But one look over his shoulder at the glow of the fires told him he had to keep going. Such destruction would have to bring the DPD in to investigate, and he needed to be far away when they finally arrived. He felt a knife of guilt twist in his gut over Stacks and the brutal fate that befell him. The man’s death is on me, he thought grimly. I took him into harm’s way and he wasn’t up to it. Pritchard was right. I should’ve listened.
On his way back to the derelict cinema, Jensen picked over his reasons again and again. He wanted badly to strike at the people who had robbed him of so much, to lash out at the shadowy cabal manipulating events from on high… and with his mind set on that, he hadn’t stopped to consider if Harrison Stacker was really ready to stand with him. Now a deeply troubled, damaged soul was dead and any chance he might have had at redemption was gone with him.
A bleak question gathered in Jensen’s thoughts. Pritchard had been an irritating, arrogant ass for as long as he had known him, but by the same token he had always been brutally honest with Jensen. There were few people, he reflected, that he could truthfully say that about. And if Pritchard had been right about Stacks, was he right about this road that Jensen had started down? My crusade, he called it…
“Where the hell do I go from here…?” Jensen said the words aloud, looking across the alley to the back entrance of the old building. But no answer was forthcoming. He could see the metal security door hanging open in the gloom, and his fingers gripped the butt of the Hurricane machine pistol hanging at his side. Was Pritchard in there, collapsed over his keyboard with a bullet hole between his eyes? Had Jensen’s single-minded need for retribution cost the life of someone else tonight?
There was only one way to find out. He couldn’t chance the energy drain of using the cloak; this would have to be a direct approach.
The Hurricane’s magazine was half full. Jensen extended the gun’s wire-frame stock and pulled it to his shoulder, moving low and fast to the door. He circled the entrance, peering into the semi-darkness within, then slipped inside.
The random clutter of the interior worked in his favor, meaning that no shooter with a high vantage would be able to get a clear sight-line and shoot him as soon as he entered – but it also meant that Jensen couldn’t gauge what kind of threat might be waiting for him. His cyberoptics cycled through vision modes, looking for the telltale threads of an invisible ultraviolet targeting laser or the bloom of heat from a concealed gunman. He saw nothing.
Although most of the movie theater looked like the aftermath of a bomb explosion as a matter of course, Jensen saw no signs that Pritchard’s remote mines had been triggered. That meant that whoever had opened the door and taken the hacker off the air was capable and dangerous. He thought about the black-clad woman on the roof and her unit. They certainly fit that profile.
Moving around a heap of rubble that had fallen from the ceiling, Jensen caught sight of the stage. Nothing had been upset, everything was untouched. He made out a motionless figure sitting in a chair, back-lit by the glow of a monitor screen – thin, angular, with an unkempt ponytail hanging over his shoulder.
For a long second, Jensen thought Pritchard was dead, but then the hacker gave a low sigh and looked off to his right, where shadows fell thick and deep. “How long do you expect me to sit here?” he asked.
“Clearly, until you learn the meaning of stay there and don’t say a goddamn word.” The terse reply had a Hispanic lilt to it, and presently a woman in a baggy civilian pilot’s jumpsuit emerged from the darkness. A heavy Diamondback revolver dangled at the end of one of her hands, and she crossed toward Pritchard, her manner lazy but her eyes alert. Her hair was short in a mix of cornrows and a semi-military cut, revealing a lengthy augmentation scar running from just above her left brow in an arc that ended behind her ear. She wore the mark like a badge of honor, but the woman’s gear and her swagger didn’t chime with the team Jensen had run into at the manufacturing plant. He had the immediate sense that he was looking at a brand new player here, someone with an agenda of their own.
Jensen took aim with the Hurricane, considering his options. The range wasn’t good, and he had a fair chance of clipping Pritchard with a stray round if he let off a burst of fire. He held his finger away from the trigger as the woman suddenly halted, casting a look in his general direction.
“He’s here,” she said to the air. “Huh. Took long enough.” The revolver rose to aim toward Pritchard’s head. “Come on up, esé. We’re all friends here.”
Jensen took a step forward into the spill of light from the stage and he saw Pritchard shift in his chair. “Want to tell me what’s going on here, Frank?” He ignored the woman, even as he kept the gun on her. It wasn’t just the three of them in the building, he was certain of it.
“They came in right after I lost the infolink,” said the hacker, confirming his suspicion. “Jammed the signal and shut me down at gunpoint.”
“Lose the weapon,” said the woman, nodding toward Jensen. “Let’s be civil, yeah?”
“You first, chica,” he shot back. “And tell your pal to quit the cloak-and-dagger routine. It’s been a long day and I’m not in the mood.”
“Jensen,” said a voice from nearby, dragging his name out into a languid, reproachful Irish drawl. “And here you used to be such an affable fella.” Until that moment hidden from view, a man got up from one of the slumped chairs in the front row and turned to face him, spreading his hands in a gesture of conciliation. He had short hair over familiar, deliberately average features that were marred by circular scar-lines indicating subdermal implants and neural augmentations.
“Huh.” Jensen lowered the machine pistol, but not the whole way. Of all the people he might have encountered in this moment, the last face he expected to see belonged to a man he’d crossed paths with half a world away, on a deep water platform in the middle of the South China Sea. “Hello, Quinn… or do you have a new identity this time?”
“Garvin Quinn is as good a name as any,” he replied, with a wan smile. Then his expression shifted, becoming wolfish, and when he spoke again his accent was pure Muscovite Russian. “It’s been a while. Surprised to see me, bratán?”
WEST SIDE – DETROIT – UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Vande followed Jarreau through an open hatch in the barge’s bow, into a compartment that Alpha team had been using as a temporary gear store. He tore his tac vest off his shoulder and threw it hard on the table in the center of the room.
Out of sight of the rest of the team, the big man allowed himself to swear, grinding out a curse word between his teeth, before turning to look back at her. “That deployment was a damned mess! What the hell happened out there?”
She swallowed hard. “Sir, I take full responsibility for this. It was my call, I made the judgment to order Mendel to go for the high ingress instead of a ground landing.”
Sol Mendel was the unit’s VTOL pilot, a taciturn former Marine Corps aviator who said little but always got the team where they needed to go. Jarreau had been in the co-pilot’s seat right next to him as the flyer pivoted over the roof of the burning warehouse. At the time he hadn’t second-guessed Vande’s command – he never did – but that was because she usually produced results. Usually.
Not this time, though. The mark had got the drop on them, escaping through a collapsing roof that they barely got clear of.
Jarreau slowly shook his head. “No. The buck stops with me, Raye. You’re my two-I-C, so your orders are my orders. I’ll have to explain it to Manderley.”
“You don’t need to cover for me, sir,” she insisted. Vande frowned. “The facts are: I played a gamble and it blew up in my face. I’m sorry, I screwed the op and we all know it.”
He eyed her. “So tell me why.”
She took a breath. “I saw him up there. The guy with the pistol from the Tarvos robot’s video. I had a choice to make – drop us down and deploy or go for the arrest. I picked the wrong option.”
“You’re absolutely sur
e it was him?”
Vande nodded. “No doubt in my mind.” She tapped a slender metallic finger on her temple. “I’ve already uploaded the contents of my optic buffer to Chen’s search matrix, and the others who were out with me on the roof are doing the same right now. It was the same shooter, believe it.”
“If we’d caught him that might have counted for something,” said Jarreau, scowling. “As it is, we’re back to square one.”
Chen’s initial searches of the Detroit city grid had thrown up the locked-down Sarif Industries manufacturing plant as the most likely target of interest, but it was pure bad luck that brought the Task Force 29 unit there right in the middle of what looked like an exchange gone wrong. The team had tracked two vehicles escaping into the city before they vanished into backstreets where no traffic cameras were still functional, so those leads were coming up short. The gunman with the augs had willingly dropped into a raging fire to get away from them, but Vande suspected that he hadn’t perished there. The look she’d seen in his eyes… it was smart, not suicidal.
“He already had an out,” she said aloud. Jarreau raised a questioning eyebrow at that. “We saw another runner as we came in, remember? Maybe both of them had escape routes set up. Whatever we interrupted, those two weren’t about to die because of it.”
“Chen’s monitoring the DPD tactical feed and he has data snoopers placed on their central precinct intranet, so we’ll know what their emergency response crews pull out of there.” Jarreau shook his head again. “But I’ll tell you right now, that’ll be shit. No-one in this city is going to put any effort into investigating a fire in a Sarif factory. Wounds from the Aug Incident are still raw around here.”
“They’re raw everywhere,” said Vande. She had ordered two of Alpha team’s operatives to shadow the Detroit cops at the site, but they hadn’t reported in yet. After a moment, she decided to venture an opinion. “Sir, I have an idea about what’s going on here. The fire, the trucks… These people are tying up loose ends. They burn the building so there’s no evidence, they take their hardware and hide it somewhere else in the city… It’s the most likely explanation I can see, and it fits the facts.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” Jarreau shot back. He sighed. “Next time, Raye, think twice. You have a tendency to get bore-sighted on something, to the detriment of everything else. It’s your only failing.”
“I—” she started in on an explanation, but a loud clatter at the hatch took her attention.
Chen leaned in through the door, a smirk on his face. “You can shower me with praise later. This day may not have been a total waste of time after all, boss…” he told Jarreau. “I just got done with the first-pass compilation on the images from the team’s optic buffers and the footage from the Box-Guard. Ran it through the matrix and we got us a match, right out of the gate.”
“You ID’d the man on the roof?” said Vande. “Already?”
“Impressed?” The tech nodded. “His name is Adam Jensen… and according to the database, he’s been stone cold dead for over a year.”
THE RIALTO – DETROIT – UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
“You know these people?” snapped Pritchard, affronted by the idea. “Why am I not surprised?”
Jensen nodded toward Quinn. “Him, yeah.” He looked toward the Latino woman with the pistol. “Her, not so much.”
“The young lady with the large sidearm is Alex Vega,” said Quinn. “I suppose you could say she’s my… driver.”
Vega rolled her eyes, slipping the revolver back into a holster on her thigh. “I’m a pilot, I’m not your damn driver. But I will be the kicker of your ass if you keep that up.”
“Fiery too,” Quinn grinned, back in the Irish brogue again. “And she’s certainly capable. Alex is a lot more than just a talented flyer.”
“Also,” said the woman. “Just once, do you think you can pick an accent and stick with it?”
Quinn slipped into the rough-edged Russian manner and chuckled. “Where would be the fun in that?”
“You’re a long way from Rifleman Bank Station.” Jensen studied the other man carefully. “Last time we talked, you were about to blow the whistle on Belltower’s dirty little black site.”
“We did exactly that. And you were searching for a woman you cared for, along with some hard truth…” Quinn cocked his head. “But looking at you now, I would hazard a guess you didn’t really find either of those things.”
Jensen’s lips thinned. “I got all the answers I needed,” he said, after a moment.
During his investigation into the conspiracy behind Hugh Darrow and the Illuminati, Jensen had found himself on a floating prison complex where the Belltower PMC was illegally confining hundreds of innocent people, all of them abducted from cities around the world. It was one part of ‘the Hyron Project’, a grotesque research and development program to use human beings as part of a bio-organic computing system.
Quinn had been there, at first presenting himself as the base’s opportunistic black marketeer – but that had just been the first of the masks he wore. At the end of it, Jensen tore Rifleman Bank’s horrific secrets wide open, and Quinn showed his real face – or something close to it. He revealed he was working toward the same thing as Jensen, to sabotage the plans of the Illuminati and disrupt their schemes at every turn. Or so it seemed. That seemed like a long time ago now, with all the revelations and greater tragedy that had come afterward.
“You never did tell me who you’re working for,” Jensen went on.
“It’s complicated,” said Quinn, with a sigh. “But the important thing to know is that we have common goals.”
The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Jensen recalled the old proverb, turning it over in his mind. But that doesn’t make him someone I trust.
“Panchaea,” said the woman, changing tack. “We heard that was you. Sent it all to the bottom, huh? How’d you get out?”
“People keep asking me that. I wish I knew.” Jensen eyed her. “What’s your part in this? You here to make sure Quinn keeps his lies straight?”
“Something like that.” She shrugged. “Me, I’m just another lost soul like you and your hacker pal here, who wound up in the wrong place at the wrong time and had to make some tough choices.”
“Wait… I know who you are. You’re with Juggernaut,” Pritchard said slowly, understanding creeping over his features. “Janus runs you.”
“Nobody runs us,” snapped Quinn. “The Juggernaut Collective doesn’t work that way. We’re a collaborative effort working together to oppose the same forces.” He glanced at Jensen. “The same people who have been trying to destroy you, Adam.”
“Oh, good grief.” Pritchard’s face twisted in a sneer. “I thought this was someone with an axe to grind here to bury it in your head, but that’s not it at all.” He glanced at Jensen. “Don’t you get it? They’re here because they want to recruit us!”
“Actually, just him,” Vega corrected. “Not you. We got enough hackers.”
Pritchard’s expression became thunderous at the implied slight. “What, those Go-Five idiots from Korea and that script kiddie D-Bar?” He snorted. “How did they work out for you?” He stood up. “Jensen, these people are not on anyone’s side but their own! They’re hooked up to every conspiracy theorist fringe group from the secessionist militia to the UFO abductees. All directed by some faceless ghost-hacker called Janus whom no-one has ever seen in meat space. They’re cyberterrorists and anarchists. Their only interest is in causing chaos and disorder!”
“There’s some truth in there,” admitted Quinn. “But mostly you’re quoting the lies spread by our mutual adversary.”
Pritchard’s tone turned cold. “I know Janus’s sort. You pretend to be white hats, but really you just want to watch the world burn.”
“I could stand to burn down some of it, yeah,” said Vega, an edge of venom in her reply. “The parts where all the rich bastards live behind their sky-high walls and fuck with the rest of us.�
��
“Clearly, your friend Pritchard has some trust issues,” Quinn told Jensen. “And perhaps a bruised ego into the bargain? If I’m honest, I don’t care. I just came here to talk to you, on behalf of Janus.”
“Is that so?” Jensen’s hand hadn’t left the grip of the machine pistol. “You told me once that we were all pawns… is that what you are right now?”
Quinn’s jaw hardened, but Vega answered for him. “Janus has an offer. And we came a long way to find you, so the least you could do is hear us out.”
“No, the least he could do is let you leave without shooting you!” Pritchard snapped.
“This isn’t a good time,” said Jensen. “I got my own issues to deal with right now.”
“Yes, we’ve been monitoring the police frequencies. Some sort of local trouble, is it?” At length, Quinn let out another sigh. “Okay, all right. Cards on the table, bratán. The fact of the matter is, we need your help.”
“Why should either of us give a damn?” snorted Pritchard.
“Because the Collective can give Jensen what he wants,” said Vega. “A way to reach those creeps hiding in their ivory towers, and drag them kicking and screaming into the light.” Her eyes flashed as she looked toward him. “Interested?”
“Keep talking,” said Jensen.
WEST SIDE – DETROIT – UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Vande watched Jarreau’s expression harden as he peered at the array of data panels Chen had dealt out across the table screen. She knew that look by now; outwardly, he seemed impassive, unresponsive, but inside he was running a fine-tuned tactical mind over all the intelligence being put before them.
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