Deus Ex: Black Light (29 page)

Quinn’s tone shifted. “Aye, you’re right at that.” He gave an apologetic nod. “Long story short, Vega and I planted surveillance devices in your man’s hideout back there.”

“
I know
,” Pritchard shot back. “
I found them and destroyed them!
”

“Well, you missed one. Because we wanted you to,” Quinn went on. “Okay, so the Juggernaut Collective have been listening in on most all of your chats over the last day or so. Don’t take it the wrong way, we were looking out for you.”

“Didn’t seem like that to me,” Jensen said coldly. “Did your pal Janus enjoy the show?”

“You continue to impress, Adam,” Quinn said, his cocky grin returning for a moment. “Look, you can stand there all night sipping shitty coffee or we can cut to the chase. Bruised egos aside, you’re at a dead end, so I’m breaking protocol because Juggernaut can
help
you.”

“
How are you going to do that
?” demanded Pritchard.

“We know where the military train is and what route it’s taking across the state. And of course, I’ve got the lovely Alex here and her jump jet at my disposal. Do I have to draw you a picture?”

Jensen frowned. “How does Janus know about the train?”

“How does Janus know about anything?” Quinn shot back. “I told you before, he’s connected
everywhere
.” He paused, moderating his tone. “Consider this a demonstration of intent. Establishing Juggernaut’s
bona fides
, as it were. I know you don’t trust us, and you’ve got no reason to. So let us do this for you. Let us show you we’re on the same side by getting you where you need to go, eh? We’re already in the air. Closer than you think.”

“
This is a bad idea
,” said Pritchard. “
This could be a setup!
”

“Time to find out,” Quinn replied. “What’s it going to be?”

Jensen tossed the cup in the trash and glared at the screen. “How fast can you get me the VTOL?”

Quinn grinned again. “How fast can you get to the roof?”

The group of six made their way down the embankment to the railbed in silence, quick and sure-footed, spilling out into a circle as their boots crunched on the gravel between the concrete sleepers. Thorne emerged from the middle of the group and paused, flipping up the visor that covered her face so she could taste the air. Like most of the group, she wore a non-reflective helmet with integral low-light scopes, and a matching bodysuit of signature-dampening meta-materials. Her weapons and equipment hung off her chest in a cross-rig, and she ran her gloved fingers over the safety latch holding her Zenith semi-auto pistol in place. She turned to face eastward and glimpsed the faint glow of the city in the far distance, the weak amber light of it reflecting off the bottom of low clouds.

One of the others detached from the group and came to the closest of the rails, on the line that threaded west out of Detroit toward the state line and beyond. He sank into a crouch, and she heard the faint whine of micro-motors in his joints. The largest of them in build and bulk, he was almost a full-body prosthesis cyborg and what flesh there was of him seemed more like a coating applied to a steel sculpture than the true matter of the man. In particular, his organic face hung on a hairless chromed head like a mask, inset with two bulky crimson optic implants that gave him a permanently doleful expression.

Thorne knew little about him, other than rumors that the man had been patched together with experimental augmentations and vat-grown bio-mech limbs after surviving the detonation of a truck bomb. All she cared about was that he was as capable as he looked. Others had chosen these operatives to assist her, based on algorithms and predictive models that Thorne would never be privy to. Each was augmented to a lesser or greater extent, many with exotic modifications that she had never seen before. But that mattered little in the situation before her; all that was required of Thorne was to marshal them to complete the objective.

He placed a hybrid flesh-metal hand on the rail and was still. “It is coming,” he said. His words were precise, clipped and heavily accented. “We should prepare.”

“You heard him,” Thorne told the others. “Take your places.” She indicated three of the operatives. “Team One, board in the crew car behind the locomotive. Team Two, we’ll board the rearmost car and sweep forward.”

The others all gave nods of agreement and set to work double-checking their gear. A slender, athletic man with recurved cyberlimbs dropped the bulky backpack he had been carrying and handed out the contents to the group – each of them were given a disk-shaped device with a pair of grips on one surface, a glittering metallic nanofluid on the other. “Test,” he called, when all the units had been distributed.

As one, the group twisted the grips and red indicators on the disks turned blue.

“Deploy,” ordered Thorne. On the breeze, she could hear the fast-approaching rush of an engine, and at her feet the rails were starting to vibrate. Each of the nine operatives found their assigned positions along the straightaway before them, each dropping down to lie on their backs with the disk devices resting across their chests, like offerings to the night sky. “Activate timers,” she called, snapping her visor shut as the rumble of the oncoming train rose to a roar.

There was a brief flash of white as the headlight on the engine swept across her, but the wavelength-deadening material of Thorne’s suit blended her body shape into the shadows. She tensed against every rational sense that told her to flee from the oncoming train, for fear it would crush her beneath its spinning steel bogies – and then it was thundering over her, a black wall of noise a few centimeters from the brow of her visor.

Thorne closed her eyes and let it happen. She felt the electromagnetic disk in her hand go active and held on tight as it automatically triggered and drew her up off the ground, and into the spaces on the underside of the train’s trailing carriage. The shock of the impact resonated through her limbs, but she hung on regardless. After a moment, Thorne dared to turn her head slightly and catch a glimpse of the railbed blurring past right below her.

Five green lights flickered on in her visor’s display; they were all aboard. Somewhere to her right, she saw a bright flare of laser light as a beam cutter began to slice through the floor of the carriage above her head.

* * *

Vande looked up as Chen entered the rear cargo wagon, swaying slightly with the motion of the train. She nodded toward the door he had just come through, leading to the center-most car where the load they were guarding was held. “How many times are you going to check those crates? We still have a long way ahead of us.”

“And miles to go before we sleep,” Chen added, with a faint smile. “I can’t help it, I’m on the spectrum. Just indulge my mildly obsessive-compulsive impulses and leave it at that.”

She frowned. Now they were clear of Detroit’s city limits, the train would not stop again until it reached their destination, a military decommissioning center in the Dakotas where the US Army disposed of their more dangerous hardware. Vande had already applied a no-sleep drug patch to her arm and she intended to remain alert and awake – but after everything that had happened during this investigation and the chaos of the firefight at the airport, fatigue was making her patience run thin. Chen’s good-natured banter chafed on her, and what he thought was endearing, she found irritating. Vande got up and toyed with the idea of moving to where the other members of her team were situated, in the forward cargo carriage two cars closer to the engine at the head of the train.

She tapped a spot behind her right ear, manually activating her infolink. “All call signs, report in.” Chen, the other agent in her car and the three up front all did as ordered, drawing a nod from her. “Solid copy. All right, from this point we are going to clear protocol. Check in every hour, alert calls only, otherwise maintain radio silence. Base, you get that?”

Jarreau’s voice echoed distantly in her head. “
Roger that, mobile team. We’re tracking you from here. Safe journey.
”

Vande nodded again and cut the signal. Jarreau was about to go into a virtual meeting with Manderley and the directors in Lyon via the NSN, largely to answer for the disruption caused in Detroit and the heat Interpol was going to draw because of it. She didn’t envy him. Vande had never liked dealing with the upper echelons of command, even in her time as a regular cop. She was better in proactive situations, in the field, in the action. She’d joined Task Force 29 because she thought they could provide that for her, but lately…

“So, anyone got a deck of cards?” said Chen. “I forgot to bring an e-book.”

She eyed the tech. “I think I may have to shoot you to shut you up,” Vande told him, her tone suddenly ice-cold and utterly serious.

Jensen stared across the VTOL’s enclosed cabin at Quinn, watching the other man scrutinize a handheld repeater screen. Over his shoulder, a narrow hatchway revealed the cramped virtual cockpit beyond, where Jensen could see Alex Vega’s hands in constant motion as she guided the aircraft over the dark countryside. They were flying low, nap-of-the-earth, skimming treetops and following the line of the terrain to stay off local ATC radar.

Vega was humming absently to herself, lost in the work of piloting.
She’s good
, Jensen thought,
military or merc trained, I’ll bet.

Being in an aircraft like this, heading into an unknown situation – it was an old, familiar state of affairs for him. He closed his eyes and for a moment he was in a different time, a different place.

“Got the train on my scope,” Vega said, breaking off from her tune to look over her shoulder. “Five minutes out, fellas.” She flipped a switch and the cabin interior lighting switched to dim crimson tones – not that Jensen’s augmented eyes needed time to become night-adapted.

For a moment, Jensen expected to see Faridah Malik’s face looking back at him from the cockpit, and he frowned. As competent as Vega appeared to be, it would have put him at ease to have somebody he had complete trust in on the stick. As Sarif Industries’ senior pilot, Malik had been there to get Jensen into and out of a lot of dangerous situations in the past, and her absence here and now was keenly felt. He let out a sigh. Thoughts of tracking down Malik’s whereabouts threatened to split his focus and he shut that away, returning to Quinn.

“How deep has Juggernaut been on this thing with the illegal augs?” he asked. “And for how long?”

The other man gave a shrug. “I’m not in charge, Jensen. I don’t set the targets and the missions. We’re a
collective
, remember? The clue’s in the name. Juggernaut is a gathering of people who operate in concert. Decisions get made by the whole, not by one person.”

“Not even Janus?”

He smiled thinly. “Janus brings a lot to the table, for sure. Valuable intel, access that the rest of us can only dream of… So maybe his voice carries a little more weight, but at the end of the day we strive toward a shared goal.”

“Destroying the Illuminati.”

Quinn nodded. “That’s the big one. A work in progress, you might rightly say. Maybe a chess game would be a better analogy…” He paused, considering his own words. “They move, we counter them. We blockade, disrupt and generally mess with their shit in every way possible.” He chuckled. “And we do it pretty well. Their organization is old and big and hidebound, it reacts like a bloody supertanker trying to make a turn.
Sloooow
.” He sounded out the word. “Despite the name, Juggernaut is more agile, and we’re always there to get in their way. See, they think they have inevitability on their side, that they’re the irresistible force. But the Collective is the immovable object.”

“Cute speech,” said Jensen, as the VTOL bounced through a patch of clear-air turbulence. “Practice it much?”

“Little bit,” Quinn admitted. “Did you like it?”

“Still waiting for you to answer my first damn question,” he shot back. Jensen looked away, using the time to take inventory of the gear he was carrying. He checked the actions on the Hurricane machine pistol and the Zenith semi-automatic Quinn had supplied him with, counting spare magazines by touch in the pouches on his tactical rig.

“You’ve had the pleasure of Task Force 29’s company,” said the other man. “They’re a special operations unit under the aegis of Interpol, or so their mission statement goes. Working internationally to stamp out terrorism and crime in the wake of the incident.” He made air quotes with his fingers. “
Good cops dealing with bad things
.”

“All that I know.”

Quinn’s smile turned sly. “But what if I told you the Juggernaut Collective believes that TF29 are tied to the activities of the Illuminati? Most likely through co-opted assets distributed through Interpol and the active Task Force units around the world.”

Jensen shook his head. “If that’s true, why are Jarreau and his people working so hard to bring down this smuggling network? Supplying combat augmentations to terror groups has the stink of those shadowy bastards all over it.”

That got him another shrug. “Janus says there are factions within the Illuminati. Opposed elements working to different agendas.”

“Janus says?” repeated Jensen. “You ever wonder how he knows that?”

“All the time. But I trust him.” Quinn’s cocky manner faded, and Jensen got the sense the man was recalling a buried personal truth that would never be revealed. “And that’s all I’m going to say about that.”

Jensen wondered what burden Janus had lifted to get Quinn to become a loyal part of Juggernaut, filing the thought away for later consideration.

The other man went on. “I know you used to be police, so you think you get where TF29 are coming from… only you
don’t
.” Quinn gestured. “Lift up your head and look away from the moment, Jensen. The Task Force was formed to fight a surge in criminal and terrorist activity, and so on… But those circumstances have only come to a head
because
of the Aug Incident! The Task Force is a direct result of a situation the Illuminati
invented
! You know this, you were there, for crying out loud…” He became more animated as he warmed to the subject. “It’s the thin end of the wedge,
bratán
. Today, the Task Force is a bunch of small units scattered around the world, doing the tough jobs so decent folks can sleep soundly in their beds… but tomorrow? They’ll grow into an army with soldiers in every city and every nation. Answerable to no government, acting without oversight, all to keep us safe from the specter of techno-terror. The Illuminati manufactured the reason for the Task Force so they could sow the seeds of a New World Order military.”