Kill Switch (3 page)

“What's the hurry for us to get down there?” asked Top. “The neighbors getting cranky?”

“Not exactly,” I said. “Our intelligence says that in the last twenty-eight hours the Russian and Chinese bases have gone dark. No radio, no communication of any kind. Nineteen hours ago our facility also went dark. We're about six hours ahead of the Russian and Chinese investigative teams. Bolton got wind of this from his network but he's in the middle of something else so he called Mr. Church.”

Top grunted. “Do we think it has been taken?”

“Unknown, but on the list of possibilities,” I said. “Gateway isn't a radar outpost anymore and hasn't been for over a decade. But that's where things get muddy. Bug had trouble finding out who actually opened it and what they're doing. We know it's some kind of black budget thing, but we only know that because of how well the details have been hidden. Very little of it is in any of the databases Bug and his geek squad have infiltrated. And like all of that kind of stuff there are lots of things named only by obscure acronyms, and projects identified by number-letter codes instead of names. That makes it tough to find, because something labeled A631/45H doesn't exactly ring alarm bells. Bug needs to have something to go on.”

Top and Bunny nodded. This was familiar—and deeply frustrating—territory for us. Our own government is so large and so compartmentalized, and there's so much bickering, infighting, and adherence to personal and political agendas, that one hand truly does not know what the other is doing. And that gets even murkier when you factor in illegal operations, of which there are many.

“Do we know anything about what they're doing down there?” asked Bunny.

I shrugged. “Not much, and what we do know is because Bolton brought us into the loop. Not sure how he found out.”

“He's Harcourt Bolton,” said Bunny.

“Fair enough. Anyway, we now know the Gateway base is active and apparently serving as a research and development shop. Mr. Church had Bug do a MindReader search on Gateway and so far he's only come up with a few things, but not as much as we'd like.”

“How's it possible we can't find out everything?” asked Bunny. “MindReader can go anywhere.”

“In theory,” I said, “but a lot of people in Washington know that we have MindReader and some of them are pretty stingy with their stuff. Can't blame them. It's not like we are actually allowed to poke our noses everywhere.”

“Yeah,” said Top dryly, “been a whole bunch of stuff on the news the last few years about government overreach. Maybe you read something?”

I ignored him. “The point is that more and more departments are using intranets instead of the public or military networks. Closed systems that can't be accessed from outside. MindReader can't go and hardwire a tap, you know.”

Top punched Bunny on the arm. “That don't mean your browser history is safe yet, Farm Boy, so stop looking at all those naked pictures. Gonna grow hair on your palms.”

“Blow me,” said Bunny.

“There are other ways to hide from MindReader,” I told them. “Paper files instead of computer records. That sort of thing.”

“Still got to be paid for,” said Top. “Operating a research base way down here? Even if it's coded, something like this has to be expensive. Got to be mentioned in the budget somewhere.”

I nodded. “That's what Bug's looking at now, but it's time-consuming.”

“If they ain't a radar station, then what are they doing down there?” asked Top.

“That's the problem,” I told them, “we don't know for sure. The intel is thin. Bolton said his sources believe they're working on some radical technology for renewable energy. Nonnuclear but with a lot of potential. Far as he could tell it was sold to the black budget people as the thing that will take us away from any dependence on foreign oil. Don't ask me what the science is because I don't know and neither does Bolton.”

“If this is energy research,” said Top, “and it's non-nuclear, then why go all the way the hell down to the rectum of the world to develop it?”

“That's what I asked,” I said. “Almost the same words. The short answer is we don't know. Bolton and Bug both found some oblique references to—and I quote—‘side effects resulting in pervasive power outages of limited duration.'”

“EMP?” suggested Bunny.

“Maybe. Dr. Hu said that there have been a number of new energy technologies that have had side effects, and EMPs are on that list. What confuses us all is the ‘limited duration' part. EMPs fry electronics. There's nothing limited about that effect. You have to replace the damaged parts.” I sighed. “So you see our problem—we have bits of intel and the pieces don't fit together. We're not even sure if any of that intel is reliable or even relevant, and we can't get anyone up here to admit to knowing anything about it, and no one down at Gateway will pick up the damn phone. Bug found a code name in the same partial data file that referenced the power outage side effect. Kill Switch.”

“Cute name,” said Bunny, not meaning it.

“If the power outage thing is a reproducible effect, then they may have isolated it in order to develop it into a new classification of directed-energy weapon. Maybe some sort of portable EMP cannon.”

Bunny whistled.

Top frowned. “EMPs,” he muttered in pretty much the way you'd say genital warts. “Been hearing nothing but trash talk about portable EMPs for ten years now.”

“I know,” I said, “but that's the next new technology for the good guys and bad guys. We want them to use as the next generation of missile shields, and to protect against small drones launched by hostiles. The bad guys want to use them against us because everything we put in the field or in the air has a microchip, motor, or battery.”

“That sucks,” said Bunny. “Couple guys sitting in a cave with a portable EMP weapon and suddenly our gunships are dropping like dead birds.”

“Won't just be caves, Farm Boy,” said Top. “Portable is portable. Put those same assholes in a UPS truck in Manhattan and it's lights out for the whole damn city.”

“Well, for some of it,” countered Bunny. “One cannon's not going to flip the switches on a whole city.”

Top spread his hands in a “we'll see” gesture. To me he said, “Washington send us down here to see if the Russians or Chinese been stealing our toys?”

“Unknown,” I said, “but that's an obvious concern.”

Top made a show of looking up and down the otherwise empty hull of the transport. Except for our gear and a modified snowcat we were all alone. “Small team to start a war with a couple of superpowers.”

“Not the plan. There's some concern that a strong military presence might send the wrong message and draw attention when it might not actually be needed. Send in a lot of soldiers and people start wondering what you have to hide. That said, though, Boardwalk and Neptune Teams are five hours behind us. They'll hold back unless we call for them, and the USS
California
is in range in case we need to open a can of industrial-strength whoop-ass. However, the president has asked us to go in first, quick and quiet. No one except the Gateway staff are supposed to know we're here. We don't want anyone or anything connected with Gateway to make the news, feel me?”

Top snorted. “The Chinese and Russians probably have every eye in the sky they own looking at this. This whole area'll probably be featured on Google Earth before we're wheels down.”

“Got to love the concept of ‘secrecy' in the digital age,” said Bunny. “Ten bucks says that some hipster blogger will be there to meet our plane.”

It was almost true, and that was somewhere between sad and scary. With the vertical spike in digital technology, anyone with a smartphone had greater capabilities of discovering and sharing sensitive information with the world than the combined professional world media of ten years ago. Social media could be used for a lot of good things, but it'd turned everyone into a potential spy or source. And, yeah, I really do know how paranoid that sounds, but it is what it is. I'm a cheerleader for the First Amendment except when I'm in the field, at which point I have the occasional Big Brother moments. My shrink is never going to go broke.

Top asked, “We have thermal scans of our base and the others?”

“They're next to useless,” I said. “The mountains there are thick with metal ores, so that screws things up.”

Top sat back and folded his arms. He had dark brown skin crisscrossed with pink scars. Most of them earned since he's been working for me. “Seems like they're throwing us into a situation about which we have shit for intel.”

“Pretty much,” I said.

“The day must end with a
Y,
” muttered Bunny.

I opened my laptop and called up a few random images of Gateway that Bolton and Bug had each found. There were some preliminary floor plans that might as well have been labeled
GENERIC LAB
, and some photos taken by satellite showing unhelpful pictures of prefab buildings nestled against a snow-covered mountain.

Bunny made a face. “We could give an Etch-a-Sketch to a rhesus monkey and he'd come up with better intel.”

“No doubt,” I said. “Bug found some shipping manifests that at least tell us what's been brought out there. Lab equipment, drilling gear, six generators—two active, two emergency backups, two offline in case—and all of the other stuff necessary for establishing a moderately self-sufficient base. Staff of seventy. Ten on the science team, twenty support staff that includes cook, medical officer, site administrator, and some engineers. The rest are military but we don't know what branch, so I asked Bug to run a MindReader deep search to find out. We're waiting on additional intel now.”

The whole DMS was built around the MindReader computer system. Without it we'd be just another SpecOps team. MindReader had a superintrusion software package that allowed it to do a couple of spiffy things. One thing it did was look for patterns by drawing on information from an enormous number of sources, many of which it was not officially allowed to access. Which was the second thing. MindReader could intrude into any known computer system, poke around as much as it wanted, and withdraw without a trace. Most systems leave some kind of scar on the target computer's memory, but MindReader rewrote the target's software to completely erase all traces of its presence. Bug was the uber-geek who ran MindReader for the DMS. I sometimes think Bug believes that MindReader is God and he's the pope.

Bunny asked, “What happens if we knock on their door and some goon from the People's Liberation Army Special Operations Forces answers?”

“Then all of us become a footnote in next year's black budget report,” I said.

Bunny sighed. “Like I said … this only happens to us on days ending in a
Y.
”

I wish I could call him a liar.

 

INTERLUDE TWO

OFFICE OF DR. MICHAEL GREENE

EAST HAMPTON, NEW YORK

WHEN PROSPERO WAS ELEVEN

“Why do you hate your father?” asked Dr. Greene.

“You've met him,” said Prospero. “You tell me.”

“Let's focus on your feelings.”

Prospero Bell sat cross-legged on the couch. He'd spent time setting the angles of his knees and ankles just so. He still wore his green jacket with the gray hoodie underneath. Each time he showed up for a new session there was more detail in the monster on the hood, and he'd begun adding colors to indicate light through water, as if the monster were submerged beneath a sunlit sea.

Prospero sighed. Heavily and dramatically. “Look, it's not that complicated a thing and it's wasting my time. But, since you're probably going to badger me until I talk about it, here it is. Do I hate my father? Yes. Is it because he divorced my mom? No. Mom's a complete wacko. I love her and I can't even stand to be around her. So, no, it's not that. So why can't I stand him? Gosh, let me think. How about the fact that he's always mean to me. Always. He hates me and he doesn't mind showing it.”

“Your father loves you, Prospero.”

“Oh, please. I'm young but I'm not stupid. It's not me he loves. It's this.” Prospero tapped his head. “He loves what's up here because he knows it can make him a lot of money.”

“Your father is a very intelligent man,” said Greene.

“Sure, but I'm smarter by at least an order of magnitude. We all know it. And I'm getting smarter all the time. And, sure, Dad's smart, but he only uses his brains to build weapons of war. Am I against war? Not really. Wars happen. But to spend your life making it easier to kill people, and easier for very few people to kill large numbers of people, then, yeah, I don't like that.”

“Because of the potential for loss of life?”

Prospero's green eyes seemed to look straight through him. “No. I don't care about people. I'm not one of them.”

“Then why?”

“Because it's a waste of intellectual opportunity.”

“Fair enough,” said Greene, interested. “What else?”

“Well, Dad doesn't believe in anything. Not God or a larger world. Nothing. And he hates it because I do. He thinks it's a waste of my time. A distraction. He'd rather me spend all my time in the lab.” Prospero snorted. “Have you seen the latest upgrades to my lab? Dad broke through the wall so that I now have the entire basement. All of it. He got rid of his billiards room to put in new sequencers and to give me table space to build whatever I want.”

“That's very generous.”

Prospero shook his head. “I kind of like you, Doc, so I'm going to pretend you're not that naïve. We both know that Dad will keep giving me as much scientific equipment as he can cram into the house in the hopes that I make another toy for him.”