Deus Ex: Black Light Read Free Page B

Their fight-or-flight reflexes stimulated beyond all rationality, those affected sank into a haze of temporary madness. In their wake, there was death and destruction that burned cities, shattered lives and tore a ragged wound in society. Darrow wanted to show the world that his creation was a dangerous mistake, to make people fear it – but beneath that, it was his buried spite at being left behind that made him lash out… and millions were still paying the price.
    Jensen had been spared, for reasons he still wasn’t fully certain of, but people like Stacks, the others in Facility 451 and elsewhere had been forced to endure the plague of madness. Darrow’s scheme was cut short, but they were still suffering.
    Worse still, the people behind Darrow, the ones who wanted to use his mechanism to
control
rather than
destroy
the augmented… They were still out there.
    “After the incident, after all the damage done, it was inevitable that Panchaea would be wrecked… But there is evidence that you were in the core of that facility, just prior to the final collapse of its structural protection systems.” Thorne cocked her head, studying him with her blank, doll-like cyberoptic eyes. “What did you see in there? How did you get out when the flood controls went offline?”
    “I don’t—”
    “Recall, yes, so you keep saying,” Thorne spoke over him. “Darrow was insane. He got what he deserved. No-one on Earth will question that, not after what happened. But the loss of Panchaea… There’s a lot of unresolved issues surrounding that. A lot of blame that until now has been unassigned. Do you follow me?”
    “I went there to stop him.” The moment the words slipped from his mouth, Jensen regretted the admission. “And I nearly died because of it. That’s all I have to tell you.”
    “Really?” Thorne raised an eyebrow. “So, with Darrow at the bottom of the sea somewhere, we should all just move on? Is that what you think?”
    He shifted in his chair, frowning as his arm remained firmly set in place on the table. “You’re the one who talked about coping. Rebuilding.”
    “For that, we need to know who gave Darrow the means to do what he did. The man might have been a billionaire but his resources weren’t limitless.”
    Jensen concentrated on maintaining a neutral poker face, but it wasn’t easy. Pieces of memory kept rising out of the depths of his thoughts when he least expected them, sometimes triggered by a word, a sound or a smell. When Thorne talked about Panchaea, things he might rather have forgotten pressed into his consciousness, fully formed and real.
    At first, Jensen had felt a directionless kind of anger burning away inside him. A fury directed at ghosts he couldn’t name, couldn’t see. But with each passing day, each hour, more and more of it was coming into sharp focus.
    Illuminati
. The word was ancient, heavy with contradictory meanings, double-speak and fantasy. It was a catch-all term; it conjured up images of cabals stocked with old men intent on running the world, of self-selected elites ruling the lesser masses by guile and force. Decades of sensationalist fiction and half-truths made it seem more legend than reality. Just a scare story, a lunatic conspiracy theory for the credulous.
    But the
fiction
was the
fact
. Jensen had learned that through bloody example, in the aftermath of the attack on Sarif Industries and then in the days that followed. While Hugh Darrow’s part in the Illuminati’s complex web of schemes had ultimately been stopped, the puppeteers holding the man’s strings had faded back into the shadows, untouched and unpunished.
    “He must have had help,” Thorne was saying. “Dangerous allies. People who need to be brought to justice.”
    They have operatives everywhere
. A warning voice sounded in the back of Jensen’s thoughts. “Guess you got your work cut out for you, then,” he said, after a moment.
    The truth was, trust and raw gut instinct were what