Deus Ex: Black Light

by James Swallow

  “On Fort Street heading east. A couple of miles from where you are…” There was a pause as the hacker suddenly caught on. “Wait. I can get into the traffic grid… I could reroute it, maybe for a brief detour…”

  Jensen vaulted up from his seat as the train pulled into the crossover station at Cobo Center. “Bring it to me,” he snapped, getting angry shouts as he barged through the workers clustered by the doors and sprinted across the platform.

  * * *

  “What the hell is wrong with these signals?” Ignoring the atonal chorus of horns sounding from the cars lined up behind him before the crossroads, the driver leaned forward and looked up at the traffic lights hanging over the street. They remained resolutely stuck on red, just as they had for the last two minutes, and showed no signs of shifting.

  The other paramedic sitting across from him in the ambulance’s cab gave an airy shrug. “First that ‘Road Closed’ sign pops up outta nowhere, then this?” She looked away. “I dunno, at this rate we ain’t ever getting to the end of our shift.”

  A sedan pulled out from the queue behind them, rolled past and jumped the lights, clearly unwilling to keep waiting. The driver got a slew of invective from the woman in the sedan, and then it was gone – but movement caught his eye as a man in a dark long coat stepped purposefully off the curb and came right up to the side door.

  Before the driver could react, the door was wrenched open and the man in the coat raised his arm. A black blade grew out of his knuckles. “Out,” he said simply.

  “Oh shit!” The driver threw up his hands and scrambled out of the vehicle, his shift partner doing the same. “Look, man, just take the rig, okay? We don’t want any trouble—”

  The man with the blade didn’t wait to listen to his words. He leapt into the seat vacated by the driver and stepped on the gas, peeling out in a screech of tires.

  Overhead, the traffic lights obediently changed to allow him to proceed.

  * * *

  “A right, then your second left,” Pritchard was saying. “That’ll take you into an underground car park. You’ll be out of the way there, no-one should bother you.”

  Jensen worked the ambulance’s big steering wheel, pulling it around until he saw the yawning mouth of the garage. The vehicle barely fit through the entrance, a burst of sparks and broken plastic coming from the rooftop emergency lights as he threaded the needle and brought it to a lurching halt.

  “How long until they track the lo-jack in this thing?” he asked.

  “Ten, fifteen minutes at the most. Don’t delay.”

  “Yeah.” Jensen squeezed through the gap in the back of the cab and climbed into the rear compartment of the ambulance.

  A sealed body bag, detailed with a bright yellow biohazard strip, lay strapped to a folding gurney. He found a plastic panel on the outside of the bag noting that one Wilder, Donald F. (CisMale/B Neg) was inside, along with a warning tab indicating the man’s corpse was contaminated with Strain 5 of Neo-SARS, a particularly virulent version of the respiratory disease. But unless Wilder had contracted the exotic virus in the last few hours, that was more likely something that had been added to his death record to keep the curious from taking too close a look at him.

  Nevertheless, Jensen hesitated. “You sure he’s clean, Pritchard?”

  “Don’t be dramatic, Jensen. He died of a gunshot wound to the throat. There’s no virus in there.”

  “Easy for you to say. You’re halfway across the city.” Jensen extended a short length of nanoblade from his arm and used it to slice open the seal on the body bag. He peeled back the plastic and found Wilder’s bloodless face staring up at him, a vacant look of pain and confusion still etched there.

  The entry wound was right where Pritchard said it would be. Discoloration and shape told Jensen that it had been a close-range shot, but not near enough to leave powder burns. Acting quickly, he patted down the dead man, but found no clues. Everything Wilder had been carrying on him was gone.

  Jensen checked the dead man’s cyberarm, but nothing about it seemed off. He scowled and sat back, looking the body up and down, searching for something that didn’t belong. He met Wilder’s dead gaze and a thought occurred to him. “His eyes…”

  Leaning in, he peered at the twin Sarif Industries cybernetic implants. Both the glassy orbs were intact and undamaged. The last thing they had seen was the person who took Wilder’s life.

  “Read me the serial code on the iris ring!” said Pritchard, becoming animated. Jensen did as he was asked, and the hacker gave a snort of approval. “Those are the ‘Atid’ models,” he explained quickly. “Named after an angel of memory. And that explains why someone wants Wilder’s body destroyed.”

  “The data buffers in the cyberoptics…” Jensen guessed what the hacker was thinking. “They’ll still have imagery stored in there from earlier in the day. We just need to access it…” He cast around, looking for something to use to remove the eyes.

  “There’s a way to do that,” Pritchard said warily. “I can talk you through it from here… but it’s a little unpleasant.”

  Jensen caught sight of his face, and his own optical implants, in the reflection of a mirrored panel. “I see,” he said.

  * * *

  If removing the artificial eye from Wilder’s right orbital socket with a scalpel and a pair of forceps was a painstaking task, doing the same to himself in reverse without cutting open his face was one of the more testing things Jensen had ever had to do.

  He willed himself to ignore the queasy sensations churning in his gut as he pulled on his implant until the self-seeking optic nerve connectors detached, and he went partially blind.

  Jensen called on the same careful skills he had cultivated building model clocks during the months he had been in recovery, after the attack at SI that nearly killed him. It helped to think of this action in the same way, of pieces coming together in uniform order.

  Wilder’s cybereye shared the same universal jacks as Jensen’s, and he cautiously inserted it into the gaping socket, taking care not introduce any blood or dirt along with it. With a moist, unpleasant click, the dead man’s eye snapped home and half of Jensen’s vision became a fuzzy blur of start-up displays.

  “Did it work?” said Pritchard. “Are you seeing anything? An Atid eye will be compatible with your neural hub. You should be able to go through the menus and navigate to the memory buffer.”

  “Getting there,” said Jensen. The sickly feelings faded away as his body quickly accepted the new eye, and he soon found the subroutine Pritchard referred to. The buffer was still intact, and Jensen drew it up into replay mode.

  It was disorienting for his brain to parse two different visual inputs at once – one from his real-time view of the interior of the ambulance and the other from Wilder’s recent past – but he managed.

  Jensen blink-clicked the buffer, spooling down the time index into the recent past. He rocked back slightly as he suddenly saw himself standing in front of a glass panel, a gun in hand. He watched his lips silently mouth the words ‘keep going’ as the moment unfolded. “Too early,” he said aloud. “Gonna run it ahead.”

  Jensen forced the replay to run on fast-forward, becoming a blur of motion. He glimpsed himself taking the pulse-gun hit; then Wilder’s point of view sliding around as he left the apartment in Ravendale; the interior of a bot-cab; the lobby of an expensive hotel—

  Switching back to normal speed, Jensen began a ride as a passenger through Wilder’s meeting at the Yukon Hotel. His breath caught in his throat as Wilder’s gaze met that of the person he had come to meet.

  “Thorne?” It was absolutely the same woman that had interrogated him at the WHO facility in Alaska. That distinctive pale skin, henna-red hair and an air of haughty coldness that set him on edge, even secondhand.

  If Jensen has to be killed, it won’t be down to you to pull the trigger. He read her lips, and the chill in him deepened. The old talent – learned back in his time at SWAT for use when star
ing down sniper scopes at dangerous perps – came easily to the fore. Jensen tried to imagine Wilder’s poorly pitched bravado rebounding off Thorne’s icy, calculating exterior, and his thoughts churned as he tried to guess at what chain of events had brought the woman to Detroit. Had she come to find him? Or was there more to her presence in the city?

  Then the gun appeared in Thorne’s hand and she fired the shot that ended Wilder, as blankly as someone might turn out a light. It was so sudden, and so horribly immediate that Jensen physically recoiled at the moment the recorded bullet struck home. A heart-rate display in the corner of playback showed a final flurry of peaks and then went flat; but the optic feed didn’t end. The tiny bio-energy cells in the implants were half-charged, more than enough to keep running and record what went on in front of Wilder’s dead eyes.

  Jensen watched Thorne move in and out of view. She activated an encrypted communications unit, and he caught snatches of her speaking again; Wilder may have compromised the operation.

  He was still wondering who had been on the other end of the line when Thorne made a second call. Move the secondary contingency plan to active status and prepare to execute, she said, and everything about the woman’s body language told Jensen she was talking to the people holding her chain. He could see it in her every motion and gesture, defiance warring with ingrained obedience.

  What Thorne said next was as clear as if she were standing right in front of him. We need to be prepared for the hangar transfer to fail, mouthed the woman. I have a contingency in place if the Task Force take possession of the cargo. Confirm the deployment of a kill squad. We can hit them on the train and leave no survivors.

  ELEVEN

  DOWNTOWN – DETROIT – UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  As he emerged from the alleyway and on to the street, Jensen saw a fast, bat-winged shape moving at rooftop level. The police drone had its strobes flashing red and blue, and the complex scanner head slung under its narrow fuselage was turning this way and that, gathering up sensor data on the area.

  It was coming his way, following the digital scent of the ambulance’s lo-jack transponder, and he couldn’t afford to be seen by it. The Detroit police force knew too much about him for Jensen just to slip past the drone unnoticed. If it captured his face, it would draw heat from real human cops in short order.

  He turned sharply into the first lit doorway that he came to – a 24-hour branch of Lucky Dot, the Chinese-owned convenience store chain that had popped up on every city street corner like a plastic and neon fungus.

  The door clacked shut behind him just as the drone thrummed past. From the corner of his eye, Jensen saw the machine pivot on its ducted rotors and rise up to take an eagle-eye view of the area. He’d have to kill time until it moved on.

  “Hi there, welcome to Lucky Dot!” The canned, pre-programmed greeting spun out of a cartoonish robot cat mounted behind the cluttered counter of the long, narrow store. Set on a rail that let it move back and forth, it had a fat torso, two chubby telescopic arms and a video screen for a head. Modeled on the company’s mascot, it resembled a giant child’s toy – but like most of the chain’s robot shopkeepers, it was grimy, cracked and covered with graffiti. “How can I help?” Its chirpy voice was generated by a limited artificial intelligence subroutine, but Jensen knew that there would be an actual human operator watching through its eyes – and those of a dozen others in a dozen other stores – from some office cubicle half a world away in Guangzhou.

  He waved the machine away and made a beeline for an automated coffee vendor on the far wall, punching in a request for a beverage. The only thing that was not out of order was Lan Ri RealTaste Synthetic CoffeEsque, and he grimly ordered a cup, deliberately keeping his back to the store’s surveillance cameras.

  Jensen rubbed his face as he waited. The skin around his right eye was tender and bruised from being twisted and pulled, and although he had replaced his own cyberoptic once again, it felt gritty and uncomfortable. The aug eye he’d stolen from Wilder’s corpse was rolling loose in his pocket.

  He listened to the fake coffee brewing, blotting out the constant background twitter of the Lucky Dot jingle music playing from hidden speakers. His mind was going around and around on what he had seen through Wilder’s eyes.

  “Jensen…” Pritchard’s voice buzzed through his infolink. “I suppose it would be a waste of time for me to tell you to do what I told you to do at the start.”

  “Drop off the grid and go dark…” He subvocalized the words so the server robot wouldn’t pick them up. “Way too late for that now.”

  Maybe Thorne was with Homeland Security, just like she’d said. But Jensen’s instincts to be wary of her had been right, and now he knew for certain that she had other, more sinister masters. The same people who had engineered the events that nearly killed him, that took his life and turned it inside out.

  “The ramifications of this reach a long way,” said Pritchard. “You see that, right?”

  “Yeah.” He couldn’t help but wonder, how much did the shadowy cabal of the Illuminati know about his missing time between the destruction of Panchaea and his awakening at Facility 451? Was he like Thorne in all this, some sort of piece in their endless games? Was he being guided and never knowing it? Each question begat more of the same, branching off into threads of unknowns that would strangle him if he tried to grasp them all at once.

  Instead, he took a breath and silenced the chaos in his thoughts. “I need to focus on what is in front of me,” Jensen said, half to himself. “Deal with what I can deal with… and handle the rest as I go.” The coffee machine ejected a cup of something mud-colored and tasteless. He took it and walked slowly back toward the front of the store, looking for any sign of the police drone.

  “That’s not the smartest approach,” Pritchard replied. “But when did that ever stop you?”

  The hacker laid out the facts: it was very possible that the people running Thorne and the smuggling network the TF29 team was trying to dismantle had planned for this series of events from the beginning. And more so, Thorne’s specific mention of a train – which had to be the military transport Jarreau had mentioned – meant that they had inside knowledge of Interpol’s plans. Did Jarreau and Vande have any idea that they had a mole in their organization? There was no way to contact the Task Force unit to warn them.

  “I’m searching all rail routes and databases in the area, but nothing is coming up,” he concluded. “If this is being done, Interpol have concealed it very well.”

  “We can’t just stand by and let Jarreau’s people ride into an ambush!” Jensen’s temper flared, and he said the words aloud without thinking about it.

  The robot behind the counter seemed to react to his outburst and it juddered on its hydraulic mount. “How can I how can I how can I?” The synthetic voice became distorted and growly, and the machine’s arms jerked into peculiar positions.

  Suddenly the video screen blanked out and rebooted itself. When the picture resolved, it was a grainy and poorly lit image from a small handheld camera. Jensen picked out what looked like the interior of a van, and resting up against a metal panel with a smirk playing on his lips was Garvin Quinn.

  “Hello, lads,” he began, speaking through the robot’s vocoder. “Nice night for a stroll, eh?”

  Jensen froze. “How’d you know where to find me?”

  “Francis is going to get upset when I answer that.”

  Pritchard made a snarling noise that made Jensen’s infolink implant twitch, but he went on before the hacker could reply. “Cut the bullshit, Quinn. Now is not the time.”

  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 listenin
g 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?”

  LAKE MONTCALM – MICHIGAN – UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  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.