Cold Front: Frost & Shadow, #1

By E. Prybylski

Can old spies learn new tricks?

 

When Liz Snow, a disabled former CIA operative, receives a call from an old friend seeking assistance, she plunges back into a world she thought she had left behind. What initially appears to be a routine task involving a minor smuggling operation escalates into a far more perilous situation than Snow could have imagined. Unidentified adversaries emerge, casting ominous shadows over the city and putting those close to her in jeopardy.

 

As she confronts these unknown threats, she must navigate a web of danger, safeguard her friends, and grapple with unforeseen challenges. Having been off the job for a long time, can Snow summon the skills and resilience needed to prevail in this high-stakes game of magic ?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Insomnia Publishing
• Release date: Jan 13, 2024
• ISBN: 9798987571927

Book preview

Chapter 1

The diner had three exits. Technically four, if you counted the window in the manager’s office that I could break out if I needed to. The front door and the fire door sat on opposite sides of the public area of the diner, and there was a third through the kitchen. A long counter ran most of the length of the diner with booths lining the space under the windows. It all had the air of well-worn exhaustion that seeped into places like this. Everything was a little tired and a little past its prime but still functional. The décor, the furniture, the people. Especially the people.

There were, by my estimation, six people in the building at the moment: two servers, the line cook, the manager, one other patron, and me. The other patron was a uniformed Boston police officer hunched over a cup of coffee at the other end of the counter. Probably on break, if I had to guess. He showed up most days around this time.

At 0615, nobody but me was really awake, and everyone moved with the sluggish weariness of bodies with neither enough sleep nor coffee. Then there was me. I’d been awake since 0500.

Old habits died hard.

The New York Times crossword lay on the counter beside my coffee, my ballpoint pen resting across it as I pondered the answer to sixteen across. Sipping at my coffee, I tried to ignore the itch in the back of my head telling me to stay on my guard, that there was danger. My PTSD and I were old friends, and I had made my peace with the fact that I was never going to be rid of it. Therapy hadn’t helped—though I never probably stayed in it long enough to let it—and the alcohol and painkillers I downed like a cactus drinks rainwater probably didn’t help, either. But I had achieved some measure of equilibrium, and at this point, I was loathe to change it.

What was sixteen across? A twelve-letter word for stubborn. I hadn’t filled in any of the other boxes yet, so they were no help. My lips pressed together a little as I turned my attention to another clue on the page.

One of the very, very small number of people I called friends had contacted me the day before and asked me to meet him here this morning. He’d said it was important and confidential, which tracked. It would have to be both if he came to me for help. Marcus Dooley—we called him Paladin—was a lieutenant in the Boston Police force and headed the department’s Special Operations Unit, so if he needed me for something, he needed it done quietly and didn’t trust people in the department to get it done.

I smelled an internal affairs problem, but I hadn’t wanted to press for information over the phone.

My leg began to cramp in its familiar pattern, the muscles in my thigh seizing, the tension spreading down over my knee and into my calf and following my leg up my body to my ribs and lower back. Great. It was going to rain.

I stretched my left leg, breathing slowly through parted lips as I tried to work the muscles without making a show of it. When it didn’t let up, I slid off the stool and stood, grabbing my cane from where I’d leaned it against the counter. Hobbling a few paces helped forestall the spasm enough that I could sit back down.

It was about then that Paladin strolled into the diner.

Paladin was a tall, broad man of over six feet with skin so dark gray it looked like the weathered bark of some ancient tree in a forest somewhere and just as tough. He was a half-orc who could give some of the weres I’ve met a run for their money in an arm wrestling contest. Two small tusks jutted up over his lower lip, barely visible. I used to think he had them filed down to blend in better and avoid prejudice, but over the years, I’d realized he’s too proud of his orcish heritage for that. He wore the sort of nondescript clothing that let him blend in anywhere in Boston this time of year: jeans, a gray t-shirt, and a muted flannel with its tartan in black and gray. It wasn’t any particular clan tartan. Just the kind of generic weave one picks up off the store rack at any big box retailer.

Like me, Paladin didn’t have many friends, but our little squad had been up to our necks in the shit together for long enough that we’re the closest thing any of us really has to family. Well, with the exception of Paladin’s wife. JSOC threw us together for a number of missions in Afghanistan, and we’d formed a tight little knot of people that the hell of war couldn’t unravel. Even with the four of us scattered to the wind, we still made time. And if one of the crew said they needed help, we all mobilized. That was just it. So when Paladin had texted me saying he needed my help, it was just a matter of what and when. There was no if.

The nickname came from the fact that he’d always been the most rules oriented of us. Sure, sometimes he understood that rules needed to be sharply bent if not outright broken, but if given the opportunity, he preferred to color inside the lines. The rest of our group had a looser relationship with how we got things done so long as they got done.

When he spotted me, Paladin gave me a sharp nod of greeting that I reciprocated.

Snow, he said, dropping onto the stool next to mine. His voice was monotone. Tired. It wasn’t from the hour, either. I knew that tone. Something had gone wrong.

Paladin, I answered, my voice calm. Empty. I could’ve tried to put some emotion into it, but Paladin knew me well enough that my usual monotone wouldn’t make him think something was off.

I need some fuckin’ coffee. His Boston accent was one of the thickest I’d ever heard. Of course, he grew up in Southie. It’s too early for this shit.

Maybe I’d been wrong. Maybe he was just tired. Mm, I responded, noncommittal as I had some of mine. It’s decent this morning.

It was decent every morning, which was why I came here. I didn’t allow myself many routines. More old habits. The fewer routines a person has, the harder it is to predict their movements. The less likely it is that an enemy operative will be able to know where or when you’ll be at a place, which means a lower likelihood of imminent danger. There weren’t any enemy operatives gunning for me in Boston. At least, none I knew of. I’d been out of the CIA for almost five years now, and I’d been so deep in cover when I was in the Company that anyone who’d known me before I went in thought I was dead.

I’m okay with that. My family are assholes. The CIA doesn’t recruit happy, well-adjusted people for the kind of work I did. Happy people usually don’t do well with the lifestyle. Or the work.

Paladin ordered his coffee, and neither of us spoke while we waited. We didn’t need words to read each other. I knew he’d tell me what he came to tell me when he was good and ready. He was probably, like me, counting the exits. Maybe waiting for the officer at the end of the counter to leave. His break was probably almost over.

The clock on the wall clicked over to 0620, and the officer in question dropped a couple bills onto the counter with a heavy sigh. His body language told me he didn’t want to go back to work. He didn’t so much as glance at Paladin and I as he shuffled out the door, putting his hat back on as he returned to the patrol car I knew was parked out front.

Something in Paladin’s shoulders unwound a little when the other cop left the bar. Definitely internal affairs, then.

So, uh, I caught wind of something I want you to look into, he said, choosing his words with the careful deliberation of a man about to break a whole host of rules and who knows it.

I waited. His coffee arrived before he continued, and Paladin gave the server a vague sort of thanks. Like me, he took it black. I think someone’s trafficking something at the port. Something big. Not people, but… could be guns, drugs… not sure what.

My brows rose some. Isn’t that the port authority’s job? Sounds like federal jurisdiction.

Doesn’t it? He dragged out the words in a way that didn’t sound like a question.

I didn’t rise to the bait. The only puzzle I wanted anything to do with that morning was the crossword. What was sixteen across?

The problem is, so far as I can tell, nobody’s reported it. I passed the information up the chain of command, and as far as I can tell, it died on my captain’s desk. When I asked him about it, he got cagey. Something in my gut says this is wrong. There’s something going on here, and… I dunno, Snow. I just feel it. Down in my bones.

I’d known Paladin for over a decade. If he said something was wrong, I believed him. I didn’t need more proof than that. Of course, what it was, exactly, was anybody’s guess. It could have been everything from bribery to an undercover operation the captain didn’t want to blow. There were at least a dozen reasons I could think of off the top of my head that the uppers might not want to tell him what was happening.

I’ll look into it, I answered, finishing off my coffee and setting the empty cup on the counter. Can’t guarantee I’ll find anything. You know how this works. But I can kick over some rocks and see what scuttles out from under them.

Paladin sighed, slouching further. Thanks. Hey, how’re things goin’ anyway? We haven’t caught up in a while.

Oh, you know, I said with a casual shrug, keeping busy. My work, strictly speaking, wasn’t legal. I knew Paladin wouldn’t slap cuffs on me or anything, but what I did came with a certain kind of discretion. I also technically earned enough that the government would’ve cut me off from my Disability payments if they ever found out. Not that I made enough to live on with those as it was. I trusted Paladin like a brother, but there were some things I’d rather he never have to lie about in court if it ever came up. I respected his work too much to risk his career like that.

The leg still as bad?

I sighed, staring at the countertop. The worn, cinnamon-colored linoleum stared back at me. Worse, I think. I didn’t like talking about it, and he knew it. But that didn’t stop him from prodding when I saw him. He worried.

Jesus, Paladin swore. And they still won’t do any more work on it?

What else is there to do? Besides, they’re too obsessed with getting me off my painkillers to care about anything else. They keep cutting my prescription and making me jump through more hoops. The last time I went in, the doctor had the audacity to ask if I’d tried adding turmeric to my diet.

He laughed, but it wasn’t a happy noise. It was bitter and full of frustrated pain. Fuck.

Yeah. He wasn’t happy when I told him where he could shove his spice cabinet.

We didn’t say anything else for a while, letting the silence fall between us, though he leaned his shoulder into mine for a moment in a show of solidarity. He was there. I knew it. I could have unloaded to him about my problems with Disability or about the nightmares, or about anything. Instead, I shoved it back into the five-piece matching luggage set my emotional baggage comes in.

When I didn’t fill the space, Paladin did. I’ll get you the details. Usual drop? he asked, downing the rest of his coffee. It was hot enough that I suspected he burned his mouth, but he didn’t show it if he did.

Sounds good. You heard from Twitch lately?

Twitch was another of our misfit crew. It was me, Paladin, Twitch, and Nick. Twitch was a tech wizard with a severe caffeine addiction (hence, Twitch). Well, that’s not the right word. He’s not a literal wizard. Genius? Close enough. He was, last I knew, doing some kind of counterintelligence involving Russia. Like the rest of us, he couldn’t talk about his job, but I knew he worked stateside these days.

Nick was the only one of us still in the field. I never quite knew what branch he worked for, but I suspected he was part of some kind of wetwork outfit. I never asked. He never said. The four of us knew better than to talk about that kind of thing. He also didn’t have a nickname. Just a Nick name. (See? I can be funny.) To be honest, I’ve never been sure if Nick is even really his name or if it’s just one he gives to people. Or maybe it’s just the one he uses with us.

Not in the last six weeks or so. You know how he is. He starts programming and then… poof. The world disappears.

I chuckled and nodded. I did know. Having seen him work, though, the results were worth it.

I’ve got to get to the station. I’ll let you know when I can get you the data.

Ten-four, I said with a mock salute.

This time, the laugh was genuine. Get the fuck outta here, he said, dropping some cash on the counter and telling the server to put my coffee on his bill.

You don’t— I started.

Paladin pointed at me. No. Shut up. Let me buy your coffee.

I frowned a little, but the pointing finger remained, and I rolled my eyes. Fine. I let him buy my coffee, and he lumbered out of the diner, leaving me to my crossword puzzle.

A twelve-letter word for stubborn. Recalcitrant.

Chapter 2

I finished my coffee after Paladin left and lingered around the diner, working on my crossword puzzle until my phone went off.

As you might guess, most of my communications went through one of those end-to-end encrypted apps that deleted messages after they were viewed. Twitch had told me which one to get at one point, and I’d settled into using it as my regular channel to most of the folks in my network. No communication is ever perfect, but this was a hell of a lot better than using social media chat or text messages through my phone carrier and less complicated than the endless relay that Twitch had tried to set up for me. He’d managed to get me to let him do something to my email address so it would be virtually impossible to trace, but I couldn’t for the life of me tell you what, so I won’t try. Something about VPNs and routing. My eyes had glazed over after he’d offered to explain it and then went on a forty-five minute diatribe. I know it was all technically English, but I’ll be damned if I could tell you about any of it.

The message was from Paladin and contained nothing but a single word: done.

I pocketed my phone and waited another fifteen or twenty minutes before departing, lighting up a cigarette outside. It’s a nasty habit, and I know it, but it was one I picked up overseas and couldn’t shake. After taking the first, slow drag, I limped to the bus stop, leaning heavily on my cane.

The chill autumn wind cut through the light jacket I wore, and I shoved my free hand into my pocket to warm it, regretting not having brought gloves. It wasn’t long before the bus arrived, and I climbed aboard and swiped my CharlieCard, dropping into a seat. My leg felt like it was on fire from my low back all the way down to my toes, and I did my best to ignore it. This kind of pain was frequent and, while it certainly meant I wouldn’t be running the Boston Marathon anytime soon, I’d learned how to breathe through it.

Chronic pain is something you adapt to. It’s there, you’re aware of it, but depending on how bad it is, you can relegate it to a background process. It’s still one of those rogue processes that uses up more RAM than it should, but at least you can manage to do something else because when it’s constant, it’s either you manage, or you die. There’s no in between. I had no plans to become a statistic, and there was a good chance I wouldn’t even be the right statistic if I did.

See? I know a little about computers.

Pulling a small pill case out of my pocket, I poured one into my palm and dry-swallowed it. I’d learned how to do that in the early days when I couldn’t get out of bed to find water. Living alone as I did made everything harder, but it was better than the alternatives. I didn’t think I could survive someone in my space. Hell, I could barely live with myself.

It took the duration of the bus ride for the narcotics to kick in, and when they did, I sighed in relief. It didn’t solve anything, but it made the screaming in the back of my head easier to bear.

I made my way off the bus. Years of service to my country, a crippling injury, and what did I get for it? Less than a dollar off my bus fare, mediocre healthcare, and Disability payments that didn’t cover my rent without the housing subsidy I’d secured. Since the CIA was technically a civilian agency, I didn’t even have access to the VA or any of the other benefits I would’ve been entitled to if I’d stayed in SIGINT and not made the jump to the Company. Probably wouldn’t have been blown up, either.

The cold and pain made me bitter, and I muttered curses about the U.S. government in all of the languages I knew—which was a good number—as I limped toward the dead drop I knew Paladin had used. It was one we’d arranged ages ago, and it was how we passed information back and forth when I needed something from inside the BPD. This was the kind of thing I did. Networks within networks. Plans within plans. Contingencies. I had a dozen routes out of the city prepared in my head at any given time, and whenever conditions changed, I revisited my plans. It wasn’t even a conscious thing by then, just this constant background noise—sort of like my leg. Not all chronic pain is physical, after all.

The bus had dropped me off near Franklin Park Zoo which, this time of year, was a riot of color with the autumn leaves in full swing. People filled the zoo and surrounding park most days between the athletic fields used by local sports teams to people walking or biking the trails and tourists exploring the zoo itself. There was a time I would have enjoyed it. Now all I saw were potential threats. My stint in Afghanistan had left me the gift of not even being able to enjoy watching the kids play without wondering if one of them was hiding a gun behind the playground equipment. They weren’t, but those thoughts still crept in, and I often found myself expecting to hear shots.

When I’d first come home, I mourned that loss of innocence. Now it was, like so many things, background noise.

I sunk onto one of the many benches and reached down to pick up a stained Styrofoam coffee cup that had been tossed on the ground near the garbage can and rolled under the bench. Opening it, I pulled out the USB drive Paladin had hidden inside before I threw away the cup. No sense in littering, after all. Concealment devices—one of the methods spies use to pass information—are often things like that. Things people expect to see but don’t really want to touch.

I pocketed the USB drive and sat for a while, watching the people meander by. Logically, I knew nobody was watching. Nobody would’ve cared about me picking up a coffee cup in the park. Nobody was probably on Paladin’s tail, at least like this, anyway. But that didn’t stop me from waiting around in the cold for a good half an hour before I limped back to the bus stop to wait.

I disliked that bus stop. One of those numbers with the platform built in for winged folk to use to get airborne, it was more or less four posts, stairs, and a bench. No matter which way I turned, my back was exposed, and I had no cover. Distracting myself, I looked up at the sky, evaluating the weather. The clouds, which had been whisps of ice earlier in the day, were now thicker as a cold front rolled in.

When I got back to my apartment—a tiny, rat-infested hole off Humboldt Ave in Dorchester—I made my way inside just as it started to rain. My place was on the ground floor of the building and was a studio the size of an average apartment’s bedroom. I had three windows in the whole place: two in the main room, one in the bathroom. In the shower. Good for an emergency exit if I were on the set of Psycho, I guess.

If it weren’t such a dingy shithole, I’d have compared it to one of the Japanese efficiency apartments, but that would be an insult to Japan, and I liked Japan. I had a kitchen counter, a half-sized fridge, a two-burner hotplate built into the peeling yellow Formica countertop, and a couple cabinets that held nothing except some plastic utensils, takeout packets of soy sauce, salt and pepper, and paper plates. The other half of the room belonged to my bed, a wall-mounted television screen I used to watch media from my laptop, and a dresser.

I didn’t even own a table and chairs.

You’d think with my side jobs, I made enough that I could have moved somewhere a little better. Somewhere I could’ve had real furniture that wasn’t bought from a thirdhand store. I’d say secondhand, but I think some of it dated back further than that. Instead, I used that money to set up caches of money, ammunition, and other things around the city in case of whatever emergency my brain told me I was preparing for. Logically, I knew there wasn’t one and wouldn’t be one, at least of that magnitude anyway. Yet here I was.

I removed my shoes near the door and sat down on my bed, pulling my laptop into my lap and slotting the USB into it to see what Paladin had left me. While I waited for my machine to decrypt the contents of the USB—that program being another gift from Twitch to all of us—I lit a cigarette and plugged the HDMI cable from my laptop into the TV and tossed on the news. I didn’t have cable and, frankly, didn’t see a need for it. I could get any information I needed other ways these days, and since I already paid for internet, having cable television seemed excessive. Besides, most of the time, it was background noise anyway.

The local news channel I had hooked into on my laptop ran a brief story about a strange, naked person being pulled out of a hole in the ground in Olmstead Park. Police were asking if anyone could identify the individual and showed a brief video. I couldn’t identify them, but I filed the data away for later. One never knew when such things came in handy, after all.

A chime alerted me to my computer finishing its work, and I returned my attention to the screen. Paladin had given me several video files that, based on the resolution and angle, I guessed came from surveillance cameras. Even with the grainy video and odd angle, I could see why Paladin was worried. The people were definitely