Cold Spectrum

by Craig Schaefer

  She opened her eyes. Luminous in the dark, faintly glistening.

  “If we made the wrong choice,” she whispered, “if we lose her—”

  “It was her choice, Jessie, and she knew the risks. She’s trusting us to have her back. So let’s get out there and do our job.”

  “Refueling?” Jessie said as the Cessna’s wings rattled under a buffet of wind. “Again?”

  “Yeah, again,” Aselia told her. “This isn’t a 747, okay? I’m pushing her as hard as I can, but unless your witch buddy here has a spell to magically conjure fuel, we’ve got to land. I’ve been flying low, zigzagging, pulling off then pouring on the speed—anything to keep them from noticing they’ve got a suspicious blip on the radar. It’s not as easy as making a beeline.”

  Kevin huddled over his laptop. Two strobing beacons pinged in neon green across a wire-frame map of the United States. We’d been flying east by northeast for hours, through rain and black clouds, chasing a point of electronic light.

  “Tracker’s holding steady,” he said, “and we’re not far behind. They’ve had to stop a couple of times, too.”

  “Let’s just make it fast,” Jessie said.

  A rainy morning gave way to a drizzly noon under a cold bronze sky. We ate cheap sandwiches on rye bread at a regional airport while Aselia ran flight checks.

  “Pretty sure, given the flight path so far, we’re headed back to New York,” she told us.

  “Makes sense,” I said. “Crohn never left the state after he escaped. He must have a hiding place. Not in the city, though. Not with the Bureau and the courts of hell hunting for him. By now his old bosses must have found what’s left of Prospero.”

  Around four in the afternoon, our target landed at a tiny commuter airport downstate, about a hundred miles north of New York City. From there, the GPS ping slowed down. Moving at highway speed. We touched down two hours behind them and ran to the rental kiosk. Twenty minutes later the four of us were on the move again, Aselia behind the wheel of an ice-white Ford Expedition.

  Winding roads cut through tall, rolling hills dressed in the colors of autumn. We curved around the feet of snowcapped mountains as the Ford’s windshield wipers slapped out a slow and steady tempo, driving back droplets of icy rain. Jessie sat impassive, shielded behind her dark glasses, but one hand squeezed her armrest in a death grip. I didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything to say.

  “The Catskills,” Aselia murmured. “Makes sense for a hideout. Remote, secluded. There used to be hundreds of vacation resorts out here. Used to be. A handful of them, once they closed doors, never got torn down. You could hole up there forever if you had someone running food and supplies out to you.”

  “Signal stopped moving,” Kevin said.

  Jessie sat bolt upright. “What do we have?”

  He leaned forward and tapped Aselia on the shoulder. “Take a left up here. And what we have . . . yeah, exactly right. Check this out.”

  He rattled the keyboard and called up a Google Earth scan. An overhead view of what looked like a ski lodge, though the slopes were deserted, and the patchwork, crumbling roof looked like a meteorite had hit it.

  “Levine’s Grand,” Kevin said. “Shuttered in 1968, and the place has been sitting vacant ever since. The property’s passed from developer to developer since then, but nobody’s ever managed to tear the old construction down, let alone build anything new.”

  I studied the map. One two-story lodge, plenty of approaches, minimal cover. A few outbuildings still dotted the property, but most had rotted to the foundations over the decades, leaving behind nothing but wooden skeletons and concrete pits. The original lodge wouldn’t have had much of a security system, and I doubted Panic Cell had time to lay down any electronic countermeasures since their arrival. Human sentries would be our biggest risk: one shout, one stray gunshot, and those hostages were as good as dead.

  “They had to refuel as often as we did,” I said to Aselia. “Meaning they were in a plane like ours, not Panic Cell’s C-130. If the rest of Crohn’s men have been rounding up captives and loading them onto that cargo plane . . . is there any chance they could avoid big airports altogether and just land it near the resort? It’d be safer for them, less chance of anyone spotting the hostages.”

  “Pass the laptop up—lemme see.”

  I held the screen up.

  She glanced away from the road just long enough to catch a glimpse, then nodded. “Oh, sure. That big, long patch of open ground just east of the resort? That’s plenty.”

  “That isn’t a landing strip,” I said.

  Aselia grinned. “There’s a reason the military’s been relying on the Hercules since the late ’50s. You can bring those birds down on beaches, in forest clearings, tundra—you name it. A C-130 lands where it wants to land.”

  “If we had to evacuate those hostages—fast—could you fly it out of there?”

  “Standard crew is two pilots, plus a navigator and a flight engineer.” She tilted her head, thinking. “But can I get her up in the air, then land her safe, someplace out of the line of fire? That I can do.”

  The sliver of the moon, a stark icy crescent, rose over the Catskills. Nearly full dark, no street lamps, no city lights to guide us. Just the Ford’s high beams cutting through the gloom and the steady slap of the windshield wipers, a metronome beat in time with my heart. Aselia killed the lights a half mile from the abandoned resort, guiding us down a narrow, broken road by instinct and touch. A quarter of a mile out, we stopped. She shut off the engine. Its growl faded to silence, replaced by the faint patter of raindrops.

  I could barely make out the main building: just a bulky and broken shadow, squatting in the thin moonlight. The bones of a dinosaur left to rot in the freezing rain. Then there was light, shining from a ground-floor window, and distant silhouettes in motion. Kevin’s tracker had worked. This was the place, and April—along with Mikki, Benjamin Crohn, and his demon-worshipping henchmen—was inside.

  I reached to my magic. A gnawing emptiness answered me. The burst of power I’d stolen from Romeo’s lips in Atlantic City was long gone now, my advantage spent, and all I had left was the hunger. Soon I would have to decide: stay clean, and face the agony of withdrawal, or make a return trip to Romeo and feast.

  Tonight, though, I didn’t have a choice. I had to fight through the emptiness, fight through the hunger, and dig as deep as I could to survive and win. April was counting on me. They all were.

  Jessie popped her pistol’s magazine, checked her ammunition, then slammed it back into place. She locked eyes with me.

  “No warning shots, Harmony. No prisoners tonight.”

  “No prisoners,” I said.

  FORTY-THREE

  The frigid mountain wind numbed my cheeks and my toes and turned my breath to wisps of white vapor. Droplets of night rain felt like needles of ice. They prickled my face and hands, soaking through my blazer. We told Kevin to stay in the car. Jessie, Aselia, and I set out across the open badlands, single file and hunched low, moving fast for cover. Ruined outbuildings dotted the mountain valley, nothing left but collapsed wooden frames or twisted tangles of metal pipe. As I was about to break from the shadows, scurrying toward the next patch of safe ground, Aselia grabbed my arm and pulled me back.

  “Hold on,” she hissed, one hand cupped to her ear. “Hear that?”

  I looked up. A faint droning cascaded through the air, like the rising trill of cicadas.

  “Plane engine?” I asked.

  “C-130, circling for a landing. Figure it’s about five minutes off.”

  “You can tell by the sound?” I asked.

  “It’s what I do.” Aselia looked to Jessie. “Your call. Storm the place now, or wait for them to bring the other hostages in?”

  Jessie frowned. “Have to wait. If they get any kind of a warning out, the plane won’t land, and they’ll probably just kill everybody right on the spot. Let’s roll with it.”

  Strobe lights emerged from the sk
y, shadowed wings and mighty propellers boiling from the darkness. The fat cargo plane bounced down on frozen wet grass, wheels thumping, engines screaming, as the C-130 lurched hard on the brakes. It wobbled, unsteady, then jolted to a stop.

  The propellers wound down. The cargo door at the back of the plane began its slow hydraulic descent, inner lights washing out across the field. We circled around the long way, using the resort for cover, getting closer.

  Four men, rifles slung over their shoulders, marched the hostages out. I counted six in all. They had their hands shackled behind their backs, heads bowed, and most sporting fresh bruises or black eyes. Linder was the first one in line.

  “Let ’em pass,” Jessie breathed, crouched beside me.

  They left one soldier behind to guard the plane. He stood at the foot of the ramp, his rifle cradled and ready.

  Jessie holstered her gun and drew her knife instead.

  She gestured for us to hold back. She moved in alone, a panther in the night, her footsteps silent on the wet grass. He didn’t see her coming. All he saw was the flash of serrated steel. Then he was on his knees, clutching at his throat and choking, sliced arteries spraying the last few seconds of his life across the steel ramp. Jessie kicked him in the small of the back, knocking him flat, and stepped over him as he died. She marched up the ramp, flicking scarlet droplets from the edge of her blade. A moment later she reappeared and waved us over.

  We jogged up the ramp to join her. The belly of the C-130 was empty. I could see where Vigilant’s funding had really been going all this time: an electronics suite took up one side of the cargo deck, with a hundred-inch screen flanked by a grid of smaller monitors, all dark now. They had an armory under lock and key, a small holding cell for prisoners. While I marveled at the engineering job they’d done to fit everything on board, Aselia headed up to the cockpit.

  “What do you think?” Jessie asked her.

  She nestled into the olive canvas pilot’s seat and ran her fingertips over the console. “I think I’m right at home. Give me twenty minutes. I’ll be ready to fly when you are.”

  Jessie turned without another word, leading me back into the dark. We skirted the field, eyes on the yellow glow behind the resort’s broken and sagging windows.

  “Must have brought in a portable generator, set up their own lights,” Jessie whispered. “So we’ve got Crohn and Mikki in there, plus at least five guys from Panic Cell.”

  “Probably just the five,” I whispered back. “We’ve already dropped a few of them.”

  “Yeah, so, two against seven. I’ll take those odds. We need shock and awe: hit ’em fast, take everybody out before they even know what’s happening. Let’s get closer.”

  Around the back of the resort, a second-floor patio—outdoor seating for a restaurant, if I had to guess—drooped on broken and sagging timbers. Jessie pointed. I cupped my hands, crouching, and boosted her foot. She grabbed the railing’s edge—my stomach clenching as the wood groaned, old nails slowly ripping from their planks—then scrambled over the top.

  I jumped up. Jessie snagged my wrists and pulled me to her. We didn’t take any time to catch our breath. Through a shattered patio door, ringed with remnants of old and jagged glass, and across an abandoned café choked in dust, we closed in on the sound of voices.

  A balcony looked down onto the resort’s indoor swimming pool. The wide hall was lit by harsh standing lights, fat yellow cords snaking across the ruptured concrete to a humming gas generator in one corner of the room. Urban explorers had left their mark here over the decades: graffiti tags festooned the basin of the empty pool and the rotten wooden walls, layer upon layer of garish paint. Water leaked from sagging timbers overhead, and dirty rain collected in brackish, dark puddles. We dropped low, hiding behind a chunk of collapsed drywall, looking down on the scene.

  Crohn stood triumphant at the lip of the pool with April silent at his side. She played at being sullen, defeated, but I recognized the steely look in her eyes. She was calculating every angle. Mikki and one of the Panic Cell troops herded the other hostages into the pool, sitting them down on the concrete. Another soldier angled the lights, while a third set up a digital camcorder on a tripod.

  “You won’t get away with this,” April said. Her voice, defiant, echoed through the cavernous chamber. So did Crohn’s condescending chuckle.

  “Of course I will. Weeks from now I’ll have a new name, a new face, a new life. You didn’t beat me, April. You never could. The best you could manage was mild inconvenience.”

  He stared at her. “What?” she said.

  “You’re still beautiful when you’re angry. I remember why I fell for you.” He took a deep breath, letting it out as a sigh. “Then you had to go and ruin everything. God, we could have been perfect.”

  “You had to go and spit on your oath of duty. You falsified evidence, Ben. Your career was never about justice or the law—it was about you. You and your damn spotlight.”

  “You don’t understand the pressure I was under,” he snapped. “I was a Bureau superstar. The best profiler in the world. You can’t imagine the expectations that put on my shoulders. I couldn’t fail, not even once. So yeah, sure, I put my thumb on the scales once or twice.”

  “And after that? You willingly joined the forces of hell, Ben. What’s your excuse for that? You were the director of the FBI. What more could you possibly want?”

  “How do you think I became the director in the first place? They gave me the job.” He glared at her, eyes narrowed. “You still don’t get it, do you? Hell won, April. The war is over. They rule this planet. And humanity? Humanity is a lost cause. So, yes, I joined the winning side. And now I’m going to do it again. Mikki? You ready?”

  Mikki stood on the far side of the pool, hands on her hips. “Looks like we’re ready to make some home movies. Want me to toss her in with the others?”

  “No,” Crohn said. “I want her to watch this.”

  Mikki snapped her fingers. One of the gunmen walked up to the pool’s edge with a big red plastic can. He upended it, splashing the contents over the bound hostages below as they struggled against their cuffs and choked for breath. The fumes rose up, sharp and pungent. Gasoline.

  The trooper behind the video camera gave Crohn a thumbs-up. A light on the camera strobed green.

  “I’m afraid you’ve all outlived your usefulness,” Crohn told the hostages. “Vigilant Lock, in its many incarnations, has been shut down from time to time. Normally, that means scrubbing our wayward operatives and starting over. This time? Well, sad to say . . . everything must go.”

  He snapped his fingers, as if remembering something.

  “Oh! There is just one other thing.”

  I froze, feeling the muzzle of a rifle press against the back of my head. Beside me, Jessie slowly raised her hands, another trooper plucking the pistol from her grip. Crohn grinned up at our hiding place.

  “We’ve got room for at least two more corpses. Bring ’em on down, gentlemen.”

  They took our weapons and marched us downstairs, standing us beside April. A moment later, another trooper came in from the rain, his buzz cut glistening and fatigues soaked dark. He jerked his thumb over his shoulder.

  “I found their vehicle about half a klick out,” he said to Crohn. “Empty, no passengers. I disabled the engine just to be safe.”

  Kevin hadn’t stayed in the car. I’d never been so relieved at somebody not following orders. Hopefully he’d run to the plane to hole up and wait with Aselia.

  Mikki shot a look at Crohn. “You said I could have Kevin.”

  Crohn waved an open hand. “How far do you think he can get on his own, on foot? We’re in the middle of nowhere. Patience.”

  At my side, April squirmed in her wheelchair. I saw her hand slip down, curling around a sheaf of papers she’d been sitting on. Torn-out pages from a crossword puzzle magazine. She hid them against her hip as Crohn turned our way.

  “You see, April? Now I win. Oh, you th
ought you’d trick me. Harmony placed a call on a compromised line, feeding your location to Linder, and set you up as a target.” He pressed the back of his hand to his forehead, dramatic. “Oh, clearly my obsession with you would blind me to the obvious ploy! And I had no idea that you knew Linder was my prisoner, so I’d be sure to fall for your ruse. I certainly wouldn’t imagine that you’d put a GPS transmitter in your wheelchair so your friends could follow you here.”

  He dropped his hand and shook his head at her, snickering.

  “Your little Trojan horse play was as desperate as it was pathetic. This is the best you can do? Really? I knew where your team was and what you were planning, every step of the way. All I had to do was leave the doors wide-open and let the three of you walk right into my trap. I have to admit, April, I’m disappointed. You used to almost be my equal. I thought you could give me a better battle of wits. Apparently I aged a little more gracefully than you did.”

  “Are you sure about that?” April asked him. Her hand slid backward, under her armrest, pushing the rolled-up sheaf of crossword pages toward me. “Maybe that was my plan all along—I knew you’d know—and I was doing something else entirely.”

  I stepped close, as if I were being protective of her, one hand on the back of her chair. Her fingers fed the rolled pages toward me a half inch at a time. As soon as Crohn’s gaze was fixed on her, captivated, I grabbed the papers and slipped them behind my back.

  “Oh, really?” His eyes twinkled as he grinned at her. “Please, enlighten me.”

  I did the honors, guessing April’s game.

  “We know you killed Prospero,” I said, “and we know you stole the contracts for the demons he paid you with. They’re the source of your strength, bound inside your body. But that’s the thing about infernal contracts: light them on fire, and the demon goes free. That’d be real bad for you.”