WEST SIDE – DETROIT – UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Vande followed Jarreau through an open hatch in the barge’s bow, into a compartment that Alpha team had been using as a temporary gear store. He tore his tac vest off his shoulder and threw it hard on the table in the center of the room.

Out of sight of the rest of the team, the big man allowed himself to swear, grinding out a curse word between his teeth, before turning to look back at her. “That deployment was a damned mess! What the hell happened out there?”

She swallowed hard. “Sir, I take full responsibility for this. It was my call, I made the judgment to order Mendel to go for the high ingress instead of a ground landing.”

Sol Mendel was the unit’s VTOL pilot, a taciturn former Marine Corps aviator who said little but always got the team where they needed to go. Jarreau had been in the co-pilot’s seat right next to him as the flyer pivoted over the roof of the burning warehouse. At the time he hadn’t second-guessed Vande’s command – he never did – but that was because she usually produced results. Usually.

Not this time, though. The mark had got the drop on them, escaping through a collapsing roof that they barely got clear of.

Jarreau slowly shook his head. “No. The buck stops with me, Raye. You’re my two-I-C, so your orders are my orders. I’ll have to explain it to Manderley.”

“You don’t need to cover for me, sir,” she insisted. Vande frowned. “The facts are: I played a gamble and it blew up in my face. I’m sorry, I screwed the op and we all know it.”

He eyed her. “So tell me why.”

She took a breath. “I saw him up there. The guy with the pistol from the Tarvos robot’s video. I had a choice to make – drop us down and deploy or go for the arrest. I picked the wrong option.”

“You’re absolutely sure it was him?”

Vande nodded. “No doubt in my mind.” She tapped a slender metallic finger on her temple. “I’ve already uploaded the contents of my optic buffer to Chen’s search matrix, and the others who were out with me on the roof are doing the same right now. It was the same shooter, believe it.”

“If we’d caught him that might have counted for something,” said Jarreau, scowling. “As it is, we’re back to square one.”

Chen’s initial searches of the Detroit city grid had thrown up the locked-down Sarif Industries manufacturing plant as the most likely target of interest, but it was pure bad luck that brought the Task Force 29 unit there right in the middle of what looked like an exchange gone wrong. The team had tracked two vehicles escaping into the city before they vanished into backstreets where no traffic cameras were still functional, so those leads were coming up short. The gunman with the augs had willingly dropped into a raging fire to get away from them, but Vande suspected that he hadn’t perished there. The look she’d seen in his eyes… it was smart, not suicidal.

“He already had an out,” she said aloud. Jarreau raised a questioning eyebrow at that. “We saw another runner as we came in, remember? Maybe both of them had escape routes set up. Whatever we interrupted, those two weren’t about to die because of it.”

“Chen’s monitoring the DPD tactical feed and he has data snoopers placed on their central precinct intranet, so we’ll know what their emergency response crews pull out of there.” Jarreau shook his head again. “But I’ll tell you right now, that’ll be shit. No-one in this city is going to put any effort into investigating a fire in a Sarif factory. Wounds from the Aug Incident are still raw around here.”

“They’re raw everywhere,” said Vande. She had ordered two of Alpha team’s operatives to shadow the Detroit cops at the site, but they hadn’t reported in yet. After a moment, she decided to venture an opinion. “Sir, I have an idea about what’s going on here. The fire, the trucks… These people are tying up loose ends. They burn the building so there’s no evidence, they take their hardware and hide it somewhere else in the city… It’s the most likely explanation I can see, and it fits the facts.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” Jarreau shot back. He sighed. “Next time, Raye, think twice. You have a tendency to get bore-sighted on something, to the detriment of everything else. It’s your only failing.”

“I—” she started in on an explanation, but a loud clatter at the hatch took her attention.

Chen leaned in through the door, a smirk on his face. “You can shower me with praise later. This day may not have been a total waste of time after all, boss…” he told Jarreau. “I just got done with the first-pass compilation on the images from the team’s optic buffers and the footage from the Box-Guard. Ran it through the matrix and we got us a match, right out of the gate.”

“You ID’d the man on the roof?” said Vande. “Already?”

“Impressed?” The tech nodded. “His name is Adam Jensen… and according to the database, he’s been stone cold dead for over a year.”

⇐ Предыдущая9101112131415161718Следующая ⇒

Поделиться: