DOWNTOWN – DETROIT – UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Jensen found a seat at the back of the augs-only carriage on the MiTrain Express from the airport, and did his best to fade into the background as it sped back into the city. With his collar turned up and his head down, he was just another passenger.

At this time of night, the train was half empty. His only companions were a group of dirty, work-worn laborers heading home after a late shift at one of the deconstruction yards out in Dearborn. Jensen could see the smoky, ill-lit site from his window, a vast scar in the landscape that went for miles. Dozens of city blocks out there had been lost to fire and chaos during the Aug Incident, and now the area was being systematically razed by one of the big conglomerates – FiveLine or Santeau, he wasn’t sure which – so they could move in and remake it as they saw fit. The irony that the augmented were the only ones who were willing to work in the dangerous conditions out there seemed lost on the rest of the world. Dust, thick and gray, covered the visibility jackets and hoodies worn by the workers, and Jensen listened with half an ear as they griped amongst themselves about their poor pay and the low quality of the company-mandated neuropozyne doses they were given.

With the dust on them, the workers seemed like washed-out charcoal sketches of real people, faded and ghostly things. In their eyes he saw the fate that the city was sharing with them. Augs like him were being ground down, slowly and carefully being erased from the world. He imagined that there would be little place for people like them in whatever would come next. Jensen dwelled on thoughts of what the future would bring and he didn’t like what he saw there.

A low buzz sounded through the bone of his jaw and his teeth clenched in response. “Jensen, it’s me,” said Pritchard. “I’ve found something you need to be aware of.”

He straightened, pushing away the fatigue that was pressing down on him. “Let’s hear it,” he told the hacker.

“A red flag went up on one of the search strings I left in the Police Department’s data net. Our former colleague Donald Wilder was named in an incident report that went live a few minutes ago.”

Jensen frowned. After Wilder had shot him and left him to be arrested, any hope of finding the former security guard had vanished along with the man. But had Wilder really been arrogant enough to stay in the city, rather than take the opportunity to make tracks? Pritchard’s next words answered that question.

“He’s quite dead, according to the police officers who found him in a hotel bathroom uptown. The statement from the evidence tech who logged the report says he was shot and killed no more than an hour after I lost contact with you in Ravendale.”

“What hotel?”

“The Yukon. Far too exclusive for someone like Wilder.”

He nodded in agreement. “Anything in the report about leads?”

“There’s the rub. Apparently the Yukon’s booking records and security monitors suffered some kind of breakdown…” Pritchard’s acid tone made it obvious how little he believed that explanation. “Long story short, there’s nothing there. I took the liberty of taking a pass over their network myself to make sure they weren’t hiding anything, but it’s been scrubbed. A very professional job, I might add.”

“Somebody is tying up all the loose ends,” Jensen said quietly, voicing his thoughts. “Kellman’s dead, the MCBs are out of the picture… and now Wilder turns up a corpse.” He paused, thinking it through. “This is standard Illuminati operating procedure. When something doesn’t go how they want it to, they sanitize everything and fade away.”

“Indeed,” agreed Pritchard. “I’m looking at the file on Wilder’s remains right now. His body is in an ambulance heading to Medical Center, but not for the morgue. Somewhere along the line, it was flagged as ‘infectious material’. His corpse is going to go straight into the furnace.”

“What?” Jensen’s thoughts raced. If the people in the shadows wanted Wilder’s body destroyed, that could mean that even in death, he carried some information of value. Jensen remembered the new augmentations he had been sporting, the pulse-gun arm and the high-spec optics. An industrial furnace would reduce them to molten slag. “Where’s the ambulance now?”

“On Fort Street heading east. A couple of miles from where you are…” There was a pause as the hacker suddenly caught on. “Wait. I can get into the traffic grid… I could reroute it, maybe for a brief detour…”

Jensen vaulted up from his seat as the train pulled into the crossover station at Cobo Center. “Bring it to me,” he snapped, getting angry shouts as he barged through the workers clustered by the doors and sprinted across the platform.

* * *

“What the hell is wrong with these signals?” Ignoring the atonal chorus of horns sounding from the cars lined up behind him before the crossroads, the driver leaned forward and looked up at the traffic lights hanging over the street. They remained resolutely stuck on red, just as they had for the last two minutes, and showed no signs of shifting.

The other paramedic sitting across from him in the ambulance’s cab gave an airy shrug. “First that ‘Road Closed’ sign pops up outta nowhere, then this?” She looked away. “I dunno, at this rate we ain’t ever getting to the end of our shift.”

A sedan pulled out from the queue behind them, rolled past and jumped the lights, clearly unwilling to keep waiting. The driver got a slew of invective from the woman in the sedan, and then it was gone – but movement caught his eye as a man in a dark long coat stepped purposefully off the curb and came right up to the side door.

Before the driver could react, the door was wrenched open and the man in the coat raised his arm. A black blade grew out of his knuckles. “Out,” he said simply.

“Oh shit!” The driver threw up his hands and scrambled out of the vehicle, his shift partner doing the same. “Look, man, just take the rig, okay? We don’t want any trouble—”

The man with the blade didn’t wait to listen to his words. He leapt into the seat vacated by the driver and stepped on the gas, peeling out in a screech of tires.

Overhead, the traffic lights obediently changed to allow him to proceed.

* * *

“A right, then your second left,” Pritchard was saying. “That’ll take you into an underground car park. You’ll be out of the way there, no-one should bother you.”

Jensen worked the ambulance’s big steering wheel, pulling it around until he saw the yawning mouth of the garage. The vehicle barely fit through the entrance, a burst of sparks and broken plastic coming from the rooftop emergency lights as he threaded the needle and brought it to a lurching halt.

“How long until they track the lo-jack in this thing?” he asked.

“Ten, fifteen minutes at the most. Don’t delay.”

“Yeah.” Jensen squeezed through the gap in the back of the cab and climbed into the rear compartment of the ambulance.

A sealed body bag, detailed with a bright yellow biohazard strip, lay strapped to a folding gurney. He found a plastic panel on the outside of the bag noting that one Wilder, Donald F. (CisMale/B Neg) was inside, along with a warning tab indicating the man’s corpse was contaminated with Strain 5 of Neo-SARS, a particularly virulent version of the respiratory disease. But unless Wilder had contracted the exotic virus in the last few hours, that was more likely something that had been added to his death record to keep the curious from taking too close a look at him.

Nevertheless, Jensen hesitated. “You sure he’s clean, Pritchard?”

“Don’t be dramatic, Jensen. He died of a gunshot wound to the throat. There’s no virus in there.”

“Easy for you to say. You’re halfway across the city.” Jensen extended a short length of nanoblade from his arm and used it to slice open the seal on the body bag. He peeled back the plastic and found Wilder’s bloodless face staring up at him, a vacant look of pain and confusion still etched there.

The entry wound was right where Pritchard said it would be. Discoloration and shape told Jensen that it had been a close-range shot, but not near enough to leave powder burns. Acting quickly, he patted down the dead man, but found no clues. Everything Wilder had been carrying on him was gone.

Jensen checked the dead man’s cyberarm, but nothing about it seemed off. He scowled and sat back, looking the body up and down, searching for something that didn’t belong. He met Wilder’s dead gaze and a thought occurred to him. “His eyes…”

Leaning in, he peered at the twin Sarif Industries cybernetic implants. Both the glassy orbs were intact and undamaged. The last thing they had seen was the person who took Wilder’s life.

“Read me the serial code on the iris ring!” said Pritchard, becoming animated. Jensen did as he was asked, and the hacker gave a snort of approval. “Those are the ‘Atid’ models,” he explained quickly. “Named after an angel of memory. And that explains why someone wants Wilder’s body destroyed.”

“The data buffers in the cyberoptics…” Jensen guessed what the hacker was thinking. “They’ll still have imagery stored in there from earlier in the day. We just need to access it…” He cast around, looking for something to use to remove the eyes.

“There’s a way to do that,” Pritchard said warily. “I can talk you through it from here… but it’s a little unpleasant.”

Jensen caught sight of his face, and his own optical implants, in the reflection of a mirrored panel. “I see,” he said.

* * *

If removing the artificial eye from Wilder’s right orbital socket with a scalpel and a pair of forceps was a painstaking task, doing the same to himself in reverse without cutting open his face was one of the more testing things Jensen had ever had to do.

He willed himself to ignore the queasy sensations churning in his gut as he pulled on his implant until the self-seeking optic nerve connectors detached, and he went partially blind.

Jensen called on the same careful skills he had cultivated building model clocks during the months he had been in recovery, after the attack at SI that nearly killed him. It helped to think of this action in the same way, of pieces coming together in uniform order.

Wilder’s cybereye shared the same universal jacks as Jensen’s, and he cautiously inserted it into the gaping socket, taking care not introduce any blood or dirt along with it. With a moist, unpleasant click, the dead man’s eye snapped home and half of Jensen’s vision became a fuzzy blur of start-up displays.

“Did it work?” said Pritchard. “Are you seeing anything? An Atid eye will be compatible with your neural hub. You should be able to go through the menus and navigate to the memory buffer.”

“Getting there,” said Jensen. The sickly feelings faded away as his body quickly accepted the new eye, and he soon found the subroutine Pritchard referred to. The buffer was still intact, and Jensen drew it up into replay mode.

It was disorienting for his brain to parse two different visual inputs at once – one from his real-time view of the interior of the ambulance and the other from Wilder’s recent past – but he managed.

Jensen blink-clicked the buffer, spooling down the time index into the recent past. He rocked back slightly as he suddenly saw himself standing in front of a glass panel, a gun in hand. He watched his lips silently mouth the words ‘keep going’ as the moment unfolded. “Too early,” he said aloud. “Gonna run it ahead.”

Jensen forced the replay to run on fast-forward, becoming a blur of motion. He glimpsed himself taking the pulse-gun hit; then Wilder’s point of view sliding around as he left the apartment in Ravendale; the interior of a bot-cab; the lobby of an expensive hotel—

Switching back to normal speed, Jensen began a ride as a passenger through Wilder’s meeting at the Yukon Hotel. His breath caught in his throat as Wilder’s gaze met that of the person he had come to meet.

“Thorne?” It was absolutely the same woman that had interrogated him at the WHO facility in Alaska. That distinctive pale skin, henna-red hair and an air of haughty coldness that set him on edge, even secondhand.

If Jensen has to be killed, it won’t be down to you to pull the trigger. He read her lips, and the chill in him deepened. The old talent – learned back in his time at SWAT for use when staring down sniper scopes at dangerous perps – came easily to the fore. Jensen tried to imagine Wilder’s poorly pitched bravado rebounding off Thorne’s icy, calculating exterior, and his thoughts churned as he tried to guess at what chain of events had brought the woman to Detroit. Had she come to find him? Or was there more to her presence in the city?

Then the gun appeared in Thorne’s hand and she fired the shot that ended Wilder, as blankly as someone might turn out a light. It was so sudden, and so horribly immediate that Jensen physically recoiled at the moment the recorded bullet struck home. A heart-rate display in the corner of playback showed a final flurry of peaks and then went flat; but the optic feed didn’t end. The tiny bio-energy cells in the implants were half-charged, more than enough to keep running and record what went on in front of Wilder’s dead eyes.

Jensen watched Thorne move in and out of view. She activated an encrypted communications unit, and he caught snatches of her speaking again; Wilder may have compromised the operation.

He was still wondering who had been on the other end of the line when Thorne made a second call. Move the secondary contingency plan to active status and prepare to execute, she said, and everything about the woman’s body language told Jensen she was talking to the people holding her chain. He could see it in her every motion and gesture, defiance warring with ingrained obedience.

What Thorne said next was as clear as if she were standing right in front of him. We need to be prepared for the hangar transfer to fail, mouthed the woman. I have a contingency in place if the Task Force take possession of the cargo. Confirm the deployment of a kill squad. We can hit them on the train and leave no survivors.

ELEVEN

⇐ Предыдущая23242526272829303132Следующая ⇒

Поделиться: