Cold Spectrum

by Craig Schaefer

  She gave a tiny nod. Taking deep breaths to keep the wolf in check and her human mind in control. She picked up her guns.

  A strangled yelp from Burton Webb echoed across the chamber. The last Panic Cell gunman had one arm wrapped around Burton’s throat, his other hand pressing a fat-barreled revolver to the side of his head. He’d backed himself into the farthest corner of the room, eyes bulging with panic.

  Feeling shaky in the aftermath of my spellwork, I paused just long enough to snatch up a pistol from a dead man’s hand. Jessie and I split up. We came at Burton and his captor from right angles, closing in on two sides.

  The trooper’s head turned wildly. The gun at Burton’s head pressed hard enough to leave a welt. Both men were on the verge of panic. We couldn’t have that. People do stupid things when they panic. And we needed Burton alive.

  “I’ll kill him,” the gunman shouted. “I will!”

  “And then we have no reason to let you live,” I said. “Be smart about this.”

  I aimed for his head, but I didn’t dare take the shot. Not with my hand unsteady, between my exhaustion and the adrenaline still pumping through my veins. Not with his finger a heartbeat away from squeezing the trigger. If I missed by half an inch, in any direction, we’d be scraping two bodies off the floor instead of just one.

  “I’m taking h-him with me,” he stammered. “We’re leaving. Don’t try to stop us.”

  I took a step forward, pistol raised and ready. “Can’t let you do that.”

  From the other side, a shadow between the stacks, I saw Jessie moving in, too. We pressed closer and pinned him into the corner.

  “Let him go,” Jessie said, “and we let you go.”

  “I’m not stupid,” he snapped at her.

  Burton whimpered as his head bent to one side, pressed by the weight of the muzzle.

  “No,” I told him, “you’re not. So use your head and consider your options. Burton dies, you die. That’s a fact. You’re not leaving with him. That’s another fact. Here’s a third: we want him more than we want you.”

  His finger tensed on the trigger. “I’ll kill him,” he shouted again. Fear had its fangs in deep. He was nothing but a broken record now, with a chance of sudden gunfire every time the audio skipped. Reasoning wasn’t going to work.

  My new trick might, if I could repeat it. I already felt the familiar ache in my stomach, and the too-familiar gulf of growing hunger. Normally I wouldn’t try to call on my magic again, not this soon, not this strong. I didn’t see any choice.

  “Jessie,” I called out, “you got a clean shot?”

  “The cleanest.”

  “Good,” I said.

  Then I flung out my hand, streamers of air snapping out like heat-mirage whips, coiling around the gunman’s wrist. His hand yanked upward, the muzzle swinging away from Burton’s face. The trigger jerked, and a chunk of ceiling tile exploded, raining down on the black rubber mats.

  Jessie fired. Her bullet caught him between the eyes and dropped him cold.

  Burton stood mute, wide-eyed, his mouth opening and closing like a fish on a dry dock. Jessie walked over and threw an arm around his shoulder.

  “Hey,” she said, “you called. We came. Be happy.”

  He stared around the chamber. Taking in the blasted and twisted server racks, the pinprick fires and acrid gray smoke, the fallen bodies.

  “My baby,” he breathed. “What did you do to my baby?”

  I sighed. “About that. Good news and bad news, Burton. We’re about to take down some really bad guys—I mean, worse than these bad guys, and that’s saying something. Good news is, you cooperate, and they won’t come after you again.”

  “Okay,” he said, still looking shell-shocked. “What’s the bad news?”

  Jessie clasped his shoulder. “Well, first we have to live long enough to get the job done. And you’re about to undergo a sudden and dramatic career change. So, do you have to supervise this system, or can Ben Crohn access it remotely?”

  “Remote access. Until midnight. That’s when access resets and I have to reenter my personal passwords. I mean”—he flailed a hand at the damage—“if it’s even still working. Do you want me to lock him out?”

  “Get it back online, pronto. I’ll grab a fire extinguisher. And no. Leave his access exactly as it is. We want him to have it.” Jessie looked my way. “You . . . should probably wash the blood off before we go outside.”

  No time to spare, but I darted into an employee restroom while Jessie told Burton the facts of life. I scrubbed the blood from my face, pumping out gritty soap by the fistful, leaving my cheeks raw and ruddy. The windbreaker I took off and reversed. The fall of my hair covered the bare tag in the back; the exposed seams, I couldn’t do anything about. Still, it was better to look like I’d dressed in a dark closet than to walk around Manhattan with blood-drenched sleeves.

  I shoved open the door and darted into the lobby, where Burton looked like he was about to throw up. I looked to Jessie. “He’s on board?”

  “I don’t have a choice,” he said. “You didn’t give me a choice.”

  “Sure we did,” Jessie said. “You can do exactly what we tell you, or you can spend the rest of your life behind bars. Or dead. See, that’s three choices. We’re so nice.”

  I led the way to the front door. We stood out on the sidewalk, anonymous in the urban foot traffic, washed in traffic noises and the smell of diesel fumes. A cold wind ruffled past as Kevin’s drone zipped overhead and then out of sight over a low-slung roof. It bobbed twice in passing, acknowledging our arrival.

  “April’s on an encrypted channel with Linder right now, hashing out the logistics.” I took out my phone. “Aselia should be on her way to our location, fresh from dropping Kevin off a few blocks away. Now we up the stakes.”

  I dialed the FBI tip line.

  When they picked up, I put an edge of panic in my voice. “Yes, those—those killer FBI agents, the ones from the television? I saw them, just a minute ago! In Manhattan, the Lower East Side. I saw them get into a blue Escalade. I only have a partial plate number—the last three digits are three-eight-four.”

  Aselia pulled up to the curb. I hung up, then tossed her my phone. She didn’t say a word before lurching back into traffic and away, northbound.

  “You . . . you just told them where we are,” Burton stammered. “And we had a getaway ride. Which we didn’t take.”

  I started walking, fast, and he scrambled to keep up. “Yep. And now, thanks to his remote access, Crohn’s getting an automated heads-up from RedEye. He’ll know it was my voice, and he’ll figure it was some kind of a ruse, but now that he has a way to track my phone, he’ll have to follow up just in case. Aselia’s running a distraction play: she’s gonna drive around and draw as much heat as she can.”

  “What if they catch her?”

  “They won’t,” Jessie said.

  “I don’t get it,” Burton said. “Why draw attention at all?”

  “Because we want Crohn to chase us,” I told him. “We just can’t let him catch us until we’re good and ready.”

  “Speaking of good and ready.” Jessie eyed her own phone, a call coming in. “Speak. Okay, yeah, we’re on the move. Do it.”

  Burton shook his head. “Wait, wait, do what? Phones are bad, okay? Phones are really, really bad right now.”

  “Kevin is patching April through to my line,” Jessie said. “It’s going to look like her call is coming from my phone. We’ll be able to listen in from here.”

  She held it close enough for me to hear the faint, tinny ringing.

  Then a woman picked up, her voice nasal. “Federal Bureau of Investigation, how may I direct your call?”

  “Dr. April Cassidy, calling for Benjamin Crohn,” April said. “He’s in the field at the moment, but you should reach out to him as quickly as possible. I believe he’s expecting my call.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  We listened in, walking briskly along the sidewalk and get
ting lost in the city crowds, as the hold music suddenly died.

  “April,” Benjamin Crohn’s voice said, “it’s been . . . a long time.”

  “I’d say I missed you,” April replied, “but we both know a lie when we hear one. We just missed each other at the drugstore.”

  “Apparently I’m a bit faster than you these days. That’s the nice thing about having functional legs. Sorry you weren’t able to get your prescription filled.”

  “Dirty pool, Ben. You know I need those medications.”

  He chuckled, a low and ugly sound.

  “Is that why you’re calling? Hoping to wave the white flag of truce? It’s a little late for that, April. We know exactly where you and your team are. I’m so close you should feel my breath on the back of your neck. I’m a little disappointed, to be honest. I hoped you’d at least give me some kind of a real challenge before all was said and done.”

  “Oh, that’s why I’m calling,” she said. “I’m sure you’ve figured out we have access to a private aircraft.”

  “Bet yours isn’t as nice as mine. So?”

  “I’m taking myself out of the game. As we speak, I’m on my way to turn myself in to local law enforcement.”

  “But—” He paused, thrown off his stride. “But you weren’t even named in the warrants for Temple and Black. We called you a hostage—”

  “You’re not the only one who can spin a story,” April said. “I’m going to confess to being an accessory. Once my lawyer arrives, I imagine we can keep the NYPD tangled in red tape for a good twenty-four hours or so, during which time they’ll be obligated to provide me with medical treatment and the drugs I require to survive. Oh, you’ll swoop in and try to take me into federal custody, but you’ll still have to file papers, argue with the locals . . . it’s going to be quite a mess. A loud mess.”

  “What’s your game?” he growled.

  “Only that I’m all alone in the big city,” April said. “While I play the lone wolf, I’ve sent the rest of my team to the plane with orders to abandon me. They’re going to vanish, Ben. They’re good at vanishing. And now that we know you’ve commandeered RedEye, they know exactly how to stay under its radar while they work to expose you and your ‘patrons’ in the eastern infernal courts. So now you get to choose: Who do you chase? Let me go and I end up with police protection, media attention, and all kinds of ways to make your life difficult. Let them go and I imagine you’ll be getting a very unpleasant phone call from your superiors by tomorrow night. I wouldn’t want to be you right now. Then again, I never did.”

  I listened to the pulse of Crohn’s heavy breathing.

  “You think I can’t round all of you up at once?”

  “I think you’re a once moderately talented investigator who let his skills go to seed, choosing to prop up his egotistical ‘legend’ by planting evidence and framing suspects. These days you’re a second-rate amateur at best. A washout who couldn’t hack it as a real FBI agent, so you had to worm your way into the bureaucracy. A paper pusher with a pedigree.”

  “You’re going to regret that,” Crohn seethed. “You know, it’s funny. I was vehemently opposed to recruiting you into Vigilant. The only reason we took you is because we wanted your pet science project.”

  “Jessie isn’t a science project. She’s the best thing that ever happened to me. And as far as regrets go, my sole regret is that I was once young and naive enough to share my bed with you. But we live and we learn. When it comes to fieldwork, Ben, you’re a pretender. I’m the real thing. Come at me if you think you’ve got the chops for it.”

  She broke the call. A second later, Crohn did the same, leaving the phone in Jessie’s hand broadcasting dead air. She put it away.

  “What . . . what just happened here?” Burton said. “So, wait. RedEye is tracking both of your phones now.”

  “Right.” I pointed into the distance. “Except Crohn thinks our phone is the one Aselia is driving all over Manhattan.”

  Jessie gave him a lopsided smile, walking with a breezy stride. “And he thinks the one we’re carrying is April’s. See, he can’t risk us getting away and blowing the whistle on him, and April just guaranteed he can’t let her get away, either. His pride won’t let him. So he’s gonna split the team he has left.”

  “Great,” Burton said. “So we’ll only have half the psycho killers coming after us. Crazy idea here, but maybe it would have been better to, say, not paint a giant moving target on our backs in the first place?”

  We moved south on Clinton Street, toward East Broadway—then I held out my hand, bringing us to a dead stop. A block ahead, a black sedan cruised by, its occupants in shark mode. Watching the sidewalks from behind dark glasses, checking every face and being obvious about it.

  “Jessie. Bureau?”

  She nodded and pointed right. “Let’s cut across.”

  “Locals,” I told Burton. “Crohn can’t tell them how he knows where we are, without exposing RedEye, but he can use ‘tips’ to send them in our path and slow us down until he gets here.”

  We darted into Seward Park, a little patch of green, the worn concrete paths strewn with dead autumn leaves. We rounded a dried-up fountain, water stained and leaf choked, while off to the side, kids were screaming and laughing on swing sets. I looked over my shoulder, double-checking that we hadn’t been spotted. Or at least that they weren’t chasing us. Yet.

  “And to answer your question,” I told him, “we want Crohn on our heels. That’s the entire point of the switch: he won’t be able to resist being there when April is captured. If we play this right, he won’t know until the last minute that we’re the ones he actually caught.”

  “Uh-huh. Operative word being caught. Did you see the woman he’s got with him? You know, wears her hair like a My Little Pony doll? Sets people on fire with her brain?”

  Jessie grinned. “Yeah. See, Mikki hates us. She hates us a lot. So guess who’s gonna volunteer to lead the second team, the one chasing Aselia’s SUV?”

  “Oh, good,” Burton said. “So she’s out of the picture, and we only have to worry about the spec-ops guys, the FBI, and the NYPD. No sweat.”

  “Exactly.” Jessie clapped him on the back. “Now you’re getting in the spirit of things.”

  Close to the street corner on the southwest side of the park, I crouched low behind a clump of scraggly bushes. The foliage was half-dead and half-brown in the October chill. A bus stop stood about twenty feet away, a few commuters listlessly waiting, pedestrian traffic drifting by. Twenty feet, and half of it was wide-open. The black sedan had pulled over a little farther up the block. Waiting. Watching. RedEye couldn’t pinpoint our position to the square foot, but it could triangulate off local cell towers—and the longer we stayed in one place, the tighter the noose became.

  Five minutes felt like an eternity. Then I saw the M9 bus chugging down East Broadway, spitting a plume of smoke toward the slate-gray sky. I tapped my earpiece, twice.

  We’d worked out a signal before the operation began, shorthand that didn’t require us to use our voices on an open line. Kevin’s response came back immediately: three quick splashes of white-noise static.

  “Distraction’s primed and ready,” I said. I watched the bus, judged the distance, counted under my breath.

  “Now?” Jessie asked.

  I held up my hand. “Wait for it.”

  Three seconds, two, then—“Now!” I led the way as we broke from cover, racing past the bushes and toward the bus stop. The bus chugged to a halt, doors hissing open. Up the block, Kevin’s drone swooped in. It circled the sedan, bounced off the windows, wriggled up and down in front of the driver. The doors swung open, and men in black suits and clunky shoes boiled out, confused, all eyes on the dancing quadcopter. The drone did an elegant pirouette just before firing a pair of barbs on wire lines. The barbs nailed one of the agents in the shoulder, and he went rigid, twitching as the Taser kicked in, then crumpled to the sidewalk. I was the last one on the bus. I looked ba
ck, watching another agent knock the copter out of the sky with the butt of his gun. His foot stomped down, shattering Kevin’s handiwork under his heel.

  The door hissed shut, and the crowded bus rolled into city traffic.

  It took ten minutes to go a single mile down East Broadway. Stop-and-go, more stopping than going, and I held my breath with every jolt of the brakes. We were packed into the crowded bus like sardines in a tin, and I didn’t want to think about what would happen if Crohn’s men boarded us. We had to worry about civilian lives. They didn’t. It felt like bliss when we got to the Worth Street stop and I could finally step outside and breathe open air again.

  “Let’s go,” Jessie said, pointing up the street. “Third of a mile between us and the endgame. Not too far at all.”

  We weren’t alone. Kevin scurried out of a Starbucks doorway, his laptop case tucked under one arm.

  “Thanks for that,” I told him. “Sorry about the drone.”

  He shrugged. “It was a heroic sacrifice. I was already working on the model-two version anyway. I’ll have it ready in time for our next mission. Assuming, you know, we don’t all die in the next fifteen minutes.”

  Burton gaped at him. “Are any of you people not crazy?”

  “Yeah,” Jessie said. “April. But she’s not here right now. Don’t worry about it; this is almost over.”

  Almost. Except that was the moment some sharp-eyed locals in a squad car got a good look at our faces. A siren squawked at our backs as the car veered up to the curb and the cops jumped out.

  “Hey!” a gruff voice shouted at our backs. “You! Stop right there!”

  Didn’t have to ask whom they meant. Didn’t have to hold a meeting to decide our next course of action, either. We ran.

  We barreled along the sidewalk, shoving through the crowds, one cop hot on our heels while the other called for emergency backup. At least the police wouldn’t open fire and risk civilian casualties—we couldn’t shoot at them, they wouldn’t shoot at us—but that didn’t mean they weren’t going to come at us with everything they had. Fresh sirens wailed from a side street up ahead. A second squad car swerved hard, tires squealing, blocking off traffic as we darted across the intersection.