Cold Spectrum

by Craig Schaefer

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  FORTY

  FORTY-ONE

  FORTY-TWO

  FORTY-THREE

  FORTY-FOUR

  FORTY-FIVE

  FORTY-SIX

  EPILOGUE

  AFTERWORD

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY CRAIG SCHAEFER

  The Daniel Faust Series

  The Long Way Down

  Redemption Song

  The Living End

  A Plain-Dealing Villain

  The Killing Floor Blues

  The Castle Doctrine

  The Revanche Cycle

  Winter’s Reach

  The Instruments of Control

  Terms of Surrender

  Queen of the Night

  The Harmony Black Series

  Harmony Black

  Red Knight Falling

  Glass Predator

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2017 by Craig Schaefer

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by 47North, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and 47North are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542047210

  ISBN-10: 1542047218

  Cover design by David Drummond

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  FORTY

  FORTY-ONE

  FORTY-TWO

  FORTY-THREE

  FORTY-FOUR

  FORTY-FIVE

  FORTY-SIX

  EPILOGUE

  AFTERWORD

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE

  In another life, Senator Alton Roth might have been a Shakespearean actor. Big, broad-shouldered, and vibrant, he had a voice that boomed to the farthest seats of the packed auditorium. From her perch backstage, watching the rally on a bank of monitors, Nadine mouthed the words along with him. She’d written them, but they sounded better on Roth’s lips. A tale told by an idiot, she thought, full of sound and fury, et cetera.

  “Amazing,” said the voice from the doorway. “Your lips move—the puppet speaks. I don’t even see the strings.”

  They hadn’t met, but she knew the man on sight, from his two-hundred-dollar haircut to his lime-green high-top sneakers. “Bobby Diehl,” she said.

  “Nadine . . . Ashton? Is that the name you’re using this week?” He flashed a hundred-watt smile, easing past her bodyguards and sauntering into the control room like he owned the place. “It’s true, what they told me. You really do bear an uncanny resemblance to Taylor—”

  “Choose your next words very carefully.”

  “Admittedly not a fan of country music, but her shift to pop was a welcome and, I think, entirely warranted career evolution. Anyway, I heard about the little trap you set for me, out in Chicago. Figured I should drop by and introduce myself before you did it again.”

  “Don’t take it personally,” Nadine said, glancing back to the screens. “You were just a means to an end.”

  Bobby held up two fingers. “A pair of ends. Harmony Black and Jessie Temple. Except the way I heard it, they left the Bast Club in bullet-riddled ruins and skipped along on their merry way.”

  Nadine’s eyes darkened. She shot a glare at her men.

  “Clear the room. Now.”

  The control-room door swung shut. Now it was just her, Bobby, and the sound of applause washing in over the tinny speakers as Senator Roth raised his arms in triumph.

  “We have mutual interests,” Bobby told her, “and a mutual problem.”

  “Vigilant Lock.”

  He pointed finger guns at her. “Bingo. Of course, it’s a bigger problem for you than it is for me. After all, as far as the public knows, the good senator—and myself—were nearly killed by a lunatic who planted a hundred pounds of plastic explosive under a casino. But you and me, we know the rest of the story. And so do our enemies. If they don’t already know that Roth is backed and bought by the courts of hell, they will soon enough. And given that a handful of public officials are secretly members of an organization dedicated to undermining demonic activity, that’s gonna make Roth’s impending run for the White House . . . a tad rocky.”

  Nadine’s bubblegum-pink lips curled in a condescending smile. “You don’t know the rest of the story. Trust me—Vigilant Lock is less of a problem than you might believe. I’m working an angle or two.”

  “Aren’t we all? I think I know the name of your angle: Operation Cold Spectrum.”

  “Do you know more than a name?”

  “I know it’s something very big, very bad, and something the powers that be want to keep dead and buried,” Bobby replied, “along with the men and women who carried it out. Only problem is, they just won’t stay dead. We’ve witnessed a miraculous resurrection. Two survivors, on the run, ready and able to spill all the nasty little beans. Retrieval teams are already hunting for them—and so are Temple and Black. Follow that trail and you could win all the prizes.”

  Nadine rounded on him. She curled her arms, squinting as she looked him in the eye. “How do you know this?”

  Bobby offered her a cocky smile. “It’s called RedEye. An NSA surveillance project. Real-time coverage of nationwide cellular-phone traffic, with full analytics and k
eyword scanning. It’s Echelon on steroids. Very secret. Very scandalous. I helped invent it. Anyway, I don’t have access to the system as it stands—I cashed in and handed it over to the Agency before I realized how much fun I could have with the damn thing—but I’ve got a tap on the director’s phone.”

  Nadine took a step toward him. She tilted her head, lips slightly parted. “Can you . . . get access to it?”

  “Would you like that? Mmm, that’d make Senator Roth’s presidential campaign a little smoother, wouldn’t it? Imagine being able to crack the cell phones of every primary contender. Every rival campaign worker. Every journalist. See, I can’t get at RedEye on my own, and the egghead behind the project littered the system with biometrics and kill switches to guarantee he’s the only one who can operate it. Job security. But a little birdie tells me you can be very convincing. I propose an alliance.”

  “It’s true,” Nadine said. “But nobody gives something for nothing, and you’re no friend to the courts of hell. What do you get out of this deal?”

  Bobby pointed to the bank of monitors. “Isn’t it obvious? I want to play with your toy. Diehl Innovations could win big under the Roth administration. I’ve even got a puppet of my own for a first-draft cabinet pick. In the short term, though, it’s a matter of self-preservation. Temple and Black are hounding my heels, same as yours. Plus . . . I’m trying to join a very exclusive social club. The eradication of Vigilant Lock is my membership fee.”

  “The Network.” Nadine turned her back on him. Musing as she studied the screens. “So the rumor is true—you are a servant of the Kings. I should kill you where you stand. My court has a standing bounty on Network operatives.”

  “C’mon, Nadine. Just because my friends don’t like your friends doesn’t mean we can’t be friends. Who’s going to tell? Hey, have you seen Hamilton?”

  “I’m not fond of musicals.”

  “Oh,” Bobby said, “you couldn’t get tickets. No, no, I understand. See, my favorite part is when Jefferson and Madison have dinner with Alexander Hamilton—not a lot of love between these guys, right? But they meet behind closed doors, and presto, they hammer out the Compromise of 1790. The beauty is, it all happened off the record. What was said? What was promised? Lost to history. All we have are the results.”

  He moved close behind her. Standing at her shoulder, both of them watching the flickering screens.

  “My friends could be your friends, too,” Bobby murmured. “And no one needs to know. So let’s hook up. We destroy Vigilant, get your pet idiot into the White House, and carve up whatever’s left of the nation when we’re done having a good time. I know you’ve got bigger ambitions than this, Nadine. Or should I start calling you . . . Princess Nadine?”

  She glanced back over her shoulder. One pert eyebrow raised, the curve of a half smile on her lips.

  “I like your tone.” Nadine turned. She jabbed a sharp bubblegum-pink fingernail at Bobby’s chest. “One thing. Harmony Black and Jessie Temple. I want them. Alive.”

  “And my friends want them dead. That’s nonnegotiable.”

  Nadine tilted her head at him, curious. “Were you under the impression I was going to invite them to tea?”

  “I suppose,” Bobby said, “there might be some wiggle room. Here, I brought you a present.”

  He handed Nadine a phone, slender with a case the color of shimmering rose gold. She turned it in her hand, looking it over.

  “The DiehlPhone Four. I thought these weren’t out until next month.”

  “Advantage of owning the company. This is more than just a sneak preview: it’s fitted with a special exclusion chip. That surveillance system I mentioned, RedEye? Can’t see or hear any information that passes through it. At least, assuming they haven’t changed my original source code too much. I’ve been using the chip myself, and the FBI hasn’t come kicking my door in—and believe me, they would if they were listening in on my conversations. Let me know how many you need—I’ll get all your people kitted out with these. Good data security is so important these days.”

  “I’ll take a dozen,” she said, “for starters. Now, about those two Cold Spectrum survivors—” Her new phone pinged.

  Bobby grinned and pointed at the screen. “And there you go,” he told her. “Happy hunting.”

  Linder’s stretch limousine was the safest place in the world. A rolling office, off the grid and freely mobile, with tinted windows and concealed armor that could take a direct hit from a fifty-caliber rifle. Run-flat tires, an NSA-grade countersurveillance suite, and electrified door handles. He liked to stay buttoned down, doing his business on the move. The limo was quiet and anonymous, just like he was.

  Tonight he’d been forced to shed his steel cocoon. It sat at the edge of an airstrip, cast in bands of stark electric light and hungry dark, as a cold night wind rustled down from the overcast sky. He stood on the tarmac with his hands in his trench-coat pockets, staring into the belly of a C-130 cargo plane as the backloading ramp slowly rumbled down.

  “This is a mistake,” he said. He didn’t spare a glance for the tall, thin man at his side. His companion had a receding hairline and a nose like a raptor’s beak.

  “The mistake,” the other man said, “was trusting you to manage Vigilant Lock’s operations. We’ve had an attempted bombing in Las Vegas, an assassination attempt against a sitting senator, you lost a captive servant of the King of Wolves—”

  “Ben, I told you, I have a team on it—”

  A sharp glance. The twitch of his hooked nose.

  “That’s Director Crohn to you. We aren’t friends, Linder. You’re nothing but the hired help. And as for the team in question, I understand Temple and Black are refusing to come in for debriefing?”

  “We’re trading voice mails. It’s a complicated situation.”

  The landing ramp touched down. Men gathered in the plane’s belly, unclipping webbed harnesses, rising from steel seats and standing to attention. They moved like soldiers but dressed like backwoods hunters, with long, scraggly beards and tinted Oakleys. Silent, their every move pregnant with the promise of impending and sudden violence.

  “Panic Cell,” Crohn said. He strode up the ramp with Linder at his heels. “Report.”

  One of the men flipped a lazy salute. “Present, accounted for, and ready for mayhem. You point, we shoot. Any questions?”

  “None. We have three targets. Primary: two fugitives on the run, their locations recently uncovered by NSA signals traffic. Wanted dead, not alive.”

  “And the third, sir?”

  Crohn gave a sidelong glance at Linder.

  “One of our own’s gone rogue. As of this moment, I’m declaring Jessie Temple and her entire team as new additions to the Hostile Entities registry. Capture them if you can; kill them if you have to. One way or another, I want them brought to heel. I will be leading this mission personally.”

  Linder started to say, “Agents Temple and Black—”

  Crohn cut him off with a wave of his hand.

  “Aren’t the problem. Their support team is. We eliminate April Cassidy, they’ll be rudderless. We take out the Finn boy, the teenager, they’ll be deaf and blind.”

  “I think you’re letting your personal feelings interfere,” Linder told him.

  Crohn turned, slowly, his eyes narrowed to venomous slits.

  “I taught Dr. Cassidy everything she knows. She’s the second-best profiler the Bureau ever built, and she’s gotten sharper with age. The wolf and the witch are nothing but weapons. Blunt instruments. We take out Cassidy—the rest of the team falls like a house of cards. To that end, I’ve requisitioned a little help.” Crohn looked to the men. “Bring her up.”

  From deeper in the plane, a cell door clanged. Leaden footsteps echoed off the metal flooring, the crowd parting.

  Linder’s gut clenched.

  “No,” he breathed. “You can’t be serious. No. Absolutely not. I was in favor of bringing in Panic Cell in case we needed them, but this . . .
Director Crohn, I’m registering my formal objection, and the rest of the Vigilant directorate is going to hear from me. This is insane.”

  The new arrival gave him a smug smile and a flip of her hair, a flowing lion’s mane dyed in streaks of rainbow color.

  “Mikki Ziegler,” Crohn said, “aka Mikki McGuire, aka Mikki Howl. Welcome to Vigilant Lock. Your freedom—and your continued survival—is fully dependent upon the success of this mission.”

  Mikki held up her shackled wrists and snickered.

  “Aw, I feel like part of the team already. Now, how about one of you little bitches uncuffs me? I just can’t wait to go and burn a few people alive. You know, for Uncle Sam and the American way. I’m feeling so very patriotic all of a sudden.”

  ONE

  Late October had come to Oregon, with a bitter winter waiting in the wings. KEEP PORTLAND WEIRD screamed the yellow writing on the wall as we cruised down Burnside in a rented Ford. Not helpful advice. If we did our jobs right, things would be a lot less weird by the time we left town.

  “I don’t like Halloween,” I said.

  Jessie Temple looked over at me from the passenger seat, her frizzy black hair pulled into a bun, and tugged down her dark glasses. She stared at me over the rims, flashing her uncannily turquoise eyes.

  “Seriously, Harmony?” she said. “I figured that was some kind of big, you know, witchy thing.”

  “It’s amateur night. You know how on Saint Patrick’s Day, all the people who can’t hold down a can of beer go out and become champion drinkers?”

  “Been there, done that, got the T-shirt and the monster hangover.”

  “Halloween is the same deal,” I said. “The one night of the year that communing with the powers of darkness and trying to conjure demons sounds like a fun party game.”

  “I’ve clearly been going to the wrong parties.”

  “It’s the one night when our job isn’t ‘fight the forces of hell’ so much as ‘save idiots from themselves.’”

  Jessie leaned back, rubbing her shoulders against the seat, getting comfortable while I drove.

  “Isn’t that a good thing, though?” she said. “I could use a few more nights like that. Hey, Halloween’s still a few days away. We might get lucky.”

  We’d spent the last week pinballing from New York to Nevada and back again on the trail of a conspiracy, our little cell of operatives more or less officially going rogue. Seemed like a routine job at first: Vigilant Lock’s covert mandate was to hunt and eliminate occult threats to the United States, and the band of robbers who’d murdered four people at a midtown Manhattan bank—robbers infected with the power of the King of Wolves, just like my partner, Jessie—certainly fit the bill.