Cold Spectrum

by Craig Schaefer

  A couple of them were smart enough to listen, laying down covering fire and pinning Mikki in place. One of them got careless; Mikki’s gunners flanked him, skirting the edge of the steak house, and dropped him with a burst that tore his throat out. He fell next to Houston’s smoldering corpse. Jessie emptied her pistol and broke cover just long enough to snatch up the dead man’s gun. She huddled next to me, gripping the weapon close to her chest.

  “We are leaving,” she snarled. She tapped her earpiece. “Forget the parking garage: get the SUV out front. We’ll rendezvous in about two minutes.”

  “That voice,” Kevin said. “Was that—”

  “Move. Now.” Jessie looked my way. “On three?”

  I curled my open hand into a fist. Faint wisps of yellow light trailed behind my fingers, the idea of elemental air given form and life.

  “On three,” I told her.

  Together, we leaped up from behind the table. Jessie opened fire on the run, forcing the shooters behind cover, while I waved my hand and laid out a shimmering trail of congealed air. A three-round burst raked toward us and slammed into my magical shield. The shells held suspended as they shivered, suddenly moving in slow motion.

  We burst through the steak-house door and out into the casino. The place was empty, chips and spilled drinks and ashtrays littering the carpet, the smell of panic in the air and sirens wailing in the distance. Out front, the SUV screeched to the curb three footsteps before we got there, and we piled into the backseat. Jessie slapped the flat of her hand against Kevin’s headrest.

  “Drive.”

  She didn’t need to tell him twice. He veered into traffic, speeding down Pacific Avenue with red-and-blue lights flashing in the rearview.

  Nobody spoke, not at first. Once we’d gotten clear, far from the lights and sirens, Kevin broke the silence.

  “That was Mikki, wasn’t it? She escaped.”

  “No,” Jessie said.

  I shot her a look. “He needs to know, Jessie. Yes, that was—”

  “She did not,” Jessie said, spitting the word out, “escape. Detention Site Burgundy is the strongest prison on Earth. It was built to hold the worst of the worst. Sorcerers. Demon cultists. People who can bend reality just by thinking real hard. They got a serial killer in there who has bones like cartilage. Guy can collapse his body and squeeze through openings small enough for a mouse. Got another guy who can step into a shadow and turn invisible. Know how close they’ve gotten to escaping? They haven’t. Nobody escapes from Site Burgundy.”

  April turned her head, looking back at us. “Jessie? What are you saying?”

  “The only way Mikki got out of that pit is if somebody let her out.” Jessie’s turquoise eyes burned cold, radioactive in the dark. “That was a Vigilant Lock team. We were just ambushed by our own fucking people.”

  “On Linder’s orders?” April asked.

  Jessie took out her phone.

  “Great question,” she said. “Let’s ask him.”

  EIGHT

  “This is Special Agent Temple,” Jessie said into the phone, “authorization ninety-three ninety-three. Get the director on the line. Oh, I guarantee he’s expecting a call from me.”

  While we waited, Jessie ticked off names on her fingertips.

  “Vigilant has three field teams besides us. Beach Cell, but they’re all in deep cover at Diehl Innovations with Agent Cooper. Redbird Cell got wiped out in Miami right before the Red Knight incident, and there’s no way Linder’s trained up their replacements this fast.”

  “That leaves Panic Cell,” I said.

  “Yeah. The team that’s always conveniently out of the country or otherwise unavailable every time we need backup.”

  “Looks like they cleared their schedule,” Kevin said.

  Jessie switched her phone to speaker mode. The sound of faint, rasping breath filled the car.

  “Agent,” Linder said, then nothing. Letting her make the first move.

  “Oh, hey, buddy,” Jessie said. “Want to hear a really funny story? So, there we were, enjoying a nice steak dinner, when one of our dining companions spontaneously combusted. And then a bunch of guys with close-quarters battle training tried to kill us. And I’m pretty sure—y’know, call me crazy if you must—but I’m pretty sure you sent them.”

  Linder sighed. “I told you to come in for debriefing.”

  “So you put out a contract on us? Fucking overreact much, asshole? And how long has Mikki been working with Panic Cell?”

  “They weren’t after—” He paused, taking a deep breath. “For the record, I was strongly opposed to releasing her. I was overruled. I promise you, Agent Temple, I am not your enemy. We can still iron things out, but your absolute best hope for survival right now is to come in for debriefing. I need to prove to my superiors that you’re still reliable assets, that you haven’t gone rogue. Trust me, things only get worse from here.”

  “Worse? Mikki and her pals just shot up a casino on the goddamned boardwalk, Linder! Civilians died, which is the exact opposite of what we’re supposed to be doing here. Quantify ‘worse’ for me.”

  “For you,” he said. “For you and your team, I mean. You still have your badges. You still have your reputations. All of that—all of it—can be taken away from you in an instant. This situation is still salvageable, but you have to come in.”

  Jessie stared at the phone, thinking.

  “I’ll call you back,” she said. She stabbed her finger at the screen and disconnected the call.

  We drove a little longer in silence.

  “He tipped his hand,” April mused.

  I looked her way, leaning around the seat. “How do you mean?”

  “What he said, just after Jessie asked how long Mikki had been working with Panic Cell. That defensive tic before he caught himself. ‘They weren’t after’—”

  “Us,” I said, finishing the thought. “They weren’t after us. I’d figured Mikki murdered Houston because he was crouched next to us—she wanted to make a grand entrance and gloat before she killed Jessie and me. But that wasn’t it at all. They were there to assassinate him. We were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “Let’s piece it together,” April said. “Before Vigilant Lock formally existed, Linder was part of the RedEye program.”

  Jessie folded her arms. “And Glass Predator. Sending my mom and her murder buddies to hunt and kill ‘domestic terrorists.’”

  “Including Douglas Bredford and his team,” I said. “We don’t know if he gave the order personally, but someone decided everyone attached to Operation Cold Spectrum had to die. So . . . is Linder using Vigilant’s resources to clean up his old messes?”

  April put a finger to her lips, walking through it. She frowned and shook her head.

  “I don’t think so. The stress in his voice—he was legitimately regretful about Mikki’s involvement.”

  “Man’s not stupid,” Jessie said. “The first time we tried rehabilitating her was a total disaster. Now she’s loose, and we’ve got even more dead civvies.”

  Streetlights washed through the passenger window, casting a hard glow on April’s face. Catching the downcast tilt of her chin, the weariness etched in the crow’s-feet around her eyes.

  “Shit,” Jessie said. “Sorry. You know I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “Why mince words? It was a disaster. Dozens of deaths, a near-global catastrophe.” April turned her face, looking out the window. “And it was my idea. My hubris. If I was a religious woman, I’d be preparing to account for it before my creator. As it is, I’ve learned to shoulder that guilt alone.”

  “What happened tonight wasn’t your fault,” I told her. “Mikki was locked down. You didn’t set her loose again.”

  “No. But the choice to try to weaponize her was entirely mine, and I’ve evidently inspired someone to re-create my experiment. That someone, I believe, not being Linder. Someone higher up in the chain of command.”

  Kevin flicked the tur
n signal. I caught his eyes in the rearview, looking back at me.

  “What about his threat? Can they really pull your badges? Kick you out of the FBI?”

  “Vigilant Lock technically doesn’t even exist.” I shrugged. “Not exactly bound by the rule of law. They can do anything they can get away with.”

  “They,” Jessie said. “‘They’ was ‘us’ just a few days ago. Raises a good question, though. We know they can go scorched earth on us. Why haven’t they yet?”

  April shifted in her seat, looking back at her.

  “Because every time we draw on Bureau resources, we essentially send up a flag letting them know exactly where we are. They weren’t after us tonight, but now they know we’re searching for the Cold Spectrum survivors. Just as they are.”

  “Aselia Boulanger. She’s the last survivor.” Jessie frowned, thinking it over. “If they don’t know where to look, they’ll just follow us right to her. Okay, we’ve gotta get off the grid, pronto.”

  “Agreed,” I said. “They’ll opt for soft leverage as long as they think they can follow us to Aselia. Once we throw them off our trail . . . shit.”

  Kevin peered back at me. “What?”

  I yanked my phone out and speed-dialed.

  “Harmony,” my mother said, “I didn’t expect to hear from you tonight. Are you in town?”

  Her voice was a blanket of warmth I wanted to wrap around my shoulders. I couldn’t right now. Instead, I said a phrase I hoped I’d never have to speak.

  “Wanted to catch you before you went on your vacation. I’m jealous. The Cayman Islands are nice this time of year.”

  She paused, but only for a heartbeat. “Y-yes. I’m looking forward to the trip. I’ll see you when I get back.”

  My mother knew what I did for a living. What I really did for a living. My real vocation—as an agent for Vigilant Lock, under FBI cover—would be hard to hide from her. After all, everything I knew about witchcraft, I’d learned from her. And Vigilant knew about her. Linder had been to her house. We’d agreed, long ago, that there might come a time when my clandestine life went sour and she’d have to go to ground for a while, for her own safety. Referencing her “Cayman vacation” was our private warning signal for her to pack a bag and run.

  “I love you, Mom.”

  “I love you, too, Harmony.”

  She hung up the phone. I cradled it in my hand.

  “Escape routes,” Jessie said. “We need options. All suggestions are welcome.”

  “We’ve still got the Oceanic Polymer cover,” Kevin said. “That’s secure.”

  “We think that’s secure. Thinking and knowing could be the difference between life and death here. Let’s get to the airport—I’ve got a way to put it to the test.”

  Despite the name, Atlantic City International Airport was about the size of a postage stamp. Down on the first level, bags slowly spun on a trio of luggage carousels. Jessie led the way to the Spirit Airlines check-in desk.

  “What’s the cheapest flight you’ve got?” she asked the attendant.

  The woman squinted at her. “Well . . . where are you trying to go, ma’am?”

  “Anywhere but New Jersey.”

  After a little more prodding, she offered us a seventy-nine-dollar shuttle flight into LaGuardia. We took it.

  “Why are we going to New York?” Kevin asked as a printer spat out the tickets.

  “We aren’t,” Jessie told him. “C’mon, let’s go check out the gift shop. I want a souvenir. Maybe a nice plastic snow globe or something equally classy.”

  The gift shop looked out across the narrow concourse, a perfect vantage point and a place to hide in the clutter. All the same, I grabbed a newspaper and hid my face when Mikki strode right past us. Six men followed in her wake—no helmets, but they had to be the same men who had opened fire in the steak house. Their moves gave them away: smooth, precise, machines of lethal grace.

  “Those beards, the cowboy look,” Jessie murmured into my ear. “These guys aren’t from the clandestine sector. They’re pure special forces, born and bred.”

  “More elimination than investigation,” I said. “It’s a hit squad.”

  We slipped the desk clerk a twenty-dollar bribe. She told us they’d flashed FBI credentials and demanded to know our flight information. “Agent Mikki” was very insistent, she said. Once we were sure the coast was clear, Jessie hustled us back out to the parking garage.

  “Well, we’re burned,” she said. “Our civvie covers are totally compromised, and so is the Oceanic AmEx account. On the plus side, obviously we’re their only lead: they don’t know Boulanger is hiding out in Des Allemands. As long as we stay under the radar, we can still get to her first.”

  “So we can’t use our real identity or our covers,” Kevin said. “Or withdraw money. Or use the card. We’re kinda boned here, boss. Even if we had cash, you can’t get on a plane or a train without ID these days. And we’ve gotta stay off cameras: they can tap image recognition, the Interstate Photo Service . . . they can do everything we can do.”

  “An intriguing conundrum,” April mused. “How would we . . . escape from us? We appear to have become the villains of this story.”

  Jessie snapped her fingers. “Then we’ll be the best damn villains anybody ever saw. Remember, we’ve hunted bad guys nobody could find. We know all the tricks they used. More important, we know how they screwed up. We just gotta learn from their mistakes. So: no planes, no trains. We’re driving it. It’s, what, eighteen hours from here to Louisiana? As long as Mikki and company are chasing their tails up in New York, we’ve still got a head start.”

  “The SUV was rented on the Oceanic Polymer card,” April said. “They’ll be able to trace its transponder.”

  “Not for long. Kevin, you still got that backdoor into the Budget car rental system? Can you scrub the receipts, like you did back in Oregon?”

  “Gimme fifteen minutes,” he said.

  “You’ve got ten. Let’s get rolling, team.” Jessie took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. “Apparently, we’re gonna go pick a fight with Vigilant Lock.”

  “More like they picked one with us,” I said.

  “Yep. More like.” She gave me the hint of a smile. “And, goddamn, are they gonna regret it.”

  NINE

  We drove through the night along endless country back roads and desolate ribbons of highway, the deep and hungry American dark. Streetlights strobed in a hypnotic beat, lulling me, my slow-burn anxiety muffled under fatigue and the rhythm of the road. Eventually I had to pull over and swap places with Jessie. It felt like I’d barely closed my eyes when we were stopped again, her hand gently shaking my shoulder, waking me up for another shift change.

  For a while, I thought I was the only one awake in the car. It was four in the morning, false dawn off to the left, and the radio faintly played under the sound of Jessie’s and Kevin’s snoring. Some local broadcast, an insomniac reading off farm-and-produce reports for an audience of nobody.

  I glanced in the rearview. April was awake. Just silent. Staring out the window and watching the shadows of trees glide by in the dark.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “Is there any reason I would be?”

  I didn’t know what to say to that.

  April reached into the canvas tote on her lap and took out a small white plastic box. Three tiny pills bounced into her wrinkled palm. She tossed them into her mouth one at a time and swallowed them dry.

  “Prilosec, divalproex sodium, and chlortalidone,” she said. “Thanks to a combination of paraplegia and advancing age. I have enough for a few more days.”

  “We can get you more,” I said.

  “Not without a prescription. And the moment I place an order, our location will light up for all to see. I’m a bit of an albatross around this team’s neck at the moment.”

  “That’s not true.”

  She arched an eyebrow at me. “Isn’t it? Thanks to my medical condition, you’re e
ither going to have to risk capture or abandon me in the field.”

  “We aren’t abandoning you,” I said.

  “No? If our roles were reversed, I’d abandon you.”

  I met her gaze in the mirror.

  She looked back at me, cold and steely.

  “What?” she said. “It’s what’s best for the team. Nothing matters but the mission. Isn’t that your mantra?”

  “I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  I fell silent for a moment. Wrestling with the question. It felt like a serpent, slithering out of my grip, refusing to give me an easy answer.

  “When I worked solo,” I told her, “it was easier. I could throw myself into the job. Live the job. But now, with you and Jessie and Kevin in my life, the things we’ve all been through together . . . I’m seeing that there’s layers to the world. Not everything is black-and-white. I guess I’m just asking more questions than I used to. Tell you what I do know, though—you’re not a liability.”

  “Of course I am. I can’t survive without my medication. I can’t take a turn driving on this little road trip because my legs don’t work. Tell me what I’m contributing, exactly?”

  “You . . .” I trailed off, fumbling for an answer.

  “You’re about to say I inspire the team, aren’t you? Grasping for some optimistic, feel-good platitude. You’re very good at those.”

  I could have denied it, but we’d both know I’d be lying. So I didn’t say anything at all.

  “Do you know the worst thing about being disabled, Harmony?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Everyone expecting you to be inspirational.” April’s lips curled in a smile of raw disdain. “The second you end up in a wheelchair, you’re not a human being anymore. No personality, no dreams, no fears or hates or regrets. You’re a sexless, faceless prop. A fetish for people’s guilt, their need to show what good people they are, being nice to the poor cripple.”

  A rest stop was up ahead. A yellow sign advertised the local price for unleaded and diesel. I pulled in. We rumbled to a stop beside the pumps. I glanced back over my shoulder.