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 the 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.

There was a sharp, brilliant light that seemed to come from behind his eyes, a sudden sense of dislocation from his body as the neural link engaged – and then Jarreau was in another place entirely.

* * *

A deliberately nondescript conference room with a large table surrounded by identical chairs – one of which he was sitting in – and walls with a wood-finish patterning. There was a window that looked out on to a repeating loop of some tranquil, nonexistent hillside under a digitally perfect blue sky, and the only other item of note was a representation of the Interpol symbol, which hung in mid-air above the table like a gravity-defying sculpture.

A collection of pixels accreted in the seat next to him, forming into an avatar of Raye Vande. She looked much the same as she did in reality, but with the detail dialed down a little. TF29 didn’t have the bandwidth or processing power for total resolution, which had the downside of making everyone in the NSN’s virtual space look like a life-sized toy version of themselves. She gave him a nod, and Jarreau looked down at the digital representations of his hands, flexing his pseudo-plastic fingers.

The Interpol logo popped like a bubble, briefly replaced by the word “Connecting…” before it disappeared outright and a third person phased into fake solidity across the table from them.

“This is Miller,” said the new arrival. “You seeing me okay?”

Jarreau nodded. He introduced himself and Vande, and felt the odd impulse to shake hands. “Appreciate you working with us on this,” he began. “And sorry about the time difference. What is it, morning over there?”

“It’s four AM in Prague,” Vande told him.

“Don’t sweat it,” Miller replied, with a weary smile. “Office is quiet this time of day. I get more done.” He leaned forward, and Jarreau got a good look at the man’s avatar. If it was an accurate representation, then Jim Miller appeared to be in his mid-forties, tall in his seat and short-haired, with a weathered aspect to him that even the NSN couldn’t entirely erase. Jarreau knew the type; a veteran cop used to doing the job his way. That was something he could work with. “So, let me tell you what we have at our end and we’ll go from there.” Miller’s hands worked at a keypad that the virtual environment hadn’t rendered, his fingers dancing in the air. “We’ve picked up chatter on our side of the Atlantic. Several persons of interest talking about a consignment of mil-spec augmentations coming out of the States in the next week or so. No details on the supplier, but what we do have is a confirmed ID on the perps that will be making the pick-up.”

Panes of data unfolded in the air between them, showing intercept records, criminal jackets and surveillance images. Jarreau saw shots taken by a long-lensed camera drone of augmented men wearing dusty combat gear, standing on a desert road.

“Mercenaries?” he said immediately. There was a subtle kind of tell that career military had about them, a way of carrying themselves even when they were outside a war zone. The men in the pictures had something else, a cocksure manner that set off Jarreau’s instinctive dislike of soldier-of-fortune types.

“Good eye,” said Miller, with a nod. “Head creep there goes by the alias ‘Sheppard’. His real name is John Trent, but he hasn’t used that in a while. He’s been on our radar for some time.” An icon appeared next to one of the men in the picture, clearly the leader by the way the others deferred to him. “Along with most of his crew, he used to be part of a Strike Team for Belltower Associates.”

“A bunch of bulls,” offered Vande. “How appropriate.”

“After the Rifleman scandal broke, Trent and his boys were among those who went AWOL. From what we can tell, they decided to go into the lucrative world of dealing illegal arms, training terrorists and just about anything violent that turns a profit.”

Vande leaned in to get a better look. “Were they at Rifleman Bank?”

Miller shook his head. “But he’s no saint. When Belltower downsized and rebranded themselves as Tarvos Security, guys with dirty records like Trent’s were the first to bolt. He’s quick on the trigger, this one. Ruthless, too. He doesn’t care if civilians get caught in the crossfire.”

“A real charmer.” Jarreau considered Miller’s words. When the story about the private military contractor Belltower, and its involvement in running a black site prison in the Pacific called Rifleman Bank, had hit the news feeds, the company’s carefully presented reputation went into a nosedive. Questions of ethics, rumors about medical experiments being performed on unlawfully held detainees, all of it swirled around and stuck to Belltower’s spit-shined uniform like mud. These days, the company didn’t exist anymore – aside from its last vestiges as Tarvos Security – but in its death throes, Belltower had spat out enough trained, augmented triggermen to make a hell of a lot of trouble for the world’s law enforcers. Case in point, he thought. “Where is this ‘Sheppard’ and his crew now?”

Miller frowned. “We don’t have eyes on them. Same time we got our intercept, they went dark. Best guess? I think they’re making a low-key transit into the States, probably via Canada.”

Vande shot Jarreau a questioning look, then turned back to Miller. “Do you have any idea what his endgame is, once he has the augs?”

Miller pinched the bridge of his nose. “That is a question that has nothing but a lot of unpleasant answers, Agent Vande. Sheppard’s been known to deal with just about anyone. There’s a chance he could trade them on to the Jinn smuggling cartel, maybe to his contacts in the African conflict zone. My personal fear is that he sells them to ARC, and then all bets are off.”

“I thought the Augmented Rights Coalition were towing the peaceful resistance line,” said Jarreau. The radical pro-augmentation activist group didn’t operate in North America, but he’d seen a security briefing about ARC’s growing presence in the European area of operations. They were centered in the Czech Republic, right on Miller’s doorstep, so it was no wonder he was wary of them.

“On the surface,” Miller told him. “But we’re hearing rumors of ARC moving toward a much more militant stance.” He spread his hands, and for a moment his avatar shuddered and jumped as parity briefly fell over the NSN’s satellite link. “You see now why I don’t want those military augs leaving US soil any more than you do.”

“This is all good intel,” Vande began, “but we’ll need more before there’s anything actionable. Ideally, we want to net this Sheppard character and his cargo…”

Miller nodded again. “Agreed. And as much as I’d like to be there with you on this, I’ve got fires to put out here in Prague. But there’s one other piece of the puzzle we got from our intercept that you’re going to find real helpful. We know where Sheppard and his crew are heading, and my guess is, that’s where the exchange will go down.”

Jarreau felt a tingle of anticipation. This could be the strongest lead they’d had in months. “Let’s hear it.”

“You ever been to Detroit?” asked Miller, with a wan smile.

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