Deus Ex: Black Light (3 page)

Jensen had been spared, for reasons he still wasn’t fully certain of, but people like Stacks, the others in Facility 451 and elsewhere had been forced to endure the plague of madness. Darrow’s scheme was cut short, but they were still suffering.

Worse still, the people behind Darrow, the ones who wanted to use his mechanism to
control
rather than
destroy
the augmented… They were still out there.

“After the incident, after all the damage done, it was inevitable that Panchaea would be wrecked… But there is evidence that you were in the core of that facility, just prior to the final collapse of its structural protection systems.” Thorne cocked her head, studying him with her blank, doll-like cyberoptic eyes. “What did you see in there? How did you get out when the flood controls went offline?”

“I don’t—”

“Recall, yes, so you keep saying,” Thorne spoke over him. “Darrow was insane. He got what he deserved. No-one on Earth will question that, not after what happened. But the loss of Panchaea… There’s a lot of unresolved issues surrounding that. A lot of blame that until now has been unassigned. Do you follow me?”

“I went there to stop him.” The moment the words slipped from his mouth, Jensen regretted the admission. “And I nearly died because of it. That’s all I have to tell you.”

“Really?” Thorne raised an eyebrow. “So, with Darrow at the bottom of the sea somewhere, we should all just move on? Is that what you think?”

He shifted in his chair, frowning as his arm remained firmly set in place on the table. “You’re the one who talked about coping. Rebuilding.”

“For that, we need to know who gave Darrow the means to do what he did. The man might have been a billionaire but his resources weren’t limitless.”

Jensen concentrated on maintaining a neutral poker face, but it wasn’t easy. Pieces of memory kept rising out of the depths of his thoughts when he least expected them, sometimes triggered by a word, a sound or a smell. When Thorne talked about Panchaea, things he might rather have forgotten pressed into his consciousness, fully formed and real.

At first, Jensen had felt a directionless kind of anger burning away inside him. A fury directed at ghosts he couldn’t name, couldn’t see. But with each passing day, each hour, more and more of it was coming into sharp focus.

Illuminati
. The word was ancient, heavy with contradictory meanings, double-speak and fantasy. It was a catch-all term; it conjured up images of cabals stocked with old men intent on running the world, of self-selected elites ruling the lesser masses by guile and force. Decades of sensationalist fiction and half-truths made it seem more legend than reality. Just a scare story, a lunatic conspiracy theory for the credulous.

But the
fiction
was the
fact
. Jensen had learned that through bloody example, in the aftermath of the attack on Sarif Industries and then in the days that followed. While Hugh Darrow’s part in the Illuminati’s complex web of schemes had ultimately been stopped, the puppeteers holding the man’s strings had faded back into the shadows, untouched and unpunished.

“He must have had help,” Thorne was saying. “Dangerous allies. People who need to be brought to justice.”

They have operatives everywhere
. A warning voice sounded in the back of Jensen’s thoughts. “Guess you got your work cut out for you, then,” he said, after a moment.

The truth was, trust and raw gut instinct were what had kept Adam Jensen alive in those days after the SI attack. Those instincts were telling him now that Jenna Thorne was not someone he could confide in.

“Tell me what you know.” Thorne enunciated each word, coldly and firmly. “Otherwise, I’m going to think you have something to hide, Mr. Jensen. And those issues of blame will need to be considered.”

He sensed something odd in the air of the room, a sudden feeling that made the flesh on the back of his neck prickle. Thorne was trying to play him; those cybernetic eyes of hers weren’t the only body-mods she had working to read his intentions. Jensen was willing to bet that the agent was also augmented with a social interaction enhancer, an insidious piece of tech that allowed the user to get real-time data from a conversation subject and manipulate them with it, even coerce them with a controlled pheromone release. He wasn’t going to fall for that.

“You can think whatever you damn well want,” he said, his patience running thin. “But right now, if you’re not helping me piece together the blanks in my memory, or walking me out of this place, why the hell should I keep talking?” Jensen leaned back. “I reckon I’m done here.”

Thorne seemed like she was about to shoot off some kind of sharp retort, but then she caught herself and reeled it back in. “For now,” she told him, and tapped the digital pad again.

The buzzing from beneath the table ceased abruptly and Jensen’s arm jerked as it was released. He grimaced, flexing the artificial muscles.

“We’re done
for now
,” she repeated, and left the room.

* * *

He told himself he was doing it just to keep his mind sharp, to try and conjure up a little of his old skill set, but after another day or two of walking the perimeter of 451, Jensen had the beginnings of an escape plan. It wouldn’t be simple, though. There were whole areas of the facility that were off-limits to the processees, and for now he only had rough estimates of guard numbers and security systems.

And then there was the bracelet. He looked down at it as he walked, fingering the surface of the device. Jensen had no doubt it was broadcasting his exact location right that second, and unless he could find a way to spoof its signal or remove the thing entirely, any attempt to leave Facility 451 would be a wasted effort.

No-one here was being told they were a prisoner, but the lack of open doors and the bleak remoteness of the location put the lie to that. Dr. McFadden had said something about the clinic’s isolation being for purposes of ‘safety’, and Jensen had to wonder exactly
whose
safety he was referring to. It didn’t take a lot to assume that anyone out beyond the fence line in the wider world, the ones who were not augmented, feared those who were. The ‘Incident’ had made sure of that.

Jensen scowled at the thought and turned back toward the complex. He caught a glimpse of himself in a window as he passed, the black commas of his eye shield implants framing an angular face and haunted eyes. His beard was unkempt and too long for his liking, and the electric razor they had given him just wasn’t enough to tame it. In the end, he let it go, that and hair that had grown shaggy. He imagined that few who knew the Adam Jensen who left Detroit in 2027 would recognize the man he saw in the dull glass. He wasn’t really certain if
he
did. Looking himself in the eye, Jensen felt an odd sense of disconnection that didn’t sit well with him.

Then he caught the sound of Stacks’s voice on the breeze and the moment faded.

He found the other man in a shaded corner of the open quad, with three more of the clinic’s residents clustered around him in a threatening half-circle. The biggest of them was a broad, thickset woman with lank brown hair and a bodybuilder’s silhouette. She had worn, gunmetal cybernetic legs covered in swirling etched detail, and he pegged her as a former panzer-girl from the disbanded aug mixed martial arts leagues. At her side were two guys in the same nondescript jacket that Jensen wore. One of them had a mono-vision band across his face, turning his eyes into one seamless digital sensor grid, and the other had tech-tattoos that suggested he was packing neural implants of some kind.

“You know how it goes,” the woman was saying, a sing-song lilt to her words. She prodded Stacks in the chest. “I mean, it’s us and them, am I right? Augs in here, natches out there. And natches ain’t gonna stick up for us. Augs gotta look out for augs, is what I’m saying.”

“Yuh.” Mono-Eye bobbed his head in agreement, while his tattooed buddy stood by silently. Despite the content of the conversation, Jensen knew a shakedown when he saw one. The panzer-girl’s next words confirmed it.

“That’s what we do. We look out. And it’s not much to ask that people give some consideration for that in return, Stacks. You get me?”

“I just go my own way, Belle.” Stacks managed a weak smile. “Okay?”

“No.” The woman prodded him again, harder this time. “Not okay.”

Stacks caught sight of Jensen approaching at the same moment the guy with the tattoos did. The thug touched Belle on the arm and she turned to face Jensen. Her jaw hardened. “Well. New guy. You wake up now, sleeping beauty?”

He ignored her. “Stacks. You got a minute? Need to ask you something.”

Stacks took a cautious step past Mono-Eye, grateful for the out but wary about making it into something more. “Hey, Jensen, we’re all cool here.”

“Jensen,” echoed the tattooed man. “The floater.” He laughed at his own joke, a quick nasal chuckle.

Belle looked Jensen up and down with an expression that was somewhere between a sneer and a leer. She pointed at his hands. “What you got there? Sarif tech, right? I know the hardware. Top drawer.” She shrugged and ran a hand down her thigh. “Not my kind of metal, gotta say. I go TYM, all the way.”

He didn’t look away. “What are those legs, Aries-model heavy mods? How’s that forty percent fail rate working for you?”

Belle’s expression hardened and he knew he’d struck a nerve. Tai Yong Medical, the constant rival of Sarif Industries in the augmentation business, may have had a bigger market share but they lacked the finesse and reliability of Sarif’s high-spec engineering. She shrugged. “I’m good. Kicked a man’s head clean off one time. You wanna see me do it again?”

“I’ll pass.” He beckoned to Stacks. “I need a coffee. Let’s get inside.”

“See you around, Jensen,” Belle called out as they walked away, her words carrying after them.

* * *

Thorne stood by the window on the upper floor, and anyone who passed her by might have thought she was in some kind of fugue state. She stared down at the quad, her eyes losing focus as Jensen and the other processee moved beyond her field of vision. It would have been easy for her to run a wireless remote intrusion into the clinic’s security grid and keep following him via 451’s network of monitors, but there was no need. She’d programmed Adam Jensen’s tracer bracelet icon into her infolink’s head-up display and now she watched it drift away below her, a black diamond edged in gold moving through the corridors toward the cafeteria.

Someone watching Thorne closely would have seen her blank eyes flicker and then lose focus. They would have seen the movement in her lips as she began a subvocalized conversation on her infolink, filtered via a portable sat-com encryption device she carried in a pocket. The words she spoke never fully formed in her mouth, they were never uttered aloud – but her handler on the far end of the transmission heard them as clearly as if they had been in the same room together.

Thorne’s report was, as always, terse and to the point. She wasted no time with preamble, sticking to the facts, pausing only when her handler responded with new directives. For long moments, she stood motionless, processing her next orders.

Finally she acknowledged them with a single spoken word. “Complying.”

The ghost signal to her infolink cut and she became animated once more. Thorne watched the black diamond, and began considering how Adam Jensen would be dealt with.

She raised the heavy crystal lighter to the tip of the cocktail cigarette, and set it burning, savoring the taste as she drew it in through bright lips the color of blood. Exhaling, she turned across the glass table and blew a thin line of smoke out over the balcony.

The man seated across from her laughed gently, amused by the act. As the sun had set and cast its fading light over the Gulf of Naples, they shared a bottle of that agreeable Conterno Monfortino, here in the hotel’s presidential suite. Now, amid the cool evening air, they basked in the afterglow of the potent wine.

“I do like the silence,” she said, and with a sweep of her hand she took in the room. “Tonight, this belongs only to us.”

He smiled. “My dearest Beth,
everything
belongs to us.”

She drew on the cigarette again. Aside from this suite, the entirety of the Hotel Imperioli was unoccupied. The only other humans in the grounds were their security detachments and a skeleton staff of serviles. The former groups were amusingly bullish toward each other, each squad of personal bodyguards sizing up the other like competing packs of wolves stalking the same territory.

The actual cost of such extravagance would never have crossed her mind. Elizabeth DuClare lived in a world where what she wanted was what happened. It was like a force of nature, as ingrained in her existence as the rising and setting of the sun. To even consider a reality where the world did not bend to her will would have been anathema to her. Born into great affluence as a daughter of one of the richest dynasties on Earth, it was her birthright. And as such, being a woman of great means and intellect and ambition, it was inevitable that she would fall into the Illuminati’s orbit.

They hadn’t
recruited
Elizabeth, like talent scouts spotting an aspiring athlete. It simply didn’t work like that. No, in a way she had always been one of them, groomed from birth to take a place on the Council of Five. It was meant to be, and there had never been an impulse in her to question it. DuClare was a queen of the world… Why would she ever have wished otherwise?

Her dinner companion leaned in and patted her on the hand, his smile widening. She wondered if it might be a hint of interest in her that ran beyond the professional. “You do look lovely this evening, my dear,” he noted.

“Lucius,” she said, with mild reproach. “Flattery will get you nowhere.”

He grinned at her. “You can’t blame an old man for trying.”

Although his actual age was his most closely guarded secret, Lucius DeBeers carried himself with the thoughtful gravitas of an elder statesman. Much of that stemmed from the cutting-edge biotechnology she herself had put his way. Her role as the de facto head of the World Health Organization gave DuClare unprecedented access to experimental medical systems that the common people of the globe would never be aware of. She helped DeBeers fight off the ravages of time and illness, and in that a special bond had been born between them.