Deus Ex Diaries Part Sixty-Eight (Mankind Divided)

This is my ongoing exploration of the Deus Ex Universe, in release order. Whether you’re a newcomer or an old-goer, I hope to make this something you can read along with and enjoy. This time I continue Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.

Having met with an informant and agreed to meet elsewhere, I had one more thing to do in the area before that…

Crossing the red light district, I entered the apartment building, passing by two men who were laughing about how “the clock man’s clock is ticking”. It probably wasn’t a good idea to shoot them out in the street, so I went up to the top floor where the door had very obviously been broken into; subtlety was clearly not those two’s strength.

The apartment hadn’t been ransacked, and I didn’t discover a body, so I looked around. I spotted a bill from the hospital, showing that Nomad had been billed 9,030 credits for a relative named Allison. It listed “Joint Amendment Surgery” along with medication and operating room fees.

I found a hidden room by moving an antique clock with a triangle code beneath the desk, as well as a ventilation shaft. Hacking into the computer on the desk, I found emails about Nomad’s daughter, no doubt Allison from the hospital form. She had attacked a psychologist after being discharged with prejudice from a psychiatric hospital, and Radich Nikoladze (leader of the Dvali organisation) had warned Nomad that Allison was ingratiating herself with “the wrong people”.

Speaking of whom, as soon as I closed the emails, Radich appeared on the monitors above. He was speaking with a threatening tone, and given the two people from the lobby earlier I ducked under the desk and exited the room via the ventilation shaft straight away. I didn’t want to get blown up!

There was no explosion, but I couldn’t hear the recording anymore due to the nearby thudding club music. However, before leaving the shaft I did check that the room wasn’t being stormed by Dvali, then dropped into the apartment bathroom. Opening the bedroom door I heard it unlock and saw a green gas dispersing, so I would have been absolutely fine thanks to my breathing augmentation…

Jumping out of the window, I contacted Smiley to tell him what had happened. He dispatched some agents to grab Nomad, who had said in an email to Allison that he would be at the Irish Stool, and I headed over myself. Nomad was upset about being detained and complaining loudly as I arrived. I sat opposite him and questioned him about the bomb making equipment I had seen in his workshop. He proclaimed innocence despite the evidence I presented to him. He started to tell me that they weren’t his tools, they belonged to— he cut himself off, but it was too late, clearly he was about to say his daughter Allison.

Nomad changed his tune, saying that it was definitely him who made the bombs, but it was already obvious to everyone. As it turned out, Allison had been in the military as an explosives expert until The Incident from two years ago, before she fell in with the “wrong people”. One of them had come to meet Nomad to say that Allison wasn’t coming, in fact she was leaving forever. He didn’t believe it and told me to find his daughter, or he would have to.

Calling Smiley again, I told him to make sure that Nomad gave up everything he knew, so that we could find Allison. Until that happened, I couldn’t proceed. Luckily, Vega called to set up a meeting with Janus, also that she had dug up something on Marchenko. She had stashed it in a bin along my way, so I could grab that before the meeting.

Since I wanted to see if I could find Vince Black before that, I headed to Překážka via the metro and went to meet Dobromila Nováková. I arrived moments before her, then spoke to her about her husband’s smuggling operation. She had turned to Black for reasons she wouldn’t really go into, but with him missing she was trusting me instead. She gave me the address and code (2565) of a storage locker which would give me all of the information I wanted. In return, she wanted a train ticket to Berlin and enough money to start a new life there.

Handing her the train ticket I had found in Black’s office, we parted ways even though she had also wanted cash and I had wanted to give it to her. I left the courtyard and contacted Delara Auzenne, who suggested that Black may have found out about the locker some other way. I headed back to the metro and hopped on the train over to Palisade Station, as the locker was situated near the bank.

As I approached, I became suspicious that this was going to end in an ambush, so I moved some dumpsters to block the entrance to the courtyard. While looking for other avenues of attack, I spotted a ventilation shaft down an alleyway and jumped up inside of it, following it around and inside the locker! Or rather, underground below the locker. I found myself behind a civilian named Olivie Devos who was not very happy to meet me.

Devos had paid Vlasta Nováková to get her out of Golem City and away from Prague. However, that came with the proviso that nobody knew where she was, so my being there put the whole thing in jeopardy. I acknowledged that Golem is hell and worth escaping from, and she argued that if I knew that I would go away before Vlasta called Vince!

Curious how she knew that name, it transpired that Olivie had paid Vince in a basement apartment in the red light district for Vlasta to help her. I sympathised with her, but as she spoke again we could hear things being moved around upstairs — Vlasta had arrived. He pulled a gun on us, but I told him that I was just there to see Olivie off, he had nothing to worry about from me.

Because I had the CASIE aug installed, I decided to persuade him rather than bribe him. Due to his nature as a proud, but volatile man I decided to choose the Omega personality answer to avoid antagonising him: he knew that if he shot me it would draw unwanted attention. Of course that was silly, given the fact that the police were in the Dvali’s pocket, but it seemed to work. He came back that there were quiet ways to kill a man, but I countered that there was no quick and quiet way to take me out — but if he took Olivie where she wanted to go that would end this.

Vlasta lowered his weapon and agreed, telling me to get lost. I had a quick look around and grabbed some ammo lying around, then headed upstairs and out through the door. My blockade was still in place, and a van was on the other side clearly where Olivie was going to be stashed.

On my way to Vince Black’s apartment, where Olivie had paid him, I grabbed the pocket secretary from the dead drop that Alex Vega had told me about. Marchenko had been born in Ukraine in 1991, hospitalised in 2011, and fallen off of the grid for 12 years. He reappeared in 2023 with a wife and child, but upon relocating to Golem City they were seemingly absent…

Proceeding on to Black’s place, I realised that I’d already taken a look on my first visit to the red light district, but hadn’t found anything too interesting. Now, however, I found Black’s corpse next to a hammer, with a pool of blood below it. Reporting it to Auzenne, she lamented not pulling him from undercover work the moment she arrived. I told her that she should report it to Miller while I retrieved some credits and a stiletto shoe from the body. The description in my inventory of the stiletto said that I didn’t know what got him killed or why, but using logic I deduced that someone discovered he was an undercover agent. I moved the body and picked up a pocket secretary from the floor. It contained an email from Roman Brusilov and suggested that Black had told a woman about his dual identity. Vlasta was apparently going to be holding him at gunpoint as he read the email, and the stiletto was a gift because it was his favourite.

I didn’t have time to think about how right I was, because I had to get to my meeting with Janus. I couldn’t leave the leader of the Juggernaut Collective waiting forever…