Dead Man's Switch (11 page)

King came in from the west because the east side of the complex held the occupied buildings, called the McNeil Island Special Commitment Center. In other words, a holding tank for deranged loonies. It was where his father worked. King had often looked at the island with Google maps. The buildings were giant triangles. Five of them in a row connected by an external corridor and surrounded by the electric barbed-wire fence.

At the northwest corner of the complex, near the helicopter landing pad, the remainder of the buildings had been shut down and abandoned. This was his destination.

King was armed with a small flashlight and a small canister of pepper spray that he'd stolen from his father's room and hidden against his ankle in his sock.

He was also armed with a door number. In the video, Blake had promised that entrance 15A had a lock that only looked secure. All it would take, Blake had promised, was a simple tug on the lock, and it would pop open.

King moved slowly among the buildings, stopping frequently to listen for footsteps. Prison guards were not likely to be here, but no sense taking risks. At least, unnecessary risks. What he was doing was definitely risky, but King didn't feel as if he had much choice.

He reached the first building in the abandoned cluster. The exterior was rough concrete, more than a century old. The steel doors had peeling gray paint and barely visible numbers that had been sprayed on with a stencil. It didn't take him long to find 15A.

It was bolted shut on the exterior with a huge padlock that
prevented the bolt from sliding open. King gave it a gentle tug, and it popped open as if it had been oiled. He slid the bolt back, and it, too, was smooth and soundless.

This, he thought, did not bode well. So far, every single thing that Blake had promised from beyond the grave had been accurate. That made it all the more likely that whatever was ahead would be equally accurate.

King stood at the door for an entire minute, wrestling with his decision.

It felt no different from when he'd been at the base of the tree in the forbidden zone, knowing that the next step would betray his trust in his father.

He realized he was only kidding himself at this point. Grabbing the lowest branch of that tree had been the point of betrayal. Everything after that was simply a journey down a slippery slope with no chance of stopping himself. King pushed open 15A and shone his flashlight into the empty hallway.

It smelled faintly of urine. Decades ago, the prisoners had been forced to use wood buckets to hold their body wastes. No amount of bleach and paint had been able to remove the stench.

King stepped inside and closed the door. It occurred to him that if someone bolted it shut on the outside, he would be trapped in this building as surely as the long-dead murderers and thieves had once been held captive. But on this slippery slope, the best he could do was to try to control the direction of his fall.

He plunged forward into the darkness.

Five doors down on the right, Blake had said. Push open the cell door and look beneath the bunk bed on the left wall.

And that's where King found it as promised.

A Macbook Air laptop. Beautiful, lightweight, and sleek.

And without a doubt, filled with something nuclear and ready to explode with fallout as poisonous as radiation.

CHAPTER 21

King popped open the laptop computer lid. Difficult not to love a Macbook Air. Gleaming silver keypad. High-resolution screen.

The screen showed a prompt for a password, and King clicked MEASLES onto the keyboard.

The screen was black for a couple seconds, and then Blake Watt's voice broke the silence that had pressed in on King in the small room.

“Don't touch anything on the computer,” Blake said. “Wait for it…”

Blake's face appeared in a small square in the upper right-hand quarter of the screen. It was obviously video. Below that square was another one of similar size, with an arrow button for play. The second video was frozen with a view of a hallway and prison cells.

“Here I am,” Blake said. “Your tour guide. But really, don't touch anything without my instructions. Wish I could stand in front of you in 3-D, like Princess Leia in Star Wars, but this was the best I could do.”

So weird. Taking instructions from someone who was dead and had been waiting for King. Weird, too, thinking that if King hadn't found this, Blake would have patiently waited for centuries to speak to the first person who opened it—like a genie waiting for someone to rub the lamp.

“You'll see that I've got a couple of programs open on the screen,” Blake said. “Don't rearrange the windows for the programs, okay? I'll be sending you to different places, and you're going to need to be slow and careful in each program.”

King found himself nodding.

“And be patient,” Blake said. Well, Blake's video recording. “You're going to be using the iPhone's hotspot for the Internet connection. I've got it running through a proxy server so no one can get this physical location. It means you'll be safe the entire time you're on the computer. But it's not going to have the Internet speed that I'd like.

“So first, go to Settings on my iPhone. Turn on personal hotspot. It won't take long for this computer to detect the wireless and join automatically. While that's happening, click pause on this video and click play on the video below on the computer screen. It's a piece of surveillance video I found when I hacked into the prison's servers. I think it will speak for itself.”

Blake hesitated. “And King, I'm sorry you have to see this. But I didn't have much choice. And I knew you'd need to see it yourself to believe it.”

How many hours, King wondered, had Blake spent setting all of this up? And then there was the bigger question. Why? What had Blake known that made him think sending messages from the dead would be needed? What had even led Blake to checking out surveillance video?

King knew there was only one way to find out. By listening to Blake.

He put Blake on pause. Blake's face froze in a distorted position.

King clicked play on the other video.

Because Blake had said it was from the prison, it was an easy guess that it was one of the corridors that led to prison cells.

For a few seconds, there was no movement except for the digital numbers that showed the time of the recording.

23:12:12.

23:12:13.

23:12:14.

Military time on a 24-hour clock. That meant the video King was watching had been taken at 12 minutes past 11 at night.

Someone stepped into the view of the camera, walking away from the camera so that the person's face was not in view.

It didn't matter to King.

He knew that person's walk. Solid, with a very slight side-to-side
action. And he knew that person's silhouette. Also solid. Wide at the shoulders.

He'd known that person's solid walk and solid silhouette all his life. He could remember riding on those solid shoulders as a boy, holding on to that person's ears as if they were the reins of a pony. He could remember that person laughing along with King during those magical moments, during the years when his father laughed often and loud and without hesitation.

Mack
.

King felt his hand move toward the keypad to click pause. Whatever was going to happen next, he didn't want to see.

But how could King leave now? How could King snap the computer lid shut and wonder for the rest of his life why Blake wanted him to watch this video?

King let the video run, aware that he was breathing shallow and loud and in short gasps, as if he were in physical pain because of the dread that filled him.

In the video, King's father stopped in the hallway at a cell door. He reached out and punched in a password to the cell door. Then he turned and walked toward the camera, not glancing up. Just walked and left the prison cell behind him.

The video kept running.

One second. Two seconds. Three seconds.

A huge guy with a shaved head stepped out of the cell. The man hesitated in the doorway. Then, in prison coveralls, he turned and walked away from the camera, his shoulders twice as wide as King's father's solid shoulders.

King glanced at the digital numbers again.

23:13:02.

23:13:03.

23:13:04.

Then the giant prisoner was out of sight of the fixed camera position, and the hallway was empty again.

23:13:05.

23:13:06.

23:13:07.

That's where the video ended.

From 23:12:12 to 23:13:07. Less than one minute had passed.

But enough time for King to witness that his father had committed a federal crime by releasing an unsecured prisoner.

CHAPTER 22

King listened to the
thud-thud-thud
of his heartbeat fill his ears as he stared at the computer screen. Both video windows were paused. Blake's distorted face filled one. The empty prison hallway filled the other.

Those two squares were one above the other. A larger square filled the rest of the screen to the left of those two squares.

King expected the
thud-thud-thud
to lessen. It didn't. He realized that his life had just shifted. Again. He'd lost his mother. Physically. But at least he had memories to cherish. He'd truly just lost his father. He'd lost his father in a way that was far worse than losing his mother. His father was still there physically, but King now saw him in an entirely different way and didn't think he'd ever be able to recover the trust he'd just lost.

His palms hurt.

He looked down and realized he'd been clenching his fists so hard that a couple of his fingernails had cut through the skin.

King let out a long breath.

Then, with a coldness in his heart, he began to play the video with Blake again.

“Sorry, man,” Blake said. “I wish it wasn't so. But it gets worse. Otherwise the dead man's switch wouldn't have been triggered. And you wouldn't be here, watching a video that I set up just in case it got worse. King, you can't walk away.”

“Yes, I can,” King said to the screen.

“Because if you do, everything on this computer is going to be released to the world in 24 hours. If you want to save your father, you're going to have to keep going here. Because they are using your father. If you can stop them, the world will see he didn't have any choice. If you walk away, it's going to look like your father was and is responsible.”

Blake looked down and then up.

“So first thing you need to do is go to my website and enter a password. I had a code in place. A trigger. Once you hooked up this computer to the Internet, it sent that code to begin a 48-hour countdown, and if you don't put the password into the website, it will leak everything to the media. Radio. Television. Newspaper. So run your mouse over the browser window that's open to my right, which is your left. Click the mouse to bring the program to the front, then hit return. That's all it takes.”

King felt like a zombie. He did as instructed.

The browser popped open. It brought him to a website:
www.blakesdms.com
. The browser window slowly filled, showing a place to log in with username and password.

“The username is your name, in lowercase,” Blake said. “L-y-o-n-k-i-n-g. That's also the password. Once you enter it, you've bought yourself and your father 24 hours. Do it, King. You have less than 60 seconds on this browser window before it shuts automatically and starts the countdown.”

King's fingers were shaky. But he managed.

“Good,” Blake said. “I know you did it because I'm still speaking to you. I've got this laptop set up for all of its software to self-destruct if you don't follow my steps precisely.”

King knew he was being manipulated. Blake—or, more accurately, Blake from the past—was pressuring King to make decisions without having any time to think. But what choice did King have?

“Okay,” Blake said. “Now it's time to tell you why I'm doing this. Forcing you to help.”

Blake leaned forward. His voice rasped a little. “I've been trying to outthink them, like a chess game. What I won't know until it happens is how they might choose to get rid of me. It's got to be an accident of
course. Drowning is my bet. That's how I'd play it if I were them. Make it look like I was trying to get off the island. It's no secret that I fight a lot with my parents. Only natural that I'd run away, right?”

Blake kept leaning forward. “The people we're dealing with are very careful. If they suspect me, then they know my computer skills. And they know what I found out. They'd be stupid to just get rid of me without finding out what I've left behind. They'd suspect that I'd put something in place to leak everything. And that's why I don't think they'd just snuff me without first finding out all that I know and what I've done with what I found.”