I had a hell of a time in Hong Kong once.
Oh yeah?
Yeah, it was October of 2002. By that point, my own team had basically fallen apart.
Well, Jennifer/Adrianne was dead, right? And you sent Luthos and Taki back to where they came from.
Exactly. Paul's heart just wasn't in it anymore. That left Mitchell, who never forgave me for what happened to Jennifer.
I don't blame him.
Yeah, yeah.
He tracked me down because he'd gotten involved in some things he shouldn't have. Did you know if you get involved in global hacking rings and rip off the wrong people, they will ruin your life and it won't necessarily involve killing you? True story. In Mitchell's case, they took his girlfriend, Claire. She just vanished. Of course, nobody actually just vanishes, my own capabilities notwithstanding. She went somewhere. She had gone on a little vacation to Bali--over Mitchell's objections, I should add--and disappeared while she was there.
Short on help from my own crew, I looked to see who within Magna Black could help me. It was a little irregular, since I wasn't exactly working on a Magna project, but I fit it into the budget by claiming I was doing corporate espionage--er, competition research. I got Cecilia Castor to help me. Now, I thought the company was doing me a favor, but in reality they were saddling me with a busybody whose help they needed but whom they found personally irritating.
Cecilia was the manager of logistics engineering. If you had to find something, she would know how. If you had to move it, she'd make it happen. After discussing with her, we agreed that we were dealing with a "finding" and "moving" situation, but in this case it was a person rather than like, a shipment of products.
Mitchell had already gone to Bali and figured out that the trail led to Hong Kong, so we didn't have to determine that part for ourselves. Admittedly, that meant trusting him and his competence, but the fact was he had done pretty well without me, at least up until he got his girlfriend snatched.
So, I had intended to go to Hong Kong by myself, but remember how I said Cecilia was a busybody? She's very hands-on. She wasn't going to help me by remote. She insisted on coming. Also, she probably liked the idea of a comped trip to Hong Kong.
Hey, who wouldn't?
Oh, she totally regretted it.
The three of us arrived via Inferno, which of course meant letting Cecilia know about it, and I hoped that token of trust meant something to her and impressed upon Mitchell that I was willing to take risks to make amends with him.
Did it work?
What do you think?
I had DANTE drop us into Wan Chai Park, and then we went to check in at the Grand Hyatt like normal tourists. We got a really nice suite because money is fake and I do what I want. We made that suite our home base and I had DANTE load it up with an arsenal in case we had to clean up the town.
Cecilia's instinct was that Claire was likely brought into the human trafficking ecosystem here, so we went to the areas where that was most likely to be going on, mostly Ap Lei Chau. It didn't take too long before we saw a suspicious van go into a suspicious warehouse and we figured we'd check it out. Turned out that particular operation was being run by Russians, and they were in fact taking on their latest shipment of human cargo, which is to say women who could be put to use in one illicit industry or another.
That's horrible.
Well, yes.
Things turned ugly although we did not get any of the women killed, I really cannot stress that enough. We sent the Russians packing at least temporarily, but what I actually wanted was access to their records, which proved that Claire had been through this particular place recently. They had pictures, and Mitchell picked her out.
Far as we could tell, Claire had been sent to work at the California, the oldest bar in Hong Kong at the time. I wanted to go in and beat up some bouncers until they gave up some information but Cecilia decided a lighter touch would work better. It was just as well, because it turned out she wasn't there anymore. Cecilia didn't tell me exactly how she got the info, just that she found a "cooperative" kitchen staffer who said Claire had been sold off to Shattered Crown, another of the local crime syndicates.
And that's when we found out she was in the hands of Caffrey O'Reilley, a real piece of shit who considered himself the King of Kowloon.
I notice all these people aren't local.
Yeah, isn't that funny? Expat scumbags.
He lived in a mansion upon Victoria Peak and had added Claire to his personal harem.
I don't know if I want to hear any more of this.
We can call it a day if you'd prefer.
No... I guess I shouldn't shy away from it. Just tell me Claire got out OK?
I cannot, unfortunately, tell you that.
Sigh. Alright, I'll prepare myself for the worst, then.
Now, per Cecilia's preferences, we did not go in guns blazing. Instead, we worked up some cover names and backstories and got an introduction as new suppliers to O'Reilley's gang. My cover name was "Robert Johnstone," which is a very funny joke if you know anything about Scottish history.
I'll take your word for it.
O'Reilley liked that I had Scottish ancestry--he was Irish, himself--and he was especially interested in my proposal that I could get him girls without having to go through the Triads. As a show of good faith, my thought was that I'd offer to buy several of his girls at well above market price. It was a good plan except for the fact that he wouldn't let me pick which ones I got, and of course he didn't pick Claire because she was new and he hadn't broken her in yet.
Oh my god. Can we please stop?
Sure.
Sorry, I just need a minute. This is fucked up.
It is.
And she doesn't make it out? Alive, I mean.
She does not.
Why the fuck are you telling me this story? Why can't you give me something with aliens or time travel hijinks or something equally goofy? I hate this.
Well, I told you I'd tell you all of my stories, and this just happens to be one of them. I never promised they'd have happy endings.
I can skip to the end if you'd prefer.
You mean the part where she dies.
Yeah.
Do I really need to know the details?
Do you want to know the details?
I don't know.
I'll wait until you decide.
OK, fine. Tell me. I'm sure I'm going to hate it.
You will.
O'Reilley got suspicious. I got to see all of his girls, and I guess he noticed how I noticed Claire, and started to wonder about that, and although he made good on his transaction--and I did manage to free like 20 women in all this, I would like to stress that I accomplished something good here--he must have gotten spooked about my interest in Claire so he quickly sold her off at a discount rate to, well, an organ factory. I got to her eventually, but it was too late. Parts of her were already in several other well-to-do people who thought themselves better than having to wait their turns on the organ donor lists.
Jesus Christ.
I know.
Thanks, I really hated this story.
I aim to please.
Wait, why couldn't you just go back and grab Claire at some point before she died?
Inferno's temporal core had been destroyed in the effort to mitigate the Rift, remember? I had no ability to travel through time at that particular point. Kinda sucked.
Oh, right. Sorry, these things all blend together after a while. What about Mitchell and Cecilia?
Mitchell hated me even more, obviously. That's two girlfriends of his I got killed, although I really don't think Claire was my fault.
As for Cecilia, we were honestly kindling a little something before the whole enterprise went tits up.
I feel like that's a shitty phrase to use in this kind of story.
Oh, I guess so. Sorry. Anyway, Cecilia was so horrified by the end she just lost all interest in pursuing anything with me. I don't blame her. My life is just like this. We went back to Magna Black empty-handed although she had picked up some info about local suppliers that we might want to do business with, so it wasn't a total loss as a business trip. I just utterly failed at what I went there for.
You actually seem to feel bad about this.
I'm not made of stone, you know. Claire did nothing wrong. She died for no fucking reason. I mean, she got thrown into this world because Mitchell pissed some people off. All I can say is that he swore off black hat stuff permanently after that. It wasn't worth it. We didn't stay in touch very often, but eventually he accepted that he's the one who got Claire caught up in all this to start with.
I think it took him six months or so but he finally told her family what happened to her. Just kind of showed up, briefly explained it all, handed over a couple of her belongings--a necklace, a ring, and her Social Security Card, I think--and left. Must have been weird for them. But I was proud of him for doing that. Facing it, you know. Facing them. I felt like maybe I had done something right in the time I had spent "raising" him.
I guess there was something positive in all this, although it's fairly awful overall.
Yeah. That's life, I suppose. You take the good with the bad. Sometimes the bad is a tiny drop in an ocean of good. Other times, the bad is a giant turd clogging your toilet of... good. I have failed at this metaphor.
Better luck next time. Also, I don't want any more stories about human trafficking.
Fair.
But there's one more thing that came out of that. Or two things.
I went so fucking ballistic after Claire died that I personally annihilated O'Reilley's headquarters. Like, burned it to the ground. Cecilia tried to talk me out of it, bless her.
But then I found something in the rubble. Under it, actually. Turned out there were several levels beneath the main basement, stuff that wasn't on any blueprints.
At the bottom of it was a level that was just... consumed, somehow, with pulsating machinery that didn't look like anything created by human hands. I took a risk and connected my cybernetics to it, thinking I could do some diagnostics and figure out what I was dealing with. I was shocked when it started talking to me. It explained that it was a smaller part of a larger being, which it called "Beachhead." More concerning, it had malevolent intentions. It wanted to consume the Earth and everything on it. That seemed bad. It wouldn't give up the location of Beachhead, and I guess O'Reilley had been keeping it near starvation to make it work for him--it could do just about any kind of signal analysis or infiltration you wanted--so I figured it was best if I destroyed it. DANTE sent me a sub-nuclear warhead and I blew the whole thing up.
That was... a left turn, all right. Did you ever find the Beachhead?
Sure did! You're gonna love that one. I promise.