s page, line, word.”

  Walker was about to and then stopped. “First, why didn’t you tell me about the book code, back at the container?”