Deus Ex: Black Light

by James Swallow

  Someone watching Thorne closely would have seen her blank eyes flicker and then lose focus. They would have seen the movement in her lips as she began a subvocalized conversation on her infolink, filtered via a portable sat-com encryption device she carried in a pocket. The words she spoke never fully formed in her mouth, they were never uttered aloud – but her handler on the far end of the transmission heard them as clearly as if they had been in the same room together.

  Thorne’s report was, as always, terse and to the point. She wasted no time with preamble, sticking to the facts, pausing only when her handler responded with new directives. For long moments, she stood motionless, processing her next orders.

  Finally she acknowledged them with a single spoken word. “Complying.”

  The ghost signal to her infolink cut and she became animated once more. Thorne watched the black diamond, and began considering how Adam Jensen would be dealt with.

  TWO

  HOTEL IMPERIOLI – SORRENTO – ITALY

  She raised the heavy crystal lighter to the tip of the cocktail cigarette, and set it burning, savoring the taste as she drew it in through bright lips the color of blood. Exhaling, she turned across the glass table and blew a thin line of smoke out over the balcony.

  The man seated across from her laughed gently, amused by the act. As the sun had set and cast its fading light over the Gulf of Naples, they shared a bottle of that agreeable Conterno Monfortino, here in the hotel’s presidential suite. Now, amid the cool evening air, they basked in the afterglow of the potent wine.

  “I do like the silence,” she said, and with a sweep of her hand she took in the room. “Tonight, this belongs only to us.”

  He smiled. “My dearest Beth, everything belongs to us.”

  She drew on the cigarette again. Aside from this suite, the entirety of the Hotel Imperioli was unoccupied. The only other humans in the grounds were their security detachments and a skeleton staff of serviles. The former groups were amusingly bullish toward each other, each squad of personal bodyguards sizing up the other like competing packs of wolves stalking the same territory.

  The actual cost of such extravagance would never have crossed her mind. Elizabeth DuClare lived in a world where what she wanted was what happened. It was like a force of nature, as ingrained in her existence as the rising and setting of the sun. To even consider a reality where the world did not bend to her will would have been anathema to her. Born into great affluence as a daughter of one of the richest dynasties on Earth, it was her birthright. And as such, being a woman of great means and intellect and ambition, it was inevitable that she would fall into the Illuminati’s orbit.

  They hadn’t recruited Elizabeth, like talent scouts spotting an aspiring athlete. It simply didn’t work like that. No, in a way she had always been one of them, groomed from birth to take a place on the Council of Five. It was meant to be, and there had never been an impulse in her to question it. DuClare was a queen of the world… Why would she ever have wished otherwise?

  Her dinner companion leaned in and patted her on the hand, his smile widening. She wondered if it might be a hint of interest in her that ran beyond the professional. “You do look lovely this evening, my dear,” he noted.

  “Lucius,” she said, with mild reproach. “Flattery will get you nowhere.”

  He grinned at her. “You can’t blame an old man for trying.”

  Although his actual age was his most closely guarded secret, Lucius DeBeers carried himself with the thoughtful gravitas of an elder statesman. Much of that stemmed from the cutting-edge biotechnology she herself had put his way. Her role as the de facto head of the World Health Organization gave DuClare unprecedented access to experimental medical systems that the common people of the globe would never be aware of. She helped DeBeers fight off the ravages of time and illness, and in that a special bond had been born between them.

  But despite knowing those truths, she enjoyed him. His fatherly manner could be comforting, and while she would never be so foolish as to talk of childish things like love, she possessed a unique kind of affection for Lucius that she could not deny.

  Is it a fondness for him, or for his power? DuClare had asked herself that question many times, and never examined the answer in too great detail. It didn’t matter. DeBeers was, as he liked to call himself, the Prima Illuminatus, the leader of the council. To be the woman he considered his peer and occasionally, his confidante, was a very good place to inhabit.

  “Do you think the others talk about us?” she said. “Your protégé? Or Stanton and that damned climber Page?”

  “Morgan, Dowd and all the rest…” DeBeers chuckled and looked away. “They know you and I have our private conversations. But does it matter what sordid motives they might ascribe to us?”

  “They’ll think it makes us weak.”

  He gave a nod. “Good. Wrong thinking emboldens foolish choices, and I’d rather I knew sooner than later if one of them is going to strike at me… At us.” He poured out more wine for them. “Page, perhaps, if the day ever comes that he can find his courage. Dowd will never make a move. He likes his domains too much the way they are.”

  DuClare made a sour face. “Dowd’s Templar minions are the reason I stay away from Paris these days. I smell them on everything when I go back to the chateau. They act like they own the city.”

  “Well, they do. But we own them.” DeBeers handed her a glass. “Pay it no mind, my dear. Besides, the climate in Geneva agrees with you. You’re positively radiant.”

  She gave him a kittenish smile, and gestured around, the red tip of the lit cigarette dancing like a firefly. “But it is so desperately dull there. I leapt at a chance to come to Italy.”

  He nodded, crossing the balcony to the balustrade. “One might almost think it was a pleasurable experience to share my company,” said DeBeers, in a mock-sad tone.

  “Lucius, don’t be melodramatic.” Her voice switched back to her more usual manner; a colder, harder tone that she used on her inferiors. DuClare stubbed out the cigarette as she sensed a shift in the tenor of the conversation. The real reason for their meeting was about to emerge.

  “Our latest adversary…” he began, his back to her. “Who do you think it is?”

  “My answer is the same as it was before. Janus hides his or her identity better than anyone we’ve ever come across. We won’t find them easily, not unless a mistake is made. And given previous form, that doesn’t seem likely.”

  “Janus…” DeBeers sounded out the name. “The Romans and their minor god, seeing past and future all at once.” He snorted with derision. “Two faces on one head. What a trite choice for a double-agent’s sobriquet.” He shot her an irritated look, and in that instant he looked like the old man that he really was. “There have been too many interdictions of our work, Elizabeth. Events too precise and too perfectly pitched to be the deeds of some random troublemaker. Janus is an uncommon foe.”

  DuClare had to admit he made a strong point. Failures like the botched assassination of William Taggart, once the leader of the now-splintered pro-humanist Humanity Front, or the damning leak of the secrets held in the black site prison at Rifleman Bank could not have been chance events. There was a guiding hand at work, one in clear opposition to the Illuminati’s grand, complex design.

  DeBeers’s mood was shifting, turning irritable. “I told Morgan that Janus and his ridiculous little band of hackers were dealt with. But it seems I declared victory too soon. The so-called Juggernaut Collective is not as dead as I would wish it to be. Like roaches. Hard to stamp them out in one go.” He glared at her, all warmth suddenly gone. “Who do they think they are?” he demanded, affronted by the temerity of an enemy that dared to antagonize him. “I have not sacrificed my years, I have not made our plans my life’s work, just to be derailed by a pack of activist children sniping at us from the cover of cyberspace!”

  “We’ll deal with them,” she told him. “Of course we will deal with them. Our group has always we
athered such attacks, from the very first days of Weishaupt and the founding. We have never veered from our course.” DuClare allowed a careful measure of warmth into her voice. “I remember something you once said. The burden of governance, the stewardship upon us is great. Perhaps at this moment in history greater than any of our group have ever had to shoulder.”

  “The responsibility falls to us…” he said. “Yes. I recall that day.”

  “History is how we transcribe it. We are the ones with courage, the insight and the moral right. We lead, Lucius. That’s what we are destined to do. The acts of some faceless coward cannot prevent that.”

  He fell silent for a long moment. “You’re right, of course.” His smile returned briefly. “You center me, dear Beth. Thank you.” DeBeers put down his glass and took her hand. His grip was firm, more so than she found comfortable. “But I don’t need a reminder of our mandate. I want a way to cut off Janus’s head – whomever he or she may be – and terminate these irritants once and for all. Mankind is at a critical societal juncture, it is divided and fracturing. There is too much at stake to become distracted!”

  “I promised you I would formulate a plan of action,” she told him. “And I have. I’ve utilized certain resources in our possession. Pawns across the board are in motion.” He released his grip and gestured for her to carry on. “We will need to play a subtle and lengthy game, Lucius. Janus will make it hard for us to get close, but I believe I have found a way.”

  “I want Janus’s true face, dear girl,” he said, his voice dropping to a whisper. “I want to know it and expose it. Then we’ll erase these upstarts from the world. Every moment of their lives, every iota of their identities, every mark they ever made will be gone forever. I’ll make it so they never existed.”

  DuClare felt an icy, familiar thrill run through her. The exercise of real power, more potent than any drug. “We have already begun,” she told him.

  FACILITY 451 – ALASKA – UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  If there had been more time, he might have been able to do something that was better than just reacting. Later, he would ask himself if it had all been part of a plan working against him, a way to force his hand before he could tackle the situation on his own terms.

  In the end, it didn’t matter. The situation was what it was, and he had to respond to it. In Adam Jensen’s experience, the world liked to take that kind of choice away from a man, and make him deal with it in the moment. Succeed or fail. No second chances.

  He knew it was a trap when he entered the day room and saw Stacks in the far corner, nursing a bloody nose. He knew it in the way that Belle and her playmates were standing around, wound tight with nervous, pre-fight energy. He knew it from the small crowd that had gathered, all of whom looked at him with hooded, wary gazes. And he knew it because he hadn’t seen a single micro-drone or orderly in the corridor along the way.

  “Now we’ll get some answers,” Belle began, without preamble. “Stacks here don’t seem to have none.”

  The crowd parted to let Jensen come closer, and he eyed them. Other residents he’d seen during the past few days, who up until now had all seemed disinterested in him, looked on as if they bore a grudge. What had changed?

  “Jensen—” Stacks tried to step forward, but Mono-Eye let an electro-prod truncheon slip out of his sleeve and he menaced the other man with it. Even though the ex-steeplejack had size over the skinnier guy, he was cowed by the humming halo around the head of the baton.

  “Stay there, big man,” said the thug, “and shut up.”

  Belle’s other lieutenant shrugged out of his jacket to show off his glowing tattoos, and Jensen saw the distinctive rough skin on his bare chest that indicated dermal armor implants beneath the flesh. He shifted on the balls of his feet, licking his lips. The first attack would come from him; it couldn’t have been more telegraphed if he’d been wearing a neon sign over his head.

  “There a problem here?” Jensen ignored both the thugs and kept his attention on Belle.

  “You’re damn right there is, and I’m looking at it.” She bared her teeth when she spoke. There were a few grumbles and angry murmurs of support from the other residents. She pointed with both hands. “I got a vibe off you from the start, Jensen. And I didn’t listen to my gut.” Belle shook her head. “My mistake.”

  “I don’t have time to play games.” He let his arms drop to his sides. “You got something to say to me, spit it out. Or else, get your toy boys out of my way.”

  Belle spread her arms in a gesture that took in everyone around them. “See these people, Jensen? We all got something in common. We all lost things in the incident. Lovers and families. Homes. Money. Our goddamned lives, we lost.” There were more growled assents, and a cold, creeping realization dawned on Jensen as the woman went on. “And now those natches blame us for everything. We’re prisoners here, man. All because somebody fucked us.” She pointed right at him.

  His breath caught in his throat as another unbidden memory came to vivid life in his mind’s eye. Another woman’s voice – the silken, almost childlike tones of Eliza Cassan – laying out a series of brutal, final choices before him, each one more unpalatable than the last.

  “You were there, in that place that sunk into the sea,” Belle snarled, her voice rising. “Did you do it, Jensen?” Her words became pure fury, and he guessed that despite her brutish manner, Belle had been as much a victim of Darrow’s terrible attack as anyone else. “Answer me!”

  He pushed his reaction aside. “Who told you that?”

  “It doesn’t matter what I was told,” Belle shot back. “I don’t hear you denying it.” She advanced on him. “Look around, you son of a bitch. Look what you did. To people just like you!”

  He could see them all, drawing on the anger and the pain that had been festering beneath the surface for those long months. They desperately needed someone to blame, someone who was here and real and in front of them, not a ghost like Hugh Darrow, his body crushed beneath thousands of tons of steel in the Arctic Ocean. They wanted a scapegoat, and somebody had decided it was going to be him.

  Jensen lost focus for a moment as that thought echoed through his head, and it was enough for someone behind him in the crowd to shove him forward, spitting and jeering. He stumbled, and the tattooed man hurtled toward him, snarling. He had kitchen knives in both hands.

  Reflexively, Jensen cocked back his cyberlimb and triggered the nerve impulse that would have deployed the blunt-tipped nanoblades concealed beneath the forearm – but there was nothing but a hollow click and he recalled too late that the augmentations had been disengaged. Instead, he went into a clumsy block that set the knives cutting across the polycarbonate shell of his arm.

  Jensen turned the inelegant move into a counterattack, dropping low and throwing a punch into the tattooed man’s gut. He took it with a grunt but little else, the shear-thickening gel in the dermal armor absorbing most of the force of impact.

  The crowd were shouting at him, baying for his blood. It wouldn’t matter what he said to them. He was the outsider, the new and the unknown, and even if she was their tormentor, Belle was still one of them. It wouldn’t have been hard to manipulate people like this, to pour all their hate into one single target. They didn’t care about the truth. Jensen had been on Panchaea, that was a fact, and it was like they smelled the scent of that place – and what was done there – still on him.

  The knives fell toward the exposed flesh of Jensen’s throat, but his attacker was inexpert with them and held the makeshift weapons too close together. Jensen’s free hand snapped up and grabbed the closest blade, hearing the metal crunch against the surface of his cyberarm’s synthetic palm. He pulled the tattooed man toward him, forcing him to overbalance. Then, as he fell, Jensen struck with his other arm and caught the man hard across the face. His assailant’s nose broke with an ugly cracking sound and blood jetted. He fell, howling in pain, losing the knives along the way. Jensen kicked them away as Belle and Mono-Eye ca
me at him together. The bigger woman was powerful, but she wasn’t agile, and her heavy augmented leg failed to hook Jensen’s and bring him down.

  Instead, he slipped back, grabbing a folding chair. Jensen swung around and beat the other thug across the shoulders with it. Mono-Eye jabbed at him with the electro-prod, arcs of blue-white fire sparkling. He missed, but the aura of the weapon was so close as it passed Jensen’s temple that his right-side optic implant briefly became blurred by the electromagnetic field.

  Where are the orderlies? Jensen wondered. Why are they letting this happen? But then he was fully back in the fight a heartbeat later.

  Mono-Eye’s limbs were organic, and that made him vulnerable. Jensen grabbed the wrist beneath the hand holding the prod and broke it cleanly, using the servos in his cyberarm to twist it to a degree off true that no human bones could bear. The thug screamed and Jensen plucked the prod from his nerveless fingers, slamming a point-blank punch into the mono-band over his eyes. Plastic fragmented and splintered, and the second of Belle’s men went down to the floor.

  But Belle herself had not waited for the outcome, and she put a trip-hammer kick into the back of Jensen’s legs. He buckled at the knees and crashed into a table, collapsing it underneath him. He lost the weapon and twisted, rolling away as Belle stamped down with the force of a wrecking ball. Her steel foot crumpled the table and smashed the prod into pieces.

  Jensen scrambled, trying to get back up, but the crowd were following the example he had set and threw chairs at him, along with anything else they could lay their hands on. He saw Stacks coming to his aid, but a savage blow from Belle knocked him aside and the other man stumbled against a wall.

  Belle crossed the short distance toward Jensen in two heavy pneumatic strides. She spat at him and went for the killer blow, her leg coming down to crush his chest and stop his heart.