Kill Switch (19 page)

Most of the time Harry hated his father for trying to turn his son into a clone. But as he removed the leather toolkit from his pocket down there in the dark, he was cool with it. He stepped up to the chest, studied the lock for a moment, then selected a tension wrench from the kit. He inserted it into the bottom of the keyhole and applied slight pressure, then he slipped a pick into the top of the lock and gave very slight torque to the wrench as he scrubbed his pick back and forth. He felt one of the pins move. Nice. He repeated this until all of the pins had shifted, though he was surprised to find that there were double the normal number of them and each moved with rusty reluctance. But Harry had a deft hand and after six minutes of patient work the lock clicked open.

“Easy-peasy, Mrs. Wheezy.” It was a nonsense thing the locksmith had said every time he opened a lock, and Harry had picked it up.

Harry gingerly removed the lock from the hasp and set it aside, then very carefully lifted the lid. The lock and the lid were absurdly heavy, almost as if they were made of lead instead of steel, but when he raised the lid he saw that the underside gleamed with gold and green. Copper. Or an alloy of both. Harry fished in his mind for what he'd learned of metallurgy from the locksmith—who insisted that his pupil understand all of the materials he might encounter. The name came swimming up out of his memories.
Molybdochalkos
. He grinned at himself for remembering that.

Then, as he looked inside the chest, his grin faded. He expected to find a false top, maybe with some actual ancient relics on it, with the real booty below—IDs and debit cards and maybe some weapons.

Instead he saw a book. That's it. Nothing else. A book. It was big, two feet long and eighteen inches wide. At least seven inches thick, and it, too, was sealed by metal bands. Six of them running laterally and two more going up and over. Each one was fastened with a smaller but no less sturdy padlock. The bands were covered by a different kind of engraving than had been used on the chest. Instead of the holy symbols of protection, the bands and the book they surrounded were covered by monsters. Prancing goats with too many heads, writhing squids, demon faces with hundreds of eyes, shapeless mounds with too many mouths and worms for hair.

Harry flinched away. It hurt his mind to look at those symbols, and in his creeped-out imagination, they seemed to move. Or to tremble in anticipation of moving. He licked his lips, which had gone totally dry. His tongue felt like old leather and his heart was punching the inside of his chest.

“This is bullshit,” he told himself.

The room threw echoes back at him that distorted his words into meaningless and sinister mutterings. He forced himself to focus on the rust-pitted locks on the metal bands. When he touched them they felt strangely warm. It was more like touching skin rather than metal. Harry recoiled. He did not like any of this. Not one bit. He closed his tool kit and put it into his pocket, closed the chest, reset the lock, and moved over to the small hatch through which he'd entered.

Except …

Except that he did not do any of that.

His eyes seemed to glaze and when he blinked them clear he was sitting on the floor with his back to the wall, his legs stretched out before him, and the big book resting heavily on his thighs.

Harry said, “What—?”

He had no memory at all of how that happened.

His eyes watered and Harry blinked again.

And he was no longer in the chamber. Now he stood in the entrance foyer to the museum. Again there was no memory of having climbed out through the hatch or of making his way up here. It was as if he had stepped out of his own mind and left his body to run on autopilot.

Except that wasn't it. And he knew it. He could feel something shift inside of him.
In his mind
. In a moment of absolute mind-numbing terror Harry Bolt realized that he was not alone inside his own head. There was someone else in there. He flung the book away and ran screaming from the building.

Only he didn't.

He
wanted
to. He saw himself doing that.

But he did not.

Harry stared at the book. He no longer held it but he clearly had not thrown it away. It lay on the floor at his feet.

It lay in a wide, dark lake of blood. A puddle of it that seemed to cover the whole floor. There were islands in that lake. Lumps. Red and torn. Covered with the last shreds of clothing. The gray and black of the library's security patrol.

The all-black of the same kinds of clothes that Harry wore. Soft, nonreflective, nonbinding black.

Roy Olvera.

Jim Florida.

Their eyes stared at him with sightless astonishment; their mouths hung open as if frozen that way as they screamed their last screams. The bodies were …

Gone. No. Not gone. The islands in that lake of blood wore the same kinds of equipment. Parts of it. What was left of it. All of it crisscrossed with knife wounds and punctured with the red dots of bullet wounds.

Harry stared for three full seconds.

Then he screamed.

 

INTERLUDE TEN

BELL FAMILY ESTATE

MONTAUK ISLAND, NEW YORK

WHEN PROSPERO WAS THIRTEEN

Oscar Bell watched the major as she walked out to her car. Bell leaned against the doorframe and watched her drive off. He was four scotches in and felt more of it than he showed.

Songbirds sang in the trees and overhead a gull whose breast was flawlessly white sailed on the breeze, heading out to sea. Bell stepped down into the yard and strolled across the grass toward the backyard. The expensive play set that had been erected when Prospero was four was still there, cleaned by the yardman but as pristine as the day it was assembled. Prospero had never used it. Not once. Bell took his cell phone out of his pocket and sat down on the saddle of the center of three swings.

His first call was to Dr. Greene. After a quick exchange of meaningless pleasantries, Bell asked, “You mentioned something to me last year and I wanted to clarify it. You said that Prospero had atypical creative drives. Do you remember? You said that there was a definite correlation between his mood and the quality of his creative output. What did you call it? The tortured artist syndrome?”

“That was an off-the-cuff label,” said Greene. “The formal description is—”

“Save the jargon. Explain it to me. Layman's terms.”

“Well,” said Greene, “it's a phenomenon that has been observed in certain cases, particularly with people who have demonstrated artistic abilities coupled with savantism. In short, when Prospero is happy he develops a kind of creative lassitude. He doesn't draw, he doesn't write, and he doesn't even go into the laboratory you made for him in the playroom. In other children freedom from stress sparks creativity. With Prospero there is a paradoxical effect. When he is feeling stressed, or has been in a fight with one of the other boys, or, um, has had, um, difficulties with you, then he is significantly more creative in all aspects. Most notably with his scientific pursuits. That is where his truest passion lies, and I suppose we can theorize that research comforts him. Or, perhaps, it empowers him in times when he feels disempowered. There is a theory that Vincent van Gogh experienced the same kind of thing, hence the nickname of the ‘tortured artist syndrome.' It's not an official label, as I said.”

“Okay,” said Bell, “I get it. Put that in writing. All of the clinical support that you can find on it. I want a thorough report and I want it in seventy-two hours.”

He disconnected before Greene could protest or ask questions.

Bell used his heels to move the swing slowly forward and back.

His second call was to Gunther Stark, commandant of the Ballard Military Boarding School in Poland, Maine.

When that call was ended Bell sat on the swing for nearly an hour. Waiting for his son to come home from school. He sat there, slowly moving back and forth on the relic from a childhood that had never really happened.

Bell tried to hate himself for what he was about to do. He tried.

But no matter how far down he dug in the cold, hard soil of his soul, all he ever found was more darkness and more dirt.

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

IN FLIGHT

OVER THE PACIFIC

AUGUST 20, 6:32
A.M.

I told Top and Bunny about Houston.

It hit them like it hit me. Sick as we were, all three of us were ready to lock and load. We sat there, hurting and trembling with impotence as we watched a live news feed on my laptop. I thought it would look bad. It looked worse. Some of the fires were still burning. The power was back on and the sky was filled with emergency helicopters. News choppers, too, even though they were being pushed back beyond a safety zone. God, how many times would we have to look at scenes like this? In America, around the world? How had terrorism become so powerful while we seemed to be dropping to our knees? Or maybe that was the wrong way to put it. How many times could we be forced to our knees and still manage to get back up?

“Funny,” said Bunny bitterly, “but I always thought it would be a nuke. After nine-eleven, after Atlanta and San Francisco, I figured the next step up would be a nuclear detonation on U.S. soil. Something smuggled in by a North Korean team, maybe; or some Russian cell trying to bring back the Soviet Union. Or the Iranians. But I never figured ISIL for being able to hit us this hard at home. Never.”

“Yeah, well, there's that old thing about assumptions,” grumbled Top. He turned to me. “Did Mr. Church really stand us down for this?”

I nodded. “Right now this is someone else's job. CIA, State Department, every intelligence agency we have, and Bug's team. We have Jerry Spencer and Frank Sessa on the ground in Houston doing forensic evaluation, and Harcourt Bolton's doing deep background for us. We all want someone in the crosshairs, but so far no one from the Islamic Nation has stepped up to own it. The president's moving assets into play, though. If we can connect the dots to ISIL, then this will change the game.”

“Third Gulf War,” said Top.

“Jesus Christ,” murmured Bunny.

I got up and went into the head for a while because my lower intestines wanted to crawl out of my ass. I sat there on the can and put my face in my hands.

All those people. The fuse lit on another war. Where was the end to it? How could we ever hope to put the pin back into the grenade? Was it always going to be like this?

Bad thoughts for a sick man to have. Bad, bad thoughts.

I went back and dropped onto a seat between Top and Bunny. For a long time we sat there, each of us shivering and sweating. Bunny looked like he was falling asleep. His eyes were glassy and unfocused. Top's brown skin had faded to a dusty gray. He met my eyes and nodded to me, conveying a truth, making an agreement. Top's like that. We can say a lot to each other without words.

Aside from the two pilots, we had six team members aboard the plane. Bird Dog and the other equipment handlers, as well as the general crew. All of them were trained as medics, but none of them were doctors. They were clustered together at the far end of the plane, looking at me looking at them. They looked worried, too.

I staggered to my feet and stumbled to the intercom on the bulkhead beside the cockpit door, identified myself, and asked to speak to the pilot.

“I can buzz you in,” he said.

“Negative. Do you have active seals?”

“Yes, sir,” he said crisply.

“Okay, then listen to me, Captain,” I said. “I am initiating a flash-fire protocol. You are hereby ordered to seal the cabin. No one gets in.”

A pause. “Yes, sir,” he said, and despite the typically bland way pilots spoke no matter what was happening, his voice had gone up a full octave.

“I do not want this plane to land in San Diego. They have a biohazard response unit at the Naval Auxiliary Landing Field on San Clemente Island. Get clearance to land us there. But call the Pier and have our big bio-containment module flown over, too. The flight crew will need to be quarantined, too. I don't know if this thing is contagious but no one is going to take chances.”

“Captain Ledger,” said the pilot, “what's happening back there?”

I wiped sweat from my eyes. The interior of the plane was filled with too much light and it seemed to be moving sideways.

“I really don't know,” I said.

 

INTERLUDE ELEVEN

BALLARD MILITARY BOARDING SCHOOL

POLAND, MAINE

WHEN PROSPERO WAS THIRTEEN

Oscar Bell did not enjoy writing checks as large as the one that kept Prospero out of jail, or the one that insured that his son would remain as a student and cadet at Ballard. With each zero his pen gouged deeper into the check and left deep impressions on all the checks beneath it.

He tore off the two checks and tossed them onto the desk of the school's commandant, a withered husk of an old soldier named Gunther Stark.

“He stays,” Bell said flatly. He could afford the repairs, but he'd feel it. He would have to move some holdings around. Ideally he'd find a way to bill Major Sails for it, providing her group accepted his proposal.

Stark glanced down at the checks, inhaled sharply through his nose, and exhaled slowly. Like a man dealing with physical pain.

“Tell me, Mr. Bell,” said the commandant, “have you spoken with your son about this?”

“Of course I have.”

“Did he tell you what he was trying to accomplish?”

“He … may have said something. What of it?”

Stark said, “He used materials and equipment from our lab to build a small-scale particle accelerator. When it was turned on, not only did it destroy a considerable portion of the lab and the surrounding rooms—”

“And you have a check that will make it even better than it was.”