Kill Switch (36 page)

I stiffened. “What are you talking about? What kind of precedent?”

Mr. Church said, “Certain elements of your account—and those of your team—parallel elements of a story that is very popular among devotees of a certain kind of pulp horror fiction. Have you ever heard of, or possibly read, the short novel
At the Mountains of Madness
by the writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft?”

“Sure, I heard of Lovecraft, but I don't read much horror. Never read that book. Was there a movie?”

“The novel was written in 1931 and published in 1936 in a pulp magazine called
Astounding Stories
. It was very popular and has been reprinted in book, e-book, and audio form many times since. Circe tells me that the story helped popularize the concept of ‘ancient astronauts' as well as Antarctica's place in that cycle of myths.”

I lunged at that. “Well, maybe they're not myths. We saw that city, and, let's face it, we're not exactly as skeptical of little green men in spaceships as we used to be.” I gave him a hard look. “Are we?”

I wasn't making a joke.

A few years ago we in the DMS had been forced to adjust our thinking about the possibility of extraterrestrial life. We no longer had the luxury of being knee-jerk skeptics. Not anymore. Church and I both knew that our world had become substantially larger during the Majestic Black Book case. We'd stumbled onto a covert arms race between a secret cabal within our defense department called Majestic Three and their opposite numbers in China, North Korea, and Russia. They were all trying to reverse engineer exotic technologies from crashed vehicles. And by “vehicles,” I'm not talking about anything with a local license plate. Start with Roswell and work from there and you'll climb into the same boat. Majestic Three, or M3 as they were more commonly known, were so far off the radar that even the DMS thought they were only some kind of pop culture conspiracy myth.

Not so much a myth, as it turned out.

The three “governors” of M3 were top-grade scientists who were preparing to launch a fleet of triangle-winged super-speed T-craft that they wanted to use to start, and win, a war with the other superpowers. They had lots of weird science culled from those crashed ships, and it gave them a real edge for a while. Echo Team went up against M3's own special ops guys, a group of—no joke—men in black. Called themselves the “Closers,” and they had all sorts of nasty gadgets including these nifty little microwave pulse pistols. Not exactly rayguns but close enough.

The kicker was that the original owners of that tech—who we never got to actually see—made it clear that they wanted their toys back. Specifically they wanted the design science for the T-craft, which was all kept in a special handwritten journal. The Majestic Black Book. The governors of M3 kept that book well protected, and a lot of the hard science was recorded only in it. They didn't trust the security of computers, even those that weren't attached to landlines or Wi-Fi.

E.T. and his buddies bullied us into recovering the Black Book. We did, and the original was turned over. I wasn't there for that part of the job. I'd taken some gunshot wounds during the big, messy finale. By the time I got out of the hospital the Majestic Black Book case was over. Since then none of us have heard a peep from anyone who doesn't have “Earth” as point of origin on his passport.

Now … there was this crazy stuff in Antarctica.

Church sighed. “It's a troubling matter.”

I laughed. “Yeah, you could say that. And you weren't attacked by a mutant penguin. Have you seen Bunny's face?”

“I have.”

“Speaking of Bunny … where is he? Where's Top? Where's everybody?”

“Most of our teams are out on assignment. You can talk over the specifics with Harcourt later. As for First Sergeant Sims and Master Sergeant Rabbit, they are on light duty. I have them out collecting evidence from the offices of the scientists who were killed down at Gateway.”

“They okay?”

Church made one of his rare jokes. “Shaken, not stirred.”

I laughed louder than the joke deserved. Ghost woke up again, looked around, saw there was nothing to eat or bite, farted very loudly, and went back to sleep. Church, without comment, went and opened a window. The sea air was nice. Bastion jumped off his chair, climbed up to the windowsill, and sat there watching the pelicans.

 

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

55 WEST B STREET

SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA

SEPTEMBER 8, 8:25
A.M.

The blast picked Bunny and Top up like the hand of a fiery giant and slammed them into the opposite wall. The force hit the man in the dark suit, too, but he was already falling, struck at the same instant by bullets fired from both DMS agents' guns. Everyone went down. The gunman toppled backward through the doorway, but Top and Bunny slammed into the wall and then crashed to the floor.

It was all very fast, very noisy, and very painful.

Top coughed and tried to blink his eyes free. His gun was gone and he began frantically slapping the floor to find it. Found it under a piece of burning wallpaper, swatted the flames away, grabbed the gun, fumbled it back into his hands. All in a wild moment while his brain tried to process what was happening. The hall was filled with choking dust and burning rubble. The heat was immense and Top shimmied away from the flames that were spreading across the far wall.

A shape rose in the gloom. Massive and hunched, and it took Top's dazed brain a second to realize that it was Bunny, staggering to his feet, his gun clutched in his fist, blood streaming down his face from between ruptured stitches.

“Motherfucker!” bellowed the young giant. “Top? Top—are you alive, you old bastard?”

“Kiss…,” gasped Top, “my black … ass.”

Bunny grabbed him with his free hand and pulled Top up. The door to San Pedro's office stood open, the wood nicked and charred. Both men raised their weapons.

“That was a fucking microwave pulse pistol,” growled Bunny.

“I know.”

“That fucking guy was a—”

“I know.”

“—fucking Closer.”

“I know.”

The fear was there for Top to hear in his own voice.

A Closer.

One of the elite group of trained killers who worked for the warped scientist who had developed the MPP handguns as well as a long list of other even more deadly weapons.

But Howard Shelton was dead.

His organization, Majestic Three, was gone. Torn down by the DMS. Top and Bunny had both been there when that group was ripped apart.

The Closers had been killed or arrested. Employment records from M3 had helped the DMS and the FBI track them all down. There were no Closers anymore. There was no M3 anymore. And no one had MPP pistols.

No one.

Except …

“Fuck me,” said Bunny as he began inching toward the open door.

“No,” said Top, “fuck them.”

His fear was still there, but now anger was burning hotter than the flames that were eating the wall behind them.

“What's the play?” asked Bunny.

“Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke,” said Top. He reached into his jacket, produced a micro-FB, flipped the arming switch with his thumb, and hurled it side-arm through the doorway.

The new generation of flash-bangs were tiny, less than a fifth the size of the M84 stun grenades used by the military. But the flash and the bang were 30 percent larger.

The explosion rocked the room and made the dividing wall shudder as if it had been rammed by a truck. The sprinklers overhead kicked on and the whole hallway was caught in a rainstorm.

“Go, go, GO!” yelled Top and they were up and running, moving around the edge of the doorway, pointing their guns, following their barrels into the room, cutting left and right, seeking targets.

The Closer who had shot at them was on the floor, his face scrunched up with pain, eyes blinking as he tried to see, his MPP held up in a two-hand grip as he fired blindly.

TOK!

TOK!

TOK!

The superheated microwave blasts tore the room apart.

Literally tore it apart. Desks and filing cabinets exploded into burning clouds of metal splinters and blazing paper. The whole doorway disintegrated into a cloud of superheated gas. Top once more felt himself lifted and thrown like a doll. He crashed into an oak desk, rebounded, and fell hard onto the floor. The world swirled around him like toilet water after a hard flush, and he fought to hang on to his gun and to his consciousness.

Bunny was somewhere on the other side of a cloud of burning dust, cursing and grunting. Top could hear the sound of a vicious fight as vague shapes moved in an awkward ballet.

The Closer got to his feet and swung the MPP toward him. His face was lined with pain from the flash-bang, and blood ran from both ears, but his eyes had cleared and there was a cruel smile on his hard mouth.

He said a single word as he raised his gun to fire.

“Sims.”

Top shot him six times. Three to the chest, but that only staggered the man, and Top remembered that the Closers wore a micro-mesh undergarment that was harder to penetrate than Kevlar and whose structure nullified most of the foot-pounds of impact. The 9mm rounds drove him backward but didn't put him down.

The next three shots went into his face.

The cruel grin disintegrated into red nothingness and the rounds punched through the back of his skull, pulling streams of blood and brain matter behind them. The Closer went down and Top rolled onto his knees, sweeping around to find Bunny. Immediately he had to throw himself to one side as a figure came hurtling through the smoke toward him.

A big figure with blond hair, and for a terrible moment Top thought that it was Bunny.

But it was not.

This man was a stranger and unless Top read his autopsy report he would remain one. His head was twisted more than halfway around, and his eyes bulged with shocked awareness at how this day had ended so much differently than he expected. The big body landed hard and lay immobile.

By then Top was up and moving, running into the smoke.

He saw the third Closer and he saw Bunny.

The man saw him, too, and Top could see his eyes, could see the quick calculation of his eyes. The man knew he could not win this fight. Or maybe he did not want to roll those dice.

So he did something that Top would have thought impossible.

The man ducked under a looping right from Bunny that would have dropped a bull, grabbed the big young man by the arm and belt, picked him up, and hurled him at Top as easily as Top might have tossed a small suitcase. The man did not even grunt with the effort of lifting 240 pounds of solid muscle.

Top tried to get out of the way.

Tried.

Failed.

And went down.

By the time he and Bunny managed to untangle themselves, the Closer was gone. The office was filling with dense smoke and everything seemed to be on fire. They paused, looking around, trying to decide how to save the moment. The Closer was nowhere to be seen, and the other two were dead.

Top dragged Bunny to his feet and they ran for the elevator, but when the doors were halfway open they suddenly stopped. The lights went out, inside the car and in the hall. In fact the whole building seemed to go strangely still despite the water pulsing from the sprinklers. Then they died, too.

“Stairs,” yelled Top and they blundered through the smoke to a crash-door and into a stairwell.

It was utterly black. Even the battery-operated emergency lights were dark. Far below they could hear the clatter of footsteps.

“Give a light,” growled Top, but Bunny already had his powerful little penlight out. He slapped it into the clip on the underside of his gun. But the light did not flash on. There was nothing, not even the faintest glow. They stood for a moment, confused and disturbed, lit only by the trembling firelight behind them. The stairwell was like the mouth of a dragon, black and deep and treacherous.

Bunny leaned one hand on the rail. “We go down there and he's waiting…”

No need to finish it.

“How'd he kill all the damn lights?” asked Top. “Don't make no sense.”

They saw a brief flash of daylight at the very bottom as the killer broke from the fire tower.

“Call it, Top,” said Bunny.

If they had been dressed for combat they would have both been carrying nonelectric chemical flares. Below them the door swung shut and the stairwell was immediately plunged into total darkness.

“Call it in,” said Top. “Let's get a BOLO out on this son of a bitch. And we need the fire department.”

But, of course, their cell phones and earbuds were as dead as the lights. The fire behind them began to roar.

 

INTERLUDE TWENTY-ONE

BELL FAMILY ESTATE

MONTAUK ISLAND, NEW YORK

WHEN PROSPERO WAS EIGHTEEN

Oscar Bell dreamed of her.

Or, maybe it was that she dreamed of him.

He was in his bedroom, alone in a midnight house, all the doors locked, all the alarms set. Dogs on the prowl, guards with guns. The way it always was.

Not that German shepherds and mercenaries with automatic weapons could keep them out.

No.

Nothing could keep them out.

Not unless he wore one of those ridiculous skullcaps. Jesus, he hated the thought. A grown man, a multibillionaire who owned more companies than he could count, a scientist and defense contractor, wearing a fucking aluminum foil hat. Well, technically a dome-shaped glass and crystal-lined metal alloy hat.

It blocked out most of the intrusions.

It stopped the dreamwalkers from stealing into his head and stealing his knowledge. It kept his slumbering mind from being complicit in the theft of his own technologies.