Deus Ex: Black Light (20 page)

“
Elizabeth. Apologies, my dear, but something has come up and this seemed the most expedient method of contacting you
.” His digitally rendered voice echoing across the distance, the synthetic version of Lucius DeBeers stood before her, unaffected by the turning motion of the jet pulling everything slightly to the starboard.

She gave a demure smile. “Of course.” The subtle message here, that Lucius had overruled her standing orders at a whim, was not lost on DuClare.

“
You’ll just circle for a bit
,” he said. “
Up here, the signal compression is better and we can talk in real-time.
” Lucius’s avatar gestured toward her. “
About what we spoke of at the hotel? It seems our adversary is moving assets into play in North America. Something is afoot.
”

“Where? This is the first I’ve heard of it.”

He nodded. “
Just so. I’ve kept it from all the others, for reasons of… confidence, you understand? This remains between you and me for the moment.
”

“Of course.” His desire for secrecy also explained this unscheduled conversation. On the ground, there was always the chance of unwanted ears listening in.

“
Janus has sent people to Detroit, Michigan. I don’t know why as yet, but there’s other activity in that city that concerns me and their presence there cannot be coincidental.
”

She frowned. “I’m afraid I don’t follow you, Lucius.”

“
There’s more. News has reached me from our asset embedded at Interpol. It appears that operatives from the Task Force 29 counter-terrorist team have located a target of particular interest. They’ve been searching for information on Adam Jensen.
”

DuClare’s lips thinned, finally shifting into a cold smile. “He went home? How very like him to do something so…
human
.” DuClare had reluctantly taken responsibility for the loss of Jensen after the man escaped from a WHO clinic under her nominal control. It had been the job of her people to monitor him after his recovery, and that failure had caused her to lose face with Lucius. But now Jensen had resurfaced, and there was a chance that she could regain control of the situation. “Not for the first time, I must admit, I wonder if things would have been better if we had simply left him in the sea after Panchaea…”

“
There’s truth in that
,” offered DeBeers, “
but after everything that has been invested in our next phase, we have to take a firm hand here. This needs to be handled decisively.
”

She leaned back in the chair, thinking of plans operating within plans, of layers of intent and scheming that went deep and far. Her cold amusement returned once more. “Perhaps there is an element of fate to it. All the pawns, gathering in the same part of the board, each unaware of what guides them.”

DeBeers chuckled. “
I quite like that analogy. You have a flair for a poetic turn of phrase, dear Beth.
” He paused, considering. “
We’re going to press the situation forward, I think. See what the roll of the dice offers up.
”

“And what about potential risk to
our
assets in the city?”

“
Oh, you let me take care of that. In the meantime, revisit your initial plans. This may even work in our favor.
” The hologram gave a slight bow. “
Until next time.
”

With a flicker of color, the lasers vanished and DuClare was alone in the cabin once again. She heard the engines shift pitch and felt the jet returning to its original flight path.

Her hand moved back to her data tablet and called up the contents of a secured file. “Open search mode,” she told the device. “Show me all files pertaining to data string ‘White Helix Lab’, subset project name ‘Black Light’. Begin.”

A myriad of pages began to build across the screen, one after another.

From the roof of the derelict building, the steady fall of the rain seemed to throw a shimmering curtain over the entire city – but the amber glow and the parades of neon lights that Jensen had come to take for granted were no longer present. The skyline that was as familiar to him as the lines of his own face had been changed while he was gone, and now it was filled with the black ghosts of dark, abandoned towers and low flickers from fires in the lawless districts.

Other cities around the world had been hit hard by the shock of the Aug Incident, but standing up here, seeing it all so clearly, Jensen realized that Detroit had taken the crippling hit harder than most, like a boxer past their prime. The city had gone down to the mat, and now the count was dropping away toward zero.

Before, with the augmentation industry on the rise, there had been a chance for Motor City to rise out of the economic mire that had trapped it during the late twentieth century. The incident had cut that dream off at the knees, and now Detroit was backsliding into the abyss, dragging everyone who lived there along with it.

Jensen took a slow breath of the wet air, and turned up the collar of the worn long coat he’d found at the bottom of the crates from his old office. He patted the inside pocket and found a pack of smokes, still half full. He cupped his hand over the nozzle of his lighter and lit a cigarette, drawing in deeply, as the metallic rattle of distant rotor blades reached him.

He looked in the direction of the noise – there, off over Forest Park, Jensen made out the shape of a beetle-shaped police helicopter circling some kind of disturbance on the ground. Spotlights stabbed down out of the sky, and Jensen saw a flicker of yellow tracer reach back up toward the chopper, the crackle of gunfire arriving a moment later. The helo lurched away and vanished into the low cloud.

Footsteps clanked up the fire escape and Jensen heard Pritchard curse under his breath. “What are you doing?” demanded the hacker. “There’s a good reason no-one comes up here.” The other man picked his way across the creaking roof until he stood beside Jensen at the lintel. “You do understand this building is condemned? Put a foot wrong and you’ll go straight through the ceiling!”

“I needed some air,” Jensen told him.

“Oh. Right.” Jensen’s distant tone registered with Pritchard and he took a moment to frame his next words. “Look… I’m sorry about your friend.”

He shook his head. “You were right, he wasn’t stable.” Jensen took another draw. “I guess I didn’t want to see it. Thought I could help him…”

“You can’t rescue everyone,” Pritchard said, after a moment. “If anybody should know that by now, it’s you.”

“Still keep trying, though…” Jensen went on. “More fool me.”

The hacker studied him. “You look strung out,” he said. “When was the last time you got more than a couple of hours’ sleep?” He nodded at the lit cigarette. “Those won’t help. It’s a filthy habit.”

“Says the guy who mainlines caffeine tablets…” Jensen’s expression became a scowl. “I’ve slept enough.”

It was hard for him to put it into words; that sense of dreamless darkness that waited for him whenever he closed his eyes. Try as he might, Jensen couldn’t hold on to anything his resting mind brought forward, and it frustrated him. He could sense the shape of it but never grasp it, like he was a blind man feeling around the edges of objects that he would never be able to see. They might have been memories, they might have been nightmares, but all he was left with were the empty vessels of failed recollection. The content gone, with only the ghost of the thing left to imprint on his waking thoughts. Every time he awoke, it was the same feeling, an identical moment of dislocation and wrongness – his mind briefly filled with an uncanny black light that seemed to invade him and blot out everything else.

Frustration churned inside Jensen’s chest, and at length he looked away from the bleak cityscape and the ceaseless downpour. “We need to maintain our focus,” he told Pritchard. “Stacks is gone and there’s nothing we can do to call that back. But we can still do something about the people responsible for his death.”

“Magnet?”

“For starters.” Jensen gave a nod. “But the MCBs are just the next link in the chain.”

“There’s someone holding the leash of those gang-bangers, that’s a certainty,” said the hacker. “Remember those infolink signals I detected? Along with the line from me to you, there were two other distinct encrypted communications nets up and running while you were at the manufacturing plant. One was talking to Magnet, the other to that strike team in the VTOL.”

“So we know they weren’t connected…”

Pritchard shook his head and pulled his jacket closer against the drizzle. “It doesn’t look that way. Totally different operating frequencies, different triangulation. At a guess, I’d say Magnet’s contact was somewhere to the east of the city, but those gunmen were talking to a satellite downlink.” He jerked a thumb at the sky.

“Which more or less confirms they’re a professional crew,” said Jensen. “That could mean government, private military contractor, intelligence agency…”

“I’ve already put out some feelers,” Pritchard noted. “Whoever they are, someone will recognize their profile.”

“Good.” Jensen took a last draw on the cigarette, and then ground it beneath the heel of his boot. “What else have you got? I know you didn’t come up here because you were worried about my well-being.”

“There is something more,” Pritchard admitted. “The break-ins at the different Sarif Industries sites around the city, and then what you said about the MCBs having a ‘shopping list’… it got me thinking about what kind of information they have to have. I mean, on the surface these look like smash-and-grab raids, but when you step back and look at the big picture, there’s a pattern.” He spread his hands. “Draw it down to one basic question – how did they know what to look for?”

“We got that. Someone wants what Sarif had. The missing prototypes.”

“More!” Pritchard went on. “Don’t you get it? They’d need information that only someone on the inside would have.”

“There is no ‘inside’ anymore,” said Jensen, following his reasoning. “Everyone at Sarif Industries was kicked out after Tai Yong’s hostile takeover.”

The hacker nodded. “But as I ably proved, there are still security protocols in place that Tai Yong haven’t purged yet. So I dug into the police reports from the first couple of raids and I found a common denominator. Each time, there was evidence that outer security doors were opened with no signs of forced entry.”

“You’re saying the MCBs had a
key
?”

“At the start, yes, until the system caught up and shut them out with a global lockdown, so they had to tackle the last few the hard way. And here’s the thing, that backdoor I left in the SI mainframe? After our two guests left last night, I accessed it to check the entry logs for the dates of those first couple of raids. The data was still there – those idiots in the DPD hadn’t even bothered to check it!”

“Give me the name,” he told Pritchard. If someone had been using their key card to assist the MCBs in their thefts, then the entry logs would have recorded their identity.

Pritchard sighed. “
Adam Jensen
.”

“What?”

“It’s
your
key card that was logged both times, Jensen. That’s why I was reluctant to tell you about this. It’s another dead end, not a viable lead… Someone must have gained access to your office in the weeks after the incident and stolen the pass so they could use it later.” He paused, thinking back. “There were plenty of opportunities. Things were a mess at Sarif. Anyone could have grabbed the pass.”

Jensen took that in, running the scenario in his mind. “Makes sense. Somebody made a smart play…”

Pritchard saw the change in his expression. “Do you actually know who took it?”

“I’ve got a few ideas.” Jensen strode away from the edge of the rooftop, making for the stairwell. “And I know where to start looking.”

“Wait,” Pritchard called after him, and he hesitated. “Before you take off on another quest to go beat information out of someone, there’s something else we have to talk about. Specifically, the
Juggernaut
in the room.”

“You’ve made it clear what you think about Janus and his group,” said Jensen. “I get it. But I haven’t agreed to anything yet.”

“You’re going to!” Pritchard shook his head. “I know how you think! Did you forget who was sitting on your shoulder in Hengsha, Omega Ranch and Montreal? I may not have been in the field with you, but I saw enough.”

“So what?”

“Janus is manipulating you!” insisted the other man. “Offering you exactly what you want so you’ll cross over.”

“You may be right,” Jensen admitted. “But that cuts both ways. I don’t have to trust these people to get what I need from them.”

Pritchard gave a snort. “I know you’re going to go ahead and do whatever you want to, but just remember,” he said. “I was right about Stacks… and I’m right about this.”

A nondescript green-gray door in the middle of faded brick frontage was all the face that Spector’s Tavern presented to the world. It sat in a side street just off Cass Avenue and it had the weathered, dogged air of a place that had lived defiantly through every attempt at gentrification, redevelopment and the failure thereof. Twenty years ago, the surrounding area had been on its way to becoming trendy; now it was as drab as it had been in the Great Depression, but Spector’s remained unchanged. Hard-edged and bloody-minded, like the locals who drank there, the aging dive bar remained a fixture in the neighborhood that fires, riots and gang warfare hadn’t managed to dislodge.

Inside, the place wasn’t any more inviting than its exterior. Dim lighting and a perpetually smoky atmosphere hid the aging décor, with most of the illumination coming from lamps over the pool tables in the back and the glow spilling from a projector screen on the far wall.

A hockey game was in its final moments on the big screen, as the Red Wings fought across the ice to pull back a tie from what was otherwise going to be a narrow defeat. Spector’s didn’t so much draw a crowd as it did have a crew of stubborn regulars, but still there was a collective expression of annoyance from them as the game clock hit zero and the equalizing shot didn’t materialize.