Deus Ex: Black Light

by James Swallow

  “Give me a thermographic overlay,” ordered Jarreau, and the pilot complied, tapping a key that turned the image on the canopy into a patchwork of heat-color. Hot white blooms surrounded the fires and a dull orange trail marked the final path the crashing train had taken. He scanned the landscape, looking for any signs of life.

  And he found one. “There!” Jarreau stabbed a finger at a human-shaped blob moving slowly across the image.

  Mendel drew that sector of the image closer and revealed the body heat of a man, his torso glowing orange but his arms and legs the cold blue of machines.

  “Put us down, now!” Jarreau snapped, grabbing his weapon and turning to the rest of his team. “Squad, deploy!”

  Panels dropped open along the side of the VTOL as it settled on to the ground with a bump, and Jarreau was the first one out on to the wet, muddy earth.

  * * *

  Jensen staggered toward the Task Force aircraft, raising his hands to show he was unarmed. Each step was slow and unsteady. The damage to his augmented legs was severe but not enough to disable him.

  Figures in the familiar black combat oversuits of TF29 spilled out of the VTOL, brandishing assault rifles in his direction. At the head of them was Jarreau, and there was a bleak expression on the team leader’s hard face. “Jensen…” he began, his lips thinning. “What happened out here?”

  “Vande’s dead,” he told him, cutting straight to the worst of it. “Chen, the others… they’re all gone.”

  “Fuck.” Jarreau barked out an order to the rest of his squad. “Spread out! Check for bodies, double-time! The locals will be here as soon as they get their asses in gear, and I want us gone by then…”

  “I’m sorry,” added Jensen. “You people were set up. There was a woman, her name was Thorne…” He hesitated. He had to be careful what he said here. There was no telling what Jarreau knew or who else might be monitoring them. “She was working for the people behind your smuggling network.”

  But to his surprise, Jarreau raised his hand to stop him. “Yeah, we know. That goddamn bloodbath at the airport was just a sideshow. They sent a team to intercept the train and take the black market augs en route.”

  “You know?” echoed Jensen.

  “This person Thorne was here, then?” asked Jarreau. “After all this, tell me she didn’t get away with the hardware.”

  Jensen shook his head, and jerked a thumb toward the burning remains of the cargo wagons. “Destroyed, every last crate. And Thorne along with them.” He took a breath, grimacing at the oily smoke filling the air. He told Jarreau about Pritchard’s lead, the images he pulled from Wilder’s cyberoptic, and the desperate race he had run to reach the train and warn Vande. “How do you know about Thorne, and the hijack?”

  “I know because something I’ve been suspecting for months was proven right, Jensen,” said the other man. His expression turned stony. “Since the first moment we were on this smuggling network, they’ve been two steps ahead of us at every turn. At first I thought it was because they were good, but the longer it went on, the more I started wondering if we’d sprung a leak…”

  Jensen resisted the urge to tell Jarreau that the footage he had seen of Thorne’s conversation pointed to the same damning conclusion – that the Task Force had been penetrated by a double-agent. “Someone at Interpol?”

  Jarreau shook his head. “Closer to home.” He gestured at the wreckage. “Vande sold us out.”

  “What?” Jarreau’s words came as a sudden shock. After what the woman had done on board the train, there was no doubt in Jensen’s mind that Raye Vande was anything but an Illuminati mole. Any suspicions he had held about her had been brushed away. Before he could voice that, Jarreau went on.

  “During the tear-down and exfil from Detroit, one of the techs found something on her panel… A secret, compartmentalized data drive.” He shook his head in sadness and disbelief. “All our mission ops, all our intel on the network, every bit of it was in there. Along with data trails showing regular uploads to a dark net server array in Brazil. They timed out to all of our ops over the last three months.”

  “That… that can’t be right.” Jensen tried to find the words. “It has to be a misdirection.”

  “No.” Jarreau shook his head again. “I didn’t want to believe it. But the drive was biometrically encoded to Vande alone. Interpol’s data intercept team in Lyon are looking into it as we speak. There’s evidence of some kind of Swiss bank account…” He trailed off, scowling. “She was the leak, Jensen. We worked side by side for months, right in the thick… and I never saw it.”

  Because she wasn’t the one. The denial tore silently through Jensen’s thoughts. It’s a setup, just like everything else.

  This was another Illuminati shell game, their eternal ploy of misdirection and obfuscation. Layers of lies, one atop another. It made perfect sense: had Jensen never been there to interfere with Thorne’s plan, her team would have made off with the stolen Sarif augs and left Interpol to sift through the corpses they left behind. Vande had been chosen to be the scapegoat, and with her dead at Thorne’s hand there would be nothing to prove that she was innocent – only Jensen’s instinct, and that would never be enough.

  He could see grief and bitterness warring across Jarreau’s face. The Task Force commander badly needed it not to be true, but the evidence in front of him was ironclad. Of course it is, Jensen told himself. They don’t make mistakes.

  Vande’s framing was a perfect fit, even if the attempt to steal back the mil-spec augmentations had failed. If Jensen spoke up now, if he challenged that version of events, there was no way to know what the outcome would be. There was only one fact that could not be denied. The double-agent operating inside Interpol and Task Force 29, perhaps even directly under Jarreau’s command, was still in place. Everything Quinn and the Juggernaut hackers suspected about the unit was being proven right.

  One of the other TF29 operatives jogged across the broken scrub to Jarreau’s side. “Sir,” she began, “I can confirm the loss of the train crew and all on-board call signs. And Jensen was right about the intruders, we counted five tangos here. We took quick scans and DNA samples as best we could, but we’re not going to be able to recover the dead, not before local heat get here. Mendel says police chatter is going crazy, they’ve got units on the way right now.”

  Jarreau gave a solemn nod. “Copy that. What about the cargo?”

  “Burned to shit,” said the woman. “The fire’s slagged everything.” She looked away. “Goddamn it. This whole op was for nothing.”

  “Jarreau…” Jensen moved to speak, but the big man shook his head.

  “Take thermite charges, smoke all the remains,” the other man told the operative. “We don’t need anyone knowing we were out here.”

  “On it.” The woman broke into a jog, racing back to the idling VTOL.

  Jarreau eyed him. “You look like you need a lift. Those legs are gonna give out on you if you walk another klick. And Interpol’s gonna want a full debrief.” He made a beckoning gesture, his other hand patting an inert inhibitor bracelet clipped to his belt. “Is that gonna be a problem for us?” The choice being offered was clear and unequivocal.

  “No problem,” said Jensen.

  “Good.” Jarreau turned away and started back toward the parked aircraft. “That’ll give us time to talk.”

  Jensen shot a look up into the sky, in the direction that Vega had taken her VTOL after dropping him off. Quinn had wanted to spirit him away and leave the Task Force ignorant that Jensen had ever been involved. But that didn’t sit right with him… and now there were new questions rising that Jensen was determined to find answers for.

  His gaze dropped to the shattered remains of the train, and he saw flares of bright white light as Jarreau’s team used their thermite charges to turn the corpses of their comrades into untraceable cinders.

  Those men and women deserved better than this, thought Jensen. Instead they died in the crossfire because of so
me elaborate scheme run by a bunch of elitist sociopaths. “That’s enough,” he said aloud, a cold and iron-hard certainty solidifying in him. He set off after Jarreau, a new determination in his dark eyes.

  CENTRAL STATION – DETROIT – UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  “You really think he’ll actually come?” said Vega, pulling her collar closer about her neck and glancing around.

  The rain falling on the streets and buildings seemed to go on forever, coating everything with a slick sheen that did little to wash away the dirt and decay of the city. She didn’t like this place. The air was too cold, the streets too narrow. Detroit felt like it was dying by inches all around her, and she wanted to be away from it.

  Quinn’s expression shifted from blank neutrality to a false smile. “He called us, love. Not the other way around. He’ll be here.”

  She shook her head. “I know you think you know this guy, but I’m telling you now. Don’t mess with him. If you’re anything other than straight with Jensen, this isn’t going to work.”

  “We all have our secrets to keep,” Quinn said, the smile fixed and brittle. “Even him. And frankly, I don’t think Janus is going to take no for an answer…”

  The station doors parted and a figure in a dark coat emerged. He spotted them off to the side of the entranceway, and approached. “We’ll find out soon enough,” said Vega. She noted a stiffness in Jensen’s gait as he came closer.

  Quinn saw it too. “You all right there? Those Interpol lads fix you up?”

  “Something like that,” said Jensen. “New servos. Still breaking them in.”

  “It’s the least they could do, given what you risked to help them,” Vega added. “But if I were you, I’d check anything they put in you for trackers.”

  “Already done.” Jensen eyed her. “Thanks to Janus, I know what to look for. I won’t make the same mistake again.”

  “Just looking out for our friends,” Quinn insisted. He glanced at Vega. “Alex, keep an eye out while the menfolk talk, will you?”

  She shot him a frosty glare. “Whatever.”

  Quinn led Jensen out of the rain, under a corroded awning across a shuttered storefront. Vega turned away from them, but her augmented hearing meant she still caught every word of their conversation.

  “So,” began Quinn. “Those nasty little augs your ex-boss cooked up are all gone. I guess we call that a success, do we?”

  “A dozen people died,” Jensen retorted. “So no, we don’t.”

  “Sure, sure.” Quinn back-pedaled. “But take what victory you can from it. And remember that Juggernaut were happy to be of assistance.”

  “So now I owe you one.”

  “I wasn’t going to bring it up so quickly, but since you mention it… yes.” Vega heard the smile in Quinn’s voice. “Janus is a real believer in quid pro quo.”

  “We’ve got that in common, then.” Vega expected Jensen to show the same wary attitude he had exhibited back in the old movie theater when they first met, so what he said next came as something of a shock. “I’ll do it. I’ll work with the Juggernaut Collective.”

  “Oh.” Quinn’s reaction showed that he had thought the same thing as Vega. He recovered quickly. “Good. Smart choice, Adam.” Quinn forced a chuckle. “We don’t have a secret handshake or anything, but you won’t regret—”

  “I already do,” he broke in. “But I’ve gone as far as I can, and like it or not, I need a new edge. You people are it.”

  Vega turned to see Jensen walking away and she couldn’t stop herself from calling out to him. “Hey. Wait…”

  He met her gaze. “Ask me.”

  “What brought you around? Before you didn’t want anything to do with us, now you’re signing on just like that.” She snapped her fingers. “What changed?”

  “I have,” he said, with grim conviction. “I reached my limit. I’ve had enough of the Illuminati. The disregard they have for everyone who isn’t one of them.” He shook his head. “Harrison Stacker. Henry Kellman. Raye Vande. Vasili Sevchenko. Netanya Keitner…” Every name Jensen uttered seemed to weigh down on him. “And thousands more. Dead, because of them. I’ve had enough of watching people pay the price for some superior bastard’s idea of what makes the world work.”

  Vega gave a slow nod. Every word he said resonated with her own motivations for becoming part of the Collective. “Welcome to the party,” she told him.

  Jensen turned up his collar and glared out into the rain. “One last thing,” he said, not looking at either of them. “If you cross me… if Janus lies… we are done.”

  Vega watched him vanish into the sheeting downpour and frowned. “He means it,” she said.

  “Of course he does,” said Quinn. “That’s why he’s the one we need.”

  MONTBRILLANT TOWER – GENEVA – SWITZERLAND

  The high-pitched tone brought DuClare from the perfect repose of a deep sleep and dragged her up into wakefulness. She rolled over on her wide bed, pulling a snarl of ivory silk sheets with her, blinking owlishly. The black hands of the antique ormolu clock on the far wall were at four and two.

  Resting atop a table across the room, the high-end custom vu-phone she habitually carried was glowing brightly atop the charging plate where she had left it, pulsing different colors with each melodic chime of its alarm.

  DuClare frowned. She had turned the device off before retiring alone to her apartments that night, and left strict instructions that she not be disturbed. Exiting the bed in an angry fashion, she pulled on a kimono and stalked to the table. Her fingertips were about to touch the device when the bedroom windows suddenly flickered. She turned, alarmed, to see the synthetic-laced glass shimmer as pixels gathered into an image on its surface. Like most of the panes in her rooms, the windows could double as screens or mirrors depending on the commands given to the apartment’s pet AI, but they only responded to spoken orders and then, only ones given by DuClare herself. The vu-phone fell silent as the incoming communication linked from it to the window-screens.

  Then her sleep-slowed thoughts caught up with her and she remembered what had happened on the jet a few days earlier. DuClare folded her arms and tried to keep a sour expression from her face, as once again Lucius DeBeers projected himself into her personal space without seeking permission.

  “Lucius,” she began, before he could speak. “It’s very late here. What is so important that it couldn’t wait until morning?”

  Visible across the glass, with the glittering lights of the city laid out behind him, DeBeers resembled a stern portrait of the man come to life, but still trapped in two dimensions. That was the illusion, though. He was a world away from her, and once more he was demonstrating that there was no space she inhabited where he could not enter, night or day.

  “The work doesn’t run to your schedule, Elizabeth.” His tone was cold and clipped, the usual warmth of his manner turned surly. “Perhaps if you were more aware of that, this situation would be less problematic.”

  DuClare guessed that he knew full well she had no idea what he was referring to. It was another tactic to put her off her mark. “If this is about the D-Project—”

  “No,” he snapped. “The situation in Detroit. I am only now learning the full scope of this. Actions on the ground have been totally disrupted. It is a mess, Elizabeth. An utter mess.”

  “What have we lost?” She hated asking the question, hated looking to him for information. It made her seem weak, which was exactly what DeBeers wanted.

  In short order, he gave her a clipped précis of the failure in Michigan. Valuable assets dead. The target package lost, presumed destroyed. Worse still, these events would have a knock-on effect that would damage activities in Europe. Materials needed to achieve certain ends would now be unavailable.

  “This forces us to source new resources from alternate suppliers,” he concluded. “That disrupts our timeline.”

  “We’ll manage,” she said, affecting a tone she hoped would mollify him. “I’ll accelerate ou
r other plans to compensate.”

  DeBeers sniffed. “I have my doubts.”

  DuClare paused, once more pushed off-balance by his words. “We talked about this, Lucius,” she said firmly. “Commitments have been made…”

  “On a great many fronts,” he broke in. “And yet there are failures like this.”

  Slowly, her deferential manner eroded. Did he expect her to accept the blame for something barely within her control? It was impossible to account for every single variable. DeBeers knew that better than any of them.

  She felt a moment of clarity snap into place. The relationship they had shared, the private conversations, had he done it all just to draw her in and fake a closer confidence? To position her as a receptacle for any failed actions on his part? How dare he! If so, then Lucius DeBeers was vainer than DuClare had given him credit for.

  “More errors of judgment like this will not be tolerated,” he concluded. “From anyone. You realize that?”

  The threat hung in the air. She nodded. “Perfectly. I’ll see to it,” promised DuClare, and before he could say any more, she went to the vu-phone and silenced it.

  The image of DeBeers vanished from the windows and with a jolt of sudden anger, she picked up the device and threw it violently across the room. It struck the antique clock and both shattered into pieces.

  Awake now, propelled by her irritation, she strode to her study and activated her tablet computer with a swipe of her finger. The White Helix files she had been studying were patiently waiting for her, each one labeled individually under a sub-code that connected it to a particular individual. “Open file designation: Black Light,” she told it.

  On the screen, a dead man’s face looked back up at her.

  LOCATION UNKNOWN

  Random clusters of dead code and forgotten information came closer, falling into rough orbit around one another until some final point of critical mass was exceeded, and abruptly they merged into a kind of island in the open void of deep data-space.