The thug with the pistol finally holstered it and, pausing to spit on the ground, he joined the others in the car. Jensen retracted the nanoblades as the vehicle revved and drove away.
When the car was out of sight, Pritchard rounded on him. “Same old Jensen! You have to interfere with everything!” He prodded him in the chest. “I was going to handle that!”
“Oh yeah?” Stacks stifled a cough and raised his eyebrow. “How so?”
“I live here now,” Pritchard went on. “That means there are certain realities I have to accept. I don’t need you upsetting the status quo any more than you already have!”
“You’re welcome,” Jensen retorted.
Pritchard gave an exasperated snort and went to the Rialto’s rear entrance, punching a code into a hidden keypad. A heavy metal fire door clunked open and he went inside, not waiting to see if the others followed him.
* * *
Jensen and Stacks entered warily, and their footsteps echoed in the space within. The Rialto’s interior was a magnificent ruin, the decaying art deco designs of the walls, the suspended gallery above and crumbling rows of seats like a snapshot of a decomposing sculpture. Musty, rain-soaked panels hung on the verge of collapse from the high ceiling overhead, and entire sections of the floor had given way into a darkened basement below.
Pritchard picked a path across a makeshift walkway built out of ladders and sheet metal, heading toward the stage where a giant movie screen would once have hung. On the dais up there, Jensen saw bubble tents and flexible plastic walls set up around banks of glowing computer servers.
A strident beeping tone echoed out across the atrium, and Jensen stiffened, instantly recognizing the pre-detonation warning of a mine template. He saw lights blinking in chains around the walkway. Pritchard’s security for his bolt hole was a series of kinetic and electromagnetic pulse grenades with proximity detectors.
Before the devices could trigger, Pritchard cleared his throat and called out a password. “Aerith Lives,” he said, his voice carrying. The countdown halted and the mines went back to a dormant mode.
“Interesting décor,” offered Jensen, surveying the interior. Off to one side, he saw an area that had been cleared of chairs and piled high with heavy plastic carry cases stamped with the Sarif Industries logo. “Let me guess, you borrowed some office supplies before you got fired?”
“I resigned,” Pritchard retorted, climbing up to the dais. He paused to check the cables on an electric-engine motorcycle that was charging from a massive battery pack. “I consider all that as my severance package.” He waved at the boxes. “Some of it is yours, I think…”
“What?”
He nodded. “From your office at Sarif. It was in storage. I… appropriated it.”
Stacks had found a refrigerator and was helping himself to a can of beer. He sat heavily in the front row and drank steadily.
“Make yourself at home, why don’t you?” Pritchard’s acid reply went unanswered.
Jensen went to the cases, shifting some aside until he found a couple that bore his old SI employee code. The first was full of files and desk clutter, but the second contained the contents of his personal locker from the company’s security ops center. Inside, there was a spare chest armor rig and a case containing his backup pistol. He checked and loaded the compact CA-4 semiautomatic, clipping it into a shoulder holster that sat inconspicuously under his jacket. “Better,” he said to himself.
Jensen crossed back to Pritchard’s home from home, the sprawling collection of hijacked computer server stacks, digital projector screens and other items of tech whose functions he could only guess at. Cables for power and data were everywhere underfoot, extending like taproots across the raised platform of the dais. One section of the stage was the hacker’s living area, with a careworn leather sofa, a portable kitchen from a disaster relief airdrop module and a bubble tent for sleeping.
Pritchard was already back in his ‘cockpit’, his hands skittering across a backlit keyboard as he worked through a waterfall of incomprehensible code across one of the big screens. “So,” he sniffed. “Where do you want to start with this crusade of yours? The sooner you decide, the sooner you can leave.”
Any answer Jensen was going to give was cut off by a strangled cry of pain from the front row. Stacks pitched forward out of his chair and crashed to the floor in a twitching heap. Jensen leapt down to him, in time to see the other man crush the beer can in his hand between the trembling fingers of his cyberarm.
The seizure had come out of nowhere, but now it had Stacks in its teeth, he had to ride it out. Another cry of pain escaped his lips and he fought for breath. Jensen turned him so he wouldn’t injure himself, but there was little else he could do but let Stacks endure the attack.
“He’s in neuropozyne withdrawal,” Pritchard said grimly. “That’s a bad reaction. When was his last dose?”
Jensen frowned. “Damn it, Stacks… You gave that girl your last cap, didn’t you?” He guessed that the other man had been holding off as long as he could before taking his remaining nu-poz – and now that choice was paying him back.
“I… I… I’m okay…” Stacks bit out the words as the tremors slowly abated. He coughed, spitting blood where he had bitten the inside of his mouth. “Ah, shit. Hurts like razors, brother.”
Pritchard dragged a device trailing dozens of colored cables over to them. He fired it up and connected the wires to maintenance sockets in Stacks’s shoulder joints. “A lot of red flags here,” he explained, after a moment, reading off a small screen. “Ah, half this stuff is meaningless to me… Looks like there could be connector failures across the PEDOT clusters…”
“I’ll manage.” Stacks forced himself to sit up, but the effort almost made him black out. “I’ll… be okay. Just need to rest.”
“Is this something to do with what happened to us at the WHO clinic?” Jensen shot Pritchard a questioning look.
The hacker was well aware of Jensen’s lack of need for neuropozyne, but his augmentations were still subject to malfunction just like any other piece of complex equipment. He shook his head. “I don’t know, and I can’t do much with this hardware, Jensen. I don’t have the tech or the knowledge to give you a full system overview. I mean, I’m a hacker, not a cyberneticist.”
Jensen scowled. “Can’t go through any legal channels, we’d be made in a second. What about black market clinics?”
“If you want to turn yourself over to the tender mercies of the local Harvester clan, go right ahead.” Pritchard nodded toward Jensen’s arm. “You’ll wake up as an eyeless torso in a wheelchair with some gangbanger like Cali wearing those augs instead. If you wake up at all.”
Jensen fell silent for a moment, thinking it through. A creeping, unpleasant thought formed in his mind. There was more to be concerned about than just Stacks’s well-being. His own was also in question.
I was out for months. I have no idea what they did to me during that time. He looked down at his hands. How do I trust my own tech?
“What about Sarif?” he asked.
“I told you, he’s in the wind—”
“The company, not the man,” Jensen added. “The lab facilities in the SI building, they’ve got all the hardware to run a diagnostic, right? And maybe some stocks of nu-poz as well.”
“If it hasn’t already been removed or looted!” Pritchard shot back. “Not to mention that the new owners from Hengsha have the towers locked down tight.”
“Pritchard, before all this blew up, you and I were responsible for the security of that building. If anyone can get in there, we can.”
He knew Frank Pritchard well enough to know that appealing to his hacker vanity, that desire to break the system, would sway him. He could see the decision forming in the other man’s mind even as he spoke.
But there was something else pushing Jensen toward this act. More than the desire to help Stacks, more than the cold suspicion that Agent Thorne or someone else in the chain of his enemi
es might have tampered with him.
The gaps in my memory. The pieces of the past I’m missing. Maybe I can find some of it there.
“It won’t be easy,” Pritchard was saying. “We’ll all need to pitch in.”
“Okay,” said Stacks. “Not like I got much option.”
Jensen nodded. “We’ll go back to where it started.”
FOUR
LOS ANGELES – CALIFORNIA – UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
In the shadows of the rooftop, a figure leaned forward on the guard rail surrounding the wide helipad and lit the caffeine stick between his lips. In the distance, the twinkling lights of the City of Angels beckoned through a dull haze of smog. He took a long, deep drag and exhaled – then hesitated, hearing boots crunch on gravel.
He smiled dourly without turning around. “Don’t lecture me, Raye.”
“Do you ever listen when I do, sir?” He turned as his second-in-command strode purposefully across the helipad toward him. Raye Vande’s European accent always seemed a little out of place on an otherwise all-American team, but the woman had fitted perfectly into the group from the very start. She was cool, focused and completely by the book – and that was exactly what Christian Jarreau liked about her. The rest of his unit could be a little unruly at times, and it helped him to have someone like Vande as his number two, someone who could play hardball with the regs when the situation required it.
“Can’t smoke anywhere in this damn state,” he went on, his gruff Louisiana brogue rising to the fore. “Helps me think.”
“The squad’s assembling downstairs, sir. Techs say we’ll have the neural subnet link with Prague in the next ten.” She brushed her short-cut blonde hair back as the wind caught it, eyeing him.
“Roger that.” He accepted her report with a nod and took another drag.
They were a study in contrasts: while Jarreau and Vande were around the same height, she was slight and athletic where he was broad and square-cut. Jarreau’s dark, chiseled face with its hooded eyes habitually wore a thoughtful expression, but for her part Vande always seemed hawkish and wary, as if she was forever waiting for a trap to be sprung. Both of them wore identical tactical rigs, form-fitting gear with a lightweight ballistic armor vest and a standard equipment loadout that would have been familiar to any counter-terror operative around the world. Jarreau’s weapon of choice, strapped to his back and safed, was a suppressed Hurricane TMP-18 machine pistol modified to his personal specifications, whereas Vande preferred a pair of twinned semi-auto Silverballer pistols.
Neither of them bore any kind of insignia on their matte black outfits, but there was an arfid chip embedded in the shoulder of their tac gear that would return a data panel if pinged by the correct interrogation signal. That panel would identify them as law enforcement officers in the employ of Interpol, with wide-ranging jurisdiction and a dozen other permissions that would allow them to get their job done. But it was a rare event for any of them to have to flash their badge, even if it was a virtual one. The group they worked for was high-speed, low-drag – Task Force 29, an international counter-terror, intelligence and investigation group created by special United Nations mandate. They were an agile operation that could react quickly without being mired in legal issues or bureaucracy.
Jarreau commanded the Alpha team of TF29’s North American unit, and he was good at it. Recruited right out of the US Navy’s E-SEAL team program a few months after the Aug Incident, he was a year into his new gig and he liked it just fine. He knew better than anyone the danger that unchecked terrorism, aug-related violence and organized crime could wreak, knew the reasons why a group like TF29 was needed in the world.
When the incident had taken place, he’d almost died from neural shock caused by the Darrow signal… but rather than remove the augmentations that had nearly killed him, he decided to dedicate himself to making sure such things couldn’t be used to hurt people again. TF29 seemed like the best way to do that, and when Interpol offered him a squad, he signed on without hesitation.
Vande was augmented as well, but she never talked much about the fire that had taken her hands, and he didn’t ask. Vande was like that a lot of the time, most of her under the surface, like the shape of a shark with only the blade of a fin cutting the water to remind you she was around.
They made a good team, along with the handpicked tier one operatives that Jarreau had personally selected to ride with them. It bothered him that they had only a single field office with a lot of ground to cover in the US and Canada, but then the doctrine of minimal footprint, maximum effectiveness was Task Force standard. TF29-NA, as they were officially designated, was frequently split up into its component action teams to deal with ongoing investigations. Right now, the Bravo and Delta teams were respectively investigating a Triad Harvester ring working out of Vancouver and a rogue militia group in the New Mexico badlands.
The big and loud actions, the common crimes, those could be left to the FBI and Homeland Security. What TF29 did was tackle criminality and terrorism that had global reach, the kind of thing that threatened thousands of people on multiple continents.
“Who is the contact we’ll be talking to in Prague?” Jarreau surrendered to the inevitable and flicked the caffeine stick over the edge of the roof, gesturing for Vande to walk with him back to the stairs.
“Jim Miller, your opposite number from the Central European office.” She fell in alongside him.
“Miller?” Jarreau’s eyebrows rose. “I’ve heard of him. He was with the Tactical Assault Group in Australia before the incident. Hell of a marksman, so they say.”
“That’s the word. And before you ask, I never met him.” Vande was from the Netherlands, recruited by the same channels Jarreau had been, but in her case via the Dutch National Constabulary’s Special Intervention Service. She’d spent time in TF29’s Lyon headquarters before transferring to the States, but Miller was an unknown quantity to her. “We’ll find out for sure when we talk to the man.”
“Yeah.” Jarreau frowned. “Right now, I’d reach out to Pope Theodore himself if I thought it would get us a lead.”
Vande snorted. “With all due respect, sir, divine guidance isn’t going to get us these creeps. Solid police work and boots on necks, that’ll do it.”
“The direct approach. I like—” He was going to say more, but a low vibration through his boots cut him off. “Another one?”
The woman paused, as if she were searching for a scent on the air. “Minor earth tremor. Nothing to be worried about. Baby quakes, they happen out here all the time, so I hear.”
Jarreau raised an eyebrow. “I like it better where the earth doesn’t move.” He descended into the muggy warmth of the floor below, noting that the empty building’s air con system was still inoperable. Once, this ‘see-through’ would have been a busy office complex, but the ongoing global economic downturn had emptied it. That was fine for Jarreau’s team. It meant no snoopers.
He exchanged glances with some of the other squad members as he passed them, getting nods of assent in return. He didn’t need to ask them what they were thinking. Like Jarreau, the rest of Alpha team were chafing at the inactivity that had been forced upon them, after dead end upon dead end had kept the unit from achieving their mission goal.
For the past three months, TF29’s North American division had been systematically locating, isolating and dismantling the branches of a widespread illegal smuggling network that traded in black market human augmentations. Since the imposition of new laws and multiple registration acts around the world, all offensive aug tech was outlawed for civilian use except by special permission – but that hadn’t stopped people trading in surplus left over from before the aug market crashed, homebrew modifications, or worst of all, mil-spec cyberware harvested from unwilling donors.
Jarreau, Vande and the rest of Alpha team were on their toughest assignment yet – tracking a faceless, unknown broker who had somehow managed to stay one step ahead of the task force every step of t
he way. Whomever this person was, they were facilitating the movement of combat-grade augs out of the United States. Jarreau had made it his mission to see that pipeline shut off, but so far he had failed to do so.
At their last post-operation briefing, one of the other team members had bitterly complained that to outthink them this much, the broker had to be someone with an inside track, someone with Interpol connections. Jarreau said nothing; but privately he had confided to Vande that he was having the same suspicions. Hopefully, Miller and the Prague office had a new lead that could help them break the deadlock.
“Time to take a dive,” said Jarreau. He dropped into a molded plastic chair, inclined at an angle beneath a semi-circular articulated frame that resembled a medical x-ray machine. The neural subnet apparatus comprised of heavy blocks of superconducting quantum image detectors that surrounded the user’s head in a thick halo, and as he settled in, the device rotated into place.
Vande took another seat beneath a second NSN unit networked to the first, as the technician working the rig double-checked the last few connections and gave Jarreau a thumbs-up.
“Neural connection is good to go, sir,” said the tech, tapping at a monitor unit. “Link parity is five by five.”
“I never like using this thing,” said Vande, with a grimace. “Too much like giving up control.”
“Agreed,” Jarreau told her. “Know how I deal with it? I pretend I’m going deep into the ocean. Think of it like a swim in the sea.”
Vande’s face creased in a scowl as the halves of a clamshell scanner rig rotated around her head. “I’m from Holland,” she shot back. “We hate the sea and the sea hates us.”
“Then just grit your teeth ’til it’s over.” Jarreau’s own rig settled into place and snapped closed.
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