Dead Man's Switch (4 page)

“Or maybe nine three three three. So many choices. Or eight eight two three.”

“So you're just giving me random numbers.”

Johnson shrugged. “Normally you figure things out faster than that. After all, you are the Lyon King.”

It was obvious that Johnson was as mad at King as King was at Johnson. King rarely lost his temper, but right now he was tempted to see if he could fit the iPhone down Johnson's throat. Sideways.

“This is serious,” King said. “The email said—”

“I don't care what the email said,” Johnson told him. “We made a big mistake getting Watt the iPhone. We lied just to buy it and deliver it. And we knew it was wrong when we did it. I told you then and I'll tell you now. When someone pays you two thousand dollars for something that's barely four hundred, there has to be a catch. Especially when the kid is only fourteen and shouldn't have that kind of money. Oh, and let me think…especially when his parents started asking about it after he was gone.”

“We didn't know about the hacker rumors until after,” King said. It was a weak argument, but it was the best he had.

“Well, we know now. We were idiots to get it for him. Why wasn't Blake supposed to have computer access? And that, Kinger, was a
rhetorical question. I don't want to know what Blake was doing with the phone, but it can't be good. Go back down to the rocks and throw it in the water.”

“Okay,” King said.

“Okay?” Johnson was instantly suspicious.

“If you let me tell you about the email. Then I'll let you decide.”

Johnson groaned. “Why do I know I'm going to regret this?”

“The email said, ‘Trust no authorities. They will hunt you too.' That's why I was wondering about the chances of swimming to the other side.”

“That's the perfect way to get your attention,” Johnson said. “You love not trusting authority.”

King took a deep breath to do his best to remain patient. “Mike,” he said, “the email came from Blake. You know, Blake Watt. It was sent to me yesterday morning. But we both know he drowned. We were at his funeral. His parents have already moved off the island.”

“Someone pretended to be him. Playing a joke on you.”

“And shutting down the infrared scanners so I could go into the forbidden zone and find the iPhone? Those rumors about Blake being a hacker…maybe they were true. Remember that it was such a big deal that he wasn't allowed on computers?”

“Forbidden zone?” Johnson's eyes widened. Any kid on the island understood how significant that was. Thermal sensors were set everywhere. If a prisoner actually managed to escape the prison building, cross the electric fence, and scamper into the rugged nature preserve that made up three-quarters of the island, his body heat would give away his location, and the sensors would track his every movement.

King told Johnson about the GPS coordinates and finding the iPhone duct taped to the trunk of a tree, about 20 feet up.

“So someone is messing with you big time. Dead people don't send emails,” Johnson said.

“Did you send it?” King asked Johnson.

“Right. And I hacked into the prison computer system to shut down the scanners.”

“Then it was Blake. The email outlined in detail how we had
purchased the iPhone and smuggled it onto the island. It mentioned the nick in the bevel. Only three people knew. You. Me. And Blake.”

“And the email was dated yesterday? Not before he drowned? Maybe you missed seeing it before.”

“Yesterday. Think I didn't look at the date and time on it 15 times to make sure?”

“Dead people don't send emails,” Johnson said.

“Yes they do,” King said. “It's called a dead man's switch.”

CHAPTER 7

Before continuing with his explanation, King glanced at his watch. In 20 minutes, they needed to be back at their own houses for the six p.m. head count. It wasn't exactly a curfew, but close enough. Since Blake had drowned, all family members of prison employees needed to be accounted for three times a day.

“Dead man's switch,” King repeated. “It's a fail-safe thing. Like with a forklift. If the driver goes unconscious for any reason and his foot leaves the gas or the brake, it automatically shuts off.”

“Blake spent a lot of time on forklifts.”

“Shut up,” King said. He never spoke like that. It got Johnson's attention, and the smirk on Johnson's face died. “The switch is usually wired to break a circuit. It protects locomotives, tractors, chainsaws, a bunch of things like that.”

Johnson nodded, but King could tell he had hurt Johnson's feelings. He would get around to fixing that later. This was too important.

“Sometimes,” King said, “the dead man's switch is not meant to protect, but to threaten. Like for hand grenades. Once the pin is pulled, when someone lets go of the handle to throw it, the switch activates a circuit and the countdown begins to the explosion. A bank robber goes into a bank holding a live grenade, and if somebody takes him down, the grenade goes off. But as long as he's holding the handle against the side of the grenade, nothing goes wrong.”

“If I say anything or ask anything, are you going to yell at me again?”

King shook his head. “You just need to take me seriously. I'm scared.”

“Scared? I've never seen you scared.” Now Johnson looked worried.

“No, you've seen me scared plenty. I just hate showing it. So look at me. I'm scared.”

“Still look the same,” Johnson said, trying a grin. “And I don't want you scared. Because then I'll get scared.”

“You'll get over it. You're scared all the time.”

“I know. Now tell me the rest. This isn't about locomotives or chainsaws or hand grenades.”

“You get the concept, right? The switch is in place to set something off if the person in control of the switch loses control.”

“Loses control. As in—”

King didn't let Johnson finish. He didn't like the word “dead.” He didn't even like saying it to explain a dead man's switch. His mother suddenly was in a coma and might die at any time. Nothing had changed King or his father more than that. Kids around him didn't really understand. To them, dead was what happened to SpongeBob SquarePants or to Wile E. Coyote when he chased the roadrunner in Bugs Bunny cartoons. Horrible, violent things happened to SpongeBob or to the coyote, but a second later, they were put back together and doing cartoon things again.

To King, dead was imagining what it might be like to touch his mother's face in a casket, expecting her skin to be soft and warm and waiting for her to open her eyes and smile. To King, dead was watching his father stand in the open front door of their house every night, looking out into the darkness in utter silence as if King didn't exist in the kitchen behind him, just as lonely.

“There are websites,” King said. “One of them is even named Dead Man's Switch. What happens is you put stuff into an email or a bunch of emails. And if you don't go to the website once a day—or whatever frequency you set up—and put in a password, the emails start going out automatically.”

“Obviously then, Blake set this up before...” Johnson didn't finish the sentence. He was beginning to believe in the reality of this situation. Slowly. The same way King had. “How do you know about all this?”

“Didn't take much,” King answered. “Just a few Google searches.
I checked it out after the first email from Blake. Wiki told me about switches in general, and then I googled for more specifics. That's when I took the instructions in the email seriously.”

Johnson let out a big sigh. “There. You've done it. Given me just enough to drag me into whatever you're doing. Now I have no choice but to ask.”

King waited.

“What did the email say?” Johnson asked.

King reached into his pocket. He had been waiting for this moment. To not be alone. He took out a piece of paper and unfolded it.

“I'll read it to you as we're walking,” King said. “Otherwise we miss head count.”

“Yeah,” Johnson said. “Like we need that reminder about Blake at this point.”

King held the paper and read aloud.

King, if you get this, it means I'm probably dead. SOMETHING CRAZY AND INSANE BAD IS HAPPENING AT NIGHT. TRUST NO AUTHORITIES. THEY WILL HUNT YOU TOO. Print this out and then immediately trash this email and empty the trash on your computer. It might not make a difference because if they find out about this, they can get on the servers and find a copy. So this will be the last email you get from me this way. Everything else will be untraceable. To get the next messages, you're going to need the iPhone. The coordinates are 47° 12' 4” N, 122° 41' 20” W. The tree will have a long wide gash on the north side, about head high. The tree is in the forbidden zone. Once you click on the link in this email, there will be three short windows of time when the infrared scanners will be blocked by a program that I slipped into the prison mainframe: 9 to 11 the morning after you click the link and 9 to 11 each of the two mornings after that. After you get the iPhone, go to Johnson. MJ
knows the password. Just ask him about The Room. I've rigged the phone. Four wrong tries and all data is gone. You will get further instructions from the iPhone after you unlock it.

As King folded it, he was too aware that the bottom of the page was torn. He'd done it, not daring to leave the remainder of the email anywhere in existence.

A more cautious person would have burned the paper after finding the iPhone in the tree. But King wanted to be able to show it to his dad if he was caught in the forbidden zone. He didn't care about anyone else on the island being mad at him. Just his dad.

But King couldn't leave the remainder of the email on the piece of paper for his dad to read. The next part detailed how King and Johnson had smuggled an iPhone to Blake for $2000. That part of the email would have disappointed his dad, and King hated disappointing his dad.

And King didn't want his dad to see the part that really scared him, now that everything else in the email had been correct. It was the part that said if King didn't retrieve the iPhone from the tree and unlock it within 72 hours, another set of emails would begin reaching the websites of every local radio and television station and newspaper with information about a serious crime that involved King's father—the crazy and insane bad thing happening at night on the island.

Johnson asked King to read the email aloud twice more. They were now less than five minutes from the cluster of picture-perfect farmhouses on the picture-perfect island. The last of the sunlight was glowing warm, and fingers of shadows seemed to caress them as they walked down the road.

“What I don't get,” Johnson said, “is why you'd take the chance that the email was right about the infrared scanners being blocked? Yeah, you can believe it came from Blake after you learned about a dead man's switch. But why believe the rest of it? Like that the infrared scanners had been blocked? I mean, really, you think Blake could have arranged something like that?”

“I had my reasons.” Like, King thought, the threat to expose whatever crime his father had committed.

Johnson stopped and put a hand on King's shoulder. “Sorry, Kinger. I'm not going any further on this. You asked me to listen to what the email said, and if I did, you said you'd get rid of the phone. I listened. Get rid of it.”

“I didn't tell you everything about the email,” King said. “There's a part I tore off the page. And it's the reason I went into the forbidden zone. It said if we didn't continue, the media would find out that my dad was part of the crazy and insane bad thing happening at night on the island.”

“It's a bluff,” Johnson said. “Your dad? Ha. Everyone knows he's rock-solid honest.”

King wasn't prepared to test their friendship. He wasn't prepared to ask Johnson to help him prove whether it was a bluff. He didn't want to know if their friendship was strong enough for Johnson to risk all the danger that might be ahead of them just for King and his father. So King prepared himself to look squarely into Johnson's face and lie. He would tell Johnson the truth after they figured out the password.

“Mike,” King said, knowing that he was about to betray his friend by lying, just as he had betrayed his father by believing the email and looking for the iPhone in the tree. “The email also said your father was part of the stuff happening on the island. If we don't get to the next set of instructions before the deadline, the world would learn about his involvement too.”

CHAPTER 8

King's dad was Mackenzie William King—Mack to everybody, including King, who'd been calling his dad Mack ever since King could swing a small baseball bat at the lobs that Mack had loved tossing in the backyard of their small home.

Some 20 years earlier, at a friend's wedding, Mack had met a Canadian girl named Ella Hutchison, a cross-border cousin of the bride. Mack had a reputation then for fighting hard and driving hard, and most people thought it was only a matter of time until his way of living took him into prison. The chance meeting at the wedding had changed things. The instant, utter, crazy, hopeless love at first sight had become family legend. Mack told that to everyone. And after a pause, he added, “She chased me and chased me until I also fell in love with her.”