Kill Switch

 

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Table of Contents

About the Author

Copyright Page

 

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This is for Carol & Bill Galante, Lisa Brackmann,

and for Dana Fredsti & David Fitzgerald.

And, as always, for Sara Jo.

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As always I owe a debt to a number of wonderful people. Thanks to John Cmar, director, Division of Infectious Diseases, Sinai Hospital of Baltimore; Dr. Steve A. Yetiv, Professor of Political Science, Old Dominion University; Michael Sicilia, formerly of California Homeland Security; the International Thriller Writers; my literary agents, Sara Crowe and Harvey Klinger; all the good folks at St. Martin's Griffin: Michael Homler, Joe Goldschein; and my film agent, Jon Cassir of Creative Artists Agency. Thanks to Patrick Seiler of the Raymond James Group; Doug Davis and the wonderful people of Kearny Pearson Ford in San Diego; Krisztal Alexis Garcilazo; Kevin J. Bartell; Patrick Freivald; Ralph Morgan Lewis; astronomers Lisa Will, David Lee Summers, Philip Plait, and David McDonald; and Jake Witkowski (creator of the Joe Ledger Heart Attack Sandwich). Thanks to Chris Wren, Daniel Foley, Paul Bosworth, David James Keaton, Lisa Kastner, Thom Brennan, and Robert Gregg Barker, for technical information.

Thanks and congrats to the winners of the various Joe Ledger contests: Jay Faulkner, Tom Erb, Sinh Taylor, Joseph Capozzi, Tricia Owens, Otis Carlisle, Diane Sismour, James Florida, Will Divine, Christel Sparks, Linda and Sheldon Higdon, and Lou Emanuele. Thanks to Tony Eldridge of Lone Tree Entertainment and Dotonna Isham of Vintage Picture Company.

 

PROLOGUE

Where were you when the lights went out?

That's the question, isn't it?

What's your answer?

Were you caught by the dark, frozen into the moment, suddenly reminded that civilization and the comfort of infrastructure are just a garment we wear? A fragile convenience. Did the sudden dark remind you that all of the things we expect to be there for us, to protect us, shelter us, provide for us, are fleeting and finite?

Were you one of the cynical ones, the doomsday-prepper types who saw everything go dark and, for one moment, stood there with a smug smile, gratified by the substance of your own prophecy? And then a moment later it caught up to you that there are a great number of things about which you never want to be right.

Did you think it was all a mistake? An error? A fault in the system, or bad wiring in the grid? You were absolutely sure someone was going to come and fix it.

Any.

Second.

Now.

Were you one of the unlucky ones who slept through the first hours of it, accepting darkness as ordinary and correct, only to be called awake by something we civilized people have forgotten about? Silence.

Did you try your cell? Your landline? Your laptop? Did you go old school and turn on the TV only to find that the cable was as dead as the lights?

There was a moment, wasn't there? When you realized that the lights weren't coming back on. That maybe they wouldn't. That maybe they couldn't.

What did you feel right then, at that moment when the truth whispered to you from the darkness?

What was the content of your thoughts, the constituents of your prayers?

Tell me.

When it all went dark, did you think it would last?

And last?

Or did you think—as so many did—that this was the end? The actual “it.” The stopping place, not just of the world as it was, but of your life as you needed to live it?

In that moment, what did you think? What did you believe?

Where were you when the lights went out?

Me?

I was trying to keep those lights on. Trying to hold a candle in the darkness. Losing ground with every step.

And when the lights went out I fell into the big, bottomless black.

 

PART ONE

THE GOD MACHINE

Stars, hide your fires;

Let not light see my black and deep desires.

—William Shakespeare

Macbeth

 

CHAPTER ONE

THE PIER

DMS SPECIAL PROJECTS OFFICE

SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA

For the record, I don't believe in this stuff.

No goddamn way.

There's possible, there's improbable, there's weird, and there's no-fucking-way. This is a mile or two past that. So, no, I don't believe in it.

What pisses me off is that it seems to believe in me.

 

CHAPTER TWO

THE PIER

DMS SPECIAL PROJECTS OFFICE

SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA

AUGUST 19, 11:41
A.M.

I was four minutes away from calling it a day and cutting out early to catch an Orioles-Padres game at Petco Park here in San Diego. Hot dogs loaded with everything that's bad for me, ice-cold beer in big red cups, and the opportunity to spend a few hours yelling at a bunch of young millionaires trying to hit a little ball with a big stick. Baseball, baby. The American pastime.

It was the first game I'd managed to catch since the craziness at Citizen's Bank Park last year. You know what I mean. The drone attacks on opening day. I'd spent a lot of the rest of the spring in hospitals. A bunch more time in rehab, then way too much sitting behind a desk doing paperwork and feeling my ass grow flat. Then I went back into the field and since then I've done nothing but run.

The Big Bad for us right now was ISIL. The press writes about them like they're a disorganized goon squad who are only a threat to the notoriously unstable governments in the Middle East. They're not. They're a whole lot scarier than that. Most of the people running them are former officers from Saddam's army. These are experienced soldiers who have been nurturing grudges. That was bad enough, but now they've upped their game and have put several special ops teams in the field. Real pros, too, and they managed to scoop up leftover Kingsmen from the ruins of the Seven Kings organization. Was it weird that ISIL was using shooters who were not Muslims? Yup. Very weird. And very scary, too, because it allowed them to come at us in unpredictable ways. A bunch of their SpecOps fighters were Americans, so even with the heightened security and paranoia here in the States following the drone stuff, we were feeling some rabbit punches from them. Attacks on power grids, an attempted sabotage of a nuclear power plant. Like that.

And our super-duper computer system, MindReader, has been picking up some hints about a really big attack planned for the US of A, and if the rumors were true then it was going to involve some kind of electromagnetic pulse weapon.

So, yeah … bad guys. Really
scary
bad guys, and they were causing a whole lot of very serious trouble. We had DMS teams running joint ops with the CIA and Homeland, with Barrier in the UK, with Mossad in Israel, and with a dozen other special operations crews.

Overall, I was busier than a three-headed cat in a dairy. That's not to say I spent all of my time in the field kicking terrorist ass. Mind you, I'm still a gunslinger for Uncle Sam, but now that I run the Special Projects Office I'm also management, which sucks six kinds of ass.

Baseball kept calling to me, though, and today was the first time I could reasonably justify leaving the shop early to have some actual fun.

The phone began ringing while I was tidying my desk.

If you work in a bank, an insurance company, or pretty much most jobs, you can pretend you don't hear that call. I know cops at the ragged end of a long shift who swear their radios were malfunctioning.

But when you do what I do, you have to drop everything else—your time off, your family, your friends, even baseball—and you take the call. Kind of like the Bat-Signal. You can't just blow it off.

So I answered the call.

It was my boss, Mr. Church.

“Captain Ledger,” he said, “I need you on the next thing smoking. Dress warm, it's going to be cold.”

I looked out the window. This was August and the Southern California summer was cooking. Temperature was eighty-eight in the shade. I was wearing shorts, flip-flops, and a Hawaiian shirt with surfing pelicans on it.

“How cold?” I asked.

“This morning it was minus fifty-eight.”

I closed my eyes.

“I hate you,” I said.

“I'll manage to live with your contempt.”

“Okay,” I said, “tell me.”

 

INTERLUDE ONE

OFFICE OF DR. MICHAEL GREENE

EAST HAMPTON, NEW YORK

WHEN PROSPERO WAS ELEVEN

“Are you going to talk today?” asked the psychiatrist. “Or are you still mad at me?”

The boy sat in the exact middle of the couch even though it was not the most comfortable place. He was like that, preferring precision over comfort. It was reflected in the number of pieces of food he would allow on his dinner plate, the number of tissues he would use no matter how many times he sneezed. Numbers mattered in ways that Dr. Greene was still discovering. So far the psychiatrist had been able to determine that Prospero Bell believed that math, in all its forms, was not merely a way to calculate sums, but was in fact tied to the very structure of physical reality. He'd even made himself a hand-drawn T-shirt last year that had a quote from mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss: “God arithmetizes,” itself a variation of a quote Plutarch famously attributed to Plato: “God geometrizes continually.”

Prospero was very tall for his age, but thin as a stick. As he perched on the couch, his long body seemed to be temporarily suspended, as if he was about to slide down between the two big leather cushions but chose not to fall. Always awkward and always strange, and he did not seem to ever fit into the world as it was. Dr. Greene knew that this reflected the boy's inner life. After four years of therapy, the doctor was quite convinced that this boy lived in two entirely separate worlds. The one inside, where Prospero clearly felt he belonged, and the one outside that he loathed and resented. That discomfort, and the resulting disconnect from ordinary social interactions, was the basis of their frequent sessions.