Kill Switch (2 page)

“I never said I was mad at you,” said the boy. He was eleven and his voice was beginning to deepen. No cracks or squeaks, just a timbre that hinted at the baritone to come.

“You threw an apple at me last Thursday,” said Greene.

“It was handy.”

“That's not my point.”

Prospero gave him a microsecond of a sly grin. “I know.”

“Then—”

“I didn't want to talk about my father anymore and you wouldn't shut up. I didn't hit you with the apple.”

“You tried. I ducked.”

“No,” said Prospero, “I missed. The fact that you ducked says more about you than my ‘missing' says about my aim. I wanted to miss. You didn't want to duck, but you did anyway because you didn't know that I wouldn't have hit you.”

Today the boy wore a green cloth jacket that he had systematically covered with symbols from cabalism, magic, and alchemy. Greene knew this because there had been three full sessions about those designs. Now there was a gray hoodie under the jacket, the top pulled up to throw shadows down over Prospero's thin, ascetic face. The boy had painstakingly drawn an elaborate and technically excellent monster on the hood. The thing had a bulbous, flabby body, stubby wings, and a beard made from writhing tentacles that trailed from the gray hood onto the green material of the jacket.

Greene met with Prospero three times a week, down from the five talks per week that marked the boy's most extreme phases, up from the twice weekly of last year when Prospero seemed to be balancing out. Greene was therapist for the whole Bell family, including the father, Oscar Bell, a major defense contractor; Oscar's current wives; and his long line of ex-wives. Greene also did occasional check-ins with Prospero's older brother from Oscar's first marriage. Greene's sessions with the rest of the family were routine, sparse, and almost pointless. They didn't need him and he privately found them intensely dull. The older boy was a clone of his father and would doubtless become fabulously wealthy building secret, terrible things for the American military. As the Bell family had since the Civil War.

Of all the Bells, Prospero was the one who logged frequent-flyer miles on Greene's therapy couch.

Greene asked, “What would you have done if I wanted to keep talking about your father after you threw that apple?”

Prospero shrugged.

“No,” said Greene, “tell me.”

The boy nodded to the coffee table. “There were five other apples in the bowl. I can throw pretty good.” He shrugged again, point made.

There was no bowl on the table now. There was nothing there, not even magazines. Greene was moderately sure the boy wouldn't throw the table itself.

“Is it your opinion that hitting me with an apple is the best way for us to proceed?”

“We didn't have that conversation, did we?”

Even after all these years and all these sessions it still unnerved Greene that Prospero never spoke in an age-appropriate way. He never had. Even when he was five years old his intellect and self-possession were remarkable. Or maybe “freakish” was a more accurate term, though Greene would never put that in any report. Freak. It was the best word, then and now.

Prospero Bell was a freak.

None of the tests Greene or his colleagues had administered had been able to accurately gauge the boy's intelligence. Best guess was that it was above 200. Perhaps considerably above that, which lifted him above the level of any reliable process of quantification. Prospero had completed all of his high school requirements last year at age ten, and passed each test with the highest marks. The boy's aptitude was odd, though. Savantism is generally limited to a few specific areas—math, say, or art. Occasionally a cluster. But Prospero seemed to excel at everything that interested him, and his interests were varied. World religions, folklore, anthropology relative to belief systems, art, music, mathematics in all its aspects, science, with a bias toward quantum and particle physics.

He was now eleven.

But he was also deeply read in areas that were built on less stable scientific ground—cryptozoology, metaphysics, alchemy, surrealist art, pulp horror fiction. The boy was all over the place. The rate at which Prospero was able to absorb information was only surpassed by his ability to both retain and process it. He had a perfect eidetic memory, and it seemed genuine, without any of the mnemonics of someone who uses tricks or triggers to recall data. Prospero never forgot a thing he learned, and because he was so observant that meant that he possessed an astounding body of personal knowledge. Greene had given Prospero tests to determine what kind of intellect the boy had, but the results had been confounding. Prospero had marked fluid intelligence—indicating that he was able to reason, form concepts, and solve problems using unfamiliar information or novel procedures—but he scored equally high in crystallized intelligence, which meant that he possessed the ability to communicate his knowledge, and had the ability to reason using previously learned experiences or procedures. People seldom scored that high in both aspects. And he did just as well with long- and short-term memory, memory storage and retrieval, quantitative reasoning, auditory and visual processing, and others.

Greene felt that his “freak” diagnosis was the most clinically accurate assessment. There was a lot of savantism in the world, but there was no one like Prospero Bell. The question that burned hottest in Greene's mind was what the boy would do with all of that brainpower. He had hinted that he had a plan, but so far had kept that secret to himself.

Prospero's intense hatred and distrust of his father was a common topic for them, and the old man wanted Greene to determine the best way for the elder Bell to gain the trust of his son. Not the love. All that mattered to Oscar Bell was a useful trust.

But that was only a secondary goal for Greene and he didn't devote much time to it. Instead he focused on something he found far more interesting. It was also the thing that most deeply concerned Prospero.

Prospero was absolutely convinced that he was not human. Not entirely.

And he was equally convinced that he was not from this world.

 

CHAPTER THREE

SEVENTY MILES NORTH OF THE VINSON MASSIF

ANTARCTICA

AUGUST 19, 10:01
P.M.

“What's the op, Boss?” asked Bunny, the big kid from Orange County who looked like a plowboy from Iowa. His dog tags said he was Master Sergeant Harvey Rabbit, but not even his parents called him by his first name. Bunny was the muscle and in many ways the heart of Echo Team. “Those ISIL shooters find a two-for-one sale on snowshoes?”

“Funny,” I said. “But no.”

We were aboard an LC-130 Hercules, a big military transport plane fitted out with skis. None of us liked the fact that our plane had to have skis. I had a third of Echo Team with me. Two operators: Bunny and Top—First Sergeant Bradley Sims. My right and left hands.

“We going way down south to get out of the summer heat?” drawled Top.

“This is a look-see,” I told them. “This gig is a handoff from our friends in the CIA.”

“We're all going to die,” said Bunny.

“There's a bright side,” I told him. “The quarterback who handed it off was Harcourt Bolton.”

Both Top and Bunny came instantly to point, grinning like kids.

“Seriously?” said Bunny, wide-eyed. “Wow. We made it to the pros.”

“I thought he retired,” said Top. “Glad to hear he's still in the game.”

Guys like us don't much go in for hero worship. The exception is when the hero in question is someone like Harcourt Bolton. If America has ever had an agent on par with the movie version of James Bond, then it's Bolton. He's the spy's spy. Cool, suave, sophisticated, incredibly smart, and very capable. I may be one of Uncle Sam's top shooters, but Bolton is the Agency's sharpest scalpel. And it's not too much of a stretch to say I'm captain of his fan club. Harcourt Bolton, Senior, was someone I knew very well. Or, should I say, I knew
of
very well. His role as a semicelebrity gazillionaire philanthropist, entrepreneur, and notorious playboy was tabloid legend. He was like Tony Stark or Bruce Wayne—a rich man who always seemed to be caught in a paparazzi photo with this year's supermodel while spending his days investing in worthy causes to better humanity. It was the kind of superstar status that never seemed quite real, because how could someone be that rich, that lucky, that smart, and that generous all in one lifetime?

That's the Bolton the general public knew. I've heard my lover, Junie Flynn, talk about getting him involved in some FreeTech ventures in developing countries. Using money and technology to save whole villages.

My guys and I knew the other side of him, however. We knew that the Bruce Wayne cover was just that. A cover. A brilliant cover, actually, because just as Bruce Wayne had that darker vigilante side with an obsession for flightless mammals of the family Chiroptera, there was a hidden side to Harcourt Bolton. He was, by anyone's estimation, the greatest spy who has ever worked for the Central Intelligence Agency. That is saying a lot. No matter what the public perception is of the CIA, they are not, on the whole, a clown college. There is a very effective little office within the CIA that makes sure the Company is regarded from a skewed perspective, because it lowers the expectations of the bad guys.

The other side to Bolton's career was the above-top-secret operations, the real 007 stuff. Like infiltrating and destroying a secret North Korean missile base that was primed to detonate the Cumbre Vieja volcano, which would have sent five hundred cubic kilometers of rock into the Atlantic Ocean, resulting in a two-thousand-foot-high tsunami. It would have wiped out the African coast, Southern England, and then the eastern seaboard of North America.

Then there was the bioweapons lab buried four stories beneath a Siberian work camp. Bolton went in alone, killed sixteen people, and blew the lab pretty much into orbit.

And the time he ripped apart a coalition of rogue Saudi princes who were financing ISIL. Bolton wore a disguise, spoke flawless Arabic, forged perfect credentials, and once he had ingratiated himself with the group, he shot all seven of them and uploaded a computer virus that stole their data and destroyed the target computers.

I could go on.

And on. I could obsess and go full-tilt fanboy on him. I would buy an action figure of Harcourt Bolton and, yes, I would take it out of the package and play made-up adventures with it. If someone told me he could turn water into wine, my only question would be whether it was red or white. And the answer would probably be the 1982 Pichon Longueville Comtesse de Lalande. Not because it's the most expensive, which it's not, but because while the 1982 is not a classic Bordeaux, it has an over-ripe, exotic quality that he's discovered would make any woman on Earth instantly disrobe. That's how Bolton would do it. Guys like him walk on water and make the rest of us look like grubby amateurs. Even my personal hero, the late, great Samson Riggs, couldn't hold a candle to him.

Bolton was the top field operator for a lot of years. Much longer than most guys manage it. He never seemed to want to retire and I could understand that. When you're at the top of your game—especially this game—there's a real fear that if you head to the showers and let a newer, younger, and less experienced player step up to bat, then he won't know better than to swing at fastballs and sliders. You stay in the game because you know it better than the other guys. Or at least you think you do. Maybe it's an ego thing—and that's got to be a chunk of it—but you know how far you've gone in the past to take the bad guys down, you know the tricks that worked for you time and again, and you don't want to take that skill set out of play. It's why so many guys like us die out there, caught in the moment when age and experience can't make up for the fact that you've lost a step getting to first base. You fall, and maybe your arrogance and fear drags someone else down, too. Maybe a lot of people. But how can you not risk it?

Bolton risked it, and he had a couple of missions go south on him. Luckily the DMS was there to back his play when things fell apart. I was the relief pitcher on the last two of Bolton's operations. I got the saves and the DMS got the credit, even if it was only an off-the-radar pat on the back by the president.

Bolton was done as a field op, though. His team was reassigned and he was given a nice desk in a nice office and people were very nice to him. Which must have been hell for a guy like him.

However, anyone who thought Bolton would just walk off the field and go sit on a porch at the Old Spies Retirement Home was sadly mistaken. Because he's a class act, and maybe an actual superhero, he shifted his gears and over the last few years he's worked his old network of contacts to get mission intel for younger CIA turks, and even for the DMS. Serious intel. If he'd been regarded as a superspy before, you can double that since then. His network was so deeply embedded in the global underworld that none of us could figure out how he did it. Someone hung a nickname on him that got some traction. Mr. Voodoo. If Harcourt Bolton says something hinky is happening—even if no one else has heard a peep about it—then you lock and load. So if he passed along intel on this job, it was on us to nut up and earn that level of professional respect.

“I'll give it to you the way I got it,” I said. “The mission has two layers. Our cover story is a surprise inspection to evaluate the status of a research base designated ‘Gateway.' This is a repurposed facility. The original Gateway was an old radar station from the early Cold War era. Satellites made it mostly obsolete so it was closed up. Operative word is ‘was.' The base was built at the foot of Vinson Massif, the tallest mountain in Antarctica. The Russians and Chinese both have research stations in the same region.”