Kill Switch (44 page)

Junie picked up her story. “When the Orpheus Gate was activated there was some kind of intense energetic discharge—something he called a ‘God Wave.' It knocked Tesla out and he was sick for weeks afterward. He had a high fever and hallucinated badly.”

“If there's any more precise description of his symptoms,” I said, “I'd like to share it with Dr. Hu. Maybe match it against the symptoms of what Top, Bunny, and I had. After all, we got sick after an energetic discharge from the Gateway machine.”

Church nodded and asked Junie to continue.

“The whole experience shook Tesla's confidence,” she said, cutting me a quick look, “and it changed him. That was when he started shifting his focus from sustainable energy and communication systems to weapons of war. Death rays and that sort of thing. Some historians say that he went mad, and maybe we know why.”

“‘Mad' is a relative term,” observed Bolton.

“There's more,” said Junie. “In 1918 a constable in a small fishing town in Spain reported that a strange machine appeared in a farmer's barn. Actually he said that it looked like it exploded through the side of the barn. He found a naked old man near the machine who claimed that he was a traveler who was trying to find his way home. The constable got sick shortly after that, and so did everyone in the town. That's where the first cases of the Spanish flu were reported.”

Well, yeah, that hit us all like a cruise missile. Junie looked around at our stricken faces.

“What?” she asked.

“Ms. Flynn,” said Church, “did anyone tell you what kind of virus Captain Ledger and his men were affected by?”

“No. Just that it was a rare mutation of the flu.”

“Yeah,” I said. “The Spanish flu.”

 

CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

THE PIER

DMS SPECIAL PROJECTS OFFICE

SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA

SEPTEMBER 8, 12:38
P.M.

Church immediately called Dr. Hu and Bug and brought them up to speed, and ordered them to run down this information. Almost immediately Bug came back with hits. Even for MindReader, a Net search required the right keywords. The hits he got were not on the “God Machine” but on the “Orpheus Gate.”

He even found pictures.

“On the screen,” I told him and Bug sent them to the big flat screen on the wall. We stared, dumbfounded. It had been there all along but we were looking for it the wrong way.

The Orpheus Gate. Orpheus descended into hell to rescue his love.

“What is hell anyway,” mused Junie, “but a name for another dimension that's inhospitable to life as we know it? Couldn't that just as easily be another dimension, another version of the world rather than something supernatural?”

No one told her she was crazy. Incredulity was a boat that had already sailed, caught fire, hit an iceberg, and sank. Even Hu, who tended not to believe in much of anything, wasn't trying to knock this down anymore. Want to know why?

There was a photo, a crisp black-and-white, of a bunch of stern-looking men standing in front of the same goddamn machine I'd seen down in the Antarctic. Same thing. The guy who stood in the center of the front row was shorter than the others, with black hair and a Charlie Chaplin mustache. We could see him very clearly because the Nazis always did take good pictures. The accompanying caption told us that we were seeing Hitler inspecting the development of a new weapon being designed by top scientists of the Thule Society.

A second photograph was in color and was grainy and poorly framed, suggesting that whoever took it hadn't been allowed to snap that shot. It was of an underground chamber filled with clunky old computers of the kind used in Europe in the 1980s. The photo showed workers installing small dark objects into a panel. Gemstones. The photograph was taken at an underground lab in the Ukrainian town of Poliske. Just a few miles from Chernobyl.

And there were other images, photos of worse quality and even some crude sketches by people who claimed to have seen such a device or worked on it while employed either by the government or a defense contractor.

“Guys,” said Bug, “I am ringing all sorts of bells here. Seriously. Orpheus Gate? Yeah, there's a whole bunch of stuff. Let me put some people on this and I'll get back to you with the bullet points.”

Dr. Hu stared gloomily at us from a window in the big screen. “Let me study the data.”

His window vanished and we stared at each other.

Junie was thoughtful for a moment, then asked, “You said that this project was under the directorship of Marcus Erskine, right? I know that name. He's been in the conspiracy theory rumor mill for a while. Back when I was making my list of possible governors of M3, Erskine was always in my top twenty. His sister, Lyssa, was married to Oscar Bell. She was nice but Oscar was a total shit. I think he's the reason she committed suicide. Poor girl. She never should have married him.”

“Bug told me Bell was on your podcast once.”

“Whoa, wait,” interrupted Bolton, looking completely thrown, “you
knew
Oscar Bell?”

“Personally?” said Junie. “Not really. I knew Lyssa through the conspiracy community. She was a regular caller on my podcast.”

“And Bell was a guest?” asked Bolton.

“No. He called in once. I didn't like him very much.”

“Please tell us about it,” said Mr. Church.

She nodded. “I was interviewing a man Oscar used to know. Oscar called in, clearly drunk, and laid into my guest. Accusing him of lying and distorting the truth. He accused him of having driven Oscar's son, Prospero, to suicide, and then he accused him of keeping his son as a prisoner. Oscar was irrational and contradictory. It really upset my guest, and when Oscar threatened to find him and kill him I ended the interview. I was furious because we were really getting somewhere. We were talking about this amazing dream diary one of his patients had kept, and how the things in it were clear proof that other worlds exist and are accessible.”

Harcourt Bolton leaned forward. “Who was that man? Who was your guest?”

“Dr. Michael Greene. He used to be a psychiatrist in the Hamptons but he closed his practice, sold his house, and went into hiding after he was threatened by men in black. Closers.”

My pulse jumped. “Whoa, whoa, wait a second. His name was Michael Greene? You're sure?”

“Positive. Why?”

“Because,” I said, “last night Bug found a police report that Oscar Bell walked into a diner in Washington state and killed the only three people in the place. A waitress, the cook, and Dr. Michael Greene. Then he killed himself.”

She stared at me. “Oh my God.”

Mr. Church removed a folder from his briefcase and placed it on the table, drummed his fingers on the closed cover for a moment, and then slid it across to Junie. However, he kept his hand there to keep the folder closed.

“Do you know who Prospero Bell is?”

“Yes, of course,” she said. “He was Oscar and Lyssa Bell's son. He was Dr. Greene's patient.”

“Have you ever seen a picture of Prospero?”

“No.”

“You're sure?” asked Bolton.

I said, “Junie has total recall.”

“Why do you ask?” Junie said to Church.

He nudged the folder an inch closer to her. “Because so much of this centers around Prospero, I asked Bug to get me a complete workup This is a photograph taken while he was a cadet at Ballard Academy in Poland, Maine.”

There was something about the way he said this that made Junie hesitate. I hadn't seen the photo yet, either, so I leaned against her as she opened it. I felt her body go rigid, her muscles tense as soon as she saw the picture. It was a high-res color photo of a seventeen-year-old boy in a military school uniform. Blond wavy hair, blue eyes, a splash of freckles across his cheeks.

He was male and he was twenty years younger, but in every other respect he looked like an almost identical twin of Junie Flynn.

 

CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

THE PIER

DMS SPECIAL PROJECTS OFFICE

SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA

SEPTEMBER 8, 12:41
P.M.

Harcourt Bolton looked at the photo and then at Junie. A deep frown line appeared between his brows. “I don't understand. Did I miss something? Is Prospero Bell related to you? Was he your brother?”

Junie picked up the photo and stared at it for a long, long time. A tear broke and rolled down her freckled cheek. “Oh God,” she murmured. “There's another one out there.…”

“Another … what?” asked Bolton.

She touched the face of Prospero Bell. “I—I think he's like
me
,” she said in a ghostly whisper. Her skin was dead pale beneath her freckles and there were ghosts of old memories haunting her eyes. “I think he was another hybrid. Another hive child.”

Church looked like Church always does. The man could be on fire and he wouldn't twitch. He ate a cookie, though, and I'm almost positive there's some kind of subliminal code when he chooses to do that. Bolton, on the other hand, looked like he wanted to jump out of his skin. He almost looked like he was going to leap across the table and kiss Junie.

“Miss Flynn—may I call you Junie? Yes? Great … Junie, can you tell me exactly
what
Dr. Greene said about Prospero?”

“First off, understand two things,” she replied, “first is that Greene never named him. He referred to him as Patient X. I made the connection only after Oscar Bell accidentally outed his son when he called in to attack Greene. Second, the interview was cut short when Oscar Bell actually threatened Greene.”

“Okay, but what did he
say
?” repeated Bolton.

She told us a story that was equal parts fantastic, tragic, and horrible. About a genius boy who never believed he was entirely human and who found comfort only in two things. His dreams and science. Prospero said that the idea for his escape machine—that was how Greene referred to it—came to him in dreams. He said that its design was somehow encoded in the parts of his DNA that were not human. In order to find his way home—or to the place he truly believed was his home—Prospero began building versions of a device. A doorway. A gateway. The God Machine.

When Oscar Bell realized the potential for the machine, he took the first prototype away from him and sold it to the military as a new weapon of war. The thing was that the prototype was far from complete and it malfunctioned constantly. But it was those malfunctions that were the basis of the contract the kid's father sold to the Department of Defense.

“Did he explain the nature of those side effects?” asked Bolton. He seemed very excited by this and was even sweating a little. I guess we all were.

“In general. Dr. Greene was not a physicist,” she said. “And also the Closers took all of his case notes. He had to rebuild everything in his files from memory. But … sure, he said that there were two of these ‘faults' that Oscar sold to the government. One sounds like what's happening around the country, like what happened in Houston, though I don't understand how ISIL could have gotten their hands on it.”

She described the first fault for us. When the machine was first turned on there was something like a reverse power surge. All machinery around the machine—but not including the machine itself—would stop working. This included batteries. It only affected nonorganic electrical conduction. It did not shut down the central nervous system of people inside that nullification field cast by the machine.

“That's Kill Switch,” I said, slapping the table. “There's no way it's not.”

“Agreed,” said Church, and even Bolton nodded.

“This means that we know what they were doing at Gateway, and it means that the ISIL attacks are our case. Boom,” I said. “Get the president on the phone.”

Bolton patted the air with a calming gesture. “Slow down, Joe. This is still theory. We can't prove any of this.”

I started to say something loud and nasty, but Junie touched my arm. “Let me tell the rest of it, honey,” she said.

“Do we need to hear more?” asked Bolton. “Kill Switch is the thing we need to be afraid of and it's what we need to stop. My guess is that Erskine was using it to create a weapon to be used against drones. Don't forget, they had a project in the works called Freefall.”

“And we'll pursue that,” said Church, “but for now let's hear the rest of what Ms. Flynn has to share.”

Bolton looked annoyed and impatient. I could sympathize. I wanted to jump right on this. If ISIL had a directed-energy weapon that could knock down our drones, then it would cut our combat effectiveness down by one hell of a lot. I started to say something but caught Church watching me. He gave me a tiny shake of his head.

Junie said, “Dr. Greene said that one of the other faults of the machine was that while it was in idle mode some people—not most, just a small percentage—experienced two distinct types of unusually vivid dreams. The largest majority of those affected had dreams in which they saw monsters and alien landscapes and images that can best be described as psychedelic. Surreal. The boy told the doctor that he believed these people were actually traveling to those worlds, that the energetic discharge transported their consciousness through the dimensional barriers so that what they saw were beings and locations that existed in other worlds than ours. Greene said that the boy was convinced that the entire surrealism art movement was brought into being because certain people had been touched, in one way or another, by this energy. They had journeyed to other worlds in their dreams and then tried to capture what they'd seen in their paintings. Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst … artists like that. Greene said that the boy told him that there was a whole group of writers who had been similarly influenced.”