SOUTH OF GRANGER – INDIANA – UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

The VTOL thundered low along the line of the railroad, cresting a shallow rise in a howl of engine noise.

In the cockpit, Sol Mendel leaned forward against his flight restraints and gave a low mutter. “Dear god…”

Jarreau stood behind him, wedged in the open hatchway between the cabin and the rear crew compartment. Both men saw the destruction laid out before them, projected on to the inside of the aircraft’s virtual canopy. Where the rail line bent into a shallow curve there was a mess of metal wreckage and dozens of smoldering fires scattered all about it. Jarreau saw a wide, ugly scar cut across the ground at an angle to the rails, a deep gouge in the earth that ended in the burning mass of the train’s locomotive.

From behind him, one of the Task Force techs was sending out calls over the unit’s encrypted radio channels, entreating anyone still alive down there to respond. No replies were forthcoming.

“I’ll orbit around,” Mendel said grimly, snapping on twin spotlights that stabbed down from the VTOL nose to sweep back and forth across the crash site.

“You said you saw something on the scope as we closed in…” said Jarreau, glancing at the local radar scope. “Another aircraft?”

Mendel shook his head. “Not sure. It was just a transient, there and gone again.” He sighed. “Probably a ghost echo.”

“Give me a thermographic overlay,” ordered Jarreau, and the pilot complied, tapping a key that turned the image on the canopy into a patchwork of heat-color. Hot white blooms surrounded the fires and a dull orange trail marked the final path the crashing train had taken. He scanned the landscape, looking for any signs of life.

And he found one. “There!” Jarreau stabbed a finger at a human-shaped blob moving slowly across the image.

Mendel drew that sector of the image closer and revealed the body heat of a man, his torso glowing orange but his arms and legs the cold blue of machines.

“Put us down, now!” Jarreau snapped, grabbing his weapon and turning to the rest of his team. “Squad, deploy!”

Panels dropped open along the side of the VTOL as it settled on to the ground with a bump, and Jarreau was the first one out on to the wet, muddy earth.

* * *

Jensen staggered toward the Task Force aircraft, raising his hands to show he was unarmed. Each step was slow and unsteady. The damage to his augmented legs was severe but not enough to disable him.

Figures in the familiar black combat oversuits of TF29 spilled out of the VTOL, brandishing assault rifles in his direction. At the head of them was Jarreau, and there was a bleak expression on the team leader’s hard face. “Jensen…” he began, his lips thinning. “What happened out here?”

“Vande’s dead,” he told him, cutting straight to the worst of it. “Chen, the others… they’re all gone.”

“Fuck.” Jarreau barked out an order to the rest of his squad. “Spread out! Check for bodies, double-time! The locals will be here as soon as they get their asses in gear, and I want us gone by then…”

“I’m sorry,” added Jensen. “You people were set up. There was a woman, her name was Thorne…” He hesitated. He had to be careful what he said here. There was no telling what Jarreau knew or who else might be monitoring them. “She was working for the people behind your smuggling network.”

But to his surprise, Jarreau raised his hand to stop him. “Yeah, we know. That goddamn bloodbath at the airport was just a sideshow. They sent a team to intercept the train and take the black market augs en route.”

“You know?” echoed Jensen.

“This person Thorne was here, then?” asked Jarreau. “After all this, tell me she didn’t get away with the hardware.”

Jensen shook his head, and jerked a thumb toward the burning remains of the cargo wagons. “Destroyed, every last crate. And Thorne along with them.” He took a breath, grimacing at the oily smoke filling the air. He told Jarreau about Pritchard’s lead, the images he pulled from Wilder’s cyberoptic, and the desperate race he had run to reach the train and warn Vande. “How do you know about Thorne, and the hijack?”

“I know because something I’ve been suspecting for months was proven right, Jensen,” said the other man. His expression turned stony. “Since the first moment we were on this smuggling network, they’ve been two steps ahead of us at every turn. At first I thought it was because they were good, but the longer it went on, the more I started wondering if we’d sprung a leak…”

Jensen resisted the urge to tell Jarreau that the footage he had seen of Thorne’s conversation pointed to the same damning conclusion – that the Task Force had been penetrated by a double-agent. “Someone at Interpol?”

Jarreau shook his head. “Closer to home.” He gestured at the wreckage. “Vande sold us out.”

“What?” Jarreau’s words came as a sudden shock. After what the woman had done on board the train, there was no doubt in Jensen’s mind that Raye Vande was anything but an Illuminati mole. Any suspicions he had held about her had been brushed away. Before he could voice that, Jarreau went on.

“During the tear-down and exfil from Detroit, one of the techs found something on her panel… A secret, compartmentalized data drive.” He shook his head in sadness and disbelief. “All our mission ops, all our intel on the network, every bit of it was in there. Along with data trails showing regular uploads to a dark net server array in Brazil. They timed out to all of our ops over the last three months.”

“That… that can’t be right.” Jensen tried to find the words. “It has to be a misdirection.”

“No.” Jarreau shook his head again. “I didn’t want to believe it. But the drive was biometrically encoded to Vande alone. Interpol’s data intercept team in Lyon are looking into it as we speak. There’s evidence of some kind of Swiss bank account…” He trailed off, scowling. “She was the leak, Jensen. We worked side by side for months, right in the thick… and I never saw it.”

Because she wasn’t the one. The denial tore silently through Jensen’s thoughts. It’s a setup, just like everything else.

This was another Illuminati shell game, their eternal ploy of misdirection and obfuscation. Layers of lies, one atop another. It made perfect sense: had Jensen never been there to interfere with Thorne’s plan, her team would have made off with the stolen Sarif augs and left Interpol to sift through the corpses they left behind. Vande had been chosen to be the scapegoat, and with her dead at Thorne’s hand there would be nothing to prove that she was innocent – only Jensen’s instinct, and that would never be enough.

He could see grief and bitterness warring across Jarreau’s face. The Task Force commander badly needed it not to be true, but the evidence in front of him was ironclad. Of course it is, Jensen told himself. They don’t make mistakes.

Vande’s framing was a perfect fit, even if the attempt to steal back the mil-spec augmentations had failed. If Jensen spoke up now, if he challenged that version of events, there was no way to know what the outcome would be. There was only one fact that could not be denied. The double-agent operating inside Interpol and Task Force 29, perhaps even directly under Jarreau’s command, was still in place. Everything Quinn and the Juggernaut hackers suspected about the unit was being proven right.

One of the other TF29 operatives jogged across the broken scrub to Jarreau’s side. “Sir,” she began, “I can confirm the loss of the train crew and all on-board call signs. And Jensen was right about the intruders, we counted five tangos here. We took quick scans and DNA samples as best we could, but we’re not going to be able to recover the dead, not before local heat get here. Mendel says police chatter is going crazy, they’ve got units on the way right now.”

Jarreau gave a solemn nod. “Copy that. What about the cargo?”

“Burned to shit,” said the woman. “The fire’s slagged everything.” She looked away. “Goddamn it. This whole op was for nothing.”

“Jarreau…” Jensen moved to speak, but the big man shook his head.

“Take thermite charges, smoke all the remains,” the other man told the operative. “We don’t need anyone knowing we were out here.”

“On it.” The woman broke into a jog, racing back to the idling VTOL.

Jarreau eyed him. “You look like you need a lift. Those legs are gonna give out on you if you walk another klick. And Interpol’s gonna want a full debrief.” He made a beckoning gesture, his other hand patting an inert inhibitor bracelet clipped to his belt. “Is that gonna be a problem for us?” The choice being offered was clear and unequivocal.

“No problem,” said Jensen.

“Good.” Jarreau turned away and started back toward the parked aircraft. “That’ll give us time to talk.”

Jensen shot a look up into the sky, in the direction that Vega had taken her VTOL after dropping him off. Quinn had wanted to spirit him away and leave the Task Force ignorant that Jensen had ever been involved. But that didn’t sit right with him… and now there were new questions rising that Jensen was determined to find answers for.

His gaze dropped to the shattered remains of the train, and he saw flares of bright white light as Jarreau’s team used their thermite charges to turn the corpses of their comrades into untraceable cinders.

Those men and women deserved better than this, thought Jensen. Instead they died in the crossfire because of some elaborate scheme run by a bunch of elitist sociopaths. “That’s enough,” he said aloud, a cold and iron-hard certainty solidifying in him. He set off after Jarreau, a new determination in his dark eyes.

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