Cold Spectrum

by Craig Schaefer

  We found one a couple of blocks away. Kevin ran a few last-second checks while Aselia pulled the Escalade over, tapping the emergency blinkers. Once everything was ready, April made the call.

  “Yes, hello. This is April Cassidy, calling for Dr. Sokoloff. I’m afraid I’m in a bit of a pickle. I neglected to pick up my divalproex prescription before leaving on a trip, and, well, I’m in Manhattan, all out of pills, and I can’t go without it. Could you please arrange for a refill? As quickly as possible?” She paused, listening. “The Duane Reade at 250 Broadway? Wonderful, I’ll be there as soon as I can. Thank you so much.”

  We rolled past the RedEye office just in time to see Ben Crohn striding across the street toward the nearest parking lot, the tails of his gray trench coat rippling at his back, followed by Mikki and four men in Oakleys and heavy fleece coats.

  “I suspect half of them are heading for the drugstore,” April said, “and half for East Twenty-Fourth Street.”

  Aselia glanced at the clock on the dashboard. “By the time they figure out they’ve been had, they’re gonna be neck-deep in traffic. That bought us a little breathing room.”

  “Not as much as I’d like,” I said, “but under the circumstances, I’ll take what we can get. Okay, next up, we need an electronics store. Someplace local, with a dumpster we can get at.”

  It took about an hour to find what we needed. All the while, going over the plan and April’s street map, rehearsing every single step until all five of us knew it by heart. We’d only have one chance to pull this off. If it all went like clockwork, no surprises, no mistakes, we might actually live to see tomorrow. Jessie caught my eye.

  “You think we can pull this off, Mayberry?”

  I didn’t answer right away. You don’t lie to your friends.

  “I think we’ve got a shot,” I told her. “I’ll tell you what I know. I know we’re all going to try our best. I know we’re gonna give ’em hell. And if that isn’t good enough to win . . . well, we’ll leave them some scars to remember us by.”

  Aselia pulled over to the curb.

  “That’s good enough for me,” Jessie said. “This is our stop.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  The RedEye lobby didn’t offer much in the way of concealment: just an open span of clean ivory tile between the front door and the reception desk at the back of the room. So we brought our own cover.

  We pushed through the front door, Jessie in front and me right behind her, carrying the cardboard box for a seventy-inch Sony television set. We’d scavenged it from the dumpster of a Best Buy, nothing but chunks of loose white polystyrene inside, but a little body language and a little droop in our knees made it look heavy enough to be real. Jessie cantered to the right as we walked in, keeping the box between our faces and the two sentries on guard.

  “’Ey, got a delivery!” Jessie called out in a bad attempt at a Brooklyn accent. “Delivery for Mr. Burton Webb, gotta get his signature, a’ight?”

  Both men moved in on us, fast, somewhere between confused and annoyed.

  “You can’t—” one said as he moved to stand in Jessie’s path. “You can’t bring that in here. No deliveries today. Turn around, now.”

  “Hey, I’m walkin’ here,” she said.

  Jessie paused as the first sentry rounded the edge of the box. He came face-to-face with her, freezing, the glimmer of sudden recognition in his eyes.

  “More accurately,” Jessie added, the accent gone, “I’m punchin’ here.”

  We shoved the box, throwing it at the second sentry. He backpedaled, fast, expecting a hundred pounds of TV set to come crashing into him. The empty box bounced off his upheld arms, harmless, as Jessie threw a brutal right cross and splintered his partner’s nose. He dropped to the floor, staining the ivory tile with a trickle of scarlet. The second man recovered fast and went for his sidearm. I was faster. I drew my pistol and held it in a two-handed grip, aiming the muzzle right between his eyes. He froze on the spot.

  “Good choice,” I told him. “Keep those hands nice and empty.”

  Jessie disarmed both men, tossing their weapons to the far corner of the lobby, then we got them on their bellies and zip-tied their wrists and ankles. I glanced sidelong at her as I yanked the ties tight.

  “What was that supposed to be—John Travolta?”

  Jessie’s lips parted, momentarily speechless. “Dustin Hoffman. Midnight Cowboy. C’mon, get with the program.”

  “I’m just saying, if you were doing Travolta, it would have been a passable Travolta.”

  The sentry with the broken nose had woken up. He jerked at his bonds and squirmed.

  “You’re dead,” he seethed. “Both of you, your whole team, everybody you know, everybody who ever knew your names. Dead.”

  “Wow,” Jessie said in mock dismay, “tough room. Everybody’s a critic. Hey, don’t suppose either of you upstanding gentlemen want to tell us how many of your buddies are here and where they’ve been stationed? How about you help us out a little?”

  His partner, pinned under Jessie’s knee, craned his neck. “How about you choke on my dick instead?”

  Jessie’s eyelashes fluttered. “Wow. I’m impressed. That’s tough talk from a man with a concussion.”

  “What concu—”

  Jessie grabbed him by the back of his head. His forehead slammed into the floor, spattering blood, leaving a crack in the ceramic tile as his body went limp. She dusted her hands off and stood up, whistling innocently. She glanced my way.

  “Aren’t you going to lecture me about unnecessary brutality?”

  I thought about it. Then I shrugged. “Just this once, under the circumstances . . . nope.”

  The receptionist was behind the front desk. On the floor, her white blouse stained spilled-wine red, her glazed eyes wide-open. After our last two visits, I knew she had a weapon hidden out of sight; there it was under the desk, a short-barreled Mossberg shotgun dangling from leather straps. She hadn’t gotten off a single shot. I helped myself to the Mossberg. Had a feeling we could use some extra firepower. Jessie patted the two invaders down, coming up with her key card on a blood-streaked lanyard.

  I shouldered the shotgun, covering the door behind the desk. Jessie waved the key card past the handle. It clicked. Pistol braced, she swept to one side and shoved the door wide.

  Nothing. Just a clear, pristine hallway, industrial eggshell white under softly buzzing fluorescents.

  I took point, with Jessie at my shoulder. Rounding each corner clean and smooth, ears perked, our footsteps as soft as we could manage. Halfway to the elevator, a man lay facedown in a pool of his own blood, the back of his sweater perforated by bullets. I crouched beside him and pressed my fingertips to his neck.

  “Dead,” I whispered. “It’s not Burton.”

  Jessie nodded to the elevator door. “What do you think? Downstairs, in the server room?”

  “It’d make sense. They need Burton to operate the system. Whole party’s probably down there.” I didn’t like the idea of going in blind. From the look on Jessie’s face, neither did she. Then I snapped my fingers. “Wait, we might have an edge.”

  Jessie followed me to the elevator door. “Whatcha thinking?”

  “When he left those voice mails, Burton said he was watching the security feeds from his computer in his office. Crohn’s people might have left the feeds active. They took the building and everybody in it, so why bother cutting them after the fact?”

  Jessie waved the receptionist’s key card at the elevator panel and hit the button. It lit up pale yellow. A moment later, the door slithered aside, opening onto a cramped, closet-size cage. We squeezed on board and hit the button for the second floor.

  “This is how you know it’s a government facility,” Jessie grumbled. “Cheap, cramped, and not built for comfort.”

  Two more corpses littered the hall leading to Burton’s office. Security, by the looks of them, wearing navy-blue body armor over their dress shirts and ties. One still held his r
evolver in a death grip, half his bullets spent. Impact holes marred the elevator door and the walls around it like bloodless craters. We stepped over the bodies and eased through the open office doorway.

  No sign of Burton, but judging from the papers and pens scattered across the threadbare carpet, they’d bounced him off his own desk a few times before dragging him away. His bulky monitor, shoved to one side, showed a slate-gray screen. I stepped around his capsized desk chair and clicked his mouse. The screen woke up. It flickered to life, showing grainy black-and-white feeds from cameras around the facility. The lobby, the first-floor hall, more corridors, and more dead bodies.

  Jessie leaned in over my shoulder, pointing to the feed in the bottom left corner. “That one. Can you enlarge that?”

  One click, and the window blossomed to fill the screen. We knew that room: the server farm in the sub-basement, aisles of flashing lights and softly whirring boxes. RedEye’s heart, brain, and nerve center. Burton Webb stood at a terminal, a Panic Cell gunman standing right behind him and watching him like a hawk. Other figures prowled the aisles, pacing forward and back, armed for battle and looking sharp.

  “What do you think,” Jessie asked. “Four guys in all?”

  “Yeah. Three roamers, plus the one on Burton. As far as I know, the only way into that room is right through the main door. Straight shot from the elevator, down a short hall. They might have somebody stationed in the hall, too; camera doesn’t cover that angle.”

  “So. Four, maybe five, guys, they’re ready for trouble, and we absolutely have to make sure Burton survives or our entire plan is screwed.” Jessie rubbed her chin. “Okay. I’ll take those odds.”

  “Thought you might.”

  She rubbed my shoulder. “You know me so well.”

  As we waited for the elevator, side by side, I braced myself for the fight. These weren’t low-rent mercenaries or bottom-feeding mobsters. Panic Cell was the real deal: special operators trained to terminate any threat, human or superhuman. And Crohn had called them in just for us.

  In my peripheral vision, I saw Jessie looking my way. I tried to keep the tension from my face. Then I caught her eyeing my shotgun.

  “You, uh, like the Mossberg, huh?” she said.

  “It’ll help downstairs,” I said. “Narrow aisles between the server racks. It’s a good tactical choice.”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  She fell silent for a second.

  “You know,” she added, “I’m really good with shotguns.”

  “Jessie.” I glanced her way. “Do you want the Mossberg?”

  “No. I mean, not if you want it.”

  I sighed and pulled back my windbreaker, baring my holster.

  “You can have the shotgun if you’d like it,” I told her, “or . . .”

  Her eyes went wide. She plucked the Sig Sauer from my holster, clutching a matching pistol in each hand.

  “Aw, yes.” She beamed at me. “Now everybody’s a winner. Except those guys down in the server room. They will never be winners.”

  The elevator chimed, and the door slid open, inviting us to the showdown.

  “Won’t even know what hit ’em,” I said as I stepped into the cage.

  That was bravado, not confidence. Trying to pump myself up for the fight. As the elevator descended with a faint whir, though, I realized I didn’t need to. I found that cold center inside myself, that quiet, peaceful place that wraps its arms around me just before the bullets fly and the blood flows. When Cody confronted me, back in our hometown, he said there was something wrong with me. That on some fundamental level, I didn’t react to violence like a normal person should. Bad wiring in my head.

  I tried to feel bad about that. I knew I should feel bad about it. I just didn’t know how.

  In moments like this, I recognized it for what it was. Survival instinct. The men in that server room wouldn’t hesitate to kill us. They wouldn’t show mercy. No, for men like them, mercy was for the weak. They only knew one way to prove their strength: by hurting people, just because they could.

  It wasn’t just Panic Cell. Wasn’t just Benjamin Crohn, or his masters in the courts of hell. I’d seen it time and time again since the day I put on a badge: men who saw themselves as predators and the entire world as prey. They saw other people, innocent people, as nothing but objects to use, plunder, and break as they pleased. Our civility was their shield. They counted on the fact that they could act like barbarians, take what they wanted, and hurt who they wanted, while the rest of us yearned for peace and moral victories. Lines protected them: lines they knew “good people” wouldn’t cross.

  For a long time, I’d wanted to be a good person more than anything else. I still tried. But in these quiet moments of truth, I faced myself and understood the facts. The things I’d done and the things I knew set me apart from the society I’d sworn to protect. I wasn’t a sheepdog watching over the flock. I was like Jessie, a wolf hunting wolves. And I would cross any line, do whatever it took, and pay any price to protect the innocent and the weak.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” Jessie murmured, her eyes on the elevator door as we glided downward.

  “Just remembering who I am,” I said.

  “Yeah?” She glanced sidelong. “Who’s that?”

  I racked the shotgun.

  “I’m the woman who makes the monsters go away.”

  The elevator stopped with a jolt. A chime rang out. The door rattled open.

  THIRTY

  A short hallway stretched out before us, lit in soft-blue LED light and ending in a sliding door of frosted glass. The air was cold and smelled of industrial antiseptic, like the antechamber to some frozen and long-forgotten hell. We moved in silence, our footsteps whispers on the ivory tile, weapons raised and ready.

  Jessie held up the key card, glanced to the small black square beside the door, then to me. I took a slow, deep breath. Four seconds in, four seconds out, steadying my grip on the shotgun. Then I gave her a nod.

  The door hissed open. Jessie dropped the card and drew her second pistol. The server room, washed in deep blue and the faint amber glow from a hundred flickering electronic eyes along the server racks, stretched out before us.

  We moved in.

  I swept left, and she went right. Normally we’d announce our presence, flash a badge, give our suspects a chance to surrender. Not today. A Panic Cell hitter stepped out in front of me as he rounded a bend in the aisle. Just for a split second, he froze.

  I pulled the trigger. The shotgun roared, shattering the silence like the sound of an avalanche, knocking him off his feet and into a server rack. Pellets shredded flesh and metal, electronics sparking as he fell to the rubber-mat floor in a cloud of blood. To my left Jessie moved like lightning, raising one pistol and firing off two quick shots, dodging around a stack, bringing up the other and blazing away. Dancing a bullet ballet and daring them to try to keep up.

  Where she was a whirlwind, I was a slow and steady juggernaut. I marched down a narrow aisle, shotgun shouldered, listening to running footfalls all around me and staying crouched. A gunman came at me from behind. I spun fast, lowered the Mossberg, and opened fire. He staggered backward as his Kevlar caught the brunt of the blast. I racked the pump and hit him again, then again, the third volley hitting him in the face and shredding half the skin from his skull. He collapsed, still twitching, the ravaged servers at his back igniting with a half dozen pinprick fires.

  Out of ammo. I tossed the empty shotgun to the rubber mats and called to my magic.

  Another trooper charged at me from the left, a screaming blur with a tactical knife, steel gleaming as he swung with deadly precision. I unleashed a torrent of congealed, twisting air from my fingertips. The stream snaked around his wrist, lashing like a thorny vine, grabbing hold. Something in my mind twisted. So did his wrist. The leash of air yanked taut and whipped his knife hand back. He slashed his own throat from ear to ear.

  Arterial blood spattered the servers, turned the blinking a
mber eyes dark crimson. It splashed hot across my cheeks, my mouth, my windbreaker. I stared, wide-eyed, as I watched him fall to his knees and die at my feet. I’d never done that with my magic before, never even considered it, but in the heat of the moment—

  “Harmony,” Jessie shouted from behind me. “Down!”

  I dropped to one knee as a three-round burst chopped above my head. Another Panic Cell gunman stood behind me—and behind him, Jessie had both her pistols raised and ready. A muzzle flash left stars in my eyes as she unloaded on him, pumping bullets into his back until he hit the floor. I was bookended in dead bodies.

  I wiped my sleeve across my face, feeling the sticky smear of fresh blood.

  Our work wasn’t done. I’d counted six operatives on the security feed. Two to go. One rounded the corner and locked Jessie in his sights, the Magnum in his grip booming. She was moving before he pulled the trigger, dropping her pistols, lunging in for the kill with her turquoise eyes blazing. The round blasted the faceplate off a server at her back, right where she’d been standing a second ago. She slapped the gun from his hand and drove a knuckle punch into his throat. He fell back, gagging, drawing his combat knife. Jessie flashed a toothy grin and beckoned to him. I knew that look. Her adrenaline was pumping, her inner wolf coming out to play, and that meant one thing.

  He was a dead man. He just didn’t know it yet.

  He lunged with perfect precision, going for the kill. She sidestepped, crouched low, and threw a punch. The trooper howled as his kneecap shattered like a porcelain plate. She caught his wrist as his leg went out from under him, twisted his arm, and drove the edge of her hand down against his elbow. His arm snapped and bent double. His hand spasmed against the back of his elbow as he convulsed on the floor. She crouched over him, with her back to me, and leaned in.

  I heard the wet crunch of throat cartilage, and he stopped moving.

  “Jessie?” I said, my voice soft. “You okay? You keeping it together?”