MONTBRILLANT TOWER – GENEVA – SWITZERLAND

The high-pitched tone brought DuClare from the perfect repose of a deep sleep and dragged her up into wakefulness. She rolled over on her wide bed, pulling a snarl of ivory silk sheets with her, blinking owlishly. The black hands of the antique ormolu clock on the far wall were at four and two.

Resting atop a table across the room, the high-end custom vu-phone she habitually carried was glowing brightly atop the charging plate where she had left it, pulsing different colors with each melodic chime of its alarm.

DuClare frowned. She had turned the device off before retiring alone to her apartments that night, and left strict instructions that she not be disturbed. Exiting the bed in an angry fashion, she pulled on a kimono and stalked to the table. Her fingertips were about to touch the device when the bedroom windows suddenly flickered. She turned, alarmed, to see the synthetic-laced glass shimmer as pixels gathered into an image on its surface. Like most of the panes in her rooms, the windows could double as screens or mirrors depending on the commands given to the apartment’s pet AI, but they only responded to spoken orders and then, only ones given by DuClare herself. The vu-phone fell silent as the incoming communication linked from it to the window-screens.

Then her sleep-slowed thoughts caught up with her and she remembered what had happened on the jet a few days earlier. DuClare folded her arms and tried to keep a sour expression from her face, as once again Lucius DeBeers projected himself into her personal space without seeking permission.

“Lucius,” she began, before he could speak. “It’s very late here. What is so important that it couldn’t wait until morning?”

Visible across the glass, with the glittering lights of the city laid out behind him, DeBeers resembled a stern portrait of the man come to life, but still trapped in two dimensions. That was the illusion, though. He was a world away from her, and once more he was demonstrating that there was no space she inhabited where he could not enter, night or day.

“The work doesn’t run to your schedule, Elizabeth.” His tone was cold and clipped, the usual warmth of his manner turned surly. “Perhaps if you were more aware of that, this situation would be less problematic.”

DuClare guessed that he knew full well she had no idea what he was referring to. It was another tactic to put her off her mark. “If this is about the D-Project—”

“No,” he snapped. “The situation in Detroit. I am only now learning the full scope of this. Actions on the ground have been totally disrupted. It is a mess, Elizabeth. An utter mess.”

“What have we lost?” She hated asking the question, hated looking to him for information. It made her seem weak, which was exactly what DeBeers wanted.

In short order, he gave her a clipped précis of the failure in Michigan. Valuable assets dead. The target package lost, presumed destroyed. Worse still, these events would have a knock-on effect that would damage activities in Europe. Materials needed to achieve certain ends would now be unavailable.

“This forces us to source new resources from alternate suppliers,” he concluded. “That disrupts our timeline.”

“We’ll manage,” she said, affecting a tone she hoped would mollify him. “I’ll accelerate our other plans to compensate.”

DeBeers sniffed. “I have my doubts.”

DuClare paused, once more pushed off-balance by his words. “We talked about this, Lucius,” she said firmly. “Commitments have been made…”

“On a great many fronts,” he broke in. “And yet there are failures like this.”

Slowly, her deferential manner eroded. Did he expect her to accept the blame for something barely within her control? It was impossible to account for every single variable. DeBeers knew that better than any of them.

She felt a moment of clarity snap into place. The relationship they had shared, the private conversations, had he done it all just to draw her in and fake a closer confidence? To position her as a receptacle for any failed actions on his part? How dare he! If so, then Lucius DeBeers was vainer than DuClare had given him credit for.

“More errors of judgment like this will not be tolerated,” he concluded. “From anyone. You realize that?”

The threat hung in the air. She nodded. “Perfectly. I’ll see to it,” promised DuClare, and before he could say any more, she went to the vu-phone and silenced it.

The image of DeBeers vanished from the windows and with a jolt of sudden anger, she picked up the device and threw it violently across the room. It struck the antique clock and both shattered into pieces.

Awake now, propelled by her irritation, she strode to her study and activated her tablet computer with a swipe of her finger. The White Helix files she had been studying were patiently waiting for her, each one labeled individually under a sub-code that connected it to a particular individual. “Open file designation: Black Light,” she told it.

On the screen, a dead man’s face looked back up at her.

LOCATION UNKNOWN

Random clusters of dead code and forgotten information came closer, falling into rough orbit around one another until some final point of critical mass was exceeded, and abruptly they merged into a kind of island in the open void of deep data-space.

Three avatars coalesced one by one, standing atop the temporary patchwork of the synthetic landscape, each looped in via the lines of a neural subnet linkage. The connections were vague, temporary things written to live only brief lives in the virtual world. It was important to the Collective’s continued existence that no trails be left, out in meat space or equally here in the unreal, for their constant foe to latch on to.

“I am monitoring,” said the cube of azure crystal. It turned gently on one apex, catching the reflected light of the myriad data trains running high above them. “We need to be quick. One gathering was risky enough… two only invites danger.”

“So talk, then.” The words came from the only human-like simulacrum in the data-space, the artfully neutral avatar as featureless as ever.

“Where’s our fella with the deep pockets?” The sardonic comment emerged from the slowly transforming silver icon that drifted between them. Letters grew from one into another, spelling out nonsense words in Cyrillic.

“He’s otherwise engaged,” said the cube. “What do you have to tell us?”

“Jensen has agreed to join us,” said the metallic symbol. “I honestly had my doubts, but what do I know?”

“You should have believed me,” said the human.

“Fine,” came the reply. “That’s a ten-spot I owe you.”

“This is good news.” The cube’s flat, mechanical voice robbed the statement of any potency. “With Jensen in play, we can increase the tempo of our operations. We can redeploy Saxon and Kelso, and some of the others.”

“One step at a time,” warned the human avatar. “The Collective is at a critical juncture. The last thing we should do is overreach.”

“So which way do we push our new recruit?” said the icon.

The human figure cocked its head. “This is the start of the next phase in our war,” insisted the avatar. “But we still have far to go. The heart of the enemy’s infiltration of this so-called Task Force is in Eastern Europe. We need to target the unit operating in Prague to root it out at the source.”

The cube’s rotations slowed. “Who is in command there?”

“This man.” A pane of information grew out of the darkness surrounding them, showing stolen fragments of a personnel file. “James Miller. We’ll need to determine if he is corrupt, or merely the unwitting tool of others.”

The silver icon flickered and changed again. “We’ll need to get our boy out there, then. How do we do that?”

“With care.” The human avatar gave a ghostly nod. “I believe Adam Jensen is our best option in this scenario. I see how he thinks. I understand him.” The figure paused. “Now we have him in the fold, he will help us bring down the Illuminati… or he will perish in the attempt.”

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