WEST SIDE – DETROIT – UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. Vande watched Jarreau’s expression harden as he peered at the array of data panels Chen had dealt out across the table screen

Vande watched Jarreau’s expression harden as he peered at the array of data panels Chen had dealt out across the table screen. She knew that look by now; outwardly, he seemed impassive, unresponsive, but inside he was running a fine-tuned tactical mind over all the intelligence being put before them.

“So, what do we have on this man?” she asked.

“A whole lot of goodies,” said Chen, his head bobbing as he spoke. “Turns out that Mr. Jensen is a local… just a city boy, born and raised in South Detroit. And get this, he was a cop. That’s where I sourced most of this data, it’s sitting there in a secure file on the DPD’s personnel database.”

“Give us the high points,” ordered Jarreau.

Chen took a breath and began. “Adam Jensen, born March of ninety-three, grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood, a B-average student with no youthful indiscretions of any note, later graduated with a Criminal Justice Bachelor’s from the University of Phoenix and enrolled with the Detroit Police Department at age twenty-one.” He tapped a still image of a young man in a dark dress uniform, a white-gloved hand raised in salute. Vande recognized the same face she’d seen on the rooftop, minus the beard, the lines of experience and the augmented eyes. “Graduated in the top ten percent of his Academy class. In 2018, he joins the DPD’s SWAT division and finds his niche, rises up the ranks until he’s leader of Team Two… but then it all goes to shit.”

Chen slid other images across the panel so Jarreau and Vande could see them clearly. The first one that caught her eye was of a front page from The Detroit Chronicle bearing the lurid headline MASSACRE IN MEXICANTOWN; the others were what looked like transcript documentation from closed-session interviews. Jensen figured prominently in them, so it appeared.

“There was a shooting,” Vande read aloud. “It says here Jensen’s SWAT unit were called in to neutralize a dangerous augmented individual… and when the time came to commit, he refused to take the kill-shot.”

“Yeah,” said Chen. “They stood him down on the spot, but someone else did pull that trigger and the whole thing led to the Mex-Town locals kicking off in demonstrations, confrontations with the cops and finally full-on rioting.”

“The target was a fifteen-year-old boy,” Jarreau said grimly.

“Whatever the circumstances,” said the tech as he went on, “by the time it was all over, Jensen’s career was in the toilet. Reading between the lines, I reckon there’s more to it that didn’t go into the official report… But anyhow, they threw him under the bus after the unrest, so he quit. Six months later, he’s headhunted by the CEO of Sarif Industries for a new gig as their director of physical security.” Chen paused. “Then, the info we have gets hazier. There are reports that Sarif gets attacked soon after by what appears to be a mercenary hit squad intent on wiping out their top scientists…”

“Most likely a rival corporation attempting to sabotage Sarif’s research,” suggested Vande. “Unscheduled external contract termination, they call it.”

Chen nodded in agreement. “Jensen is almost killed in the process, but he clearly had a real good medical plan, ’cos a few months later he’s back at work sporting a whole bunch of shiny new augs, with Sarif footing the bill. Once again, he turns up on the DPD’s radar when the company forces the cops to stand down, so Jensen can deal with a gang of idiots from Purity First who took over a Sarif production facility. Wanna guess which one?”

Vande’s eyes narrowed. “The manufacturing plant that got torched?”

“Exactly. Give the lady a gold star.” The tech swiped through more of the virtual documents. “That building was familiar turf to him. In fact, this whole city is his home territory, so that’s gonna be a problem when catching him.”

“Not necessarily,” Vande insisted. “We can use that to our advantage. Being on home ground will make him complacent, and he may drop his guard…”

“What happened after that?” said Jarreau, pulling them back on to the narrative of events. “Chen, you said the records show him as deceased.”

“More accurately, missing-presumed-dead,” said the other man. “Jensen is mentioned again in a police report about him confronting one William Taggart at a Humanity Front rally at the convention center, and then he fades away.”

“Taggart…” Vande turned over the name. The man had been the public face of the world’s largest anti-augmentation group, touring the globe with lectures and book signings. But like many others, Taggart had gone missing in the madness of 2027, in an event that some believed he had a major hand in making happen. “We’ve all heard the stories about how his Humanity Front were connected to the incident,” she went on.

“None of that has been proven,” Jarreau said firmly.

“But the Front were connected to the violent anti-aug radicals in Purity First,” she insisted. “I doubt very much that Jensen was a fan of either.”

Chen took a long breath. “Whatever his intentions were, that’s the last piece of viable intel we have on the guy. Jensen goes off the grid, then the Aug Incident hits and suddenly everybody is dealing with that.” He indicated a post-recovery image of the man, his face marked by the black commas of implants around his eyes. “Jensen had forty to fifty percent of his body replaced with augmentations, so there’s no way he would have come through the incident without being affected, right? Anyhow, the next time his name rises to the top, it’s attached to a formal declaration of his may-be-a-corpse status.”

Vande nodded to herself. In the nightmare of the incident, a lot of augmented people had died of shock or been killed in the throes of it. Years later, there were still many families with unanswered questions and missing people who had never been found. But the tragedy had also given opportunities to the more calculating.

She voiced a thought. “Jensen wouldn’t be the first person to use a major disaster like the incident as a way to disappear. All he had to do was let the world go on thinking he was dead, and he’d have a free pass…”

“For what?” Jarreau shot her a look. “If he wanted to remain a ghost, why come back to the one city in the world where he’s the most known? It doesn’t track.”

“Because the reward must be worth it,” she retorted. “We can assume Jensen is pro-aug, enough that he picked a fight with the most well-known anti-aug spokesman on the planet… It’s not much of leap to suggest he could have been radicalized.”

“You think our boy is involved with those ARC activists over in Europe?” Chen considered the possibility. “Yeah… I could see it.”

“You’ve got nothing to prove that, just circumstantial evidence,” said Jarreau.

Vande held his gaze. “The point is moot, sir. It doesn’t matter how Jensen connects to ARC or Sheppard and his mercs. He’s clearly armed, dangerous and capable.” She ticked off each word on a finger.

Jarreau was silent for a long time, before he turned to Chen. “Seth. Dig deeper. If Jensen went dark, we should find out why. Where was he? Who was he with? He worked with a lot of people at Sarif and in the Detroit police force. Look for someone that he might reach out to.” He dismissed the tech with a nod. “Get on it.”

“Copy that,” said Chen, as he walked away.

Then the team leader’s hard gaze was on Vande again. “Raye, listen to me. I know it’s tempting to put all your energy on this one guy because of that screw-up at the plant,” he told her. “But just make sure you’re not reaching too far. We don’t know why Jensen was there. Until we do, I’m not going to hang him in absentia. Clear?”

“Clear,” Vande replied, tensing as she spoke. “So let’s put him in a cage, give it a shake and find out what’s really going on.”

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