Kill Switch (48 page)

“Want to know what I find curious?” said the president sharply. “That you have the brass balls to talk to me in this manner. Perhaps I need to remind you who is commander in chief and who is a subordinate.”

“I am very much aware of the Washington power structure, Mr. President.”

“Are you? That may require a formal review. If you thought that by calling and insulting me you would somehow reclaim what you justifiably lost, Deacon, then you are very much mistaken. You've mismanaged the powers and authority granted you by my predecessors. If I had any doubts before about putting Harcourt in charge of the DMS, I have none now. In fact I wonder if he's not the most appropriate person to take exclusive directorship of the DMS.”

Mr. Church said, “Since you are being frank with me, Mr. President—and as it seems I can't get further onto your bad side—let me be equally frank with you.”

“Oh, please do. You've got a little bit of rope left.”

“I will give you the benefit of the doubt that you made a decision based on your understanding of the situation as it stood prior to this conversation. I called to help you clarify your vision. We are at a crossroads, you and I. I would hate to see you take the wrong path merely because you dislike me. I would hope your integrity, political sobriety, and good judgment will keep you from making choices that could have unfortunate consequences for the nation we are both sworn to protect.”

“Don't you dare threaten me, you arrogant son of a bitch,” growled the president.

“That was not a threat, Mr. President, though I find it significant that you've chosen to take it as such.”

The line went dead.

The president stared at the phone for a moment.

“Asshole,” he muttered.

Then he bent forward, cleared the line, and made a call.

 

CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE

SEAHAWK PLACE

DEL MAR, CALIFORNIA

FIVE DAYS BEFORE THE PULSE

SEPTEMBER 8, 10:12
P.M.

I had high hopes for a quiet night.

I got home very late and had a nice dinner with Junie. Fish tacos and dirty rice. Then we put the dishes in the sink and moved to the balcony to watch the stars over the ocean. It had been cloudy earlier but now there were stars by the billion.

Junie was in on the case now, and I was free to share the rest of what had happened with her. I told her about Lilith calling Mr. Church with a tip about a new and very mysterious ISIL leader she called the Mullah of the Black Tent.

“I thought that case was taken away from you,” she said.

“Church said he was going to talk to the president about that. Maybe he'll have some good news for me tomorrow.”

She touched my face. “I know you want to get back into this, Joe, but you have to give yourself time to rest.”

“I've had enough rest, thanks,” I said. She didn't like that answer, but she knew how to pick her fights.

The evening rolled on toward night. We talked about Majestic and Gateway. We speculated about Prospero Bell. What was he like? Did he know about her and the other hive kids? She said that Greene seemed to suggest that maybe Prospero wasn't dead, that his death had been faked. It was only an impression, though; she had nothing to base it on. My middle-aged marmalade-and-white tabby, Cobbler, came and sprawled in my lap. Junie was still on her first glass of wine because she had no tolerance at all. I forget how many glasses of bourbon I'd put away. More than my share, but on the whole not enough. Junie wore one of my flannel shirts over a skimpy top and leggings. Her feet were propped on the rail, toes touching mine. We were drifting toward a lazy, let's-go-to-bed silence when my cell phone rang. I grunted in surprise when I saw who the caller was. He wasn't someone who called me except in very rare cases when he couldn't otherwise find Junie. Bemused, I punched the button.

“Toys,” I said.

“Ledger,” he said.

There was a moment of silence, which is how a lot of our conversations start. A moment to assess. I hated him for a long time, and with very good cause. Last year, when the Seven Kings—led by that monster Nicodemus—invaded a hospital in San Diego with the intention of killing Circe O'Tree—Rudy's pregnant wife and Church's daughter—Toys nearly died to protect her. In doing so he helped save Junie's life. Toys was nearly cut to ribbons by broken glass. His body is covered with scars. Afterward, when he was leaving the hospital, I told him that while I still didn't like him and would never forgive him for the crimes he'd committed, he and I were no longer at war.

“Junie's right here,” I said, “hold on and—”

“No,” he said. “I didn't call for her. I called for you.”

“For me? Why?”

“I need your help. I just killed four people,” he said.

 

CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO

CATAMARAN RESORT HOTEL AND SPA

3999 MISSION BOULEVARD

SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA

SEPTEMBER 8, 10:51
P.M.

Toys was sitting on a deck chair outside of his room but stood as we approached. He was dressed in jeans and a Hawaiian shirt, looking exactly like a vacationing tourist unless you looked into his eyes. If eyes are the windows of the soul, then beyond those panes was a bleak and wasted landscape that was devoid of all hope.

“Are you okay?” asked Junie as she hugged him and kissed his cheek.

“I'll live.” He looked at me. “Ledger.”

“Toys.”

No handshakes. We weren't touchy-feely with each other and probably never would be. He didn't try to pet Ghost, either, because Toys is not that stupid.

On the chair next to him was his ragged-looking cat, which eyed Ghost with such obvious disdain that the dislike between them was immediate and palpable. Ghost barely tolerates Cobbler, but his general opinion of cats is that they are chew toys. The cat on the chair probably considered all dogs to be scratching posts. Ah, love.

Toys introduced the cat as “Job,” explaining that the scruffy animal had been through the wringer.

“Lot of that going around,” I said.

Junie reached out a hand to Job, which he sniffed and then rubbed his head against. Ghost looked disgusted and walked over to the closed door of Toys's apartment, took a sniff, and immediately began to growl softly.

I drew my gun and nodded to the door. “Shall we?”

“You won't need that,” said Toys. “All of the drama is past tense. It's not pretty, though.”

“I promise I won't faint,” I said as I reholstered my Sig Sauer.

He gave a half smile. “I meant that for Junie.”

Junie patted his arm. “I'm pretty sure I'm unshockable at this point.”

Even so, Toys shifted to stand in front of the door. “Let Joe go in. Even if you are the Iron Lady, you don't need to see that. I had to, um, encourage one of them to talk to me.”

“I got this,” I said, and pushed past him. The door was unlocked, the lights turned low. I stepped inside and stopped, with Ghost lingering on the threshold, a ridge of hairs standing up along his back. The entire room was a mess and there was blood everywhere. He said that he'd had to encourage one of them. I spotted who that unlucky bastard was right off. He was the one who didn't look human anymore. There was only a small patch of unbloodied rug to stand on and I went no farther in. Everything that could be read was splashed on the walls and written in the taut lines of pain etched into four dead faces. The distinctive freshly sheared copper smell of blood was masked by three burning sticks of temple incense.

The men were dressed in dark suits. On the bed were four microwave pulse pistols.

Closers.

“Ah, shit,” I muttered. I squatted down beside one of them and tore open his shirt, then repeated that on the others. As I suspected, this guy and his chums weren't wearing the super-skivvies. If they had been, Toys would probably be dead. Without touching anything else I withdrew and closed the door behind me. I took a moment to breathe the fragrant night air.

“I told you,” said Toys quietly.

“Tell me what happened,” I said, and he went through all of it, speaking quickly and in low tones. When he got to the part where he questioned the last of the four assassins, he paused and looked down at his hands. They appeared to be very clean, the way flesh looks when it's been scrubbed with furious vigor. My own skin has had that glow a few times over the years. When Grace Courtland died in my arms it took weeks before my hands felt clean of her blood.

“They're Closers,” I said.

Toys nodded. “New to it, though. They hired on a few months ago.”

“Hired by who?” I asked, but then my cell rang. It was Bug.

“Kind of busy at the moment,” I told him.

“Unless you're taking fire, Joe,” he said, “this is more important. I've been searching through all those papers for more on that book inventory. The Unlearnable Truths. And I think I hit gold.”

“I am definitely listening,” I said, holding my hand out to Junie and Toys to be quiet. “Hit me.”

Bug hit me. “This kid Prospero Bell believed that there is a mathematical code hidden in the unlearnable books, right? Well, he wasn't joking. That code is there, and it tells you how to program the power flow so that the God Machine works the way it's supposed to.”

“To open a dimensional gateway,” I supplied, and Toys stared at me, eyebrows raised so far they nearly vanished into his hairline. Junie put a finger to her lips.

“Right,” said Bug, “but it does more than that. With the sequencing code you can regulate any of the Kill Switch devices on the same network. I ran this by Bill Hu and he says that what this means is that if you made a bunch of the Kill Switches, you could position them around an area, switch it on, and everything inside is switched off. Hu thinks that they've been doing this already. Houston and the debate and like that. But Dr. San Pedro's records indicate that these smaller devices are single use. They melt down completely after a few seconds. Now, if you have the master control sequence code, those devices
won't
overheat. You can place them around, say, New York City, switch them on so that everything goes dark, switch them off again, and keep doing that as much as you like. No one has to even be there to run them. And you can keep doing it when the emergency responders get there. You can make this go from bad to worse with the flip of a switch, but only if you have the sequence code.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said. Sweat had begun to pop out all over my body. The implications were … well, staggering. I actually felt the floor tilting under me. And I immediately knew—absolutely 100 percent knew—that we hadn't seen how bad this could get. Not even close.

“You okay, Joe?” asked Bug.

“Not even a little.”

“Well, it gets crazier,” he said, his excitement raising his voice to a mouse squeak. “We're eighty percent sure that Gateway had a spy in Oscar Bell's organization. A guy who Bell hired to obtain the Unlearnable Truths for Prospero but was actually on the payroll for Erskine and company. He used ‘Mr. Priest' as his cover name, but we were able to lift prints from reports he filed, and even though the prints were degraded we ran them through—”

“I don't need the science,” I said. “Give me the damn name.”

“Esteban Santoro. Joe, he's Rafael Santoro's brother.”

Rafael Santoro was the chief assistant—the Conscience—to the King of Fear, Hugo Vox. Santoro was one of the most brutal, sadistic men I've ever encountered. A man who raised coercion to a dark art form. He was also the man who formed and personally trained the Kingsmen, the elite special ops fighters who worked for the Seven Kings. I'd fought the man and he'd nearly killed me. Church made the guy disappear. Not sure if he was alive or dead.

Now we had to deal with his brother.

I said, “You're going to hurt me, aren't you, Bug?”

He cleared his throat. “Esteban Santoro, or Mr. Priest, used to be one of the field operators for the Ordo Fratrum Claustrorum. And when he left them he went to work for Howard Shelton. He was a Closer.”

“Shit.”

“And this guy Priest apparently acquired
all
of the books on Prospero's list.”

“Right, but they were destroyed along with Gateway.”

“The books maybe,” said Bug, “but not the scans.”

I stiffened. “What scans?”

“That's what we found. Priest oversaw a complete scan of the Unlearnable Truths. It was part of their search for the sequencing code.”

“Where are those scans?”

“I'm working on that now. It was outsourced to one of the contractors who worked with Erskine, but we don't know which one. Nikki thinks she'll have that figured out by this morning. Noon at the latest.”

“That's incredible, Bug. You're amazing.”

“No, I'm not. I'm slow. I should have figured this out before now.”

“No, you're amazing. I could kiss you.”

“Please don't.” He paused. “But that lady who works for you…? The one with all the stuffed pandas on her desk? Lydia-Rose? Maybe you could put in a good word for me…?”

I laughed. “Done.”

“Just so you know,” said Bug, “I called this in to the Pier. Mr. Church was busy so I told Mr. Bolton. He's already working on it, too.”

“Nice. Thanks!”

I disconnected the call and turned to Toys. “You were the Conscience to the King of Plagues. You knew Rafael Santoro.”

He flinched and went pale. “Yes.”

“The name you were about to give me when Bug called … was it Esteban Santoro?”

Instead of being surprised he merely looked old and sad. “Yes.”

“What I don't get,” said Junie, touching his arm, “is why they went after you.”