Perfect Dark: Second Front Read online

  “Madame Director,” Velez said. “Something’s happened.”

  Cassandra turned from where she was standing behind her desk, saw Velez waiting in the doorway, the two Shock Troopers there standing at rigid attention. Cassandra held up her hand, motioned Velez to come forward, then turned her attention back to the most insistent of her secretaries.

  “I’m putting you on hold,” she said.

  The holograph flickered, the secretary looking suddenly pained. “Madame Director, this needs your attention immediately.”

  “In a moment,” Cassandra said, and she muted the call, pulling her earpiece free from her ear. “I should just get one of the subcutaneous, I swear. I’m spending more and more time on the bloody phone.”

  “Something’s happened,” Velez said again. “The situation is getting worse.”

  “I haven’t heard anything.”

  “Have you looked at the markets today?”

  “Not for an hour or so, I’ve been buried.”

  “Matsuo had a heart attack on his way home from work yesterday.”

  “Matsuo? He was CFO of Beck-Yama?”

  “Yes.”

  Cassandra didn’t speak for a moment, reading the expression on Velez’s face, and seeing in it all her sudden suspicions. There was more coming, Cassandra knew, but already she knew she didn’t need to hear it. She knew where this was going.

  “You have proof he’s behind it?” Cassandra asked softly.

  Velez removed her d-PAL from its sleeve at her hip, handing it over. “Replay newsfeed, Tokyo local, archive one.”

  In Cassandra’s hand, the d-PAL chimed, responding to Velez’s voice. From its projector bloomed a video image, the angle slightly skewed and the recording choppy. Voices speaking in Japanese crackled.

  “Private video, recorded on a hovercam,” Velez said. “You can see it. Outside the Beck-Yama building near the Ginza.”

  The image shimmered, focus resolving, and Cassandra found herself looking at a cluster of people, men and women, most of them in suits, all rushing toward the same spot, forming a circle of spectators. The camera moved closer, rising, and over the shoulder of one of the bystanders, she was now seeing Beck-Yama CFO Matsuo lying prone, on his back, one hand to his chest. The pain and fear in his expression was unmistakable, a sheen of perspiration shining across his brow. On his right side, a woman was holding his hand, trying to comfort and calm him. The mysterious Joanna, Carrington’s new favorite toy.

  First Bricker, now this, Cassandra thought. Is that what she is to him? His blunt instrument?

  “No doubt it’s her?” Cassandra asked.

  “None. You can see … here, when she gets up.”

  In the holograph, EMS had arrived, Beck-Yama medics pushing through the cluster, roughly moving Joanna out of the way. She righted herself, then got to her feet, her expression almost convincing in its concern, and for a moment she looked directly into the camera, and Cassandra imagined there was mirth in her eyes, and felt sickened.

  The holograph winked out, the d-PAL in her hand chiming once more. Cassandra handed it back to Velez.

  One of the secretaries was waving for Cassandra’s attention from his holograph, and without looking at him, she reached over and killed all her open calls with a push of a key. The various images winked out.

  “It’s not good, is it?” Cassandra asked quietly.

  “No, it is not, Madame Director.” Velez frowned, then added, reluctantly, “Based on this new information, I am afraid I am not comfortable in allowing you to return to Paris. I’m going to require that you remain here for a few days longer.”

  “He’s just … he’s out of control, Anita.”

  “That is how it appears, yes, Madame Director.”

  Cassandra sat down heavily in the unused chair at her desk, ran her hands through her short blond hair, tugging at it.

  “Do you have the proposal?” she asked Velez, suddenly.

  It took Velez a moment to realize what Cassandra was saying, and then she dipped into her coat, removed the same envelope she’d presented her CEO with four days earlier. Cassandra tore it open, pulling the sheets free and laying them on her desk, grabbing the nearest pen. She scanned quickly, crossing out words, writing in new ones, then initialing each of her changes. Without a pause, she added, at the bottom of the document:

  Agreed upon and implemented, this day, January 22nd, 2021.

  Finished, she handed the pages back to Velez.

  “I won’t let you kill him,” Cassandra said. “But it’s about time someone put a stop to his little Joanna, don’t you agree?”

  Carrington Institute

  London, England

  January 22nd, 2021

  Her father used to say that pain was God’s way of letting you know you weren’t dead yet, and by that logic, Joanna Dark could only conclude that she was still alive. From the catalogue of her aches and wounds, very much alive, indeed.

  It wasn’t the first time she’d awoken since returning to the Institute, but it was the first time she’d opened her eyes to find herself feeling, finally, rested and able to face the world. Prior, she’d simply awoken long enough to be tended by Cordell or Steinberg, to eat the food they’d brought her, to drink the water they’d given. Neither had had much to say, and it was probably just as well, because she’d been so damned tired, she wouldn’t have been able to carry a conversation on a forklift.

  This time, though, she was awake—truly, finally awake—and for a time, Jo simply lay in her bed, listening to the silence around her, taking a slow inventory of herself. She began with her feet, confirming they were still at the end of her legs, and experimentally wriggled her toes. They responded without delay or discomfort. She tried moving her legs next, just slightly, feeling the lurking presence of her childhood fears once again, remembering the time she had spent as a small girl unable to move at all due to a spinal cord defect. But her legs responded as her toes had, albeit with more stiffness and the dull throb that told of bruises and strain along her quads and hamstrings.

  It was her torso that really hurt, she determined. The bullet wound still burned in her flesh, and she knew she was breathing shallow, trying to keep from straining her injured ribs. At some point while she’d slept Cordell had removed her IV, and her arm where the needle had been inserted presented a different soreness, somehow more subtle that the rest.

  She blinked, realized she’d dreamt of her father again. Unpleasant, still rife with her guilt, but at least not as bad as some of the other ones she’d had about him recently. Those weren’t dreams, in her opinion—no, those qualified as nightmares, the kind where she woke up screaming. Jack Dark, decomposing flesh sagging and putrid hanging from his face, pointing his finger at his daughter and telling her that she had done this to him, that she had let Zhang Li’s bitch daughter Mai Hem kill him.

  This most recent dream—at least as much of it as she could remember—was less directly accusatory, but its thrust had been the same, if perhaps more subtle. A memory of six, maybe seven years ago, only thirteen, as her father taught her how to shoot. Nothing particularly remarkable about it, except in the dream Joanna was twenty-one, not thirteen, and suddenly she couldn’t shoot to save his life. That had been what he’d said, berating her on the firing range in her dream, growing more and more frustrated with her.

  “You can’t shoot to save my life,” Jack Dark had said.

  No mystery in what that was about, no sir. But at least he wasn’t decomposing in front of her as he said it.

  She gave it almost half an hour, just lying there, before finally attempting to sit up, and it went well right up to the moment Joanna swung her feet off the bed and onto the floor. It was the move that did it, the unconscious shift of her torso as she’d turned her hips, and both the bullet wound in her side and the broken and cracked ribs in her chest announced their displeasure. The pain wrapped her like a hug, searing around her middle, and she lost what little breath she had for a moment, and had to catc
h herself with her right hand on the headboard to keep from toppling, an act that made the pain, for a moment, crescendo, but that, thankfully, kept her from toppling face first onto the floor.

  Okay, Joanna thought. We’ll try that slower.

  Slower, it turned out, was the way to go, at least for the time being. Very slow, in fact, so that it took her nearly an hour to shower and change into fresh clothes. Getting her boots on was the hardest part, because it required her to bend, and every time she did so her vision would swim with dots of white light. In the end, she managed to get the boots on her feet, but abandoned the idea of lacing them up.

  Finally, Joanna ventured out of her rooms and into the ominous silence of the Institute grounds.

  She found Daniel Carrington in the Operations Center, where he was overseeing some fifteen other Institute staffers as they worked their duty stations. The atmosphere inside the larger room was thick with the combined smells of body odor, electronics equipment, and half-eaten meals, and the always-dimmed lighting of the room only amplified the palpable sense of tension. Tired and battered as she felt, she thought everyone else—right up to and including Carrington—looked worse.

  “Sir?”

  Carrington and Grimshaw both turned, their expressions almost identical in fatigue and frustration. If pressed, Joanna would have said that Grimshaw, who never took particular pride in his appearance or his hygiene, looked marginally the worse of the two.

  Still, the hacker managed to flash her a wan smile before turning back, wordlessly, to his battery of consoles.

  “You’re up finally,” Carrington said, eyeing her with a look so full of doubt, Jo wondered if he expected her to collapse once more there and then. “Jonathan seemed to think you were going to be out of commission for a while.”

  “Shows you what he knows.” She gave him her cockiest grin, then snapped to attention and gave him a salute. “Reporting for duty, sir.”

  Carrington stared at her, assessing, and Jo hoped she was selling herself well. Before entering the room, she’d taken a minute to steady herself, to straighten up and put on her best face, trying to banish her multitude of hurts for the meeting. Carrington could be as overprotective as he could be apparently reckless, and the last thing Jo wanted was for him to send her back to bed. Something was clearly going on, after all; she had determined that much on the walk over, and the atmosphere in the Ops Center had confirmed it. That Carrington himself appeared so grave told her one thing more.

  Whatever was going on, it concerned dataDyne.

  And that meant that Jo wanted—needed—to be a part of it.

  Carrington grunted, gesturing vaguely with his free hand, and Joanna dropped the salute. He came forward, using his cane, and Jo waited until he was almost in reach before asking the question that had been burning her since she had entered the room.

  “What do you need me to do?”

  The old man made a noise, almost another grunt, but this time, Jo could hear the amusement in it. He put out a hand, taking her arm at the elbow and giving her an almost grandfatherly squeeze.

  “That’s my girl,” he said. “Though it would seem, at least to some, that you’ve already done more than enough.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means, Joanna, that you have apparently done me one better. I invented the null-g engine. You, on the other hand, have apparently mastered instantaneous teleportation. Or translocation. Or some manner of material manifestation. Or something.”

  Joanna felt her brow furrowing in confusion and hoped the look she was giving Carrington was all the response he needed.

  He chuckled again, softly and entirely without mirth. “Aye, and if you’re bewildered, just imagine how I’m feeling at the moment. While you were fighting it out with Roarke in Seattle, Joanna, you were simultaneously escorting Zentek CEO Georg Bricker from the Zee Arena some 315 meters below you.”

  “Uhm.”

  “And while you’ve been sleeping in your room the last handful of days, you’ve also found the time and the means to journey to Tokyo, where you apparently induced a heart attack in Shin Matsuo, Beck-Yama InterNational’s chief financial officer. You’re not moonlighting for Core-Mantis now, are you Joanna?”

  “Okay,” Jo said. “What?”

  “Someone has taken upon themselves to shift the balance of power amongst the hypercorps, Jo, and they’re making it look like you’re their agent of change. Bricker is dead, Zentek is gone, and Beck-Yama looks poised to collapse within the next eight to twenty hours. In both instances, Core-Mantis OmniGlobal has been—or looks to be—the group to benefit.”

  “CMO? Not dataDyne?”

  “And yet another reason for my continued frustration. CMO. At the rate things are progressing, by this time tomorrow they’ll be second only to dataDyne in size and power. A distant second, but second nonetheless.”

  “But I’ve never even dealt with CMO! Just this last time, in Los Angeles, and before that, during Initial Vector, when I was following Hayes, but … but I’ve never even spoken to one of their agents!”

  “There was Carcareas.”

  “She was meeting with Dr. Murray’s psycho, I never spoke to her! I barely got a look at her, and I know she never got a look at me!” Jo stopped herself, realized that her voice had been rising, and that just that much effort was making her chest ache. “How are they doing this? Why me?”

  Carrington scowled, started to speak, then stopped, and Jo thought he was rephrasing his answer in his head.

  “To the first, obviously it’s some technological means of which we’ve been unaware. Or, possibly, a complete cosmetic redesign of an agent—Core-Mantis, perhaps, someone else, perhaps—remade to appear as much like you as possible. The second, however, that’s the question of true issue, Joanna. Because you are now linked to me, at least in the eyes of our most dangerous adversary, dataDyne. You are known to both Dr. DeVries and her head of security, Anita Velez. And while I have every reason to believe that what they know is limited only to the fact that you work for me and nothing further, that is more than enough. Regardless of what CMO, Beck-Yama, anyone else may think, certainly dataDyne believes that it is you committing these murders, and that you’re committing them at my behest.”

  She could feel herself flushing, feel the sense of outrage rising as all the implications of what Carrington was telling her took hold. The sense of violation was as acute as it was sudden. Joanna had grappled, and grappled hard, with the knowledge that she was a killer, that the gifts she had been given, however they had come to her, were ultimately to that end. That someone would use her face to hide their own murders made her feel raw, and it made her feel used.

  Whoever was responsible, dataDyne, Core-Mantis, even Alfie at the tobacconists down the lane, it didn’t matter. She had to stop them, and more, she had to make them pay.

  Even as Jo concluded that, she knew, absolutely, that it was what her father would have had wanted of her.

  “DataDyne,” Jo said after a moment. “How much do they actually know about me? Do they know that I killed Zhang Li, for instance? That I killed Mai Hem?”

  “To the last I would say that they certainly do not. If they had, their entire mind and power would have turned long ago to the task of apprehending and punishing you.”

  “Punish,” Jo said. “You mean kill.”

  “That would have been the inevitable result, yes. But do not doubt for a moment that they would not have … extracted as much information from you as possible before granting that mercy.”

  Joanna’s snort was filled with contempt.

  Mercy, she thought, and dataDyne. Two words that could never be made to go together, not even if you tried bonding them with an arc welder.

  Carrington scratched at his beard, musing. “As to the broader question, what does dataDyne know about Joanna Dark, I would hazard not much more than I have already said. Grim has gone to great lengths to erase any and all public information about you, no matter where
that information might have resided. As I said, Velez and DeVries know of your part in Operation: Initial Vector, that you infiltrated pharmaDyne Vancouver. They know you’re one of my operatives, and they’ve certainly concluded that you are a trusted one. As to who you are, I’d guess that they know next to nothing. Your first name—because they heard me use it, to my folly—but there are many Joannas in the world, I shouldn’t think. But the number of people who know you as the daughter of Jack Dark are certainly limited to a handful, and I’d daresay, all of them people in my employ.”

  “What did you say?” Jo asked.

  “Hmm?”

  “Why’d you call me that? Call me ‘the daughter of Jack Dark?’ ”

  Carrington looked genuinely puzzled. “Because you are. Have I committed some offense, Joanna? If I have, I must beg your forgiveness … I’m approaching my thirty-seventh hour without sleep, and fear the fatigue may be betraying me.”

  She stared at him, wondering how sincere the words were, wondering if she wasn’t simply transferring her own fears onto the man. Her father had warned her of Daniel Carrington, after all—had told her that she couldn’t trust him, should never trust him. But he had never given her a reason, and in Jack Dark’s absence, Daniel Carrington had come to fill his place—to an extent—in Joanna’s life.

  Jo shook her head and grinned, dismissing the comment, trying to downplay the awkwardness of the pause. She turned to take in the battery of displays, the dancing holographic images and the vivid plasma screens.

  “All right,” she said. “Guess I should start with CMO, right? They’re the obvious suspects.”

  “The Institute’s in lockdown, Joanna, every campus, all across the world. Nobody’s going out, not until I’m certain dataDyne won’t be landing an advance assault force on our front lawn.”

  “Okay, that’s everyone, but that’s not me.”

  Jo gnawed on her bottom lip, thinking. One of the holographs was projecting an image of her, captured from the footage of Shin Matsuo’s heart attack. A wire-frame had been overlaid on the image, and call-outs floated at the periphery, drawing lines to various points on the image’s body, declaring percentage matches, offsets. According to the readout, the woman hovering at Shin Matsuo’s side, giving him mouth-to-mouth, was a 99.4 percent match with Joanna Dark.