Deus Ex: Black Light Read Free

data monocle, he scanned the yard and found Jensen. “You,” he called out, his voice carrying. “Got a visitor.”
    Jensen’s jaw stiffened.
Who knows I’m here?
    “Don’t get your hopes up.” He found Stacks looking at him glumly. “Trust me, ain’t what you want it to be,” he said, reading the question in his gaze. “Not by a long shot.”
    * * *
    They took Jensen to a part of the clinic that he had never seen before, a lower level where daylight didn’t reach and the sickly glow of florescent lamps made everything look like it was coated in a layer of grimy transparent plastic.
    The guard opened a door and Jensen entered a chamber that could only be described as an interrogation room. A cluster of monitoring devices looked down from behind an armored glass bowl set in the middle of ceiling, above a metal table bolted to the tiled floor. On his side of the table, a metal chair. On the other, the same but occupied by a rail-thin woman of average height in a characterless black jacket and trousers. She didn’t look up as he walked in, engrossed in the glowing display of a digital pad. The cold color of the screen reflected off a milk-pale face, framed by short, shock-red hair. He spotted the telltale dermal markers of neural implants, and saw that her right hand – delicate and long-fingered like its organic twin – was made of brushed steel. Her manner and her outfit screamed
government agent
to Jensen’s ingrained cop instincts.
    He dropped into the empty chair without waiting to be asked and rubbed the unkempt stubble on his chin. The woman’s gaze flicked up to study him, then back to the digital pad. The quiet between them stretched, and Jensen’s lip curled. The silent treatment was one of the first questioning techniques they taught police officers in the academy, that the mere act of saying nothing would sometimes compel a suspect to fill the void with words and maybe incriminate themselves along the way.
    But this was amateur hour, and he wasn’t in the mood for it. Jensen leaned forward across the table and fixed the woman with a hard eye. “If you’re gonna make me wait,” he began, “I could use a cup of coffee.”
    Was that the ghost of a smirk on her face? It was gone before he could be sure, and she flicked one of those long fingers over the surface of the pad. Jensen caught the sound of a high-pitched buzz from beneath the surface of the table, and without warning his right arm slammed down and locked firmly against it, pinned there as if it had been pressed into place by an invisible hand.
    There was a thick steel bracelet around his arm; it had been there when he woke up in the recovery room, and Dr. Rafiq had promised him that it was just a medical monitoring unit to keep tabs on his wellbeing. Jensen hadn’t bought that for a second, not after he’d seen the same thing on Stacks and all the other residents of 451, but he hadn’t figured it would work like an
actual
restraint. Buried in the table, there had to be an electromagnetic generator that was keeping his arm in place. The woman, he noticed, was sitting exactly far enough away to be out of reach of his one free hand.
    “All your offensive aug systems were inhibited after your initial recovery,” she said, confirming his earlier suspicions. Her accent was mid-American but deliberately colorless. She put the digital pad on the table and produced a wallet from her pocket, unfolding it to present him with a badge and identity card. In the process, Jensen caught a glimpse of the butt of a matte black pistol protruding from an underarm holster. “I’m Agent Jenna Thorne, with Homeland Security.”
    “Federal Protective Service…” He read the information off the digital ID card. “Thought you guys were just security guards.”
    The wallet went back into her pocket. “Our mandate has been greatly expanded in the last couple of years.”
    “Right…” He nodded at the bracelet. “You expecting trouble from me, Agent