Deus Ex: Black Light Read Online Free PDF Page A

place to inhabit.
    “Do you think the others talk about us?” she said. “Your protégé? Or Stanton and that damned climber Page?”
    “Morgan, Dowd and all the rest…” DeBeers chuckled and looked away. “They know you and I have our private conversations. But does it matter what sordid motives they might ascribe to us?”
    “They’ll think it makes us weak.”
    He gave a nod. “Good. Wrong thinking emboldens foolish choices, and I’d rather I knew sooner than later if one of them is going to strike at me… At us.” He poured out more wine for them. “Page, perhaps, if the day ever comes that he can find his courage. Dowd will never make a move. He likes his domains too much the way they are.”
    DuClare made a sour face. “Dowd’s Templar minions are the reason I stay away from Paris these days. I smell them on everything when I go back to the chateau. They act like they own the city.”
    “Well, they do. But we own
them
.” DeBeers handed her a glass. “Pay it no mind, my dear. Besides, the climate in Geneva agrees with you. You’re positively radiant.”
    She gave him a kittenish smile, and gestured around, the red tip of the lit cigarette dancing like a firefly. “But it is so desperately
dull
there. I leapt at a chance to come to Italy.”
    He nodded, crossing the balcony to the balustrade. “One might almost think it was a pleasurable experience to share my company,” said DeBeers, in a mock-sad tone.
    “Lucius, don’t be melodramatic.” Her voice switched back to her more usual manner; a colder, harder tone that she used on her inferiors. DuClare stubbed out the cigarette as she sensed a shift in the tenor of the conversation. The real reason for their meeting was about to emerge.
    “Our latest adversary…” he began, his back to her. “Who do you think it is?”
    “My answer is the same as it was before. Janus hides his or her identity better than anyone we’ve ever come across. We won’t find them easily, not unless a mistake is made. And given previous form, that doesn’t seem likely.”
    “Janus…” DeBeers sounded out the name. “The Romans and their minor god, seeing past and future all at once.” He snorted with derision. “Two faces on one head. What a trite choice for a double-agent’s sobriquet.” He shot her an irritated look, and in that instant he looked like the old man that he really was. “There have been too many interdictions of our work, Elizabeth. Events too precise and too perfectly pitched to be the deeds of some random troublemaker. Janus is an uncommon foe.”
    DuClare had to admit he made a strong point. Failures like the botched assassination of William Taggart, once the leader of the now-splintered pro-humanist Humanity Front, or the damning leak of the secrets held in the black site prison at Rifleman Bank could not have been chance events. There was a guiding hand at work, one in clear opposition to the Illuminati’s grand, complex design.
    DeBeers’s mood was shifting, turning irritable. “I told Morgan that Janus and his ridiculous little band of hackers were dealt with. But it seems I declared victory too soon. The so-called Juggernaut Collective is not as dead as I would wish it to be. Like roaches. Hard to stamp them out in one go.” He glared at her, all warmth suddenly gone. “Who do they think they
are
?” he demanded, affronted by the temerity of an enemy that dared to antagonize him. “I have not sacrificed my years, I have not made our plans my life’s work, just to be derailed by a pack of activist children sniping at us from the cover of cyberspace!”
    “We’ll deal with them,” she told him. “Of course we will deal with them. Our group has always weathered such attacks, from the very first days of Weishaupt and the founding. We have never veered from our course.” DuClare allowed a careful measure of warmth into her voice. “I remember something you once said.
The burden of governance, the stewardship upon us is