“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.
EIGHT
THE RIALTO – DETROIT – UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
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 en
try 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.”
CASS CORRIDOR – DETROIT – UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
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.
A broad-faced man in a faded brown jacket cursed under his breath and turned around on his stool to find the tall, bull-necked bartender offering him a wireless reader device. “Ah, shit, Jake. You can’t even let it sink in before you want me to pay up?”
“Losing a bet is losing a bet,” said the man behind the bar, his eyes hard and unfriendly. “Boss said you’re not good for credit anymore, Henry.”
“Your boss can blow me,” he retorted. “I got money. I’ll pay, then screw you!” Henry leaned forward and angrily pressed his thumb to the reader. A moment later, there was an answering beep and he was fifty credits poorer as the stake vanished from his bank balance. “I’ll take another drink while you’re at it,” he demanded.
Jake obliged, blankly pouring another two fingers of bourbon into his glass.
Henry raised the drink in a sarcastic salute to the hockey team. “You guys have sucked ever since you moved to Canada! Up yours too!” The liquor burned pleasantly on the way down, and he turned his back on the screen once again, his mind already thinking about the next wager he was going to make.
“Henry Kellman…” The voice was all gravel, and it came from close at hand. “Didn’t you quit drinking?”
Henry twisted on the stool to see who was talking to him and he started answering before his brain caught up to what he was seeing. “Yeah, well, I unquit, so go mind your own business—” He froze; he was looking at a ghost. “Holy shit. Mr. Jensen.”
How the man had walked into Spector’s, how he had made his way to the stool next to Henry’s, all without him noticing until right now, those questions flared and faded in his thoughts before he could utter them.
Jensen gave a slow nod. “Back from the dead. Again. Guess I’m making a habit of it.”
Henry put down the glass before the sudden shaking in his fingers made him spill the contents. He blinked, trying to make sense of what was going on. “Wait, they said you’d been killed in all that crazy shit that went down…” He caught sight of Jensen’s black polycarbonate hands as the other man signaled Jake for a drink of his own. “Oh man. Oh man…” He forced himself to stop talking, in case he said something he would regret. Regrouping, Henry forced a brittle smile. “I’m real glad that wasn’t true. I guess we’re all in the same boat now, right? Shit out of luck?” He gave a weak laugh.
Jake had a bottle of Tango Foxtrot black-label whiskey in his hand, but he hesitated before pouring a shot for Jensen. “This place isn’t a hanzer joint,” he said firmly. “Maybe you wanna go drink somewhere else.”
“I really don’t,” said Jensen, ice forming on the words.
“Hey!” Henry tapped a thick finger on the countertop. “This guy, he’s okay! He used to be my chief when I worked security over at Sarif, I’ll vouch for him!”
Jake’s vacant expression didn’t shift, but eventually he poured out a drink for Jensen and walked away, never once taking his eyes off the man.
“Don’t blame him, he don’t have a lot of what you might call ‘social skills,’ Mr. Jensen,” Henry went on. “So. Uh. You’re back in Detroit? How’s that going for you?” He shifted uncomfortably on the top of his stool. Half of him wanted to get up and make his excuses as quickly as possible, and the other desperately wanted to know what the hell Adam Jensen was doing in town.
“It’s a work in progress, Henry,” Jensen replied, taking a sip of the whiskey. “You’re not an easy man to find. I had to do a lot of asking around.”
“You were looking for me?” Henry gradually started to slide himself off the stool.
“Your apartment was closed up.”
“Yeah…” he admitted. “I had to move out. I mean, after the incident and all, it’s not like I was an aug or nothing, but it was tough times… I ended up in a flophouse ’cos that’s all I can afford.” Henry paused, and a churn of old anger rose briefly in his gut. “Shit, man, they just fired the whole damn lot of us! No severance pay, no call-back, no help… Everybody on the security team, out of a job overnight! And after all we did to keep that place from getting torn apart during the riots…” He shook his head, and took a pull from his bourbon to steady himself. “That sweet kid Cindy on the front desk, she could… would have died that night if we hadn’t been there.” The drink helped him focus, and when he looked back at Jensen it was with a brief surge of defiance. “Those sons-of-bitches on the company board screwed us over, plain and simple. Sold Sarif to the Chinese, just washed their hands of us… And you too, looks like.”
Jensen nodded to himself, as if something was making sense to him. “So you’ve got to take whatever work you can get, right?” He nodded toward the screen on the wall. “Earn some money to make your bets.”
“Yeah.” Henry couldn’t stop himself fro
m shooting a look toward the clock above the bar and then toward the doorway. He had somewhere else to be.
Jensen knocked back the rest of his whiskey. “Why don’t you tell me about the pass card, Henry? Who took it from my office?” His tone was flat, without inflection. “Was it you?”
“I don’t know what you mean—” Henry started to rise off his seat, but then the arm lying across Jensen’s lap suddenly grew a black, meter-long sword blade that extended out to hover over Henry’s thigh.
“Stick around,” Jensen told him. “Finish your drink. We’re not done catching up.”
Henry gingerly settled back on to the stool and placed his shaking hands around his bourbon. “Look, Mr. Jensen… you gotta know how hard it was here after the incident. Everything falling apart, no-one with any damn answers about what was gonna happen next. You weren’t here, Sarif was AWOL, and that dickhead up in digital security was no help to any of us on the guard detail…”
Jensen cocked his head, as if he was listening to a voice that only he could hear. “Go on.”
“So when the word came down I was out, I took advantage, yeah. Figured I’d hold on to it, could be worth something… What the hell else was I gonna do?” He paused, the reality of it settling on him. Henry thought that the part of him that was ashamed by his conduct had died off, but it was still in there. “No-one else was looking out for us,” he added. The justification seemed pathetic.
“Us?” Jensen seized on the word. “Who else?”
Inwardly, Henry cursed. That single slip had been enough, and Jensen had caught it immediately. He looked at the clock again. Now he was late, and that made things worse.
“You waiting for something, Henry?” Jensen had seen his nervous glances. “Anyone I know?” The other man turned and faced him with a cold, measuring stare. “I know you. You used to work for me, remember? I know you’re not the only one in on this.”
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