Arasaka Tower.
Thirty-third floor, Counterintel work area.
Restless and on edge, Carter returned to his desk with the chip in hand. He turned on his computer, inserted the chip, and pulled up the mission file on the cyberpsycho James.
In the end, the selection cursor in his cyberoptic stopped on the copy screen.
[Copy? Yes/No]
Carter hesitated.
The moment he thought back to his boss's questioning just now, his unease only deepened.
He had no idea what Kai was really after.
"Did he find out...?"
Carter sank into heavy self-doubt, racking his brain for when exactly he might have exposed himself.
"He just got back from out of town. There's no way he could already know anything about me."
"If he had real evidence, I'd have been kicked out of Arasaka already."
"But he definitely suspects something. Could he think I was the one who leaked his route and got the Animals sent after him?"
"If that's really what he thinks, then no matter how hard he digs, he won't find anything. That actually makes me safer."
"Too bad he didn't die in the attack. If he had, I might've had a real shot at moving up."
As if he had finally made up his mind, Carter selected copy.
His cyberoptic recorded all of the material, then he pulled out a fresh chip and slotted it into the neural port at the base of his neck.
Coming from Counterintel, he almost never transmitted anything important over the Net.
Public networks were full of corporate surveillance and digital monitoring.
The moment he finished copying the data, Carter got to his feet and headed out.
At the same time, Kai sat at his desk, reviewing the mission intel through a mix of documents, images, and video while building his own conclusions.
Very few people would be able to recognize the true nature of this experimental military-grade Sandevistan.
Even if it ended up on the black market, it could easily be sold off as just another standard Sandevistan model.
After all, unapproved military-grade implants came with enormous risks, and the people who bought that kind of chrome were usually desperate lunatics anyway.
If NCPD had not quietly kept the implant for themselves, and Militech had no intention of recovering it, then only one possibility remained.
Someone had intercepted it.
Whether out of greed, poverty, or some other reason, whoever had stolen it clearly had no idea they had already been dragged into something much bigger.
Not long after, Jackie called with the information he got from Inspector Stints.
It was now completely certain that NCPD had never taken possession of the implant.
By the time the cyberpsycho's body was delivered toward NCPD Central, the Sandevistan was already gone.
Stints had also made it clear that he wanted nothing to do with corporate business and told Jackie not to come asking for intel like that again.
After hearing the message Jackie relayed, Kai could not help laughing at himself.
"Heywood still hates corps as much as ever."
"And somehow a corpo rat like me still has a real friend from Heywood."
"Heh. Guess that only proves I'm an edgerunner wearing a corpo skin."
"Am I wrong, Jackie?"
Jackie answered, "I think you need to get out of that snake pit. No telling where the next set of fangs is gonna come from."
Kai did not respond to that head-on.
Instead, he only said, "Snake pit, whorehouse, both fit pretty well. Anyway, I've still got work to do. Once this thing's over, how about we grab a drink at Lizzie's?"
Jackie laughed in approval.
"Now you're talking. Lizzie's is the place. Their braindance setup is something else."
Kai muttered inwardly, Of course it is. You have any idea who their BD tech genius is? Judy Alvarez.
Once he had the intel from Jackie's side, Carter also came into the office to report his own findings.
He said there was no sign of any implant matching the file being traded on the black market. The only Sandevistans currently circulating were low-end gang trash.
With several angles of intel now gathered, Kai shifted his attention to the cyberpsycho kill site itself.
He pulled up surveillance footage from around the corporate plaza, then accessed Counterintel's internal database and retrieved the personnel files of NCPD staff involved in duty, cleanup, and transport operations.
Then he began cross-checking them.
He wanted to see which NCPD personnel had appeared at the scene and which of them had an opportunity to steal the Sandevistan.
Faces and streams of coded data rolled across the screen.
Every NCPD employee present on the day of the incident was listed out.
Then he filtered again, narrowing it down to only those who had direct contact with the cyberpsycho's body.
The number of candidates grew smaller and smaller until Kai saw a familiar name.
[Name: Gloria Martinez]
[Position: Emergency Medical Technician, Night City Public Medical Center]
"A coincidence?"
Gloria was the woman from the mother-and-son pair he had saved at the crash scene during the Animals attack.
She was still recovering at a Trauma Team medical center.
Kai reviewed the scene footage and found that Gloria had been the one who wheeled the cyberpsycho's body onto the emergency vehicle before leaving the scene.
He then pulled up David Martinez's full personal file and saw that David had just wrecked Arasaka Academy's online education system and now owed a huge compensation payment.
"Emergency medical worker. In urgent need of money. Had a chance to take the implant alone..."
At that point, Kai was nearly certain he could recover the military-grade Sandevistan.
"It has to be her."
Gloria was effectively in his hands.
There was no way the Sandevistan was slipping through his fingers now.
One phone call would be enough to get the implant back.
But if he wanted to build the trap he had in mind for Susan, then he needed bait strong enough to draw the rat in.
And this military-grade Sandevistan was perfect bait.
Given the kind of person Susan was, there was no way she would pass up an opportunity to hammer Counterintel with it.
Kai closed out the desktop system and checked the time.
It was already getting late.
So he got up from his desk and prepared to head downstairs.
He crossed the office floor, passed reception, and reached the elevator, pressing the down button.
When the doors opened, he stepped inside.
The internal display was still droning on and on about Saburo's "great" life story.
Kai exited the elevator and stepped outside Arasaka Tower.
The first thing he saw was the pair of giant holographic goldfish swimming above the corporate plaza.
At the same time, crowds of men and women in businesswear moved busily through the traffic circle, while plenty of stylish city dwellers crossed between them. Overhead, office AVs and private craft cut between the towers from time to time.
The rebuilt corporate plaza had become one of the most famous landmarks in the world.
But the structures that truly dominated it, Arasaka Tower and the Militech building facing one another across the plaza, stood there like two black giants ruling over everything below.
Kai looked up at those two giants in silence.
After a moment, he started walking toward the transit station with long, steady strides.
Inside the maglev transit car, Kai removed the portable comm unit from over his left eye and loosened the black tie at his collar.
Now that he had decided to go home and rest, he did not want anything else disturbing him.
On the first night after his rebirth, all he wanted was to quietly take in Night City's familiar, hard-won nightscape.
Standing in the carriage, one hand gripping the overhead rail, he gazed out the window.
The steel forest rose layer upon layer, coated in scattered light.
Neon stretched across the sky above the city.
A winding river flowed in from the harbor, passed beneath the iron bridges of the city, and disappeared into the underground drainage system.
Rain softened the night into a blur.
As music played through the train car, Kai stared quietly out the window and murmured,
"I should've left a long time ago."
"But if I'm being honest..."
"In this damned city..."
"My life is here."
(End of Chapter)
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