RAVENDALE – DETROIT – UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. But then it was gone and Wilder’s expression became one of careless false humor

There was a flash of emotion over Don Wilder’s face, a micro-expression that anyone other than Jensen might have missed. Fear. Despite the blank, glassy gaze of his twinned cyberoptic implants, the shock of seeing his former boss right there in the spot he doubtless thought was his safe place was clear.

But then it was gone and Wilder’s expression became one of careless false humor. “Well, damn. Jensen, here you are. Come in, then. Take a load off.” He waggled the beer in his hand. “Can I get you a cold one?”

“Put down the bottle and keep your hands where I can see them,” Jensen replied, keeping his semiautomatic leveled in Wilder’s general direction.

The man shrugged and obliged, unconsciously flexing the black plastic cyberarm as he did so. The action reminded Jensen of how he’d behaved after first getting his aug limbs. Like the optics, Wilder’s replacement arm was new, and if Jensen was right, their make was Sarif Industries.

“When did you get that arm and the eyes?” said Jensen. Considering how human augmentation technology was being heavily regulated since the incident, the fact that he’d come across two people in the space of a few hours with brand new mech augs couldn’t be an accident. “Take it off the top for yourself?”

“You like ’em?” Wilder flexed the arm in a bodybuilder pose, stepping slowly around the table in the middle of the room. “Better than yours, I reckon.” He paused. “How’d you find me? I mean, I paid off some hacker punk to trash the SI employee database, erase the ID files of everyone on the security detail… make it look like it all got lost in the incident, y’know?”

“You forgot that I know your face,” Jensen told him. He moved slightly, keeping a good distance between them. “Did you really think you were going to get away with this?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Wilder said, with a shrug. “Look, if you ain’t gonna put that gun away, then I suggest you leave. Last I heard you went missing up north. I don’t know what happened to you there but it’s nothing to do with me… You don’t want me to call the cops, do you?”

“Sure. You can tell them how you had Henry Kellman murdered to keep him quiet,” Jensen spoke over him. “Or was it just that you wanted to keep the rest of his money for yourself?”

Wilder paused, rocking on the balls of his feet. Finally, he let his hands drop. “You know, I heard a rumor you were back in Detroit but I thought it was bullshit. Stupid me, huh?” His tone turned mocking. “Adam Jensen, the bullet-proof man. David Sarif’s attack dog.” He sniggered. “Gotta say, you’re looking a little worse for wear.”

Jensen ignored the comment. “The hardware that you helped the MCBs to steal. You’re going to tell me where it is, right now.”

Gradually, Wilder let the false good humor slide off his face. “Or what? You’re gonna shoot me in cold blood? I don’t think so—”

“Don’t test me.” Jensen aimed the compact CA-4 pistol directly at the other man’s head and cocked the hammer. “It’s been a long day and I’m a little short on patience.”

Wilder backed away a step, his hands coming up again. He almost stumbled over a low armchair. “Okay! Shit!” He swallowed hard. “Look, Kellman, that was something that had to happen, he was a drunk and he couldn’t be trusted… You know that. You know he had no guts.”

“Explain it to me,” Jensen growled.

“You weren’t here, you didn’t have to live through all the aftermath.” The other man let out a heavy sigh, bitterness and anger clouding his next words. “Kellman got the pass card, yeah, so we took advantage. Believe me, there were more than enough interested parties. They came to us.”

“Who did?”

“I’m not telling you that. More than my life is worth.” Wilder shook his head. “Anyhow, I don’t care about her name, just the color of her money. But there’s connections there, man, like you wouldn’t believe.” He fluttered his aug hand in the air. “Up way high.”

“I can imagine,” Jensen prompted. “Keep going.”

The other man shrugged. “Be realistic. You’re just one guy with an overdeveloped hero complex. You’re not gonna stop these people from getting what they want, you or those spec ops assholes from Task Force 29…”

“Task Force?” He seized on the name, understanding immediately. “You mean the crew at the manufacturing plant?”

A derisive snort escaped Wilder’s mouth. “See? You don’t even know who the players are! You got no idea what you’re messing with.” He shook his head. “Bad enough I got those pricks from Interpol sniffing around, but now here you are busting in like the Lone Ranger! Don’t you know to leave well enough alone, Jensen? The deal’s already been done. This time tomorrow, the hardware is going to be somewhere over the Atlantic, halfway to who-gives-a-shit. This is my endgame, man. Time to cash out and retire.”

“Those are military weapon prototypes we’re talking about,” insisted Jensen. “Dangerous black market hardware. Did you even consider for one second how many lives they could destroy?”

Wilder rolled his eyes as he circled the table. “Oh, spare me the bleeding heart routine. How many guys have you put down? How many deaths are you responsible for?” Jensen stood his ground, his aim never faltering. “What, you don’t think that the rest of the security detail knew?” Wilder shook his head. “You’re no angel. You’re no better than me.”

There was a truth in the other man’s words that cut deeper than Jensen expected, and his lips thinned into a hard line. Wilder saw it and knew he had touched a raw nerve.

“You know, for a second there I actually considered cutting you in,” he continued. “But you’d never have gone for it. You ain’t honest enough to admit who you really are.” He smiled coldly. “In a way, you’re just like poor old Henry. Hollow inside. All that shit about the Mexicantown shoot back in the day, and what happened with that stuck-up witch Reed…? I heard about it all.” Wilder pointed at him with the fingers of his cybernetic hand. “You let it rule you, Jensen. It made you weak.”

Then in an instant, the action like a magic trick, Wilder’s hand snapped backward at a 180-degree angle and the forearm behind it bifurcated, revealing the narrow mouth of a pulsed energy projector hidden inside the mechanism.

Even as Jensen’s finger squeezed the trigger of his pistol, the kinetic wave from the pulse projector blasted outward with the force of a chained hurricane. Hit squarely by the shock effect, he was catapulted back through a glass partition and into an anteroom.

Momentarily dazed by the assault, Jensen tried to shake off the blurring of his vision as a strident, high-pitched beeping reached his ears. He rolled to one side, catching sight of a mine template fixed to the bottom of another low-slung armchair, the blue glow of a Pulsar electromag charge in the discharge slot.

“Stay down,” sneered Wilder, just as the powerful EMP lit off and Jensen was wracked with pain. Lightning-like sparks crackled all over his augmentations, making him shake and convulse uncontrollably. His limbs became dead metal, unresponsive and immobile.

Jensen tried to lean up and failed, his sight filled with jagged sheets of false color and error messages as his augs spun through one failed reboot cycle after another.

He saw Wilder approaching, his cyberarm reshaping itself as it reset. “Cool toy, huh? When I saw it, I just had to get me one.” He bent to scoop up Jensen’s gun from where it had fallen. “But it’s non-lethal, though, just like that EMP. What a shame.” Wilder checked to make sure there was a round in the pistol’s chamber. “Thanks for leaving that key card behind, man. That made me rich! The buyer, she gave me a vox synth to spoof the locks…” He paused, pressing a small metallic disk to his throat. “That opened a lot of doors.” An artificial emulation of Jensen’s own voice echoed through the room. “Clever, huh?” Wilder toyed with the device. “Of course, you ruined it all by actually blundering into everything, but I’m gonna deal with that right now.”

Jensen put all the effort he could muster into moving his right arm toward a jagged shard of glass lying just out of reach of his fingers, but nothing happened.

Wilder cocked his head and mumbled words too soft to register; the man was using an infolink’s subvocal pick-up to talk to someone else. The buyer, Jensen guessed.

The conversation didn’t stay hushed for very long. “What?” snapped Wilder. “Are you kidding me?” he asked to the air, gesturing with the pistol. “I got him right here. One shot and—” Wilder winced as a voice that Jensen couldn’t hear cut him off. “Fine. But I want a bonus for my trouble! He knows me and that complicates things.” He nodded again and let the gun drop. “Okay.”

“Trouble with… the boss?” Jensen forced out the words.

“She must like you,” Wilder spat, grabbing a telephone handset off a nearby shelf. “Whatever.” He dialed 911 and then he pressed the voice-shifter to his neck again. “Yeah. Police.” Jensen heard his own voice once more, the strange disconnection of it making his head swim. The throbbing pain from the aug implants in his skull meant it was hard to concentrate. “I want to turn myself in. My name is Adam Jensen. I hurt a bunch of people at Spector’s Tavern. I’ve got a gun.” Then Wilder hung up and tossed the pistol into the shadows. “That ought to do it. Unlike in the rest of this town, the cops around here will actually come looking.”

Jensen shifted slightly, the first tingles of feeling returning to his fingertips; but Wilder was standing over him.

“Lights out,” he grinned, and his boot came down with pain and darkness close behind.

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