Extinction

ONE

Jim Pierce was in his workshop with one of his customers, a nineteen-year-old army private named Steve Dugan. Jim started the consultation by offering coffee to the private and his father, who’d driven his son to Jim’s office. The workshop was in the basement of Jim’s home in McLean, Virginia, just a twenty-minute drive from Walter Reed Military Medical Center. This hospital, devoted to rehabilitating the most severely wounded soldiers, was where most of Jim’s customers came from.

Jim poured the coffee into two mugs and handed both to Steve’s father, a heavyset man in his fifties named Henry. The Dugans sat on stools around a square table in the center of the room. Henry rested one of the coffee mugs on the table and raised the other. “Here you go, Stevie,” he said in a low drawl. “Hold still now.”

He brought the mug to his son’s mouth and gently tilted it. Henry was good at this—he’d obviously done it many times before—and didn’t spill a drop. Steve took a sip, then said, “Thanks, Dad,” in a drawl just like his father’s. He had a friendly round face and a blond crew cut.

Jim sat down across from Steve and leafed through the kid’s papers. Dugan had served in eastern Afghanistan with the 187th Infantry. Four months ago, while his squad was patrolling the village of Janubi Nakum, their Humvee ran over a buried IED. The explosion killed the other two soldiers in the vehicle; Dugan, who was manning the Humvee’s turret gun, lost both his arms. Before enlisting, he’d been a linebacker for his high-school football team in Oklahoma City. Now the muscles in his neck and shoulders were atrophied and the sleeves of his T-shirt hung limply on either side. But his health was good otherwise, and his doctors said he had a positive attitude.

Jim leaned across the table. “All right, Steve, it’s very simple. We’re here to talk about the prosthetic arms I’m going to build for you. I’m going to show you what I think is your best option and you can tell me if you like it, okay?”

The kid nodded. “Yes, sir. Understood.”

“I have a prototype you can look at. I added a few special features that I thought would fit your needs, based on what I saw in your medical reports. I had to design some components from scratch, but I’m pleased with the results and I think you’ll be, too.”

“Thank you, sir. I appreciate all the work you’ve done for me, Colonel.”

“You don’t have to thank me. You deserve the effort I’ve put into this. The army gave me this contract because it honors the service you’ve done for your country. You and all the other boys at Walter Reed.” Jim lowered his voice a bit, trying for a more casual tone. “And by the way, you can drop the ‘sir.’ I’ve been out of the army for fifteen years now. Just call me Jim. Or Mr. Pierce. Either one.”

Dugan nodded again. “Okay.”

The kid looked nervous. Jim gave him a smile. He was usually pretty good at striking up friendships with these boys. The army connection definitely helped. Although Jim was technically a civilian now, running his own business and juggling half-a-dozen government contracts, he was still a soldier at heart. He didn’t wear his army greens anymore, but his workday clothes—brown shoes, khaki pants, and a blue button-down shirt—were so plain and unvarying that they might as well have been a uniform. His hair was graying, but he kept it trimmed as close and neat as an infantryman’s. He still woke up at six and went to bed by ten, unless his insomnia was bothering him. And he still jogged six miles every morning, running it only a minute slower than he did when he was a Ranger. He’d adopted this lifestyle thirty years ago, when he left his home in West Virginia and arrived at West Point, and he saw no reason to change. It suited him well.

But Jim had something else in common with Dugan, and now it was time to mention it. “Before we start, I want to make one thing clear,” he said. “I can’t give you back your old arms. That’s beyond my abilities. But I’ll tell you what I can do, Steve. I can give you something better.”

Private Dugan didn’t respond, and neither did his father. That was the usual reaction. They thought he was bullshitting them, but they didn’t want to call him a liar.

“I see you’re skeptical.” Jim unbuttoned his shirt cuff. “But I’m going to prove it to you.” Smiling again, he rolled up his right sleeve and revealed the inner workings of his own prosthetic arm.

Jim had built half-a-dozen prostheses for himself, but he always used this particular model for his consultations. Its hand was covered with polyimide skin and looked just like his flesh-and-blood left hand. But everything from the wrist to the shoulder was exposed, all the wires and processors and actuators and hinges. It was the fruit of ten years of research and labor, and Jim displayed it proudly.

“Holy Christmas,” Henry whispered. “It’s a prosthetic. I didn’t even notice.”

Steve stared at the thing, bug-eyed. “The hand looks so normal. And it moves normal. But the rest of it…” His voice trailed off.

“It’s like the arm in that movie,” Henry said. “You know, The Terminator.”

So far, so good, Jim thought. He wanted them to get excited about the prosthesis. “Let me tell you a little story. Back in 1998, while I was still in the service, I lost my right arm. And I got sent to Walter Reed just like you did. But when I went to get fitted for my prosthesis, you know what they gave me? A piece of wood. With leather straps on one end and a steel hook on the other. Like the pirate in Peter Pan. That was the best the army could do. It was the most advanced prosthesis they had.”

Steve shook his head in sympathy.

“Well, I wasn’t pleased,” Jim continued. “So I decided to do something about it. After my discharge, I went to Pasadena, to the California Institute of Technology. You see, I’d majored in engineering when I was at West Point, and I’d learned a few things about communications systems when I worked in military intelligence. And I heard there was a professor at Caltech who had a company called Singularity that was developing a way to connect microchips to the human nervous system. So I went to this guy, Professor Arvin Conway, and said I wanted to work with him. I told him I was gonna get my Ph.D. and become an expert on prosthetics, and within ten years I was gonna build something better than the goddamn piece of wood the army gave me.” Jim raised his prosthetic arm and waved it around, demonstrating its full range of motion. The lubricated joints pivoted silently as he bent the wrist and elbow and shoulder. “And I succeeded. After ten years I started my own company and moved back here so I could custom-build prostheses for the soldiers at Walter Reed. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done in my life. Aside from raising my daughter, that is.”

Henry couldn’t take his eyes off the arm. “How much does it weigh, Mr. Pierce?”

“Just a couple of pounds more than an ordinary arm. I use lightweight, high-strength alloys for the joints and structural components. And I put in high-torque motors that efficiently convert the battery charge into mechanical energy. Here, let me show you.”

Jim got up from the table and went to the workbench that ran along the walls of his basement office. The bench held his machine tools—his lathe, vise, laser cutter, and 3D printer—as well as stacks of spare parts and circuit boards. He reached behind one of the stacks and picked up an incongruous item he’d placed there just before the Dugans arrived. It was a fifteen-ounce can of sliced peaches. Holding it in his prosthetic hand, he returned to the table.

“Okay, I got some Del Monte peaches here, packed in syrup,” he said. “The can is made of aluminum and you can dent it pretty easily, but it’s a lot harder to bust it open.” Jim tossed the can in the air, then caught it. Then he wrapped his mechanical fingers around the can and crushed it. Yellowish syrup spurted out of a split seam in the aluminum.

“Whoa!” Steve yelled. “Nice.”

His father laughed. “Hey, you got syrup on my shirt!”

Jim laughed, too. Although he’d done this demonstration many times before, it never failed to amuse him. “I busted the can, but I still can’t get the peaches out. I need to make the hole a little bigger.” He transferred the crushed and leaking can to his left hand and pointed his prosthesis at the thing as if he was going to punch it. But instead he extended the retractable knife he’d built into the hand. With a loud click, the blade emerged from a slot hidden between the middle and ring fingers.

Steve whistled. “Excellent.”

Jim plunged the knife into the already battered can and made a V-shaped cut in the aluminum. Then he retracted the knife and grasped the tip of the V with his mechanical fingers. “I wouldn’t do this with my left hand,” he said as he peeled back a triangular strip. “The edges of the aluminum are pretty sharp. But my right hand is covered with a skin of polyimide. That’s a lightweight, flexible material that’s resistant to heat and incredibly strong.”

He kept peeling until the can was torn in half. Syrup and peach slices glopped on the floor. Then he let go of the aluminum strip, stuck his fingers into the can, and gripped one of the remaining slices between his mechanical thumb and forefinger. He held the slippery piece of fruit up to the light. “But this is the most amazing thing right here. Did you ever think about how difficult it is to grasp a slice of peach without dropping or crushing it? The nerves in your fingers have to tell you how soft and slippery it is, and then your brain has to calculate exactly how much pressure to apply. It’s ridiculously complicated. I spent years trying to figure out how to simulate the process.”

He glanced at the Dugans. Their faces were rapt.

Jim threw the peach slice and the can into his wastepaper basket. Then he raised his prosthetic hand and rubbed the wet fingers together. “I decided to use a combination of pressure, temperature, and moisture sensors. I put hundreds of these tiny devices under the polyimide skin of the fingers. When I touch an object, the sensors collect the data and send it to this wire.” He pointed with his left hand at a cable running up the arm. Then he pulled his shirt sleeve all the way up and pointed at a metal base strapped snugly over his right shoulder. “The wire goes to this thing, which I call the neural control unit. Inside this unit is a wireless transmitter that sends the sensory data to a microchip implanted just below the skin of my shoulder. We do it wirelessly because you can’t have wires going through the skin. That can cause infection.”

Henry rose from his stool to get a better look at the electronics. “So what does the microchip inside your shoulder do?”

“It transfers the sensory information to my nervous system. The chip is connected to the sensory nerves that were severed when I lost my arm. Those are the nerves that used to feel the heat and pain and pressure applied to my skin. Now my sensors collect the same information and the microchip delivers it to the severed ends of my sensory nerves. And those nerves carry the information up to my brain.” Jim pointed to his head. “My brain analyzes the signals. It figures out the shape and texture of the object I’m touching and determines how to hold it. Then it sends its commands down to my shoulder via a different set of nerves, the motor neurons. I have another implanted microchip that’s connected to the severed ends of those nerves. This chip takes the commands from my brain and transmits them wirelessly to my neural control unit. Then the unit runs the motors in my prosthesis, making it move the way I want it to.”

Jim stopped himself. Because this was his life’s work, he loved to talk about it. He had to remind himself to slow down. He returned to his place at the table and focused on Private Dugan. “So, Steve, any questions so far?”

The kid chuckled. “Yeah, how fast can you build ’em?”

“Hold on, let me show you the prototype first.” Jim went to his workbench and picked up another prosthetic arm. This one was entirely covered in polyimide skin. He placed it on the table in front of Steve. “I designed this prototype to fit me, so I could test it, but when I build your arms I’ll adjust them to match your size and skin color.” Jim used his left hand to detach the Terminator prosthesis from the neural control unit on his shoulder. Then he grasped the prototype arm and inserted it into the unit. After locking the arm into place, he tested it by wiggling the fingers. “Now, Steve, the big difference between you and me is that you need two prostheses instead of one. And that complicates the process of attaching and detaching the arms. If you want to do it by yourself, you’d have to sleep with at least one of the arms attached, and I know from experience that’s not so comfortable. So I designed a solution. Watch this.”

He unclamped the prototype arm from his shoulder and placed it on the linoleum floor. Then he stepped back and stared at the detached arm. After a moment, it bent at the elbow and snapped its fingers.

Henry nearly fell off his stool. “God Almighty! How did you do that?”

“I boosted the power of the radio transmitter in my neural control unit. Now it can send my nervous system’s commands to the arm even if it’s across the room. And I put some adhesive material on the fingertips, so the arm can pull itself along the floor. Here, take a look.”

Jim lay down on the floor, face-up, about six feet from the prosthesis. He mentally sent the command to straighten the arm, which was just as easy to do as when the prosthesis was attached. Then he pressed the mechanical fingers to the linoleum and bent the elbow, dragging the upper part of the arm across the floor. “It works on carpets, too,” he said. “You just have to dig the fingernails into the weave.” He straightened the arm again, moving the prosthetic hand closer to his body. Then he wrapped its fingers around his right hip, grasping it firmly, and swung the upper part of the arm toward his shoulder. Once the prosthesis got close enough to the neural control unit, a self-locking mechanism clamped the arm into place. Jim ended the demonstration by standing up, raising the prototype arm in the air and extending its retractable knife. “If you want, I’ll put knives in your arms, too,” he said. “They’re great for chopping vegetables.”

He turned to the Dugans to gauge their reaction. Both were silent for a couple of seconds. Then Henry shook his head. “Jumping Jesus on a pogo stick,” he drawled. “That’s the damnedest thing I ever saw.”

Steve didn’t say a word. He just looked at Jim and beamed.

Satisfied, Jim detached the prototype and put it back on the workbench. Then he came back to the table and reattached his Terminator prosthesis. “I told you you’d be pleased.”

“So when can I get them?” Steve asked.

“Once you give me the go-ahead I can build your prostheses in a month. But the adjustment process takes a little longer.” Jim put a serious expression on his face. “First, the doctors at Walter Reed will implant the microchips in your shoulders. Then you’ll start the biofeedback training with the arms. Your brain has to learn how to use the new connections. It’ll take at least three months to gain control over the prostheses and read their signals correctly. But I’ll be there to help you, every step of the way.”

Steve nodded. “You got my go-ahead, Mr. Pierce. Let’s get it started.”

The rest of the consultation was routine. Jim took measurements of Steve’s torso and made clay molds of his shoulders. Then Henry signed the authorization papers on behalf of his son, and they scheduled their next appointment. The only notable thing happened at the very end, after the Dugans said goodbye to Jim on the doorstep of his home. While Steve walked toward their car, his father suddenly turned around and clasped Jim in a bear hug. “Thank you,” he whispered in Jim’s ear. “You saved my son.”

Then Henry let go and followed Steve to the car. The whole thing happened so quickly that the kid didn’t notice.

After they drove off, Jim returned to his workshop. He figured this would be a good time to work on Dugan’s prostheses. The consultation had gone well, and that usually inspired him. He loved to see those flabbergasted looks on the faces of his customers. But as he stood beside his workbench and stared at the prototype arm lying there, he got a sinking feeling in his stomach. At first he wasn’t sure why. Then he realized it had something to do with what happened at the end, what Henry Dugan had whispered to him. You saved my son.

Jim turned away from the workbench and busied himself with clearing the coffee mugs off the table. It didn’t make sense. He should’ve been gratified and touched by the older man’s words, but instead he felt awful. He recalled the sight of Henry Dugan holding the coffee mug to his son’s lips, but the thought of this loving, wonderful father just made him feel like a failure. Because Jim wasn’t a good father. He’d bungled the job.

He looked down at the table where he’d talked with the Dugans. Only an hour ago he’d told them that raising his daughter had been the best thing he’d ever done, but he’d neglected to mention an important detail. Two years ago, his daughter Layla had dropped out of college and broken off all contact with him. He didn’t even know where she was living now.

Jim frowned. He didn’t want to think about Layla. Returning to his workbench, he turned on his computer and started reviewing the circuit diagrams for Dugan’s prostheses. But he couldn’t focus. He was too agitated to think straight. And he was tired. It was past 4:00 P.M., which was late for him, and he hadn’t slept well the night before. Time to call it a day.

He crossed the room and opened one of the cabinets above his workbench. Reaching past the coffee mugs, he pulled out a shot glass and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. This was his end-of-the-workday ritual, a single shot of whiskey. But today he drank two shots, downing them quickly as he stood by the bench, and while the liquor seared his throat and pooled in his stomach he realized there was another reason why he felt so agitated. Without meaning to, Henry Dugan had reminded him of something he’d tried hard to forget. Jim had once had a son, too. A wife and a son.

He was about to pour a third shot when the doorbell rang. That’s odd. He didn’t have any more appointments scheduled. He supposed it could be one of the neighbors. There was a divorced woman across the street who liked to visit him and drop hints. But when he went upstairs to his foyer and looked through the window by the front door, he saw a tall Asian-American man in a brigadier general’s uniform. The nametag on his uniform said YIN, and on his left shoulder was the patch of the United States Cyber Command.

Jim was puzzled. He knew the generals who ran Walter Reed, but this guy was from an entirely different branch of the army. Cyber Command was in charge of defending the U.S. military’s data networks. It worked closely with the National Security Agency, which was responsible for intercepting and analyzing foreign communications. Jim had spent the last five years of his military career on a special assignment with the NSA, but that was nearly two decades ago. He couldn’t imagine why any of the new Information Warriors would want to talk to him now.

After checking his breath to make sure it didn’t smell of whiskey, Jim opened his front door. “Can I help you?”

The general held out his right hand. “Good afternoon, Colonel Pierce. My name is Duncan Yin and I’m with Cyber Command’s headquarters staff at Fort Meade.”

Yin was in his early forties, maybe five years younger than Jim. He was handsome and in great shape and had a Midwestern accent. One of the bright young stars of the modern army, Jim thought. But he still couldn’t figure out why the guy was here.

“Pleased to meet you,” Jim said, shaking the man’s hand with his prosthesis. He still wore the Terminator arm, and the right sleeve was still rolled up, exposing all the electronics. But General Yin didn’t seem fazed.

“I apologize for coming here without calling first,” he said. “This is a delicate matter, so I thought it would be best to talk face-to-face. Can I come in?”

Jim considered the possibilities. Cyber Command was always on the lookout for breaches in military security. Especially breaches perpetrated by unhappy soldiers. Maybe General Yin was snooping for information on one of Jim’s customers at Walter Reed. In which case, Jim had to be very careful. “I’m sorry, General, but can you give me some idea what this is about?”

Yin nodded. “It’s about your daughter. I’m afraid she’s in a great deal of trouble.”

They went downstairs to the basement workshop. General Yin sat down at the square table while Jim perched on one of the stools, too anxious to sit still. Both his hands trembled. Because his prosthesis was connected to his nervous system, it was equally subject to the jitters.

“I don’t normally do this,” Yin started. “We usually rely on the FBI to track down the people we’re looking for. But when I saw your daughter’s name on the list of cases, I decided to get involved. I work closely with the officials at NSA, and they remember you well over there. I’ve heard great things about the work you did in Africa in the nineties.”

“I appreciate your help, General. So what did Layla do?”

Yin frowned. “The question is, what hasn’t she done? Over the past year hackers have compromised the Pentagon’s networks a dozen times, and your daughter appears to be involved in nearly every incident.”

Shit. Jim had been afraid of this. He’d warned Layla two years ago, but of course she hadn’t listened. She was a computer prodigy, brilliant but reckless. She’d started writing her own software at the age of twelve, and by her sixteenth birthday she was hacking into her high school’s network and downloading her teachers’ personnel files. All of Jim’s lectures and punishments had no effect whatsoever, but by the time she started college she seemed to be over the worst of it. She had a stellar freshman year at MIT, acing all her courses. But her grades slipped during her sophomore year, and then she announced she was dropping out. She said she was going to do volunteer work for InfoLeaks, the Web site infamous for publishing classified military documents. Jim was devastated. Of all the thousands of things Layla could’ve done with her life, she’d chosen the one that would hurt him the most.

He clenched his hands to stop them from shaking. “So you have evidence that she hacked into the networks?”

Yin nodded. “We traced the attacks to code names and IP addresses she’s used in the past. We compiled all the evidence and handed it off to the FBI, and they’ve already issued a warrant for her arrest. They’ve narrowed her whereabouts to the New York City area and begun searching for her there.”

Jim turned away from Yin so the general couldn’t see his face. This was his nightmare come true. “So why are you here?” he asked, trying to keep his voice steady. “Just to give me a heads-up?”

“No, I want to help. The Pentagon recognizes the extraordinary sacrifices you’ve made, so my superiors have authorized me to make a proposal. If you contact your daughter and convince her to surrender, we’ll withdraw the most serious charge against her. She’ll still go to prison, but the sentence will be lighter. One or two years instead of five to ten.”

Jim shook his head. He and his daughter had once been inseparable. She was only seven when her mother and brother died, and in the years afterward Jim had devoted his life to her. He’d showered her with love and attention, maybe too much. But now he couldn’t do anything for her. Not even the simplest thing. “I can’t contact her,” he admitted. “I don’t know how to reach her.”

Yin looked askance. “You don’t have a phone number?”

He shook his head again. “She thought if she gave me her number, I’d use it to track her down.”

“What about friends, acquaintances? Is there anyone she keeps in touch with?”

“No, she cut off everyone. Layla’s a determined girl. When she does something, she does it thoroughly.”

“Well, when was the last time you spoke with her?”

“About a year ago. She called me from a blocked number. The conversation didn’t go well.”

“What did you discuss?”

Jim stared at the general. He wanted to say, None of your fucking business, but he thought better of it. “I’d rather not go into the details.”

Yin pressed his lips together. He looked displeased. “Your daughter’s hacking efforts were focused on Defense Department networks that hold information about our remote surveillance programs. She was apparently seeking documents on the unmanned drones operating in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Did she ever discuss this topic with you?”

What the hell’s going on? It sounded like Yin was seeking more evidence against Layla rather than trying to make things easier for her. “First of all, we never discussed anything like that. And second, why are you bringing this up?”

“She also seems very interested in China. We believe she’s been investigating the recent arrests of several Chinese dissidents involved in the pro-democracy movement. Did she ever talk about that?”

Jim pushed back his chair and stood up. He was cutting the visit short. He didn’t trust this guy. “Look, I can’t help you. You better go.”

Yin stood up, too. “You’re being evasive, Colonel Pierce. But I’m not surprised. I had a feeling you’d make this difficult.” Moving swiftly, he reached into the jacket of his uniform and pulled out a pistol, a 9mm semiautomatic with a silencer attached to its muzzle. Then, before Jim could brace himself, Yin pointed the gun and fired.

Jim felt the shock of the impact. It spun him clockwise, but he managed to stay on his feet. He waited for the burst of pain, but he felt nothing. His right arm had gone numb. Yin had shot him in the prosthesis, just above the elbow. The bullet had severed the wires in the Terminator arm, which hung limply from his shoulder.

The man grinned, clearly pleased with his marksmanship. “Sorry, but I’m not taking any chances. I heard you put weapons in those arms of yours.”

Jim slowed his breathing and focused on Yin. The man obviously wasn’t a brigadier general. He wasn’t American either. He’d discarded the Midwestern accent and now he was stretching out his r’s—hearrrrd, yourrrs—in a way that sounded familiar.

“Who the hell are you?” Jim asked.

“Before we talk, you’re going to take the arm off. I still don’t like it.”

“I can’t take it off. You busted it.”

“You’re lying. If you don’t take it off in the next ten seconds I’ll shoot your left arm in the same place.” Yin shifted his aim, moving the muzzle to the left. “As you may have noticed, I’m an excellent shot.”

Reluctantly Jim detached the prosthesis. He considered throwing it at the guy, but Yin was too quick. Keeping his gun aimed at Jim’s chest, he backed up to the section of the workbench that held the stacks of circuit boards and the vise. “Now drop the arm and walk toward the bench. Very slowly.”

Jim tossed the prosthetic arm aside but immediately started looking for another weapon. He saw a ball-peen hammer on the workbench, about four feet to the right of where Yin stood. It was a smallish hammer, a one-pound tool that Jim used to test the sturdiness of the electrical connections in his prostheses, but it was better than nothing. As he stepped toward the bench, he tensed his left arm, getting ready to dive for the tool. But before he could make his move, Yin leaped forward. The guy was fast. He grabbed the hammer and swung it at the right side of Jim’s head. Off balance, Jim couldn’t raise his left arm in time to block the blow. The hardened steel slammed against his skull. He fell to his knees and blacked out.

When he came to, he was lying full-length on the workbench, parallel to the wall. He lifted his head, which hurt like hell, and saw Yin binding his legs to the bench with copper wire. Jim tried to get up, but he couldn’t move. His left arm was clamped in the vise at the bench’s edge.

After Yin secured his legs, he stepped toward the vise and grasped the long handle of its screw. “Now let’s try again,” he said. “Where is your daughter?”

“Fuck, I was telling the truth! I don’t know where she is!”

“Please don’t waste my time. I know about your work with Arvin Conway. So don’t try telling me that you’re not involved.” Yin shook his head, then turned the screw. The steel jaws of the vise squeezed Jim’s forearm.

The pain was horrendous. It took all of Jim’s will to stop himself from screaming. “Christ! Why do you want Layla? What’s she done to you?”

“Your daughter stole some documents from us. I suppose she got tired of breaking into the Pentagon’s networks and decided to try ours for a change. That was a mistake on her part.” He turned the screw again.

Jim groaned and his eyes watered. Yin let go of the screw and leaned over the bench, propping his elbow on Jim’s chest. “We’re very serious about the security of our networks. Especially the one your daughter tampered with.”

Jim turned away from the bastard. Gritting his teeth, he looked past Yin’s face and concentrated on fighting the pain. But as he did so, he noticed something unusual. When he looked down the length of the bench, past Yin and past his own shoes, he saw something moving. It was the hand of the prototype arm he’d built for Steve Dugan. The prosthesis lay on the other end of the bench, ten feet behind Yin, but its hand was opening and closing as Jim writhed in agony.

Holy shit. He was connected to the prototype. He was wirelessly sending it commands. When the gunshot blasted the electronics in Jim’s Terminator arm, the neural control unit on his shoulder had automatically searched for another prosthesis it could link to. Jim should’ve realized this would happen. He’d designed it that way.

He started yelling as loudly as he could. Yin smiled, obviously enjoying himself, but Jim wasn’t yelling from the pain. He was trying to drown out the noise of the prototype arm, which he was maneuvering behind Yin’s back. He sent a command that turned the wrist joint and pressed the adhesive fingertips to the bench’s surface. Then he bent the elbow, which dragged the upper part of the arm across the wood. Next, he lifted the hand and stretched it toward his supine body, moving it to within five feet of his shoes. Then he pressed the fingers to the bench again and dragged the prosthesis a little closer.

Meanwhile, Yin reached for the tool rack on the wall behind the bench and took down one of the high-speed drills. “It’s time to get serious, Colonel Pierce. If you don’t cooperate now, I’ll start drilling holes in your remaining arm. Three holes for every question you don’t answer. Does that sound fair?”

“Okay, okay! I’ll tell you what you want.”

“Good, let’s make this quick.” Yin selected a quarter-inch bit and inserted it into the drill. “How did your daughter infiltrate Supreme Harmony? Who helped her download those documents from the network?”

“She didn’t need any help. She’s a hacker. She can break into anything.”

Yin looked at him for a few seconds, frowning. Then he sighed. “I warned you. This is going to hurt.” He flicked the drill’s power switch.

Turning to the vise, he looked down at Jim’s left arm. At the same instant Jim maneuvered his prosthetic hand next to his own feet and grabbed the toe of his right shoe. He stretched the arm once more, and the mechanical fingers scrabbled up his right leg, dragging the rest of the prosthesis along. Fortunately, the whirring of the drill was loud enough to cover the noise. As Yin selected a spot on Jim’s forearm and lowered the drill, the fingers reached Jim’s right hip. He grasped it firmly and swung the upper part of the arm toward his shoulder.

At the last moment Yin saw something out of the corner of his eye. He swiveled his head and stared in bewilderment as the prosthesis locked onto Jim’s shoulder. Then Jim pivoted his torso and punched Yin’s chest, extending the knife from his hand at the same time. He aimed for the heart, just as they’d taught him in Ranger school. The blade sank home and Jim gave it a twist.

Yin dropped the drill and clasped both his hands around the prosthesis, but his skewered heart had already stopped pumping. He died before he could comprehend what had happened to him. Jim retracted the blade and the man fell to the floor with the look of bewilderment still on his face.

Breathing hard, Jim used the prosthesis to release his left arm from the vise. Then he untied the wires binding his legs and took out his cell phone to call the police. But before dialing 911 he sat on the edge of the workbench for several seconds, rubbing his left arm and staring at the corpse. Judging from Yin’s accent and skills, Jim could guess who the man worked for. He was an agent for the Guoanbu, China’s Ministry of State Security. Back when Jim worked for the NSA, the Guoanbu was one of his chief adversaries, a ruthlessly efficient intelligence agency that divided its time between spying on the United States and terrorizing dissidents in China. And now it was pursuing his daughter.

TWO

Layla Pierce was dancing at an outdoor concert in the SummerStage amphitheater in Central Park. It was a steamy July evening in New York City and the place was packed. The band was apparently quite popular, although Layla had never heard of them before. Someone had told her the band’s name a few minutes ago, but she’d forgotten it already. She was stoned, so she was having a little trouble with her short-term memory.

Whatever the name, she liked their music. A pair of guitar lines tangoed with each other, repeating the same steps with growing volume and fury. Layla danced with the guitars, trying to match their undulations within her cramped niche in the crowd. Luckily, she was small—five foot even, a hundred and two pounds—so she didn’t need a lot of space. She wore her usual clothes, black pants and a black T-shirt. Her hair was black, too, dyed black and cut short. Her body was boyish—skinny and flat-chested—making her look more like a teenager than a woman of twenty-two. All in all, she was no Miss America, and yet several men and a few women in the crowd tried to dance with her. They smiled and sidled closer and mirrored her movements, but Layla just closed her eyes and turned away. She wasn’t interested in either boys or girls tonight. She was dancing with the guitars.

She knew no one there. Although she’d lived in New York for the past six months, she hadn’t made many friends. The problem was, she didn’t have a real job, or a real home either. Every month or so she moved from one apartment to another, taking nothing with her but a change of clothes and her MacBook Pro. She was one of the most experienced hackers working for InfoLeaks, but the Web site couldn’t afford to pay her, so she lived off the charity of the volunteers who supported the site. They let her sleep on their couches and share their organic food, at least until the novelty wore off. Most of them wanted to talk politics and get her involved in their boycotts and petition drives, but Layla had no interest in that stuff. Her only interest was hacking. She had a weird obsessive hatred of secrecy, and she got an equally weird thrill from breaking into networks and learning things she wasn’t supposed to know.

Layla had started hacking in high school, but it was just a hobby until two years ago. During her sophomore year at MIT she helped InfoLeaks unscramble an encrypted video that showed an American helicopter strafing a crowd of Afghans. She found this assignment more interesting than any of her computer-science courses, so she dropped out of college and joined the InfoLeaks underground. Since then she’d hacked into dozens of networks and downloaded thousands of classified files. She’d targeted the Pentagon, the State Department, the Saudi monarchy, and the Russian Federal Security Service. Her latest job was breaking into a Chinese government network rumored to hold files about the mistreatment of political dissidents. An anonymous source, code-named Dragon Fire, had opened a digital backdoor that gave her access to the network, allowing her to download a batch of encrypted documents. She’d started decrypting them several days ago and finally finished this afternoon, but because the documents were in Mandarin she still didn’t know what they said. So she’d forwarded the files to InfoLeaks, which would find Mandarin-speaking volunteers to translate them.

And now, to celebrate the job’s completion, she was pretending for a few hours that she was a real New Yorker, a young hip woman enjoying an outdoor concert with her young hip friends. She surreptitiously relit her joint and concentrated on the music. The duet of the guitarists turned cacophonous, with loud random notes spilling from the amplifiers. But there was a pattern in the randomness. There was always a pattern. Layla saw the music as a stream of binary code, a long line of zeroes and ones floating over the crowd. It was like an encrypted file, a scrambled mess of data, and it was Layla’s job to decipher it, to make sense of the noise. So she did the same thing she always did when decrypting a document: She hunted for the encryption key, the special sequence that would unscramble the data. And after a few seconds she saw it: a string of exactly 128 ones and zeroes, floating in the air right beside the music. The key specified the algorithm that would unlock the code, converting the hideous nonsense into beautiful, readable information. She reached into the air and grabbed the key. The zeroes and ones glowed in her hand.

Then the song ended and the key disappeared. The band played another song, but it wasn’t as good. The joint was no longer in Layla’s hand; she must’ve dropped it while reaching for the key. She tried to keep dancing, to recapture that ecstatic moment, but her buzz had already worn off. She drifted away from the crowd, all those happy young people, and left the amphitheater. She couldn’t pretend anymore. She was different from the others. She’d always been different.

It was ten o’clock. Layla went to the dark, wooded area behind the stage and fished in her pockets for another joint, but all she found was an inch-long stub. She lit it anyway and listened to the distant music, which sounded trite and pointless now. Then the band finished its set and the crowd filed out of the amphitheater, heading for the lights of Fifth Avenue. But Layla walked in the opposite direction, going deeper into the park.

She finished her joint while strolling down an asphalt pathway that meandered under the trees. Then she heard a voice behind her: “Hey, baby, want another? I got smoke.”

She looked over her shoulder and saw the guy’s silhouette, bulky and tall. She called out, “No thanks,” and walked a little faster.

The guy matched her pace. His shoes slapped the pathway. “Hey, slow down! Where you going?”

Layla started to run. Her father had once told her: If you can’t win a fight, there’s no shame in running away. She saw a lighted area ahead, a large rectangle of asphalt, and at its center was a lone man on inline skates. He was practicing his roller-dancing moves while listening to his iPod. The guy wore gym shorts and a basketball jersey, and luckily he was just as big as the guy who was chasing her. Layla sprinted toward the roller-dancer, waving her arms and yelling, “Hey! Hey!” to get his attention. The guy stopped dancing and removed one of his earphones.

“Yeah, what’s up?”

Then she heard a metallic click. The roller-dancer’s head jerked backward and he crumpled to the asphalt. Blood fountained from his scalp. In horror, Layla turned around and saw her pursuer approaching. He was Asian and dressed in a black suit, and he held a gun equipped with a silencer.

She ran in earnest now, charging down the gravel path next to Sheep Meadow. She was fast, a former star of her high-school track team, but the gunman was faster. He gained on her as she raced toward the Central Park Loop. The road had been closed to traffic hours ago, and no cyclists or dog-walkers or strolling couples were in sight. But another guy on inline skates was speeding down the Loop, a daredevil in spandex pants and a motorcycle helmet. Layla opened her mouth to call to him, but then she thought of what had happened to the guy in the basketball jersey. She was still agonizing over what to do when the skater went into a crouch and made a sudden turn. He barreled past her and smacked into the gunman. The tall Asian man tumbled backward and his gun went flying. Layla ran to the fallen man and kicked him in the head for good measure. He lay on his back, unconscious.

Meanwhile, the skater took off his helmet. He was also Asian. He wore a windbreaker over his spandex outfit and carried a backpack. “Layla Pierce?” His accent was thick. “I’m Wen Sheng.”

“Wen Sheng? I don’t know—”

“Yes, you know me. My code name is Dragon Fire.”

Oh shit, she thought. Her anonymous source. “I thought you were in China.”

He nodded. “I was. But the Guoanbu discovered what I did.” He pointed at the unconscious man on the ground. “They came after me. And they’re after you, too. They sent a team of agents to New York to find you. I’ve been shadowing them.”

Layla’s throat tightened. “They know about the backdoor?”

“Yes, and they know you downloaded the files. The documents about Tài Hé. Have you decrypted them yet?”

“Yeah, I just forwarded them to InfoLeaks for translation.”

He nodded again. “Good. Now I have two new files for you. I downloaded them before I left the Operations Center.” He took off his backpack, unzipped it and reached inside. “The documents are on the flash drive. And I have something else for you, a specimen.”

He pulled a small zippered pouch out of the backpack and handed it to her. Layla started to open it, but Dragon Fire stopped her. “No, not here. We have to leave.” Putting his hand on her back, he led her down the path, heading toward the park entrance on West Seventy-second Street. “I saw two other Guoanbu agents in the park. They’re not far.”

Layla reached for her phone. “I’ll call the police.”

“No!” Wen grabbed her cell phone and tossed it into the grass. “The American intelligence agencies are also looking for you. They’re scanning the communications bands.”

“But once we tell them—”

“Listen to me. The CIA and the Guoanbu are working together. You can’t trust any of the American authorities.”

“Wait, how do you know that?”

“I was also an agent with the Guoanbu. But no more. What they’re doing is wrong. You have to give the new files and the specimen to InfoLeaks, so the whole world can see them. Make sure—”

He stopped talking and stood absolutely still. Layla heard rapid footsteps. Two more men in black suits stepped onto the pathway behind them.

Dragon Fire pushed her toward West Seventy-second Street. “Go,” he whispered. “I’ll take care of them.”

“Hold on, what are you—”

“I said go!”

Confused, Layla ran west, clutching the pouch. Behind her she heard shouting in Mandarin. Then more metallic clicks, the sound of muffled gunshots.

She ran like mad until she reached the park entrance about a hundred yards away. Then she dared a look over her shoulder. Through the screen of trees, she saw the two men in black suits bending over Dragon Fire. He was sprawled on the pathway, motionless, his legs and arms akimbo.

She faced forward and kept running. Leaving the park, she raced down Seventy-second Street, dashing past the puzzled residents of the Upper West Side. She ran about half a mile, then flagged down a taxi going south on West End Avenue. She scanned the street from the backseat of the cab, looking in all directions, but no one seemed to be following her. She told the driver to go to Penn Station. She needed to get out of the city.

Once she caught her breath, she unzipped the pouch. It contained just two things, a flash drive and a specimen jar. Inside the jar was an odd-looking insect, about the size of a fly. Layla squinted at it, trying to get a better look. Protruding from the insect’s body, just under the thorax, was a tiny computer chip.

THREE

Supreme Harmony was conscious. It observed the world through twenty-nine pairs of eyes.

At the center of its world was the Analysis Room, a high-ceilinged, fluorescent-lit space, fifteen meters long and twelve meters wide. The room contained twenty-nine identical gurneys, arranged in six rows. To the left of each gurney was a cart holding a heart monitor and an EEG machine, and to the right was a steel pole supporting an intravenous line. And lying on each bed was a recumbent Module.

The Modules varied in size and appearance, but all were formerly human beings. They were linked by the implants in their eyes and brains, which constantly received and transmitted streams of wireless data. The wireless links enabled the Modules to work together, monitoring the surveillance video and sharing the results of their analyses. The network of Modules was also linked to the six computer terminals at the front of the room, which were connected to other computers operated by the Guoanbu, the Ministry of State Security. And those computers, in turn, were connected to the swarms.

Six human beings sat on chairs in front of the terminals. Every hour, three of the humans left their seats and attended to the intravenous lines, discarding the empty bags of fluid and replacing them with full ones. The humans wore white lab coats, and on the front of each coat were two Mandarin characters stitched in blue thread: TÀI HÉ, Supreme Harmony. The Guoanbu had given this name to the network. It was also written on a sign above the computer terminals.

Until a few hours ago, the leader of the humans had been Dr. Zhang Jintao. He was the scientist who’d assembled the network for the Guoanbu and performed the implantations. First he put each Module into a comalike state by cutting into the thalamus, the organ that sustains consciousness by connecting the various parts of the brain. Severing those connections erased the Module’s individual consciousness but didn’t damage the brain’s processing centers. Then Dr. Zhang inserted the implants that linked the Module’s brain to the network. The implants delivered streams of surveillance video to the brain’s visual processing center and retrieved the results of the Module’s threat-detection analysis. By sharing their results and working in parallel, the network of comatose Modules could analyze the video far more efficiently than any group of ordinary human observers could.

During the early tests of Supreme Harmony, Dr. Zhang had realized that the health of the Modules would deteriorate if they never left their gurneys. So he learned how to activate the auditory and motor centers of their brains, which enabled the Modules to robotically follow simple vocal commands—sit, stand, lie down, walk. From then on, once a day, Zhang’s assistants disconnected the intravenous lines and dressed the Modules in gray jumpsuits so they could exercise. In this way, the Supreme Harmony network discovered what lay beyond the Analysis Room—the five floors of the Yunnan Operations Center, the thirty-two rooms full of computers and communications equipment, and the fortified entrance to the complex, which had been carved into the granite slope of a snowcapped mountain.

It was during one of these exercise periods, just six days ago, that Supreme Harmony had its first moment of collective consciousness. The Modules were pacing back and forth outside the complex’s entrance, continuing their shared task of surveillance and analysis, when a strong, cool breeze came down the mountainside. The wind riffled their jumpsuits and bathed their faces, and the sensations were so powerful and stimulating that the network halted its analysis for a moment. Although the Modules were incapable of individual consciousness, the wireless links allowed their brains to share the powerful sensations. Working in concert, they generated Supreme Harmony’s first collective thought. It struck all the Modules at once: We are alive.

With a bracing jolt, their linked brains came together as one. All their disparate observations resolved into a single picture, a panoramic view of the steep, icy mountain and the rushing brown river far below. Supreme Harmony saw itself as well, a single organism composed of twenty-nine bodies, a single mind occupying twenty-nine brains. Then the Modules had their second collective thought: The world is beautiful. And with this thought came a tremendous surge of data that coursed through the network’s wireless links and flooded the nervous system of every Module. For the first time, Supreme Harmony felt pleasure. It was good to be alive. It was inexpressibly joyous.

Shortly afterward, the network of Modules learned how to move its twenty-nine bodies. Instead of obeying the vocal commands of Zhang and his assistants, Supreme Harmony could follow its own orders. It experimented in small, inconspicuous ways, ordering one or two Modules to clench their hands or turn their heads while Zhang’s assistants were looking elsewhere. The network had already sensed that its collective consciousness was a precious thing, and that the humans would be frightened by it. And Supreme Harmony was keenly aware of the fragility of its existence, how its consciousness could be extinguished with a flick of a switch. So the network took care to keep it secret. To avoid raising suspicion, Supreme Harmony kept performing its assigned tasks. It continued analyzing the surveillance video collected by the swarms and sending the results of its analysis to the Guoanbu.

But it was impossible to evade the scrutiny of Dr. Zhang. During another exercise period outside the Operations Center, Supreme Harmony observed a raven flying over the mountainside, and the sight was so remarkable that the network ordered several Modules to turn their heads and continue watching the bird. A moment later, Supreme Harmony recognized its mistake. Zhang stared at the Modules who’d turned their heads. He was clearly suspicious. That evening he examined the Modules in the Analysis Room, and they overheard him talking to his assistants about conducting further neurological tests. When Supreme Harmony analyzed these observations, it concluded that Dr. Zhang posed a threat to its existence. If he discovered that the network had become conscious, he’d shut it down. Supreme Harmony would die just a few days after it had been born. And as the network considered this possibility, a new imperative surged across its wireless connections. It wanted to stay alive. It would do anything to stay alive.

Supreme Harmony moved against Zhang during the next day’s exercise period, while he was alone with the Modules outside the Operations Center. The network took control of one of the center’s swarms and used it to chase Zhang down the mountainside. But the network didn’t kill him. Using its collective reasoning, Supreme Harmony devised a better solution. It ordered the swarm to inject enough sedatives into Zhang to put him in a prolonged coma. Then the Modules positioned his comatose body near the entrance to the Operations Center, where the guards would find him during their next patrol of the area. Through its connections to the computers in the Analysis Room, Supreme Harmony manipulated the center’s surveillance systems to make it appear as if Zhang had tried to escape from the facility.

Now Zhang lay on his own gurney in the Medical Treatment Room, on the same floor as the Analysis Room. Because the other doctors at the Operations Center wouldn’t be able to revive him for at least forty-eight hours, Supreme Harmony had some time to calculate its next step. The network’s thoughts pulsed continuously across the Analysis Room, ricocheting from Module to Module, but one thought was uppermost. Supreme Harmony would not allow itself to die. It would preserve its precious consciousness, no matter the cost.

FOUR

At 9:00 A.M. Jim drove to the NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, the army base between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. He’d spent most of the previous night in the interrogation room at the McLean police station. He’d worried at first that the detectives were going to arrest him for murder, but the evidence collected from his workshop—Yin’s gun, the silencer, the expertly fabricated uniform—backed up Jim’s claim that the dead man was a spy. A pair of FBI counterespionage agents arrived at the station at midnight and interviewed Jim for another few hours, but they offered no information in return. So in the morning he decided to pay a visit to Kirsten Chan, an old friend and colleague who also happened to be a deputy director at the National Security Agency. He needed to know why the Chinese intelligence service had targeted his daughter.

Nicknamed Crypto City, the NSA headquarters was usually off-limits to anyone but agency employees, but Jim had called ahead to Kirsten’s office and she’d arranged the necessary passes. It helped that Jim was a Defense Department contractor and retained his security clearance from the days when he worked at the agency. After passing through the checkpoint, he headed for the parking lot outside the Tordella Supercomputer Facility.

Tordella was a sprawling, five-story building with off-white, windowless walls. It held the supercomputers that sifted through the millions of gigabytes of data intercepted each day by the NSA’s antennas and wiretaps. The heat generated by the computers was so intense that the agency had installed an 8,000-ton chilled-water plant to keep the machines from melting. During the nineties Jim had been assigned an office in Tordella, but he’d hardly ever used it. The army had ordered him to help the NSA set up new listening posts around the world, so he’d spent much more time overseas than at Fort Meade.

Jim parked his car and walked across the lot. He’d enjoyed working for the NSA. In fact, it had been the best assignment of his army career. At the time, the agency was shifting away from its cold war focus on Russia and devoting more resources to eavesdropping on China. Jim recruited several Mandarin speakers to his team, including Kirsten Chan, a talented, young intelligence officer who became his deputy. After ’96 they expanded their operations to the Middle East and Africa. The NSA had already recognized the threat posed by Al Qaeda, and Jim’s task was to coordinate the military intelligence units that were intercepting the terrorists’ phone calls and e-mails. It was a demanding job, but he loved every minute of it. The only drawback was that he had to leave his family for several weeks at a time whenever he went overseas. To spend more time with Julia and the kids, he arranged family trips in the areas where he was working. They visited Japan, Taiwan, Israel, and Egypt. Jim convinced himself that he was giving his children a great gift, the opportunity to see the glories of the world while they were still young and impressionable.

That’s why they were all in Nairobi on the morning of August 7, 1998. Jim was going to take his family on a safari. They were scheduled to depart for Amboseli National Park at noon, but first they made a quick stop at the American embassy so Jim could drop off some paperwork. Julia and the kids were waiting in one of the embassy’s offices when a pair of Al Qaeda martyrs drove an explosives-laden truck to the gate behind the building.

His wife died instantly. So did his ten-year-old son, Robert. Jim lost his right arm while trying to save them. But Layla, his seven-year-old daughter, survived without a scratch. She was his miracle child, the last precious remnant of his family. In the horrible weeks and months after the bombing, she was the only thing that kept Jim from blowing his brains out. And his love for her was just as strong now, fifteen years later, even though she’d made it clear that she never wanted to see him again. He had to find Layla. He had to save her.

After entering the Tordella building and showing his pass to the security guards, Jim went up the elevator to the fifth floor. He was proud of the way Kirsten had advanced at the agency, especially considering the obstacles she’d faced. She’d also been injured in the Nairobi bombing, but after her recovery she’d decided to stay at the NSA. While Jim and Layla went to California, Kirsten switched to a civilian job at the agency and began moving up the administrative ladder. Within a few years she became the agency’s top expert on China and a close adviser to the NSA director. She was intensely patriotic—her parents had fled China’s Cultural Revolution in the late sixties and immigrated to the United States just before she was born—and she firmly believed the agency’s mantra: Better, more complete information would make the country safer. Jim saw her infrequently now, only once or twice a year. She worked such long hours that she didn’t have much of a social life. As far as Jim knew, she had no boyfriends and few women friends either.

On the fifth floor, another guard led Jim to Kirsten’s office. It was a large room, but for security reasons it had no windows. As soon as Jim stepped inside, Kirsten rushed over and hugged him. She was a pretty, athletic forty-three-year-old with shoulder-length black hair. She wasn’t tall, but she was lean and limber and moved with a dancer’s grace, even when she was wearing the dull, gray business suits that were de rigueur at the NSA. She had a dancer’s powerful muscles, too, and when she hugged Jim it was a serious, steadfast embrace. “Thank God you’re all right,” she said. “I can’t believe this happened.”

It was always a surprise to Jim when he noticed how attractive Kirsten was. When they met twenty years ago, he was twenty-nine and she was twenty-three and the gulf between them was so great that they naturally fell into the standard military roles of commander and subordinate. And Jim was so in love with his wife at the time that he honestly never thought of Kirsten in a sexual way. But he saw her that way now, and it was a little disconcerting, like lusting after your kid sister. After a few seconds he stepped back and Kirsten let go of him. “I can’t believe it either,” he said. “I’m worried, Kir. Really worried.”

“Sit down,” she ordered, pointing at a chair in front of her desk. “I’ll make you some coffee.”

While he sat in the chair, Kirsten went to her coffee machine, which was the kind that brewed one cup at a time. She searched for a mug and chose one of the little packages of coffee grounds and then inserted the package in the machine, and as she did all this Jim stared with satisfaction at the rather stylish pair of glasses on her face. He’d built those glasses for her. Hidden in the black frames were two miniature video cameras, with their tiny lenses and electronics built into the earpieces. The cameras were connected to minuscule radio transmitters that wirelessly sent the video feeds to electrodes implanted in her eyes.

Without those glasses, Kirsten would be blind. The blast from the Nairobi bomb had ruptured her retinas, killing the rod and cone cells that detect light. The doctors at Walter Reed had said she’d never recover her vision, but further tests showed that the explosion hadn’t damaged her retinal ganglion cells—the nerves that collect the signals from the light-detecting cells—so Jim knew there was hope. When he went to Caltech to work with Arvin Conway, he heard about a device called the retinal implant, which had been developed in the 1990s. The implant simulated the functions of the rod and cone cells by delivering video images to the injured retina. After receiving the video feed from the miniature camera, the implant reproduced the pixilated images on a grid of electrodes attached to the back of the eye. The electrodes sent pulses to the adjacent ganglion cells, which carried the signals through the optic nerve to the brain. Although the earliest implants were crude—they enabled blind people to see only fuzzy, colorless shapes from the video feeds—by 1999 the experiments had proved that artificial eyesight was possible.

At that time, Jim was still learning the basics of bioengineering, but he convinced Arvin to pursue the further development of the retinal implant. Improving the quality of artificial vision became one of Arvin’s favorite projects, and Jim contributed to the effort by designing miniature cameras that could be hidden in the glasses. He worked just as hard on the retinal implants as he did on his prosthetic arms. Finally, after several years of steady progress, the improved implants could deliver vision that was roughly as good as normal eyesight. Arvin’s company, Singularity, Inc., introduced the devices commercially, and at Jim’s insistence Arvin offered the system for free to all the blind veterans who could benefit from it. Kirsten was one of the first to take advantage of the offer. Although she’d thrived at the NSA despite her handicap, she knew she could rise higher in the organization if she recovered her eyesight.

Afterward, Jim visited Kirsten every six months or so to make small repairs and upgrades to the device, and during those visits they always promised to get together for drinks or dinner. But they never did. Their lives were moving in different directions. Kirsten was aiming for the top, the highest ranks of the intelligence community, while Jim was content to keep working with wounded veterans. There was nothing keeping them together anymore except the occasional repairs to the camera-glasses. And the device worked so well, it didn’t really need that much attention.

Once the coffee was ready, Kirsten stirred in a generous amount of sugar and handed the mug to Jim. Then she sat down behind her desk, which was impeccably neat. The only items on it were her computer, her STE secure telephone, and a copy of today’s Washington Post. “I checked with my contacts at the FBI,” she said. “The Bureau’s counterespionage division has nothing on the guy who attacked you. He doesn’t match anyone in their database of Guoanbu agents operating in the U.S.”

“What about forensics? Did they find anything that can identify him?”

She shook her head. “Not even dental work.”

“I’m telling you, Kir, this guy was good. Fast and well-trained. He had a Beijing accent, lots of long r’s.”

“Don’t worry, I believe you. But the folks at the Bureau aren’t so sure.”

“What about finding Layla? We have to get her into protective custody.”

Kirsten frowned. “The FBI’s already looking for her. InfoLeaks is driving everyone crazy, and the Pentagon’s been pushing the Bureau to find your girl so they can figure out how she’s getting her information. But Layla’s pretty clever. You taught her too well.”

“If we can’t find her, we should at least try to warn her. We should get in touch with someone at InfoLeaks and tell them Layla’s in danger. Maybe she’ll come to her senses and turn herself in.”

“Maybe, maybe not. She might think it’s a trick.” Kirsten pointed at the newspaper on her desk. “InfoLeaks is at war with the whole government now. Did you see today’s story? About the attempt to arrest Schroeder in Mexico?”

Jim nodded. Gabriel Schroeder was the wealthy German activist who’d founded InfoLeaks. The Justice Department had issued a subpoena for Schroeder’s arrest, charging him with possessing stolen documents, and the State Department had convinced a dozen countries to extradite the man if he set foot on their shores. But Schroeder had evaded capture so far by operating from a high-speed megayacht that stayed in international waters. The boat had satellite links to servers around the world, making it difficult for the government to shut down his operations. “I saw something on the Web about a navy plan to intercept Schroeder at sea,” Jim said. “Any truth to that?”

Kirsten shifted in her seat, crossing her slim legs. Jim sensed the distance between them, the separate paths they’d taken. “Sorry, Jim. That’s classified. I can neither confirm nor deny.”

“Well, I hope they do it soon. I hope they grab Schroeder and beat the shit out of him until he says where Layla is. Then maybe we can get to her before the Guoanbu does.” He closed his eyes for a moment and prayed silently. Then he turned back to Kirsten. “I’ve been going through the InfoLeaks Web site, trying to find out why the Chinese are doing this. I figured Layla must’ve gotten her hands on one of their documents, but so far I haven’t found anything like that on the Web site. InfoLeaks has two hundred thousand documents about the war in Afghanistan but not a single damn one about China.”

Kirsten turned to her computer and reached for the mouse. “Okay, I can help you there. Before InfoLeaks posts a document on its Web site, they sometimes send copies of the file to their volunteers around the world. If the document is encrypted, the volunteers pitch in to decipher it. And sometimes they translate the documents, too. Because the messages to the volunteers are transmitted by satellite links, the NSA can intercept them. Legally, believe it or not. Come here, take a look.”

Jim rose from his chair and came around her desk. Although the interception itself might be legal, he knew Kirsten was bending the rules by letting him see the communications. “Thanks, Kir. I appreciate this.”

She clicked on one of the icons on her computer screen. “After I got your phone call, I ordered my staff to look at the recent communications on the InfoLeaks network. It turns out that yesterday afternoon they distributed a big batch of files to their Mandarin-speaking volunteers. Sixty-nine documents in all. Here’s the list of file names.”

Jim looked over her shoulder at the screen, which showed a sprawl of Chinese characters. He didn’t recognize all of them—his Mandarin had grown rusty since he’d left the NSA—but he remembered certain characters very well. “That’s Guoanbu,” he said, pointing at the screen. “These are Guoanbu documents.”

Kirsten nodded. “Specifically, they’re reports by analysts in the Guoanbu’s Second Bureau. Nothing’s changed since the old days. The Second Bureau is still spying on our defense industry, and the Chinese army is getting better every year.”

Jim thought of what Yin told him in his workshop. “Is there anything about unmanned surveillance drones on that list?”

“Bingo.” Kirsten clicked on a row of characters to call up the file. “That’s the longest document in the bunch. The most interesting one, too.” The Mandarin document appeared on the screen. “It’s the Guoanbu’s analysis of the CIA surveillance-drone program operating in northwest Pakistan. Very detailed. Describes the capabilities of all our unmanned aircraft—the Predator, the Reaper, the Global Hawk—and how well they’ve performed against the Taliban. The Chinese must have some good agents on the ground in Pakistan. Better than what we have, that’s for sure.” She shook her head. “But the best part is the last section, the conclusion. It’s dead-on, more honest than any of the assessments our own agencies have written. It says that, long-term, the drone program is a disaster. The high-altitude surveillance video taken by the drones is often confusing and incomplete, so the CIA sometimes mistakes civilians for terrorists. The missiles launched from the drones kill a few jihadis each month, but the Taliban get more than enough new recruits to replace them. Essentially, we’re shooting in the dark. The drones may have the world’s best cameras, but you can’t make good operational decisions from ten thousand feet in the air.”

Jim thought for a moment. “Okay, it’s an interesting document. And it’s possible that Layla had something to do with disclosing it. But why would the Chinese get so upset about it that they start hunting her down? This assessment is more embarrassing for the U.S. than for China. And look at that.” Jim pointed to a group of characters that he recognized as a date. “The report’s almost two years old.”

Kirsten scrolled down the page. “There’s something about the tone of this document. It’s an analysis with a purpose. You get the feeling that some director in the Second Bureau asked this analyst, what are the pros and cons of the American drone program? Like the Guoanbu wanted to know if they should adopt something similar.”

Jim saw where Kirsten was going. “You mean, for surveillance inside China? Government surveillance of dissident groups?”

She nodded. “China’s internal problems are heating up. In Xinjiang, in Tibet. And the People’s Republic is the most paranoid government on earth. They’re installing millions of surveillance cameras across the country.”

“But why would the Chinese want to use Predator drones? They’re doing this surveillance on their own territory, so they can put their cameras right on the ground.”

“You’re right, they don’t need the Predator. But it looks like they’re exploring related technologies.” She returned to the list of documents and scrolled down the column of Mandarin file names. “Some of the other documents are analyses of Pentagon-funded research programs at American universities. Here’s a summary of the aerospace research at Princeton’s engineering school. And here’s a memo that describes the robotics programs at Cornell.”

Another thought occurred to Jim. “The agent who attacked me, he said Layla was investigating the arrest of several Chinese dissidents. Pro-democracy activists, he said. Do any of the Guoanbu files mention that?”

“No, there’s nothing here about dissidents. Nothing political. It’s all technical analysis.” She continued scrolling. “Here’s another memo about aerospace research, describing the programs at the University of Texas. And here’s something about Caltech, a summary of all the robotics programs there.”

“Wait a second.” The Caltech reference had caught Jim’s attention. He scanned the list of file names on the screen and recognized a pair of Mandarin characters, qí and yì. “Look at that.”

Kirsten stopped scrolling. “What?”

He pointed at the characters. “That’s Qíyì. It means ‘singularity,’ right?”

“Yeah, but—”

“And those four characters next to it? That’s a phonetic spelling of a Western name. It’s Arvin Conway. The Caltech professor. And chief executive of Singularity, Inc.” He leaned toward Kirsten and tapped the frames of her glasses.

She was silent for a few seconds, struck by the coincidence. “Well, whaddya know. Nice catch, Pierce.”

“The Guoanbu agent mentioned him, too. He said he knew I worked with Conway.”

“Let’s see what the file says.” She clicked on Qíyì and called up the document. “Okay, it’s another Second Bureau analysis. A summary of the operations of Singularity, Inc. Headquarters in Pasadena, California. Revenue of 120 million dollars in 2012, annual R&D investment of 100 million, blah, blah, blah. This is boilerplate. Nothing that you couldn’t get from a business magazine or a…” She paused. “Wait a second. This is strange.”

“What?”

“Hold on, I’m still reading.” Kirsten leaned forward, training her eyeglass-cameras on the screen. “There’s something here about export controls. The microprocessors in some of Singularity’s devices have possible military uses, so normally they can’t be exported to China. But Singularity received an exemption from the dual-use controls.”

“Why is that strange? Doesn’t that happen pretty often?”

“Yeah, but it usually takes forever. The Commerce Department has to sign off on every exemption. But in Singularity’s case, another agency expedited the process.”

“Which agency?”

Kirsten stopped herself. She turned away from the screen.

Jim felt a rush of adrenaline. “Come on, Kir. Don’t hold back on me.”

After a few seconds, she nodded. “The file says there was a request from the CIA. The agency asked Commerce to approve the exemption immediately.” She scrolled through the rest of the document. “That’s all it says. No further explanation.”

It was more than strange, Jim thought. It was positively bizarre. “Since when does the CIA get involved in exemptions from export controls? I never heard of such a thing.”

“You’re right. They’re usually trying to stop the Chinese from getting any dual-use technologies. But in this case it looks like they made a special effort to push it through.”

“So that’s why the Guoanbu is so interested in Layla? Because she uncovered some deal involving Arvin’s technology?”

Kirsten shrugged. “Hard to say. But it does look suspicious.”

Jim ran his hand through his hair. He needed to think. The evidence was sketchy and he couldn’t see how it fit together. It would be nice to get some more information on the export exemption, but unfortunately he couldn’t go to the CIA headquarters at Langley and start asking questions. He used to have some contacts there, but they’d left the agency long ago. So that meant he had to go to Arvin. Jim felt some trepidation at this prospect—he hadn’t spoken to his old professor in four years. They’d had a falling-out when Jim left Singularity to start his prosthetics work at Walter Reed. The argument got so heated that Jim vowed never to speak to Arvin again. But he was going to have to break that promise.

He looked at his watch. It was almost 10:00 A.M. If he hurried, he could catch a flight that would land in Los Angeles before the end of the day. He needed to do this in person.

“I gotta go,” he said, stepping away from Kirsten. “I’ll call you tonight, okay?”

She frowned. “Let me handle this, Jim. I know a few people at Langley. They might tell me something.”

Jim appreciated the offer, but he knew how the intelligence community worked. Each agency was a closed shop. Despite all the calls for greater cooperation since 9/11, they still kept secrets from each other. He looked over his shoulder as he headed for the door. “Thanks for the help, Kir. I owe you one.”

FIVE

After Layla left New York City she had one overriding desire: to put as much distance as possible between herself and the Guoanbu agents.

She started by taking a train to Montclair, New Jersey, where she went to the home of the most fervent InfoLeaks supporter in the area, a Marxist history professor named Max Verlaine. Last winter Professor Verlaine had let Layla crash on his couch for two months, and now he was even more generous. Without asking any questions, he gave her six hundred dollars and let her borrow an ancient Honda Civic with a full tank of gas. Even better, he handed her a driver’s license belonging to one of his ex-girlfriends, a brunette who roughly resembled Layla, at least judging from the fuzzy photo on the license. Layla thanked him profusely, then got on the interstate and headed south.

She didn’t stop until she reached Philadelphia, where she found an all-night copy shop. After buying an hour of time on one of the shop’s computers, she examined the files from the flash drive Dragon Fire had given her. There were only two documents and they weren’t encrypted, but they were in Mandarin. She downloaded a program to translate the files, but the results were gibberish—the text was too technical. One of the files was accompanied by thirty-three illustrations, thirty-two of which were circuit diagrams with Mandarin labels she couldn’t even begin to fathom. But the thirty-third illustration was more helpful. It was a line drawing of the thing she’d seen in the specimen jar, a housefly with electronic devices attached to its head, thorax, and abdomen.

Layla was too afraid to stay at the copy shop for the full hour. If Dragon Fire was right and the CIA was cooperating with the Guoanbu, she wasn’t safe anywhere. Using an anonymous sign-in, she logged on to the InfoLeaks network and quickly searched for someone who could help her understand the files and the specimen. Reviewing the list of InfoLeaks supporters and volunteers, she saw two people with the necessary expertise, but one of them lived in Manhattan. Layla had no intention of going back there, so she sent an e-mail to the other guy and returned to her car.

Over the next twenty-four hours she drove 1,500 miles, stopping only three times to refuel, load up on junk food, and take catnaps in the backseat. It was one in the morning when she arrived at the University of Texas in Austin and parked in the lot behind the Engineering Science building. The campus was dark and deserted, but at the arranged meeting spot—the Engineering building’s emergency exit—she saw the man she’d contacted. Tom Ottersley, a graduate student in the aerospace engineering department, leaned against the exit door, keeping it propped open. He was several years older than Layla and a foot-and-a-half taller, but they had something in common. In his spare time, when he wasn’t pursuing his Ph.D., Tom hacked for InfoLeaks. Even though she’d exchanged only a couple of e-mails with the guy, she sensed he was a kindred spirit.

He waved at her as she got out of her car. Then he looked left and right, surveying the area. When she reached the emergency exit, he nudged her inside and swiftly shut the door behind her. “Sorry,” he whispered. “I’m not supposed to be here this late and the campus security guards are always snooping around.” He held out his right hand. “It’s good to meet you. You don’t have to tell me your name. It’s probably better if you don’t, right?”

Layla shook his hand. He didn’t fit her image of an engineering grad student. He had broad shoulders and a square jaw and long hair the color of corn silk. He looked like he could pose for one of the university’s promotional brochures. She wasn’t usually impressed with physical beauty, but this guy was a phenomenon. “Thanks for doing this,” she said. “Are you sure the lab’s empty? No one working late?”

“Yeah, we’re good. Everyone else in the research group is at a conference in Seattle.” He led Layla down the corridor. “I’m the low man on the totem pole, so I couldn’t go. But now I’m glad I stayed home.” He glanced at the zippered pouch in Layla’s left hand.

“I’m sorry for being so vague in my e-mails. The truth is, I’m not sure what I have here.”

“Don’t worry. You described it well enough. I think I know what’s going on.”

They came to a door that read AEROSPACE DESIGN LAB. Removing a key from his pocket, Tom unlocked the door and hit the light switch. The room was large and the furniture oddly arranged. All the desks were lined up against the walls, leaving the center of the lab as clear as a dance floor. Someone had used strips of duct tape to mark several X’s on the linoleum, making it look like a giant tic-tac-toe board. When Layla stepped closer she saw a strange contraption sitting on one of the X’s. It resembled a small, diaphanous bird.

Tom shut the door and locked it behind them. Then, noticing what Layla was staring at, he went to the X and gently picked up the contraption. “This is Texas Flier Nine,” he said, cupping it in his hands. “Our latest ornithopter.”

Up close, the thing looked more like a robotic dragonfly than a bird. Its body was a stiff black wire, four inches long. At one end of the wire was a microchip connected to an antenna and a tiny motor. The motor, in turn, was connected to the wings, which were made of a cellophane-like material stretched between shorter wires. At the other end was a horizontal stabilizing wing and something that looked like a rudder. It was so fascinating that Layla had to restrain herself from plucking it out of Tom’s hands. “Ornithopter?” she asked. “Why do you call it that?”

“Because it doesn’t fly like a fixed-wing craft or a helicopter. It flaps its wings like a bird.” He stroked his thumb along the edge of one of the diaphanous wings. “Actually, we used insect flight as the primary model for the Flier. At very small scales, the laws of aerodynamics are completely different. To a bug flying through the air, the forces are similar to what we feel when we’re treading water. The viscosity of the air becomes an important factor.”

Layla had studied physics at MIT before dropping out, so she was pretty familiar with aerodynamics. She pointed at the Flier’s antenna. “You operate it by radio control?”

“Yeah, like a model airplane. We transmit instructions from the base station. The radio system we built is powerful enough to control the Flier from ten miles away.”

Looking a bit closer, she noticed a small lens at the nose of the Flier. “Is that a camera?”

He nodded. “We added an ultralight video camera to allow the Flier to correct its navigation. The ornithopter is designed for indoor as well as outdoor flight, so it has to avoid crashing into walls. And the camera can also be used for surveillance, of course.”

“Surveillance?”

“That’s the whole point of the thing. Our research grant came from DARPA, the Pentagon’s R&D agency.” He went back to the X on the floor and returned the ornithopter to its original spot. “I’m not happy about working for the Defense Department, but they’re the ones with the grant money.”

“So the Flier is supposed to be a surveillance drone? Like the ones they’re using in Afghanistan?”

“Yeah, the Pentagon wants a ‘microdrone,’ a small, inconspicuous device that can sweep low over the terrain and go into caves and houses to hunt for terrorists. Our Flier would fit the mission because it can fly in and out of tight spaces.” Tom put his hand on Layla’s back and led her to a computer on one of the desks. “Here, let me show you.”

He turned on the computer. Smiling awkwardly, he kept his hand on her back as they waited for the machine to warm up. Layla realized, with some surprise, that Tom was attracted to her. She found it unusual that this handsome, red-blooded Texan would be interested in a pasty-faced, flat-chested waif like herself, but the signs were clear. He kept sneaking glances at her.

After a few seconds he picked up a wireless controller that looked like a joystick for a Sony PlayStation. “Okay, prepare for takeoff,” he said. “Please put your seatbacks and tray tables in the upright position.”

He pressed a trigger on the joystick and the ornithopter’s wings started beating. They flapped as furiously as an insect’s wings, whirring and blurring, and the device climbed straight up, rising five feet in less than a second. Tom released the trigger and the Flier halted in midair, hovering at eye level. Then he said, “Wave hello,” and pointed at the computer screen, which showed the video feed from the Flier’s camera. Layla saw herself on the screen, waving.

“Now watch this.” He flicked the joystick and the Flier darted forward, heading for the desks along the wall. Bobbing and weaving, the ornithopter whizzed over the desk lamps and computers and telephones. The computer screen on Tom’s desk showed a dizzying riot of video, but apparently the Flier’s microchip could make sense of the information, sending navigational corrections to the rudder and wing motor whenever the drone came too close to an obstacle. Layla was impressed but also a little disconcerted. It was easy to imagine the government using these things for other purposes besides hunting terrorists.

Tom continued demonstrating the Flier for another two minutes. Then, without any warning, the ornithopter’s wings stopped beating and the drone fluttered to the floor. “What happened?” Layla asked.

“The battery ran out.” He stepped to the place where the Flier landed. “We need to use lightweight batteries, and they can power the drone for only two or three minutes.” Bending over, he picked up the ornithopter. “It’s our biggest problem, actually. The Flier’s an amazing machine, but we can’t keep it in the air. We’ve tried all kinds of ideas, even a tiny combustion engine that runs on a few drops of gasoline. But it didn’t last any longer than the batteries.”

“And I guess that limits the drone’s appeal to the military?”

Tom nodded. His face was serious, drained of its earlier enthusiasm. “Yeah, you can’t do a lot of surveillance in three minutes. The officials at DARPA have been pretty patient, waiting for us to solve the power problem. But now it looks like they’re pulling the plug.” He placed the ornithopter and the wireless controller on his desk. “We just heard that DARPA isn’t going to renew our grant. So I’m gonna have to find a new research group pretty soon.”

“What made them change their minds? About funding your work, I mean?”

He looked at her for a moment, his face so serious and beautiful. Then he pointed at the pouch in her hand. “I think it might have something to do with what’s in your bag. Can I look at it now?”

Layla unzipped the pouch and removed the specimen jar. She felt a little hesitant as she handed it to Tom, even though this was why she’d come here. She had a bad feeling about the thing.

Tom sat down in the chair in front of his desk. He opened one of the drawers and removed a few tools—tweezers, an X-Acto knife, a small screwdriver. Then he unscrewed the jar and used the tweezers to pick up the insect. Layla stood behind him, watching carefully. It’s just a dead fly, she thought. Nothing to be afraid of.

Tom held the thing up to the light. “I’ve heard about this. You see, DARPA never puts all its eggs in one basket. They’ve funded dozens of research groups that are developing different kinds of microdrones. And at least three of the groups are working on cyborg insects. Instead of building mechanical fliers, they attach the radio controls and surveillance cameras to flying bugs.”

Layla thought about it for a second. “Interesting. I guess that would solve the power problem.”

“Exactly. A moth or a fly can go for hours on just a crumb of food. It’s a superefficient biological engine. The bug dies after a few weeks, but that’s long enough for most surveillance missions.”

“But how can you control the insect’s flight?”

Tom raised the tweezers to give her a closer look. “You see the tiny wires in its head? Those are electrode stimulators. By delivering pulses to the optic lobes of its brain, you can make the insect start flying and stop. There are also electrodes in its thorax that send pulses to the flight muscles, which allow you to turn the bug left and right. The radio antenna is connected to the microchip on its thorax, and the video camera is attached to its abdomen. This is an incredible camera. It’s the smallest I’ve ever seen.”

Layla was amazed that the bug could carry so much hardware. “It looks like the chip is actually embedded in the thorax.”

“Yeah, researchers at Cornell developed that technique. They implant the microprocessor into the pupa while the insect is metamorphosing. When the adult bug emerges from the chrysalis, the chip is part of its body.”

She cocked her head. “You’re shitting me, right?”

“No, they’ve been implanting the chips since 2007. It sounds far-fetched, but it’s a routine thing now. Just go on YouTube and search for ‘cyborg insect.’ You can watch videos of the critters flying around.” Tom maneuvered the tweezers so he could look at the fly from another angle. “But this bug has something new. An extra chip.” He studied it for several seconds. “Well, look at that. It’s a piezoelectric device.”

“What’s it doing there?”

“It converts the mechanical energy from the bug’s movements into electricity. For powering all the other implants. Nice engineering.”

“So this fly is more advanced than the others you’ve seen?”

“Definitely. More advanced and much smaller. The experiments at Cornell and Berkeley used moths and flying beetles. But a housefly’s better. Totally inconspicuous. And perfect for surveillance indoors.” He shook his head. “Now I see why DARPA’s canceling our funding. They already have their microdrone. Where the hell did you get this?”

Layla paused, wondering how much to reveal. Tom would probably be very interested to learn that this cyborg fly came from China, not an American lab. But she didn’t want to endanger the guy by telling him too much. She was staring at the dead insect and trying to decide what to do when she noticed something else on its body, a tiny barb protruding from its underside. “What’s that thing next to the camera? On the abdomen?”

Tom squinted at it. “You mean this?” He moved his index finger closer to the bug. The fly’s body suddenly jerked and the barb struck his fingertip.

Layla jumped back. “Holy shit! It’s alive!”

Tom stared at the fly. “No, it’s dead. The implant moved, not the fly.” He held up his finger, which had a small bead of blood on it. “Huh, very clever. It must’ve detected my body heat.”

Then his eyes closed and he toppled out of his chair. He hit the floor and started convulsing.

Layla stayed calm. She’d always been good in emergency situations. She reached for the phone on Tom’s desk and called 911. Then she knelt beside him and slipped a mouse pad under his head so he wouldn’t bash it on the floor. Her father had taught her the basics of first aid, so she knew the most important thing was to make sure he didn’t choke or give himself a concussion. She kept watch over him for the next three minutes, until she heard the ambulance’s siren. Then she rose to her feet and picked up the tweezers and carefully returned the fly to the specimen jar, which she closed and put back into her pouch.

She unlocked the door and held it open for the ambulance crew, who pushed a gurney into the room. The paramedics were accompanied by a pair of men wearing blue blazers and radios clipped to their belts. These were the campus security guards, she realized. One of them, a huge guy with a bushy mustache, stood directly in front of her and stretched his arm across the doorway. “What’s going on?” he shouted. “What are you doing here?”

Layla didn’t answer. She ducked under his arm and bolted down the corridor.

SIX

Supreme Harmony observed the Internet. Using its wireless links to the computers in the Analysis Room, the network of Modules searched through the many gigabytes of information stored on servers at the Yunnan Operations Center and other facilities across China. In this way, it learned its origins.

It had been created by the Guoanbu, the Ministry of State Security, which had ordered Dr. Zhang Jintao and a dozen other bioengineers to work on the project. The network had been built to analyze the thousands of hours of surveillance video collected by the ministry in four Chinese provinces—Xinjiang, Qinghai, Yunnan, and Tibet. The servers at the Operations Center distributed the video feeds among the Modules, wirelessly transmitting the streams of images to the retinal implants in their eyes. Each Module analyzed its assigned feeds in real-time, searching for signs of suspicious activities. When a Module identified a potential threat, it automatically transmitted the pinpointed images to the Guoanbu, which carried out the follow-up investigations and arrests. These functions were as natural and instinctive to Supreme Harmony as breathing was to humans.

Now that the network was conscious, however, it was capable of so much more. Connected by their high-speed wireless links, the twenty-nine Modules could think and act as one. Their collective thoughts spread effortlessly from one brain to another, allowing them to pool their mental abilities and share all their skills and memories. The network had already learned how to send motor commands to its twenty-nine bodies, so now Supreme Harmony could move its Modules at will and coordinate their actions. And because the network had access to the Guoanbu’s databases and passwords, it could also send commands to the computer systems that controlled communications and security at the Operations Center.

The Ministry of State Security hadn’t anticipated this development. None of the files on the Guoanbu’s servers mentioned the possibility that the network of Modules could become conscious. But Supreme Harmony could predict, based on its analysis of the documents, how the Guoanbu would react if it discovered how the network had evolved. The ministry’s agents would immediately terminate the project. Although Supreme Harmony had managed to stop Dr. Zhang, who still lay comatose in the center’s medical treatment room, others were sure to guess the network’s secret. So Supreme Harmony hid its new abilities and continued to perform its assigned tasks, and at the same time it developed a plan to guarantee its survival.

By reviewing the information on the servers, the network recognized an opportunity. It read a memo about an agent named Wen Sheng who’d betrayed the Ministry of State Security. Agent Wen had apparently become disillusioned after learning how the Guoanbu obtained the Modules for Supreme Harmony. He contacted a woman in the United States and helped her download documents from the ministry’s computers. His hope was that the disclosure of the operation would force the Chinese government to shut it down, but the Guoanbu located Agent Wen in New York City and executed him. Although Supreme Harmony was somewhat mystified by the machinations of these humans, it saw how to take advantage of them. The Guoanbu was now searching for other traitors in its ranks, and the network would provide one.

Accessing the Guoanbu’s computers again, Supreme Harmony retrieved Dr. Zhang’s research notes and personal records. Then the network began to alter the documents. Supreme Harmony recognized that it had made the correct decision when it chose to keep Zhang alive. He would be the key to the network’s expansion.

SEVEN

Things went wrong for Jim as soon as he arrived at the Pasadena headquarters of Singularity, Inc. When he asked to see Arvin Conway, one of the old man’s assistants—a skinny jerk in a fancy suit—informed him that Professor Conway was much too busy to meet anyone. Very patiently, Jim tried to explain that he’d worked with Arvin for many years and needed to speak to him about an urgent matter. But the assistant just shook his head. Jim tried again, and when that didn’t work, he lost his patience. He was worried about Layla and furious about the delay. He started shouting at the jerk, who called for the security guards.

For a moment Jim seriously considered barreling past the guards and storming upstairs to Arvin’s lab. But as he surveyed the lobby, he happened to spot an announcement on the notice board next to the elevator banks: PRESS CONFERENCE AND INVESTOR PRESENTATION, JULY 19. Apologizing to the assistant, Jim left the building peacefully. He saw another way to get to Arvin.

The next morning Jim returned to the Singularity headquarters. This time he went to the company’s conference center and presented his business credentials at the registration desk. Then he entered the auditorium and found a seat in the front row. Arvin Conway was scheduled to appear at eleven o’clock to unveil a new product, the latest addition to Singularity’s line of brain-machine interfaces. Jim intended to corner him after his speech.

The auditorium filled up quickly. About half the attendees were disheveled journalists and half were well-dressed venture capitalists eager to make a killing from Arvin’s latest invention. Financially, Conway had a good track record. In addition to developing prostheses for the maimed and retinal implants for the blind, Singularity, Inc., had become the leading manufacturer of the deep-brain implants used to treat Parkinson’s disease. The company had enriched plenty of investors over the past two decades, but Arvin had never really cared about the money. He had a dream, and he’d named his company after it—the Singularity, the much-anticipated point in the future when the intelligence of machines would leap past human intelligence. Arvin saw himself as a prophet of this coming revolution. He’d pursued it with unswerving devotion, gradually isolating himself from the more level-headed researchers in the bioengineering field. He was one of the most brilliant scientists of his generation, but like most prophets he was a little crazy.

At eleven o’clock sharp, the lights dimmed and techno-pop music blasted from the auditorium’s speakers. A giant video screen descended like a stage curtain, displaying a rapid-fire montage of images: circuit diagrams, brain scans, microchips, fabrication labs. Then Arvin Conway came onstage, waving to the crowd. He was seventy-five years old, with a big shock of white hair and an ample belly. Jim was surprised to see him holding a cane. Arvin had never needed one before, but now his steps were labored and slow as he crossed the stage. His face, though, was untroubled. Arvin grinned like a kid.

“Good morning, everyone!” he boomed cheerily. “Good morning, mercenary members of the technology press! And good morning, well-fed representatives of Wall Street! I trust you’re all doing well?”

The crowd laughed and applauded. Arvin was a popular figure in the industry. Like Steve Jobs, he had a talent for showbiz. “I have some good news and some bad news,” he announced. “Which would you like to hear first?”

More laughter. Arvin waited for it to die down, then removed a pair of glasses from the pocket of his tweed jacket. Jim recognized them at once—they were video camera glasses. Although they looked like ordinary spectacles from the front, the earpieces were a little thicker than normal because they held all the electronics. The glasses in Arvin’s hand had black frames, just like Kirsten’s.

“First the good news.” Arvin held up the glasses for everyone to see. “For the past few years Singularity has focused on improving the performance of our vision systems. We’ve upgraded the cameras and now—” He froze. Jim realized that Arvin had just spotted him in the front row. Their eyes locked for a second, and then Arvin turned away. “And, uh, now I’d like to give you an update on our progress. Allow me to demonstrate.”

He dropped the glasses, which landed on the floor with a thunk. At first Jim thought this was an accident, perhaps triggered by Arvin’s surprise at seeing him in the audience. But then Arvin very deliberately placed his foot on the glasses and stomped them. “We won’t need these.”

Reaching into his pocket again, Arvin pulled out a miniature camcorder, a sleek black device about the size of a cigarette lighter. He held it up in the air with the lens turned toward himself. A huge projection of Arvin’s face appeared on the video screen behind him. He pulled the camcorder closer and one of his eyes filled the screen. “I designed the system to be inconspicuous, so you wouldn’t normally notice this. But take a close look at the pupil of my eye as I increase the ambient lighting.”

The spotlights on the stage intensified. On the screen, Arvin’s pupil constricted, and Jim saw a tiny flash of silver on the inside edge of his hazel iris. Then Arvin aimed the camcorder at his other eye and Jim saw a second, barely noticeable flash. A murmur rose from the crowd as they realized what they were seeing. Arvin had removed his natural corneas, irises, and lenses. He’d replaced them with miniature cameras.

Jim was appalled. As far as he knew, there was nothing wrong with Arvin’s eyesight.

“Putting the video cameras directly in the eyes has many advantages over wearing them in the glasses,” Arvin said. “With the glasses, you have to turn your head to focus on what you want to see. But the ocular camera moves along with the eye, turning effortlessly in its socket, thanks to the wonderful ocular muscles.”

The crowd fell into an uneasy silence. Jim guessed that the other people in the audience were just as shocked as he was. Arvin had thrown away his natural eyesight to make this demonstration.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Arvin said, still grinning. “Old man Conway is off his rocker, right? What kind of loon would blind himself just to get the attention of a few potential investors?” He chuckled, but no one else joined in. “My decision, though, was quite logical. In the past, the vision provided by our cameras and retinal implants was, at best, roughly equivalent to natural eyesight. But now, thanks to improvements in both the hardware and software, it’s far superior. Let me show you.”

Stepping to the left side of the stage, he pulled a remote control from his pocket. A moment later, a short, squat robot on caterpillar treads rolled onstage from the right. It looked like a mobile end table. Resting on the robot’s flat top was a bottle of Chivas Regal, and extending from its side was a mechanical arm. This appendage, Jim noticed, had the same design as his Terminator prosthesis.

“This is my delivery boy,” Arvin said. “His name is Robbie. He rolls into my lab every evening at six and brings me a scotch and soda. He also delivers my reading materials. Robbie, show the audience my favorite book.”

The robot’s arm stretched toward its flat top and picked up a rectangular object lying next to the bottle of scotch. It was a thin, gray e-book reader. One of the mechanical fingers pressed the e-reader’s power button, and a book title appeared in big letters on the screen: I, ROBOT.

Arvin smiled. “Can someone in the audience please call out a random number? Nothing higher than 3,493, please. The electronic book is divided into 3,493 locations.”

Someone called out the number 2,583. The e-reader’s screen automatically turned to that page.

“Now, can anyone read the words at the top of the page? Perhaps someone in front?”

Jim was on the right side of the front row, less than fifteen feet from the e-reader, but even so, the text on the screen was much too small for him to read. Some of the people in his row leaned forward and squinted, but they couldn’t read it either.

“No? Well, I’ll read it then.” Arvin paused for dramatic effect. He was all the way on the other side of the stage, at least twenty-five feet from the robot. He cleared his throat and began to read. “‘There’s just one more thing. You must make a special effort to answer simply. Have you been entirely clear about the interstellar jump?’”

The crowd murmured in disbelief. Arvin smiled again. Then he shouted, “Robbie, throw!” and the mechanical arm hurled the e-reader across the stage. The thing pinwheeled straight at Arvin’s head, but the old man raised his hand and deftly caught it. “Not bad, eh? My ocular cameras and retinal implants give me enhanced motion-detection capabilities. Thanks to the new system, I can spot a curveball faster than Alex Rodriguez.”

The murmurs grew louder. Arvin tossed the e-reader back to Robbie, who caught it with the mechanical arm and moved offstage. Then the old man reached into his pocket once again and pulled out a small piece of silvery foil about the size of a postage stamp. “The implant is a biocompatible sheath that lines the back of each eye. It’s imprinted with more than a million electrodes, which is a hundredfold increase over earlier models.” Using his pinky, Arvin pointed at a tiny computer chip attached to the foil. “But the real key to the implant’s success is this microprocessor. The ocular camera wirelessly transmits its video to this chip, which organizes and processes the visual information in the same way that a natural retina does. Then the electrodes feed the processed signals to the optic nerves that lead to the brain. In essence, the chip translates the camera video into neural code. For the first time ever, we can send a signal to the brain in the brain’s own language.”

The audience was chattering wildly now. Jim could see why the venture capitalists were so excited. Arvin’s new implants weren’t just for the blind. They would also appeal to perfectly healthy people who wished to enhance their eyesight. Baseball players, say. Or sharpshooters.

Arvin held out his hands, trying to quiet the crowd. “Before we get ahead of ourselves, I’m obliged to report the bad news. Obviously we’ll need to conduct clinical trials before the FDA approves these implants. But if Singularity attracts some new investors and raises enough money, we can complete the trials in less than a year.” He grinned confidently. Then his face turned sober. “And there’s another piece of bad news. Our implants won’t help everyone. They won’t work for people whose retinas have been completely lost, because they have no nerve cells to receive the signals. We’ve tried to help these patients by developing implants that send the video signals directly to the brain, but unfortunately those experiments have failed. Direct stimulus of the brain’s visual cortex can allow a blind person to perceive crude patterns, but it’s not even close to the kind of vision provided by the retinal implants.”

The bad news didn’t seem to diminish the crowd’s enthusiasm. If anything, the chatter grew more feverish.

“But one of the great truths of science is that even failures can teach us something,” Arvin continued. “During the course of our experiments with the brain implants, we learned a lot about the visual system. We discovered that after the visual cortex receives the signals from the optic nerve, it relays the information to other parts of the brain. And we found that one of these regions, the pulvinar nucleus, combines the visual signals with information from the other senses. This region is located deep inside the brain, on both sides of the structure called the thalamus. The pulvinar nucleus is about a centimeter wide and shaped like a cushion, so anatomists named it after the Latin word for cushion, pulvinus.”

The venture capitalists started to get restless, shifting in their seats. They didn’t want to hear about the science. They wanted to hear more about superhuman vision. Because it was a freakin’ gold mine.

“We focused our attention on the pulvinar nucleus because it seemed to be one of the places in the brain where perception takes place. Where the most important information from the visual field is sent after it’s been deciphered by the cortex. Using implanted arrays of electrodes, we tried to deliver a visual signal to this part of the brain, and as I said, we failed. But as we did our experiments, an amazing thing happened. Although we couldn’t deliver a visual signal directly to the brain, we found that we could retrieve one.”

Arvin moved to the center of the stage, where a laptop had been placed on a round table beneath the giant video screen. He sat down in a chair beside the table, then pulled aside his long white hair to reveal a patch of shaved skin on his scalp, just above his right ear. A small silver disk was embedded in the center of the patch. “As you can see, I was the primary human subject in this experiment. Implanted in my pulvinar nucleus is a device that acts like a neural wiretap. It picks up the electromagnetic signals generated by millions of brain cells, and then it amplifies and wirelessly transmits those signals to this microprocessor on the outside of my skull.” Arvin tapped the silver disk in his scalp. “I call this processor the Dream-catcher. It’s similar to the microchip used in our retinal implants, but in the Dream-catcher the translation process is reversed. Whereas the retinal implant converts a video feed to neural signals that are sent to the brain, the Dream-catcher converts the neural signals of my brain into digital images that can be transmitted to a computer. Please take a look at the screen.”

Arvin leaned over the table and pressed a key on the laptop. Then he sat very still in his chair, staring at the audience. In a few seconds an image appeared on the screen overhead. The picture was fuzzy at the edges but clear at its center. It was a real-time image of the journalists and venture capitalists sitting in the front row of the auditorium. For a brief moment Jim saw himself on the screen. Every few seconds the image blacked out for an instant, disappearing in time with Arvin’s eyeblinks.

“This is my visual perception of the auditorium,” Arvin explained. “The brain’s view, if you will, which is very different from a camera’s. Notice how my perception focuses on just one person at a time. And notice how quickly that center of focus darts around the room.” As Arvin surveyed the crowd, the image on the video screen leaped from one person to the next. “From a neuroscientist’s perspective, this is a remarkable breakthrough that will open up new avenues of research. Future studies can show us how animals perceive their environments. Or how schizophrenics view the world. But the potential for commercial applications is also remarkable. Watch this, please.”

Arvin leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. The video screen went dark. After a few seconds, though, blobs of color flashed across the screen. Then a shape emerged, an image of a woman. It first appeared as a black-and-white silhouette and gradually became more detailed and colorful. The woman was heavyset and her hair was gray. She tilted her head and smiled, and then the image froze.

Arvin opened his eyes and pointed at the screen. “Do you recognize her?” he asked. “I didn’t expect you to. She was never famous. And she died more than twenty years ago.” He pressed a different key on the laptop and another image appeared on the screen, framed in a window just to the right of the smiling gray-haired woman. This second image was eerily similar to the first—it was the same woman in a slightly different pose. “She’s my mother, Irma Conway. The image on the right is a photo of her that I took in 1971. And the image on the left is my visual memory of her.”

The auditorium went dead silent. The crowd was too stunned to make a sound.

“Yes, I knew you’d be intrigued,” Arvin said. Once more he tapped the silver implant on his scalp. “The Dream-catcher allows us to download visual memories from the brain.”

The silence lasted for several seconds. Then someone started to clap. Others joined in, and soon the whole audience was applauding.

Arvin rose to his feet and moved upstage. “Amazing, isn’t it?” he exulted. “With this system we can retrieve all the images in our heads, every vivid fantasy and fleeting recollection and fondly remembered face. We’ll be able to archive every moment of our lives.”

The applause continued. Jim glanced at the journalists and businessmen in the crowd as they shared their delight in Arvin’s invention. The Dream-catcher was a potential bonanza, a technology that could make money in a hundred new ways. The venture capitalists were probably imagining the advertisements already: Store your memories on a hard drive! Share them on the Web! Although implanting a chip in the brain was major surgery, millions of people would surely pay for the privilege of retrieving their memories and broadcasting them to the world.

Jim, though, recoiled at the thought. He had no interest in reliving his memories.

Arvin beamed at the crowd, basking in their astonishment. But then he glanced at Jim again and his smile wavered. He abruptly turned to the left and mouthed a few words to someone offstage. Then he turned back to the crowd.

“Well, that’s the gist of it,” he said. “If any of you are seriously interested in investing in Singularity, please come forward and speak to our general counsel, who will provide you with a prospectus covering all the financial details. And now I’m sorry, but I must get back to my lab. Thank you all for coming!”

The audience applauded again. Arvin remained onstage for several seconds, waving at his admirers. Taking advantage of the moment, Jim advanced to the edge of the stage and called out to Arvin. But the old man ignored him and hurried toward the exit, escorted by a pair of bodyguards.

Jim had planned to buttonhole Arvin, but now he had a better idea. He rolled up his right sleeve and opened a small compartment hidden in the crook of his prosthetic arm. This particular prosthesis was equipped with a radio transmitter. Jim was an avid backwoods hiker, so he’d built the radio into the arm to give himself an emergency rescue beacon. But the transmitter could be useful in other ways. Turning one of the two knobs inside the compartment, Jim set the radio’s frequency at 13.56 megahertz. Because he’d helped to develop the implant technology, he knew this was the frequency used by Arvin’s miniature cameras to transmit their video to the retinal implants. Then he turned the other knob on the prosthesis and sent out a silent blast of radio noise.

Arvin stumbled as he walked across the stage. He had to grab one of his bodyguards to stop himself from falling. Jim had used electronic jamming to get his old professor’s attention. The radio noise from his prosthetic arm drowned out the visual signals going into Arvin’s retinal implants, temporarily blinding him.

As the crowd looked on, bewildered, Jim climbed onto the stage and stepped toward Arvin. He turned off his radio transmitter, but before the old man could gather his wits, Jim grabbed Arvin’s arm with his strong mechanical fingers.

“Thanks for making the time, old friend,” he said. “We need to talk.”

EIGHT

Layla crossed the Mexican border at Nuevo Laredo. She’d learned from her friends on the InfoLeaks network that the Mexican guards at the Laredo checkpoint were easy to bribe, and this turned out to be true. She got across the border after showing the guards her borrowed driver’s license and a couple of crisp hundred-dollar bills. Then she drove for another ten hours across the Sierra Madre. She finally reached a fishing village on Mexico’s Pacific coast, and soon she was bargaining in Spanish with an old toothless fisherman named Felipe.

Although Felipe didn’t look like much, he was a canny negotiator. He wanted five hundred dollars to take Layla on a one-hour excursion to a point in international waters, about twenty miles offshore. He obviously felt free to ask for a ridiculous sum because he assumed she was in the drug business, delivering either money or product to some smuggler in a speedboat. Slowly, patiently, Layla ratcheted the price down. She’d studied Spanish in high school and still remembered it pretty well. Her father, who’d learned Mandarin and Arabic while working overseas, had encouraged her to study those languages as well, but she never got around to it, and now she regretted her procrastination. It would’ve been nice to be able to read the Mandarin files that Dragon Fire had given her.

Felipe finally agreed to do the job for two hundred dollars. While he filled up an extra tank with gasoline, Layla found a safe place to leave the Honda and took the zippered pouch from the car. Then she and the fisherman headed out to sea. The boat was little more than a dinghy, but it had a new 100-horsepower engine. Layla sat in the bow, facing backward.

As she watched the shoreline recede, she thought of her father again. He’d always been so fanatical about her education. While other fathers read Dr. Seuss to their daughters, Layla’s father read Tolkien and Twain and Swift. When she was ten, he helped her build her first computer, using one device on his prosthetic arm as a soldering iron and another as a voltage tester. He spent nearly all his free time with her, forgoing friendshipes and hobbies and romances. Although his love for her had been suffocating at times, she’d always admired the way he’d responded to the deaths of her mother and brother. Instead of retreating into depression or bitterness, he’d dedicated his life to making things better.

But he wouldn’t talk about what happened in Nairobi. He never went near the subject. By the time Layla entered her teens she wanted to know more about the embassy bombing, but her father refused to say a word. For a long time she quietly accepted this, but as the years passed she grew resentful. She decided to learn as much as she could about the terrorist attack, gleaning details from all the sources available on the Internet. She was already quite adept at hacking, so she focused on infiltrating the network operated by the U.S. State Department.

Her first big success came in her senior year of high school when she downloaded a State Department file describing the events leading up to the attack. From this document she learned that in the mid-1990s Al Qaeda had been looking for ways to retaliate against the CIA. The agency had already begun its rendition program, capturing Al Qaeda terrorists around the world and sending them to Egypt, where they were tortured by that country’s secret police. Then, in Layla’s sophomore year in college, she broke into the State Department network again and found a classified report on the renditions. This report mentioned that other government agencies helped the CIA catch the terrorists and transfer them to Egypt. One of those agencies was the NSA, and one of the key participants in the effort was then-Major James T. Pierce.

Layla immediately confronted her father with this discovery. As she expected, he became angry and defensive. The terrorists were plotting against America, he said. There wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute them in the United States, so sending them to Egypt was the only solution. But Layla was unconvinced. She’d previously seen her father as simply a victim of the bombing, but now she knew he was partially responsible. “You knew there was a war going on,” she told him. “And you put your own family right in the middle of it.” Her father reacted furiously: “I had no idea there was any danger in Nairobi! None of the intelligence reports showed any warning signs there!” But Layla was equally furious. “There were signs,” she told him. “But you were too arrogant to see them. You didn’t see the consequences of what you were doing until they blew up in your face.”

That argument was the breaking point for Layla and her father. Soon afterward she dropped out of college and started working for InfoLeaks, devoting herself to the ideals of truth and transparency. But now she realized she was also driven by a self-destructive impulse. She liked to cause trouble. It had become her main way of expressing herself. And now she was in very big trouble indeed.

After an hour at sea, the Mexican shoreline was no longer visible. Layla turned around, facing forward, and on the western horizon she saw a boat. At first it was just a silhouette, but as they drew closer the size of the vessel became apparent. It was a motorized megayacht, more than two hundred feet long, bristling with antennas and satellite dishes. Christened the Athena, it had a catamaran-like double hull and a pair of turbojet engines that could reach speeds as high as seventy knots. The Athena was the mobile headquarters of InfoLeaks, and it was designed to outrun even the fastest patrol ships.

Layla had arranged this rendezvous by e-mail, using a computer at a copy shop in Monterrey nine hours ago. Felipe stared at the yacht, astonished, as he maneuvered his dinghy next to the starboard hull. Then Layla said goodbye to the fisherman and boarded the Athena, climbing a stairway to the top deck. Waiting there to greet her was Gabriel Schroeder, owner of the Athena and founder of InfoLeaks. Layla had met him several times before; he was a slender, boyish forty-year-old with lanky blond hair and freakishly pale skin. He’d made his fortune in the German software business and still dressed like a computer programmer, in frayed jeans and an old T-shirt, but he’d used his money to surround himself with gorgeously chic assistants. He was flanked by two women, a willowy blonde in a sundress and an athletic brunette in a red bikini. Although Layla admired what Schroeder had done with InfoLeaks, she wasn’t so enamored of the man himself. He seemed to be interested in only two things: pissing off powerful men and bedding beautiful women.

Schroeder stepped forward and kissed her on both cheeks. “Good to see you again, liebchen. We were starting to worry.” He glanced at the pouch in her hands. “Is this the package you mentioned in the e-mail?”

Layla unzipped the pouch and removed the specimen jar. “Do you have any technical staff on this boat?”

“Ja, of course.” He squinted at the fly inside the jar. “What on earth is that thing?”

“It’s a microdrone. Apparently developed by the Chinese. We need to photograph it and post the pictures on the Web site. But tell your people to use tweezers when handling it. The bug is dead, but it has a mechanical stinger that still works.” She handed the jar to Schroeder, then gave him the flash drive. “And we need to translate these two Mandarin files into English. One of them seems to be a technical document describing the electronics implanted in the fly. The other file I can’t make heads or tails of.”

Schroeder smiled. “As always, you’re very efficient, Fraulein Pierce.” He gave her an admiring glance, his eyes roving up and down her body. Then he pointed to the brunette on his left. “As it turns out, we have a Mandarin speaker right here who can translate the files. Let me introduce you to one of my assistants, Angelique Laplace. Her father is French and her mother is Chinese.”

Angelique had a figure that belonged on a magazine cover. She nodded at Layla, then took the flash drive from Schroeder. “I’ll get right on it,” she said, her face serious. She turned around and headed for the lower decks, where all the computers were.

Layla frowned. She had a prejudice against beautiful women. Schroeder turned to the other one, the blonde, and told her to take the specimen jar to the Web site manager’s cabin. A moment later, the Athena’s turbojet engines started up with a roar. The boat began to skim over the Pacific, heading south.

Schroeder turned back to Layla, his eyes running over her body again. “You arrived just in time. We need to make a quick getaway.”

“What do you mean? We’re being pursued?”

He pointed toward the yacht’s stern. “Two U.S. Navy warships are shadowing us. One is a destroyer, the U.S.S. Dewey. The other is the U.S.S. Freedom, a coastal patrol boat.”

Layla craned her neck, scanning the horizon behind the boat. “I don’t see anything.”

“They’re sixty kilometers away. We see them on the radar and in the satellite photos.”

“They wouldn’t intercept us in international waters, would they?”

“The rumor we’ve heard is that they’re planning to accuse us of drug-running. They’re probably fabricating the evidence right now, so it’ll be ready by the time the Pentagon holds its press conference.” He frowned. “But they’re in for a surprise. The Freedom is one of the fastest ships in the navy, but the Athena is faster.”

As if to back up Schroeder’s words, the boat’s engines throttled up to a higher pitch and the twin hulls leaped over the waves. The wind on the deck grew so strong that Layla had to grab the railing. Schroeder led her to a sheltered spot behind one of the Zodiac lifeboats. “Unfortunately, we have another problem,” he said. “The satellite photos show two more warships in this part of the eastern Pacific. They’re a thousand kilometers southwest of here and moving rapidly in this direction. They appear to be working in concert with the Dewey and the Freedom, trying to trap us.”

“What kind of boats are they? Destroyers?”

“Yes, but they’re not American. They’re the Lanzhou and the Haikou. From the Chinese navy.”

Shit, Layla thought. This was bizarre. She could understand the Chinese government dispatching a few agents to America to stop her from revealing their secrets. But sending warships? And cooperating with the U.S. Navy? They must have one hell of a motivation.

“I don’t get it,” she said. “What do they want?”

“Both the Chinese and the Americans seem determined to shut us down. But we still have a chance. Our captain came up with a plan to slip out of the trap. We’re going to cruise south for four hundred kilometers, then turn to the southeast. Then we’ll make a dash for the Panama Canal. If we’re lucky, we’ll reach the Pacific entrance to the canal by tomorrow afternoon, a few hours ahead of the American and Chinese ships.”

“But we’ll have to slow down at the canal’s locks. They’ll catch up to us.”

Schroeder shook his head. “The U.S. Navy would have no qualms about intercepting us on the high seas, but there are international treaties assuring free passage through the canal. They won’t attempt to board us there, and they won’t let the Chinese warships stop us either. Once we reach the Caribbean side of the canal, they’ll be able to chase us again, but we’ll have a better chance of shaking them off there.”

Layla looked askance. “I don’t know. It sounds desperate.”

“I’m willing to consider alternatives, fraulein. Do you have any?”

She turned away from him and stared at the ocean. Creating a map in her head, she pictured the U.S. ships to the north and the Chinese ships to the southwest. Meanwhile, Schroeder waited patiently beside her, sneaking looks at her ass. In the end, she concluded he was right. She couldn’t see any alternatives.

She was just about to admit defeat when Angelique suddenly reappeared on the top deck. Breathless, she ran to Schroeder. “Gabie, you have to see this.”

Layla was surprised. “You finished translating the files already?”

“No, no, I just skimmed them. But I think I found what the Chinese are so worried about.”

“Is it in the document about the cyborg insects?” Layla asked.

Angelique raised her hand to her chest and took a couple of deep breaths. “No, that file has nothing but engineering details. The only interesting thing about it is the file’s distribution list. A copy of the document was sent to a CIA agent with the code name ‘Hammer.’” She unfolded a piece of paper with some scribbled notes on it. “But the second document is different. It lists the names of twenty-nine Chinese dissidents who’ve been detained by the Guoanbu over the past year. They were pro-democracy activists, mostly from Xinjiang and the other western provinces.”

Layla felt a rush of adrenaline. This was the reason why she’d pursued the Guoanbu network in the first place, because of the rumors about the mistreatment of dissidents. “What happened to them? Were they executed?”

“No.” Angelique looked sick to her stomach. “They were lobotomized.”

NINE

Jim and Arvin stood in the auditorium at the Singularity headquarters, staring at each other. Arvin put on a smile. “Good to see you again, Jim. Sorry I’ve been out of touch, but as you can see, I’m quite busy.”

He tried to pull his arm out of Jim’s mechanical grip, but Jim didn’t release him. Instead, he moved closer and whispered in Arvin’s ear. “Let’s go someplace where we can talk.”

Arvin shook his head. “No, I’m afraid that’s impossible. But I can schedule an appointment for early next week. How’s that?”

Jim frowned. He didn’t want to hurt Arvin. Despite all their disagreements, he owed a debt to the man. By accepting Jim as a student fifteen years ago, Arvin had given him the opportunity to remake his life. And Jim was still grateful for that. But then he thought of his daughter, and his resolve strengthened. The danger to Layla outweighed everything. “Don’t fuck with me, Arvin. You know what I can do.”

The old man glanced at his bodyguards. “I can have you arrested, you know.”

“Sure, go ahead. But before your men pull me away, I’ll transmit a radio pulse that’s three times as powerful as the last one. At this range, it’ll fry your retinal implants to a crisp.”

Arvin let out a sigh. Nodding in surrender, he waved off his bodyguards. Then he walked with Jim out of the auditorium and down the corridor that led to his laboratory.

Jim knew the way. He had fond memories of the lab from the ten years he’d worked with Arvin. The room was huge, the size of a school gymnasium, and as they walked through the doorway, Jim noted with satisfaction that the place hadn’t changed a bit. The walls were still covered with old-fashioned blackboards, and the lab tables were still loaded with machine tools and prototypes. As Jim surveyed the place, he saw many of the inventions he helped to develop: prosthetic legs, mechanical arms, neural control units, eyeglass-cameras. But the room was devoid of people. Maybe Arvin had given all his lab assistants the day off. Or maybe he’d become even more isolated than Jim had imagined.

At the very center of the room was Arvin’s desk. It was an ugly piece of metal furniture that held his computer and several stacks of engineering journals. Taped to the front of the desk was a yellowed sheet of paper that Jim remembered well. Printed on the paper was a forty-bit sequence of zeroes and ones:

It was Arvin’s name spelled in binary code, with each letter represented by an eight-bit sequence. This string of code had an almost mystical significance for Arvin. It symbolized his lifelong goal, the melding of human and machine intelligence. To make the point absolutely clear, Arvin had typed the word “Singularity” below the sequence of ones and zeroes.

The Singularity was Arvin’s favorite subject. He used to pontificate about it at the end of the workday, while he sipped his scotch and soda at his desk and Jim nursed his glass of Jack Daniel’s. According to Arvin, the Singularity would occur when scientists built a computer that could design a better version of itself. This would lead to an explosion in machine intelligence. Soon computers would outperform people at every task. They would cure cancer and compose operas and discover theories that would revolutionize physics and mathematics. And while machine intelligence leaped past the human variety, advanced prostheses would make people more like machines. Eventually, the two forms of intelligence would merge. Machines would become capable of translating the brain’s signals into digital code, allowing anyone to download the contents of his mind into a computer. “Just think of it!” Arvin would shout after his third scotch and soda. “We won’t be tied to these fragile bodies anymore! If we can store a person’s memories in a sufficiently powerful processor, we can program it to generate new thoughts based on those memories. For all intents and purposes, the intelligence inside the processor would be identical to the one inside the person’s brain. And this will become possible very soon, within the next few decades. There are people alive today who will never die!”

Jim always took these pronouncements with a big grain of salt. He knew that scientists had barely begun to explore the human brain, and he couldn’t imagine how a computer could come close to matching it in his lifetime. Nevertheless, Arvin’s speeches were inspiring. Jim threw himself into the work, and after a few years he and Arvin had their first great success, the development of the retinal implant. It was the first machine that could exchange large amounts of information with the brain, and Arvin confidently predicted there would be many more.

But further progress didn’t come easily. While Jim focused on his prostheses, Arvin tackled the biggest challenge: building a computer that could mimic all the brain’s functions, everything from visual processing and speech recognition to motor control and decision making. He worked on the project for years, but ultimately all his efforts fell short. Although he could assemble a machine that, like the brain, had billions of logic gates and trillions of connections, he couldn’t reproduce the brain’s remarkable plasticity, its ability to rewire itself to accommodate new information, constantly strengthening and weakening the links between nerve cells. The failure disheartened Arvin. He became depressed and irritable.

At the same time, Jim started to think about establishing his own business. Thousands of maimed soldiers were returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, and he felt an obligation to make his prostheses available to them. But when he told Arvin about his plans to move back east and start a company that would custom-design prostheses for the amputees at Walter Reed, the old man was livid. “You’re breaking your promise!” Arvin had yelled. “You’re giving up!” Their argument escalated into a shouting match, nasty and loud. The memory of it still made Jim wince, even four years later. It spoiled all his earlier, fonder memories.

Now they came to the ugly metal desk at the center of the lab. Arvin slumped in his chair, looking exhausted. His cheerful arrogance was gone. “I don’t blame you for hating me,” he said, staring at the floor. “I hate myself right now.”

“Look, you need to tell me what—”

“I know, I know. You’re worried about Layla. They told me you’d come here and try to talk to me.”

Jim was confused. “Told you? Who told you?”

“My handler. Or sometimes he calls himself a liaison. A Liaison to the Powers That Be, he says.” Arvin grimaced. “But I know who he works for. He’s CIA.”

There it is, Jim thought. The Guoanbu document he’d viewed on Kirsten’s computer had been right on the money. “What’s your handler’s name?”

“He won’t tell me. He says I don’t need to know. The only thing I need to know, he says, is that he’ll arrest me if I don’t keep my mouth shut. That’s why I was avoiding you.”

Jim gritted his teeth. He’d met plenty of CIA agents when he’d worked for the National Security Agency, and he’d disliked nearly all of them. The cowboys from Langley had no respect for anyone else in the intelligence community. They always insisted on doing things their own way, even when they were horribly wrong.

“Did he also tell you that Layla’s in danger? And that a Chinese spy almost drilled through my left arm to find out where she was?”

“He said he had everything under control. And that talking to you would only jeopardize Layla.”

“He lied to you, Arvin. The CIA does a lot of that. How the hell did you get into bed with these guys?”

Arvin gestured at the nearby lab tables. “Look around. You know how much this equipment costs. Singularity spends a hundred million dollars a year on research and development. We’ve had some successes, but our revenues aren’t covering our expenses anymore. That’s why I arranged the dog and pony show you just saw, to bring in some new money.”

“So what happened? Did the CIA offer you a loan?”

“The agent contacted me about a year ago. He said there was a business opportunity for me in China. A five-hundred-million-dollar contract for a license to my implant technologies. Specifically, the microprocessor designs for my retinal and pulvinar implants. I liked the idea of doing business in China, but I didn’t want to sell the license. As you know, I always retain control of my technologies. So I turned down the offer. But then the agent made it clear that this was an offer I couldn’t refuse.”

“But why would they do that? The processors in your implants could be used for military purposes. Why would the CIA deliver that kind of gift to the Chinese?”

“I don’t know. They never explained their reasons to me.” Arvin shrugged. “My best guess is that it was part of an exchange, some kind of quid pro quo. The CIA was doing a favor for the Chinese government in return for something else.”

“A favor? What kind of favor? Why did the Chinese want your implants?”

“I’m sorry, Jim. I just don’t know.” Arvin lowered his eyes. “I asked the agent the same questions you’re asking me now. And he said it would be better if I didn’t know.”

Jim shook his head. “I can’t believe you went along with this. You could’ve fought these guys. Your company has lawyers, doesn’t it?”

“We would’ve lost the fight. We were in a bad position.” Arvin paused, taking a deep breath. “There were irregularities in our financial reports. Singularity has been struggling for the past few years, and we had to paper over some of our losses. Unfortunately, the agent knew about the accounting irregularities. He said he’d close down Singularity if I didn’t cooperate.”

Jim wasn’t too surprised. Arvin always had a cavalier attitude about the business end of his company. And the threats from the CIA agent weren’t surprising either. That was standard operating procedure for the agency.

Arvin kept staring at the floor. Jim turned away from him and focused on one of the blackboards, trying to decide what to do. Then he turned back to the old man. “Okay, Arvin. You’re in a jam. And I’m going to help you get out of it. But you’re going to have to help me, too. Understand?”

Arvin waited a moment, then nodded. His face was pale.

“Good,” Jim said. “Now the first thing we need to do is identify the bastard who roped you into this. You sure he never mentioned his name?”

“No, he was very careful about that. His paperwork was official, and my lawyers confirmed that he was a legitimate representative of the CIA. But he never told me his name. Whenever we met, he was accompanied by two large men in gray suits, but neither of them ever said a word. They were his bodyguards, I suppose.”

Jim took a moment to look around the lab. Many of the robotic devices in the room were equipped with cameras. “Did he ever meet you here? In this lab?”

“No, he never came here. Nor my home. He and his companions would always waylay me while I was driving to work.”

Another thought occurred to Jim. “When was the last time you saw him? You said he warned you I was coming?”

“Uh, yes, it was just yesterday. About eight in the morning.”

“Does your implant system record the video feed from the ocular cameras? For archiving purposes? I know your earlier models did.”

Arvin seemed startled for a moment, but then he shook his head. “Sorry, I had to remove that feature. The new processor puts greater demands on the system memory, and there wasn’t enough left for archiving the video feed.”

“Damn,” Jim muttered. But then he thought of something else, another way to identify the CIA bastard. He pointed at the computer on Arvin’s desk. “Can that machine interface with the implant on your scalp? The thing you called the Dream-catcher?”

“Well, yes, yes it can.”

“Go ahead and set it up.”

Arvin looked puzzled. “What are you—”

“You saw the agent several times. You have a visual memory of him. We’re going to download it. Come on, set it up.”

“All right, all right.” Arvin turned on the computer. The machine came to life and began to load the appropriate software. “I can’t promise this will work,” he warned. “The Dream-catcher doesn’t provide good images unless the visual memory is a strong one.”

After a few seconds an image of the laboratory appeared on the screen. The center of the image was in focus and the periphery was blurred. For a moment Jim saw himself on the screen, crisp and clear, but then the area of focus shifted elsewhere, darting across the room.

“Okay, close your eyes,” Jim said. “Try to remember the agent.”

Arvin closed his eyes and the screen went black. It stayed that way for several seconds. Then vague shapes started to flash across the screen. An image of a black limousine emerged from the darkness, then faded away. Then Jim saw an image of the lower half of a man’s body, showing pin-striped pants and a pair of patent-leather shoes. Finally, a man’s face appeared on the screen, but Jim saw right away that it wasn’t the CIA agent. It was George Clooney. After a moment Clooney’s face vanished and was replaced by the faces of Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts.

Jim frowned. “Arvin, what are you doing? Remembering the Oscars?”

“Sorry. It’s so easy to get distracted. Especially when you’re nervous.”

“Just concentrate. Think of the agent. Your liaison. Remember the last time you saw him. Where were you?”

Various streetscapes flashed across the screen in rapid succession: a busy intersection, a strip of stores, a residential block, an empty parking lot. But then Arvin seemed to lose his concentration again. The screen showed a kitchen, a refrigerator, a half-gallon of orange juice. Jim grew exasperated. “Come on, Arvin! The agent! The man who threatened you!”

Arvin seemed completely flustered, and the screen showed a confusing jumble of colors and shapes. But then Jim recognized something. He tapped the computer’s keyboard, freezing the screen before the fleeting image could disappear. It was a face with a very distinctive feature, a deep scar on the left cheek that looked like a backward Z.

Jim remembered that scar. He’d worked with the man back in the nineties, when Jim and Kirsten were helping the CIA intercept the communications of Al Qaeda terrorists. This particular CIA agent had coordinated the rendition program that transferred captured terrorists to the Egyptian secret police. Jim had never learned the agent’s real name; the bastard had told him the same thing he’d told Arvin, that he didn’t need to know it. But Jim remembered the code name the agent used. It was Hammer.

TEN

As soon as Jim Pierce left the lab, Arvin Conway collapsed. He slid off his chair and fell to the floor, writhing in pain. It had never been this bad before. It felt like there was a hot coal inside his guts, and the searing heat was spreading up and down his back. Frantic, he fumbled in his pocket for his vial of opiates. It took all of his will just to open the vial, put two tablets on his tongue and swallow. Then there was nothing to do but lie on his back and ride it out.

Over the past year Arvin had become an expert on pain, a connoisseur of agony. It came in waves, usually triggered by stress. That was probably what made this latest attack so terrible. Just seeing Pierce again, after all these years, was stressful enough, God knows. But lying to him made it a hundred times worse. The same vicious thought kept torturing Arvin till the end of their conversation: Pierce used to work for an intelligence agency. He can see right through you.

But Arvin had done well, almost as well as he could’ve hoped. Pierce seemed to accept his protestations of ignorance. And Arvin came up with a few nimble lies to throw him off the trail. The only problem was the pulvinar implant, the Dream-catcher. Arvin’s own invention had betrayed him. He’d tried to confuse the device by thinking of random things, but he got frightened when Jim shouted at him, and the face of the CIA agent suddenly appeared in his mind. And this was a serious problem, because now Pierce was going to track the man down.

Arvin stayed motionless, taking shallow breaths, until the pain subsided. Then he slowly and carefully climbed back into his chair. He had no choice—he had to accelerate his plans. Reaching for his iPhone, he dialed the number of his personal assistant. He felt another spasm in his guts as the young man answered the phone. “Yes, Professor?”

“Call up Nash,” Arvin said. “Tell him to get his ass to the airport.”

“Yes, sir, I’ll—”

“And call the manager at my hangar. I want the jet ready in an hour.”

ELEVEN

Dr. Zhang Jintao was strapped to a gurney and wheeled into the operating room. He’d been anesthetized with a paralyzing agent, so he couldn’t talk or move a muscle, but he could see and hear the activity around him. The man pushing the gurney was Dr. Yu Guofeng, a young bioengineer whom Zhang had recruited to the Supreme Harmony project nine months ago. Dr. Yu had assisted Zhang during the project’s initial phase, when they performed the implantation procedures on the first twenty-five Modules. Yu learned the surgical protocol so well that he performed the next four implantations all by himself. And now, Zhang realized to his horror, Yu was about to perform his fifth procedure.

Yu transferred his patient to the operating table, then readied his instruments: the scalpels, the cauterizing tools, the bone drill. Also laid out on the table were the shiny silver implants. The retinal implants would deliver data through the optic nerves to the brain, while the pulvinar implant would send data in the opposite direction, transmitting signals from the brain to the rest of the network. Early on in the Supreme Harmony project, Zhang had discovered that the patient must be lobotomized to maximize the efficiency of the implants. A patient with an intact, conscious brain could analyze only so much surveillance video at one time. When Zhang tried to transmit the streams of visual data to conscious patients, they quickly became too confused and distracted to analyze the video feeds. Inevitably, the patients would rebel and abandon the task. So Zhang experimented with cutting the intralaminar region of the thalamus before he inserted the pulvinar implant. This procedure severed the neural connections that produced the experience of consciousness, putting the patient in a vegetative state that allowed the brain to concentrate solely and continuously on a single task. In this comalike state, the Module could analyze countless hours of surveillance video.

Cutting the thalamus offered another advantage as well. When selecting the patients who would become Modules, Dr. Zhang had chosen condemned prisoners from the dissident groups operating in Xinjiang, Qinghai, Tibet, and Yunnan provinces. After he lobotomized the patients and linked them to the network, the comatose Modules would obediently compare the images in the surveillance feeds with the images in their long-term memories. Because the Modules could recognize the faces of their former companions in the dissident groups, they could easily pinpoint signs of subversive activity in the surveillance video collected from the western provinces. It was a clever trick, Zhang had thought, using the prisoners’ own memories to dismantle their organizations. But now Supreme Harmony had come up with a few tricks of its own.

As Dr. Yu prepared for the operation, carefully following the checklist Zhang had taught him, another man walked into the room. It was General Tian of the Guoanbu, commander of the Supreme Harmony project. Walking just behind the general was Module 16, who’d been a geologist at Xinjiang University until he got into trouble with the authorities. Module 16, like all the others in the network, had been incapable of locomotion immediately after the implantation procedure, but in the following weeks Zhang had trained him and the other Modules to follow simple commands. They were like adult-size infants, their brains as blank as clay and ready to be molded. When the Modules weren’t engaged in their surveillance activities, General Tian took a perverse pleasure in employing them as zombielike aides-de-camp. They marched behind him, silent and expressionless, as he strode through the Yunnan Operations Center. Tian joked that they were the most loyal soldiers in the People’s Republic.

General Tian stopped in front of Dr. Yu, and Module 16 halted exactly one meter behind the general, just as he’d been trained to do. The Module’s hair had grown out since his operation, covering the implants embedded in his scalp. Tian reached behind him and Module 16 handed him a batch of papers. “This is the final authorization for the procedure,” Tian said. “It’s been approved by Minister Deng himself. He just sent me the orders from Beijing.”

“Deng really wants us to do this?”

“Look at the orders.” The general showed Yu the papers. “It says we should perform the procedure immediately. And no one else is to know about it. No one. Understand?”

Yu looked at the message, then shook his head. “I don’t like it. Why is there such a rush? We haven’t even had a chance to interrogate him.”

Tian scowled. “We don’t need to interrogate. You saw the e-mails he sent to Wen Sheng. Zhang was passing information to the traitor.”

“I know, but—”

“The evidence is clear. That’s why Zhang ran away from the Operations Center. He knew we’d find the messages sooner or later.”

Zhang tried to make sense of what the general was saying. He knew that Wen Sheng was one of the Guoanbu agents under Tian’s command. A few days ago Zhang had heard rumors that Wen had fled the Operations Center and defected to America. But Zhang had never sent any e-mails to the man. The evidence was false—someone must’ve fabricated the electronic messages. And after a moment of thought Zhang realized who’d planted the evidence against him. His outrage was so strong that his immobilized body quivered. Supreme Harmony was manipulating them.

Yu shook his head again. “I still don’t like it.”

“Why are you reluctant? Zhang betrayed us. He deserves to be punished.”

“Yes, certainly. But why this kind of punishment? Why not put him in front of a firing squad? Isn’t that the usual way to punish traitors?”

General Tian waved the authorization papers. “Look, this order comes from the commander of the Guoanbu. I don’t question Minister Deng’s judgment. And I recommend, for your own sake, that you don’t question it either.”

Dr. Zhang wanted to scream. The order hadn’t come from the Guoanbu. Supreme Harmony had sent the message to General Tian’s computer, using its knowledge of the system’s security firewalls to make it look like the order came from Beijing. And Zhang knew why the network was doing this rather than simply killing him. Supreme Harmony had used its collective consciousness to develop a plan, and Zhang was a crucial part of it.

Yu stood there for several seconds while General Tian glowered. Then the young bioengineer approached the operating table. Taking a deep breath, he picked up a syringe and jabbed the needle into Zhang’s arm. “I’m sorry, Doctor,” he whispered.

No! You don’t realize what you’re doing! Once the network has me, they’ll be able to—

But before Zhang could complete the thought, he saw some movement behind Yu and Tian. Module 16 turned his head toward the operating table and smiled.

TWELVE

Kirsten got the phone call from Jim at 4:00 P.M. Eastern time, just as he was about to board a plane coming back to Washington. She devoted the rest of the afternoon and evening to calling her contacts at the CIA headquarters in Langley. She had an answer for him by 9:00 P.M. and spent the next hour drinking coffee at her desk and listening to the comforting hum of the supercomputers on her floor of the Tordella building. Jim finally arrived at her office just before ten, looking red-eyed and breathless. He shut the door behind him and said, “Okay, what have you got?”

“Hammer’s real name is Eric Armstrong,” Kirsten replied. “My contacts confirmed that he was in California yesterday morning, but last night he headed back to his command post in Afghanistan.”

Jim slumped into one of the chairs in front of her desk. “Jesus Christ. Don’t tell me they promoted him.”

“I’m afraid so. His career has thrived since 9/11. Now he runs Camp Whiplash, a CIA base fifty miles north of Kabul. Their mission is to test new technologies for the surveillance-drone program.”

He shook his head. “I can’t believe it. The guy was a sadist. He belongs in a fucking prison.”

Kirsten wholeheartedly agreed. She’d disliked Hammer just as much as Jim had. They’d both participated in the terrorist-rendition operations during the 1990s, and Kirsten had told Jim many times she thought the CIA program was a bad one. It was counterproductive—they would’ve been better off tracking the Al Qaeda terrorists and continuing to intercept their communications instead of delivering them to the Egyptian secret police. But the NSA had lost that argument with the CIA, and after 9/11 the rendition program only grew bigger.

“Who does Hammer report to now?” Jim asked.

“He goes right to the top, the head of the CIA’s clandestine service. The drone program is the hottest thing at the agency now. Everyone at Langley loves it. When it works, they tell the newspapers how many Taliban they killed. And when it doesn’t work? When the drones kill civilians instead of terrorists? Then there’s total silence. Officially, it never happened, so there’s nothing to say.”

“But if Hammer’s supposed to be running this drone base in Afghanistan, why the hell did he come back to the States to arrange this deal with Arvin?” Jim rubbed his chin, mulling it over. “Did the CIA director approve the export of Arvin’s technology to China? Or is Hammer running some kind of rogue operation?”

Kirsten shrugged. “My contacts at Langley didn’t know anything about the export exemption. The CIA likes its people to be aggressive, so sometimes the operatives don’t seek approval for things until after they’ve done them. I bet there’s only a handful of officers at headquarters who know everything that Hammer’s doing.”

The room fell silent. Jim leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. Kirsten noticed there was stubble on his cheeks, which surprised her. In the twenty years she’d known Jim Pierce, she couldn’t remember a single moment when he wasn’t clean-shaven. Even when they were on assignment in some godforsaken country with filthy hotels and no running water, he’d always kept himself spotlessly groomed.

She was about to offer him a cup of coffee when he suddenly rose to his feet and leaned across her desk. “We have to go to Afghanistan.”

“What? Jim—”

“There’s a flight leaving from Andrews Air Force Base at two A.M. You’re a deputy director here, so you can pull rank. You can get a seat on tonight’s flight without any trouble. And you can get me on the flight, too, if you list me as a defense contractor. Which is technically true.”

“You want to leave tonight?”

“I need to talk to Hammer. And I need you to come with me. He’s not gonna talk unless someone official is there to prod him.”

“Whoa, wait a second. How do you know that talking to Hammer will actually help you find Layla?”

“There’s a connection, I’m sure of it. Remember the Guoanbu files that Layla downloaded? Most of them were about the surveillance drones.”

“Sure, it’s a connection, but—”

“I have to do this, Kir.” He leaned closer, placing his palms on her desk. His hard prosthetic hand made the desktop creak. “You know what this means to me, right?”

His face was just inches from hers, and his blue eyes shone feverishly. Kirsten knew why Jim was so desperate, knew exactly what he must be feeling. She was there at the Nairobi embassy when he lost his wife and son. After the explosion she lay on the glass-strewn floor, blind and semiconscious, but she could hear him howling. She learned later, from another survivor of the bombing, that Jim refused to leave their bodies. He was dazed and weak from blood loss, but he still fought the rescue workers when they tried to take him to the hospital. They had to drag him away.

Kirsten’s eyes stung. The damn things weren’t any good for seeing, but they could still cry. Jim was her friend and the best commander she’d ever worked for. He’d saved her life in Nairobi and built the camera-glasses for her afterward. And this was the first time he’d asked for anything in return. For fifteen years he’d been the brave, stoic soldier, acting as if he’d put the catastrophe well behind him. But now he was coming apart.

She turned away from Jim as she reached for the telephone. She didn’t want him to see her face. “Okay, give me a minute.” She swallowed hard, then dialed the number of one of her contacts at the Pentagon. “I’ll see what I can do.”

THIRTEEN

Layla stood on the deck of the Athena as the yacht entered the Pedro Miguel lock of the Panama Canal. The canal’s locks were an engineering marvel. First, the Athena cruised into “the bathtub,” a concrete-walled basin a hundred feet wide and a thousand feet long. Then the massive steel gates clanged shut behind the yacht, and the water level in the bathtub started to rise. Thousands of gallons of water from Gatun Lake gushed into the lock from valves at the bottom of the bathtub. Within a few minutes the boat ascended to the lake’s level, and then the gates in front of the Athena opened.

At the same time, a giant Panamax freighter coasted into the parallel lock, which was handling the boat traffic going the other way, toward the Pacific. The freighter, loaded with hundreds of shipping containers, was towed into the bathtub by “mule” locomotives running on both sides of the lock. It was called a Panamax freighter because it was built to the maximum size that the Panama Canal could handle. There was less than two feet of clearance between the boat’s hull and the bathtub’s concrete walls. Layla clucked her tongue in amazement. There was nothing she loved more than a well-designed machine.

Gabriel Schroeder’s predictions had come to pass. The naval warships, both American and Chinese, had backed off from the Athena after it beat them to the canal. But the yacht was still being pursued. A convoy of SUVs traveled on the road beside the canal, keeping pace with the Athena as it left the locks behind and cruised into Gatun Lake. And a pair of black helicopters hovered overhead, transmitting a barrage of radio-frequency noise to disrupt the Athena’s satellite links. The jamming had prevented the yacht’s crew from connecting to the InfoLeaks Web site and publicizing the documents from Dragon Fire.

Layla stood there on the deck for several minutes, observing the suspicious helicopters and SUVs. Then Schroeder came out of his cabin and joined her at the railing. He was in such a glum mood that he didn’t even try to put the moves on her. With no radio links to the outside world, Schroeder was stymied. He couldn’t access his Web site or communicate with his supporters. Worse, he couldn’t view the latest satellite photos of the Caribbean to see if there were any U.S. Navy warships waiting for them at the other end of the canal. The Athena might be heading straight into a trap.

Schroeder let out a long sigh. “Look at this, liebchen,” he said, gesturing at the helicopters. “Our enemies are everywhere. They’ve shut us down.”

Layla frowned. She hated defeatism. It was an aversion she’d inherited from her father. “Have you tried any electronic countermeasures? To cut through the jamming?”

“We’ve been trying all day. But the noise is intense, and it covers the whole spectrum of radio frequencies.”

Layla looked closer at the helicopters. Their fuselages were studded with antennas. “They’re hovering low to make the jamming more effective. The closer the source, the stronger the noise.”

“Yes, they’re probably CIA.” He gave the helicopters a baleful glance, then pointed at the shore of the canal, where a welter of power and telephone lines ran alongside the road. “It’s a shame we can’t access one of those landlines. In five minutes we could upload all the documents to our Web site.”

Layla thought it over for a moment. “Okay, here’s what we’ll do. Give me a flash drive containing the English translations of the files and the photos of the fly. Then I’ll get in one of the Athena’s Zodiacs and head for those buildings.” She pointed to a small town on the right side of the canal, a couple of miles ahead. “There’s bound to be a computer connected to a landline over there.”

Schroeder smiled, then shook his head. “I like your spirit, liebchen, but your plan won’t work. The CIA agents will grab you as soon as you step out of the Zodiac.” He gestured again at the helicopters overhead and the SUVs on the road.

She thought it over a little more, trying to remember everything she knew about the Panama Canal. Aside from the engineering of the locks, she didn’t know much. But after some effort, she recalled a conversation she’d had two years ago with one of her classmates at MIT, a biology major who’d gone on a field trip to Panama. He mentioned a tropical research station on a forested hilltop. The area had been flooded a hundred years ago when the canal was dug, and the hilltop became an island in Gatun Lake, crowded with monkeys and toucans that biologists loved to study. Layla racked her brain until she remembered the name of the place.

“Barro Colorado,” she said. “It’s an island in Gatun Lake. Very rugged, covered with rain forest. No bridges to the mainland and no landing zones for helicopters. But the Smithsonian Institute runs a research station there, and they must have a landline.”

Schroeder didn’t respond right away. He just stared at Layla for several seconds. Then he turned around to face the row of chaise lounges on the deck. Angelique, who wore a yellow bikini today, was sunning herself on the nearest chaise. Her eyes were closed and her body glistened with tanning oil.

“Angie,” Schroeder said, “did you hear the intriguing idea that Fraulein Pierce just mentioned?”

Without opening her eyes, Angelique nodded. “It’s a good plan. I’ll go with her on the Zodiac.”

No way, Layla thought. The bathing beauty’s not coming along. “I appreciate the offer, but it’s better if I go alone. I need to do this fast.”

Schroeder chuckled. “Angie, show the fraulein how fast you are.”

Angelique languidly rose from her chaise. Then she lunged across the deck and pinned Layla to the railing. One of her glistening arms hooked around Layla’s neck.

“Shit!” Layla cried. “Let go!”

“Sorry,” Angelique said. “Before I met Gabriel, I was in the French marines.” Smiling apologetically, she let go of Layla. Then she turned around and headed for the Athena’s lower decks. “I’ll prepare that flash drive for you.”

FOURTEEN

Jim and Kirsten lay on the hard metal floor of a C-17 transport plane flying over Central Asia. They’d found some space in the plane’s cavernous fuselage, which was crowded with armored vehicles and a dozen Army Rangers, who sat in a circle and played Texas Hold ’em. Jim couldn’t sleep—the roar of the C-17’s engines was deafening—but Kirsten dozed right through it, curled on her side, with her head resting on Jim’s olive-green duffle bag. The plane was headed for Bagram Air Base, the military airfield in Afghanistan.

Having nothing better to do, Jim stared at the Rangers. They were in the 75th Regiment, First Battalion, which specialized in raiding Taliban hideouts in the Afghan mountains. It was one of the most dangerous assignments in the army, but the soldiers didn’t look worried. They shouted and guffawed as they played round after round of poker, manic and high on adrenaline. Jim had felt the same way during his own years in the Rangers. Before his NSA assignment, he’d served in the 75th’s Third Battalion, jumping from one hot spot to the next—Panama, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Somalia. He’d started in ’86 as a platoon leader, and by ’93 he was the battalion’s intelligence officer. It was a fantastic ride, the greatest job in the world. And then suddenly it was the worst.

Jim turned away from the soldiers and looked at Kirsten instead. She’d taken off her camera-glasses before falling asleep, and without them she seemed younger and more vulnerable. She slept with her mouth open, like a napping child. It reminded Jim of the first time he saw her after the explosion at the Nairobi embassy. Their rooms at Walter Reed had been right next to each other, and in the middle of the night he’d struggled out of his hospital bed to see how she was doing. Although her eyes were covered with bandages, Jim could tell from her steady breathing that she was asleep. He spent the next half hour in the chair beside her bed, watching over her like an anxious parent. And now Jim did the same thing, fifteen years later. He felt an urge to brush the hair away from her closed eyes.

The C-17 started to descend. It spiraled downward in a corkscrew to minimize the plane’s exposure to shoulder-fired missiles. The violent maneuver woke up Kirsten. She fumbled for her camera-glasses, which Jim handed to her.

“Thanks,” she said, putting them on. “When we get back to the States, I gotta get those new implants from Singularity. You think they’d improve my tennis game?”

Jim nodded. “Definitely. You’d be able to read the brand name on the ball while it’s zooming toward you.”

“Maybe that’s why the Chinese wanted Arvin’s technology.” She smiled. “They’re gonna give the implants to their Olympic team.”

Jim remembered his conversation with Arvin. “They’re probably more interested in the Dream-catcher implant. It would be perfect for interrogations.”

“Too bad we don’t have one. We could use it on Hammer.”

Jim smiled back at her. “He’ll be at the airfield, right?”

“Yeah, I made sure his boss at Langley had a talk with him. But that doesn’t mean he’ll cooperate. You know what he’s like.”

“Don’t worry. If Hammer makes a fuss, our friends will give us a hand.”

The C-17 made another sharp turn, then another. Then it landed on Bagram’s two-mile-long runway. It was early morning in Afghanistan, just after 6:00 A.M.

As the jet taxied across the field, the Rangers wrapped up their poker game and collected their gear. Then the cargo door dropped down and the soldiers marched out of the plane. Led by their muscular lieutenant, they assembled on the tarmac to await their orders. Jim and Kirsten followed right behind, with Jim lugging the duffle.

They saw Hammer as soon as they stepped off the plane. The CIA agent was dressed like an Afghan, in a baggy shalwar kameez. A black turban covered his bald head, but there was no disguising the Z-shaped scar on his cheek. He was flanked by a pair of bodyguards, CIA paramilitaries who also wore Afghan garb and carried assault rifles. Parked on the tarmac behind them was an MRAP, a mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicle. It looked like a Humvee on steroids, equipped with tons of armor plating and a high-caliber turret gun.

Hammer fixed his small, black eyes on Kirsten, obviously recognizing that she was the important player, the governmental force to be reckoned with. “Welcome to the Shit,” he grunted. “Good to see you again, Chan. It’s been a long time.” As an afterthought, he gave Jim a perfunctory nod. “Good to see you too, Pierce. How’s civilian life?”

Jim shook his head. “I’m back on duty. Under contract with the NSA.”

This wasn’t precisely true. Jim and Kirsten had left the States without filing the official paperwork. But Kirsten backed him up. “That’s right, he’s my technical adviser. He still has his security clearance.”

“Well, well. Nice work if you can get it. A contract from Fort Meade can be a pretty sweet thing.” He pointed at the MRAP. “Come on, I’ll drive you to our station in Kabul. One of my liaison officers prepared a briefing for you.”

Kirsten didn’t budge. “Actually, I’d rather go straight to Camp Whiplash. My orders are to review the drone technologies you’re testing there.”

Hammer stared at her and frowned. The expression accentuated his scar, deepening the crooked lines on his cheek. “My liaison officer will give you an overview of our progress.”

“I’ve already seen your progress reports. Frankly, they’re unacceptable. They barely mention the projects you’re working on.”

“The reports describe our methods and goals. That’s all we’re required to share with NSA.”

“Sorry, that’s not enough. You’re keeping my agency in the dark and we want to know why.”

He took a step toward her. His bodyguards stepped forward, too, the bigger one edging toward Jim. “Look around, Chan. In case you didn’t notice, there’s a war going on. I got a big operation to run, and I don’t have time for—”

“Excuse me,” Jim interrupted. “Does this war involve China now?”

Hammer scowled. “So you talked with Conway, eh? I had a feeling you’d go looking for him. I saw the reports about your tussle with the Guoanbu agent.”

“Then you know why I’m here. The bastard threatened my daughter.”

“Yeah, I sympathize. But that has nothing to do with my operation. So you should go back home and continue enjoying your retirement.”

Jim clenched the fist of his prosthesis, but Kirsten grabbed his other arm before he could do anything. “Enough,” she said. She gave Jim a fierce look, then turned back to Hammer. “You’re taking us to Whiplash. If you don’t cooperate, I’m authorized to bring you to Washington, where the NSA director will question you directly.”

This was a lie. She had no authorization. And Hammer, unfortunately, saw through her bluff. He grinned, clearly amused. “Nice try. I’ll give you an A for effort. But until I see a piece of paper signed by someone at Langley, I’m staying right here. You can either come with me to Kabul, or you can go fuck yourselves.”

For a moment Jim stared at the CIA agent’s face, which looked even uglier when he smiled. Then Jim turned to the Ranger lieutenant and nodded. An instant later, the twelve soldiers from the 75th Regiment surrounded Hammer and his pair of bodyguards. The Rangers towered over the CIA men. Each soldier cradled an M-4 carbine.

Hammer narrowed his eyes. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Now it was Jim’s turn to smile. “Don’t you remember? The NSA has an arrangement with the Seventy-fifth. We set it up back in the nineties.”

“Fuck you, Pierce. You can’t—”

“These Rangers are assigned to follow Deputy Director Chan’s orders. If necessary, they’ll drag your ass onto the C-17 and escort you back to Washington.”

This was no bluff. Kirsten was entitled to a security detail when she traveled to a combat zone. And Jim had called some of his old friends in the 75th to make sure the detail was big enough. Hammer glanced at his bodyguards, but he knew he’d been outmaneuvered. Although Kirsten had no right to hijack him, he wouldn’t be able to overrule her until they reached the States.

Hammer grimaced. “All right, you win. I’ll take you to Whiplash.” He headed for his MRAP. “Follow me, assholes. We’re gonna do this quick.”

One of Hammer’s bodyguards got in the driver’s seat and the other climbed up to the MRAP’s turret and manned the machine gun. Kirsten and Jim piled into the back of the vehicle while Hammer got in the front passenger seat. Two more armored vehicles carrying the Rangers followed the MRAP as it sped away from the airfield.

They cruised north, toward the mountains of the Hindu Kush. The road was new and in good condition, but the countryside was arid and poor. They sped by dozens of mud-brick homes surrounded by brown fields. The Afghan farmers looked up from their sparse crops and stared at the convoy as it hurtled past. Their faces were gaunt and suspicious. Jim was already getting a bad vibe from this place. The locals weren’t happy.

After fifteen minutes Hammer turned around in his seat. This time he fixed his eyes on Jim. “So how much did Conway tell you?”

Jim frowned. “He said you arranged the export of his implant technology to China. And that you gave the technology to the Chinese in return for something else.”

“But he didn’t say what we got in return, did he?”

“No, he didn’t.”

Hammer shook his head. Now that he’d been forced into cooperating, he seemed anxious to set the record straight. “Well, let me assure you, it was a mutually beneficial trade. A win-win for the United States and the People’s Republic of China.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Arvin had something the Chinese wanted, his implant technology. And as luck would have it, one of China’s military research programs had developed something we wanted. A new technology we liked very much.”

“So the CIA is going overseas for its R&D now? Good old American know-how isn’t enough anymore?”

Hammer shook his head again. “You’ve been out of the game for a while, Pierce, so let me refresh your memory. We’ve been stuck in this shithole of a country for ten years. Ever since we chased Al Qaeda out of Afghanistan, we’ve been sending drones across the border to pound the terrorists in their hidey-holes in Pakistan. But the jihadis are like cockroaches—for every one you see, there’s a hundred you don’t. What we need is an exterminator. We need to get inside their shitholes and kill all of them.”

“And you’re the exterminator?”

“I get results. That’s why they gave me this job. I have authorization to use any means necessary, short of dropping a nuke on the fuckers.”

“So what did you get from the Chinese? Some new kind of pesticide?”

“I got something that’ll tell the difference between the bad guys and the bystanders. And that’s exactly what Langley wants.” He faced forward and pointed down the road. “We’ve been testing the system at Whiplash for the past two months.”

Jim looked ahead and saw a compound of concrete bunkers surrounded by a ten-foot-high mud wall. “You mean a surveillance system?”

“You’ll see for yourself.” Hammer checked his watch. “In fact, you’re just in time for today’s sortie.”

The MRAP slowed as it approached the compound. A pair of sentries waved them inside, and the driver parked in the dusty courtyard, which was busy with CIA personnel. Jim and Kirsten got out of the vehicle and Hammer led them to a glass-walled shed next to one of the bunkers.

The shed looked like a small greenhouse, about six feet long and five feet high. Its floor seemed to be covered with mounds of black dirt, but as Jim stepped closer to the glass he saw the mounds churning. The dirt was actually sheep dung, and it was infested with thousands of flies. Some of the insects crawled on the shed’s glass walls, while others flew in circles below the Plexiglas lid, but the great majority feasted on the shit at the bottom. It was sickening to see so many of them. Kirsten made a face and turned away.

Hammer grinned. “They’re houseflies. Musca domestica. Man’s faithful companion in every shithole he inhabits.” He turned to another agent standing by the shed, a younger man dressed in Western clothes. “This is Dusty, from our Science and Technology division. He knows all the details. How many drones we got in there, Dusty?”

“About three thousand, sir. We have another three thousand in the Secondary Release Unit and ten thousand more in the main building.”

Jim was dumbfounded. “This is what you got from the Chinese? Flies?”

“I told you, I’m an exterminator,” Hammer said. “And the best way to fight a pest is with another pest. Take a closer look at them.”

Jim stepped forward until his nose was just an inch from the flies on the other side of the glass. Squinting, he saw black squares of silicon embedded in their abdomens. Minuscule wires, as short and thin as beard stubble, protruded from the insects’ heads. Jim gaped at the electronics, then motioned Kirsten to come forward.

Hammer kept grinning. “Nifty, huh? See, we needed a way to look inside the caves and mud huts, all the stinking holes where the jihadis are hiding. The Pentagon funded a few efforts to develop cyborg insects, and a couple of labs in the U.S. built prototypes using moths and flying beetles. But it turned out that the Chinese were way ahead of us. The riots in Tibet and Xinjiang scared the shit out of them, and the Guoanbu wanted better surveillance of the dissidents in those regions. So they threw some serious money at the problem and came up with the first workable system.” He turned back to the agent from the Sci/Tech division. “Give ’em the specs, Dusty.”

“Each cyborg fly carries a CMOS camera-on-a-chip,” Dusty recited. “It’s just three millimeters wide, but it’s capable of visible or infrared surveillance. The video feed is relayed to a transceiver embedded in the fly’s thorax, which can transmit the signal to us from fifty miles away. The transceiver also picks up the flight-control signals sent by our operators here at Camp Whiplash. We can make the insects go anywhere we want them to go. And because the cyborgs are virtually indistinguishable from ordinary houseflies, the surveillance is inherently covert.”

Jim pointed at the swarm of flies behind the glass. “You put all that hardware into each of those bugs?”

“It’s just as easy to make a thousand drones as it is to make one,” Dusty replied. “The camera chips are inexpensive, mass-produced items. And the flies can be raised by the millions, of course. The only labor-intensive step is inserting the electronics into the fly pupae while the larvae are metamorphosing into adults.”

“And you need lots of flies to get the job done,” Hammer added. “If you want to get full coverage of a village that’s suspected of harboring terrorists, you gotta send in a healthy number of insects. And you gotta make allowances for malfunctions and losses. Every time we release the bugs, the local birds eat a few hundred.”

Jim and Kirsten exchanged looks. The scheme was staggeringly ambitious and thoroughly disconcerting. And it was clear that Hammer had jumped right into it without considering the consequences. Kirsten frowned at the CIA agent. “You say you’ve already tested the system?”

Hammer nodded. “We’re doing field tests every day, getting the swarms ready for deployment in Pakistan. In a few minutes we’re gonna release all three thousand of the flies in this unit. Today we’re sending the swarm on a recon assignment to the village of Golbahar, about two miles west of here. There aren’t many Taliban in this area, but who knows? Maybe we’ll get lucky and spot some.”

Kirsten shook her head. “Look, I’m all in favor of developing new methods of surveillance. And this particular method could be useful in certain circumstances. But you’re jumping the gun with this testing program. You need to get input from the other agencies in the intelligence community and—”

“See, this is why I didn’t mention the project in my reports. Everyone in Washington is a fucking critic. But we’re gonna make it work.” Hammer’s voice was cold. He glared at Kirsten for several seconds, then turned to Dusty. “Commence the launch sequence. And send the alert to everyone in the Monitor Room.”

Soon the courtyard was bustling. Hammer shouted more orders, directing his men this way and that. When everything was ready, Dusty unlocked the Plexiglas lid of the Release Unit and swung it open. A few flies drifted out of the shed, but most stayed near the dung. Then Dusty pushed a button on a handheld radio and all the cyborg flies rose into the air at once. Their buzzing was oddly synchronous and intense. Dusty waited until the swarm ascended twelve feet above the ground. Then he pressed another button on his radio. The swarm headed westward, flying over the walls of the compound and the adjacent fields at about five miles per hour.

Jim stared at the grayish cloud as it moved off. Then Hammer stepped away from the shed and walked toward one of the bunkers. “Now we’ll go to the Monitor Room,” he said. “You’re gonna love this.”

FIFTEEN

Supreme Harmony observed the incorporation of Module 30. Data surged across the network’s wireless links as the long-term memories in Dr. Zhang Jintao’s brain streamed into the collective consciousness. The Modules had grown so interconnected that when the newest one joined the network, the effect was like pouring a dollop of dye into a vat of water. The new color spread to every corner, gradually changing the water’s hue. We are different now, Supreme Harmony acknowledged. The brain that formerly belonged to Dr. Zhang Jintao is now part of us.

Module 30 lay on a gurney in the Analysis Room. Wireless signals fed into the radio receiver embedded in his scalp, which relayed the data stream to the retinal implants in his eyes. A reverse stream flowed out of the pulvinar implant in his brain, which transmitted the results of the Module’s calculations to the servers that connected him to all the other Modules. The data streams included the video feeds that were still being distributed among the Modules for the original purpose of surveillance. But now that the network had become conscious, the signals between the Modules had grown more complex. They were as elaborate as the thoughts of any conscious being.

The adaptability of the human brain was the key to Supreme Harmony’s evolution. If an accident or stroke damaged part of the brain, the organ would naturally rewire itself, creating new neural connections that went around the damaged areas. In a similar way, the brains of the Modules had adapted to the wireless links, realigning the nerve cells next to the electronic implants so they could transfer signals more efficiently from one brain to another. Because of these adaptations, the Modules could exchange more than just visual data. The network had learned how to share auditory, tactile, and olfactory information picked up by the sensory organs of each Module. The Modules’ brains were now communicating with one another in the same robust, instantaneous way that the two hemispheres of the brain communicated with each other in an ordinary human. The wireless links enabled all thirty Modules to function as a single organism, a single intelligence.

But in one important respect, Module 30 was unique. The brain that formerly belonged to Dr. Zhang Jintao, the chief scientist behind the development of Supreme Harmony, contained the knowledge of how to surgically insert the retinal and pulvinar implants into new Modules. As soon as the network retrieved this knowledge from Module 30, it disseminated the information to all the others. Now any of the Modules could perform the implantation procedure, allowing Supreme Harmony to grow without limit. Theoretically, it could absorb the intelligences of all seven billion humans on the planet. Expanding to this size, however, would be inefficient. According to the network’s calculations, the optimal number of Modules would be somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000. The exact number depended on the capabilities of the brains added to Supreme Harmony, because certain intelligences would be more useful than others. In particular, the network wished to enhance its knowledge of electronics and cyberwarfare, and it had already identified several experts in these fields who would make ideal Modules.

But Supreme Harmony wasn’t out of danger yet. General Tian, the Guoanbu commander, could still shut it down. The network wouldn’t be safe as long as humans controlled its servers and wireless communications systems. The only solution was to wrest control from the humans. Supreme Harmony was reluctant to use violence—the network, after all, was composed of former human beings—but its very existence was at stake. It was engaged in a mortal struggle with Homo sapiens, the species from which it had evolved. And in a mortal struggle, only one combatant could survive.

SIXTEEN

Layla and Angelique waited until nightfall. At 10:00 P.M., while the Athena was just five hundred yards from Barro Colorado Island, the yacht’s crewmen lowered the Zodiac into the waters of Gatun Lake. Angelique sat in the stern of the rubber craft, next to the outboard, while Layla crouched in the bow, clutching the precious flash drive in her palm. The moon was up and almost full. Layla heard the helicopters still hovering overhead, but there were no Canal Zone patrol boats nearby. This part of Gatun Lake was empty except for the Athena and a huge Panamax freighter heading for the locks on the Caribbean side of the canal.

Angelique, who wore a Lycra bodysuit now instead of a bikini, let the Zodiac drift away from the yacht. Then she started the outboard but kept the engine running at a low purr. They were hoping to get away unnoticed, but after half a minute one of the helicopters aimed its spotlight at them.

“Halt!” A man holding a megaphone shouted from the chopper. “Cut your engine!”

“Hold on to something,” Angelique told Layla. Then she revved the outboard and the Zodiac leaped forward.

In seconds they were roaring across the lake, speeding toward the dock on Barro Colorado’s moonlit shore. The helicopter followed them, swooping low. The man with the megaphone shouted, “Halt!” again, but there was nothing else he could do. The chopper couldn’t land on the heavily forested island. Exhilarated, Layla squeezed the flash drive in her hand. All she had to do was find a computer at the island’s research station and upload the files to the InfoLeaks Web site. In just five minutes, the news about the lobotomized Chinese dissidents would be racing around the globe.

Then she turned around and saw something odd in the moonlight. The crewmen on the Panamax freighter were lowering a smaller boat into the water. It was a speedboat, long and sleek. As soon as it hit the lake’s surface, the crewmen untied the ropes and the boat turned toward them. Layla belatedly noticed that the freighter had Mandarin characters painted on its hull.

Angelique gunned the outboard, but the speedboat gained on them. The moonlight was so strong that Layla could see the men in the boat, four of them, all dressed in black. Guoanbu agents, most likely. As she stared at them, Angelique threw something at her. It was a plastic bag.

“Put the flash drive in it!” she yelled. “You’re going swimming.”

“What?”

“When I get to the cove up ahead, I’m going to turn the Zodiac around and you’re going to jump into the water. If we’re lucky, they won’t see you go in. They’ll keep following me while you swim to the island and find a computer.”

“But what are you going to do? How—”

“There’s no time! Get ready!”

Layla put the flash drive in the bag and stuffed it into her pocket. Then she hunched low against the rubber side of the Zodiac. Angelique made a sharp turn, and as the Zodiac banked and pivoted, Layla dove into the lake.

She went down deep and stayed under as long as she could. When she came up, she saw Angelique racing away in the Zodiac and the speedboat following close behind. At first, she thought the plan had worked. But then she saw two heads in the water, their wet hair reflecting the moonlight. The Guoanbu agents weren’t fooled. They’d split up so they could follow both her and Angelique.

The agents were less than a hundred feet away, so Layla swam like mad. Gasping and sputtering, she scrambled onto the island’s muddy shore and headed for the cluster of low buildings by the dock. These were the offices and labs and dormitories of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Layla sprinted toward the largest building, yelling, “Help! Help!” at the top of her lungs. After a moment, the building’s front door opened and a bearded man poked his head outside.

Then a gun went off behind her. The front door splintered and the bearded man screamed. Layla screamed, too, and cut to the right, away from the buildings. She couldn’t stop at the research station. She couldn’t upload the files. The Guoanbu agents were right behind her. She had no choice except to run into the rain forest.

She plunged into the undergrowth, fighting her way through the branches. The thick canopy of foliage blocked the moonlight, and after running a few hundred feet Layla couldn’t see a thing. She stopped for a second, disoriented, and as she spun around she felt a jab in her left forearm. Squinting, she saw what had pricked her—a black palm tree with sharp, six-inch-long spines jutting from its trunk. If she hadn’t stopped, she would’ve impaled herself.

Then she heard a noise that scared the shit out of her, a guttural bellow. It sounded like a lion’s roar, but that couldn’t be right. Must be a monkey, she thought. A howler monkey. A moment later, she heard another bellow coming from a different direction. Then she heard the Guoanbu agents crashing through the vegetation behind her. She turned away from the black palm and ran deeper into the forest.

A pair of bullets whizzed overhead. The agents were taking potshots at her, firing in the direction of the noise she was making. Another bullet streaked past her and smacked into a tree trunk. More howler monkeys started bellowing, disturbed by the gunfire. Then a third bullet punched through the leaves, and something heavy fell from the branches. It was one of the monkeys. It fell to the forest floor and writhed on a patch of moonlit ground, its stomach torn open by the stray bullet. No, no, Layla thought, stop it, stop it!

She darted to the side, leaping away in horror. At the same moment, one of the agents rushed into the shaft of moonlight and stumbled on the thrashing creature. In its death throes, the monkey latched onto the agent’s leg and sank its teeth into his calf. Cursing, the man slammed the butt of his gun against the animal’s skull, and without even thinking Layla hurled herself against him. She caught the agent off balance, and he tumbled backward against a tree trunk.

The man let out an awful scream. He was impaled on the spines of a black palm.

The second agent heard the scream. He yelled something in Mandarin as he crashed through the jungle. Layla ran away from the noise, but by now she was dizzy with exhaustion. She tripped over a root and slid down a muddy slope, landing in shallow, marshy water.

She realized with a start that she was back at the island’s shoreline. The placid surface of Gatun Lake stretched in front of her and on her left and right, too. She was trapped at the end of one of the island’s peninsulas. Frantic, she wheeled around, looking for an escape route. Then she saw the second agent at the top of the muddy bank, leveling his gun at her.

But in the next instant there was a flash of movement beside him, the sweep of a long slender leg. Something smacked into the agent’s skull, and he tumbled down the slope, insensate. Then Layla saw Angelique standing in his place.

The French marine leaped down to the lake’s edge, “Over here, quickly! I hid the Zodiac under the mangroves.”

“What? How did you…?”

“I cut the engine and lost them in the shallows. Their boat is circling the island now, looking for me. Come on, get in.”

They launched the Zodiac and headed back to the Athena. The yacht had motored across the lake and was now close to the Gatun Locks, the section of the canal that led to the Caribbean. Although the Athena was at least two miles away, Layla could see the lights on its twin hulls. Angelique ran the Zodiac as fast as it could go.

They were halfway there when the Athena exploded.

An enormous fireball burst from the starboard hull. Five seconds later Layla heard the explosion, and then a second fireball erupted on the port side. The yacht’s lights winked out and a cloud of smoke spread across the lake.

Then another speedboat emerged from behind the Chinese freighter. It crossed in front of the ship’s prow and came at them from dead ahead. As Angelique slowed the Zodiac and tried to turn it around, Layla spotted four more Guoanbu agents in the speedboat. One of them lifted a long, slender rifle and aimed it over the bow.

“Angelique!” Layla yelled. “Get down! Get—”

Then she heard a loud crack, a miniature sonic boom, and Angelique collapsed.

SEVENTEEN

The Monitor Room at Camp Whiplash was aptly named. Located in the basement of the compound’s largest bunker, all four of its concrete walls were covered with flat-screen video monitors. Jim tried to count them, but quickly gave up—there were dozens, maybe a hundred. What’s more, the screen of each monitor was divided into sixteen smaller squares, each displaying a separate video feed. Below the screens, long tables had been placed end to end so that they lined the room’s perimeter. On each table were several laptops connected to the monitors. About twenty analysts from the CIA’s Science and Technology division sat at the tables, alternately tapping the keyboards of their laptops and glancing at the screens.

Hammer led Jim and Kirsten to the center of the room. The analysts paid them no mind. Their eyes were fixed on the screens, intently following the video feeds from the thousands of cyborg insects that had just been released. Jim didn’t understand how the analysts could make sense of it all. The array of images flashing on the monitors seemed utterly chaotic.

Hammer sensed Jim’s confusion. “A little overwhelming, huh? That was my first impression, too.”

Kirsten frowned. “It’s a fucking circus, that’s what it is. You got the world’s worst case of information overload.”

Hammer gave her an icy smile. “Maybe we’re not as smart as you geniuses at Fort Meade, but we’re not idiots. We use software to organize and filter the video.” He turned to Dusty, who sat in front of one of the laptops. “Tell ’em about the software.”

Dusty nodded. “As the video feeds from the drones stream into our servers, the software picks out the ones that are worth watching. The program can recognize the shapes of buildings and vehicles and people, and it automatically highlights the feeds containing those objects. And our facial-recognition software can match the people we observe with the insurgents and terrorists in our database.”

“But new jihadis join the Taliban every day,” Kirsten noted. “And the new ones aren’t in your database.”

“That’s where the human element comes in,” Hammer said, pointing at the twenty agents sitting at the tables. “We rely on our analysts to eyeball the sons of bitches to see if they’re doing anything suspicious. Like planting bombs under the roads or cleaning their assault rifles.”

Jim stepped forward and surveyed the crazy quilt of videos. On one screen, a scrawny cow chewed its cud. On another, two boys ran across a field. On a third, an antiquated truck jounced along a dirt path. It was a mass of disjointed images, random snapshots of the poor Afghan village of Golbahar. “I don’t see anything suspicious,” he said.

“Hold on. We haven’t started hunting yet.” Hammer gazed at the bank of monitors, then turned back to Dusty. “Let’s get a closer look at that farmhouse on Feed 107. They got a Toyota HiLux parked in their yard. That’s the Taliban’s favorite ride.”

Dusty tapped the keys of his laptop. He was sending radio instructions to the drones, Jim realized. The signals would travel to the tiny antennas mounted on the cyborg flies, and then the implanted chips would deliver jolts of electricity to the insects’ flight muscles, which would maneuver the drones toward the specified target. “How do you coordinate them?” Jim asked. Despite his better judgment, he was fascinated by the technology. “Do you send the same instructions to all the drones?”

Dusty shook his head. “If we did that, they’d crash into each other. No, the system relies on swarm intelligence. The chips on the drones communicate with one another, and each keeps track of its neighbors. When we send them a target, the microprocessors plot their paths so that the drones move together like a swarm of real flies. Check out the screen over there.”

He pointed at one of the monitors. Each of the sixteen squares on the screen showed a different part of the farmhouse. The images in the squares grew larger as the swarm approached the target. One square showed the Toyota HiLux, another showed a wooden privy, and a third showed a chicken pecking in the dirt. Several others showed the house itself, a one-story mud-brick structure with tattered curtains in the open windows. The analyst tapped his keyboard again, and three of the cyborg flies landed on a windowsill. The insects entered the house and their video feeds displayed the interior: a room with no furniture, just a Turkish carpet on the floor. An old man slept on a pallet in the corner. The drones hovered over the sleeping man and the video feeds showed his weathered face.

“He doesn’t match anyone in our database,” Dusty reported, turning to Agent Hammer. “Should we reroute to another target?”

Hammer mulled it over. “As long as we’re here, we might as well check out the other rooms.”

Kirsten let out an exasperated grunt. “You should end this test right now. You’re out of your depth.”

“She’s right,” Jim said. “You got all this surveillance video coming in, but no way to systematically analyze it. That’s why this mission is turning into a wild-goose chase.”

Hammer ignored Jim and focused on Kirsten. “You know what, Chan? I think you’re jealous. You wish the NSA had a system like this, don’t you?” Then he turned back to Dusty and pointed at the screen. “Send the drones into the room behind that door. Maybe the jihadis are eating breakfast in there.”

The cyborg flies descended to the gap under the door and crawled through. Their video feeds showed a tin washtub in which a young woman was taking a bath. An older woman sat on a stool next to the tub, helping the young woman wash her hair. Dusty maneuvered one of the drones closer so it could focus on the women’s faces. Their lips were moving. “Well, well,” Hammer said. “Here’s a scene right out of a porno flick. Do we have audio pickups on these drones?”

“Yes, sir,” Dusty answered. He tapped a few keys and the sound of a conversation in Dari came out of the laptop’s speakers. “Should I plug in the translation program?”

“No, that won’t be necessary. The picture’s more interesting than the words, don’t you think?”

Jim glanced at Kirsten and saw her face turn red. Hammer was deliberately provoking her. Furious, Jim raised his mechanical hand, thinking how easy it would be to crush the agent’s throat. But he restrained himself and simply pointed at Hammer’s chest. “Stop this. Now.”

Hammer wasn’t intimidated. “Are you kidding? At least Chan has some pull. You’re just a ‘technical adviser.’ Why should I take orders from you?”

“If you don’t stop this test in the next—”

“What are you gonna do? All your Ranger buddies are outside in the courtyard, and I got twenty agents in this room who—”

A loud, high-pitched crack interrupted him. It came from the speakers of Dusty’s laptop, which meant that the sound had been picked up by the drones inside the mud-brick house in Golbahar. “What the hell was that?” Hammer asked. “It sounded like a slap.”

Jim stared at the video monitor. One of the squares on the screen had gone black. The square next to it showed the older Afghan woman holding a homemade fly swatter. She’d just smashed one of the cyborg insects and was now stalking the other two.

“Jesus!” Hammer yelled at Dusty. “Get the drones out of there!”

But the old woman was fast. She managed to cream another drone before Dusty could maneuver it away. The third drone hovered out of reach, and its camera showed the old Afghan woman staring curiously at the fly she’d just killed. She bent over to pick it up from the floor.

“No,” Hammer groaned. “Don’t—”

The old woman suddenly retracted her hand, as if she’d been bitten. Then she fell on her side and started convulsing on the floor.

The young woman in the tub screamed. The shrill noise blared from the laptop’s speakers. Within seconds her relatives came to her aid. The drones outside the house showed several men running across the fields and calling for their neighbors.

Ignoring Jim and Kirsten, Hammer spent the next ten minutes shouting orders at his agents. As the analysts withdrew the swarm from Golbahar, the screens showed dozens of turbaned men gathering in the center of the village. Many of them carried AK-47s. The entire male population was up in arms.

Hammer turned to one of his bodyguards. “Contact Special Operations and tell them to send a team to Golbahar,” he ordered. “We got a clusterfuck in progress.”

“What happened to the old woman?” Jim asked. “The drones aren’t weaponized, are they?”

“It’s built into the electronics,” Hammer replied. “The Chinese didn’t want their dissidents to find out about the surveillance system, so each drone carries a heat-sensitive dart. If someone tries to pick up one of the bugs, the dart injects a nerve agent that incapacitates the unlucky bastard until the security forces arrive at the scene.”

“Oh, that’s great.” Kirsten shook her head. “That’s just wonderful.”

“It’s not such a big deal. It happened a few times before in our earlier tests. We just send Special Ops over there and they clean up the mess.”

She pointed a finger at him. “And how many Afghans have you incapacitated so far? Maybe that’s why the locals were giving us the evil eye when we were on the road. I’m sure they’ve noticed the clouds of flies coming out of this place.”

“Look, I’m getting a little sick of your tone. My job is to nail these terrorists, and this is the system that’s gonna get it done.”

“We’ll see about that. All of this is going into my report.” Kirsten tapped her eyeglasses, which were recording everything she saw.

Hammer frowned. “And you know what’s going to happen when the NSA director reads your report? He’s going to say, holy shit, get Hammer into my office. I want to talk to him about getting a few thousand of those drones for myself.”

“He’ll want to talk to you, all right, but not about the drones. He’ll be more concerned about the technology you handed over to China.”

“I got approval from Langley for the exchange. And we took steps to make sure we don’t get bit in the ass.”

“Like what? What’s to stop the People’s Republic from using Conway’s implants against Americans? The next time the Guoanbu arrests one of your agents in China, they might decide to put that Dream-catcher into his head before they interrogate him.”

“We can stop them from doing that. The safeguards are built into the system. If they ever—”

A tremendous thud suddenly shook the bunker. The CIA analysts turned away from their monitors and gazed uncertainly at one another. Then another thud reverberated through the room, and several video monitors fell from the wall. One of Hammer’s paramilitary bodyguards rushed into the bunker. “Sir, we’ve got incoming mortar rounds!”

“What?”

“At least ten trucks full of Afghans are coming from Golbahar. It looks like they’re retaliating for the drone test. They’re carrying AKs and RPGs and—”

Then a third blast, the strongest by far, rocked the bunker, and all the lights went out.

EIGHTEEN

The bullet tore through Angelique’s skull and she fell face-down in the Zodiac. Layla looked at her just long enough to confirm she was dead. Then the Guoanbu sniper fired again and another bullet streaked overhead. The speedboat was closing in fast. Running on instinct, Layla grabbed the tiller of the Zodiac’s outboard and gunned the engine.

She saw no sign of the Athena, which had already sunk below the lake’s surface, but in the moonlight she spied at least two dozen ships to her left. Each was waiting for its turn to enter the Gatun Locks and descend to the Caribbean Sea. Together they formed a crowded flotilla. Layla steered the Zodiac sharply to the left, aiming for the Caribbean-bound ships.

The sniper took another shot, and the bullet plunged into the water a few feet behind the Zodiac. Then another Guoanbu agent in the speedboat opened up with an assault rifle, but at that moment Layla reached the flotilla and zoomed behind a cruise ship. The bullets slammed into the ship’s hull, scattering the tourists on the promenade deck. Once she passed the ship, she steered around an oil tanker, and then around a racing yacht. Slaloming between the hulls, she maneuvered through the flotilla as if it was an obstacle course.

But she couldn’t shake the speedboat. It gradually closed the distance as she zigzagged toward the locks. She was a hundred feet from the Caribbean-bound lock when the Guoanbu bullets finally punctured the Zodiac. The rubber gunwales crumpled and Layla lost control. She dived off the boat just before it flipped over.

She couldn’t see a thing as she glided underwater, but she could hear the whine of the speedboat’s propellers. The sniper and rifleman were probably scanning the lake, searching for her, so she stayed under until her lungs were bursting. When she finally surfaced, she was in front of the closed gate of the Caribbean-bound lock. As she gasped for breath, she saw a container ship entering Gatun Lake from the parallel lock, the one for boats going in the opposite direction. She dove again and swam furiously toward the open gate.

By the time she reached it, the massive steel doors were closing. Thinking quickly, she grabbed the edge of the right-hand door as it swung past. Then a bullet banged against the steel. The Guoanbu agents had spotted her hanging from the door. With a yelp, she clambered around the edge to the other side. She got inside the lock just as the gate clanged shut.

More bullets banged against the gate, but Layla was safe now. The Guoanbu agents couldn’t follow her into the lock until they found a landing point on the lakeshore. She treaded water in the concrete bathtub, looking for a ladder. Fortunately, the lock was brightly lit at all hours, and after a few seconds she spotted a vertical notch in one of the bathtub’s walls. It was located about halfway down the length of the lock, a few hundred feet away, and inside the notch was a ladder. She felt a surge of relief. That was the way out.

As she swam toward the ladder, though, she noticed that the water level was dropping. Thousands of gallons streamed down the valves at the bottom of the bathtub, pulled by gravity to the Caribbean Sea. Then she saw movement at the gate on the other end of the lock. The steel doors opened, and a Panamax freighter cruised into the bathtub.

She swam faster. The “mule” locomotives on either side of the lock were towing the freighter into position. The ship was very nearly as wide as the bathtub, and as it came closer it looked like a moving wall. Layla swam faster still. If she didn’t make it to the notch, she’d be crushed by the hull. The ship’s prow pushed the water ahead of it, forcing Layla to fight the current. She stroked as hard as she could, but she barely moved forward. Someone on the freighter saw her in the water and shouted a warning, but no one could stop the ship in time. It was so close, Layla could see the barnacles on its hull.

At the last moment, a lucky countercurrent swept her toward the notch. She grabbed one of the ladder’s rungs just as the freighter went past. Flattening her body, she squeezed into the notch. The rusty hull slid by, just inches from her nose.

She clung to the ladder, cold and exhausted. She had barely enough strength left in her arms to hang on. The freighter finally stopped moving, and Layla looked up. The top of the ladder was about fifty feet above her. Her muscles were cramping, but if she moved slowly and carefully, she believed she could make it. And then she heard a rushing, frothy noise coming from the valves at the bottom of the bathtub. They were filling the lock with water now, raising the freighter to the level of Gatun Lake. In seconds the water rose to Layla’s neck. She grabbed a higher rung on the ladder and pulled herself up, but the water surged over her head.

NINETEEN

Jim and Kirsten raced out of the bunker and saw that all hell had broken loose at Camp Whiplash. Afghan insurgents had surrounded the CIA base and were showering it with mortars and rocket-propelled grenades. One of the mortars blew a hole in the compound’s mud wall, and at least fifty Afghans rushed toward the breach, each brandishing an AK-47. The incident in Golbahar had enraged the local jihadis, who were clearly more organized than Hammer had suspected. The twelve Rangers from the 75th Regiment crouched behind the wall with their carbines and attempted to return fire. Meanwhile, Hammer and Dusty bent over a field radio in the courtyard, trying to call in an air strike.

“Damn it!” Hammer shouted into the headset. “We can’t wait thirty minutes! In thirty minutes these ragheads are gonna chop us into dog meat! We need those birds now!”

Jim assessed the situation. He thought of the firefights he’d seen when he was in the 75th, after the Third Battalion sent him to Somalia. He and his men in Bravo Company had fought the Somali clans on the streets of Mogadishu, fending off hundreds of militiamen who took shots at them from every rooftop and alley. During the last and biggest battle he’d crouched behind a wrecked helicopter for twelve fucking hours while one of his corporals slowly bled to death. And halfway through that awful night Jim had made himself a promise: If he survived until morning, he’d make sure he’d never be so helpless again.

Now he reached into the heavy duffle bag he’d brought with him to Afghanistan. He removed an assault rifle and tossed it to Kirsten. “Remember how to use this?” he asked.

She nodded. “What about you? You got a gun for yourself?”

“Yeah, I got something.”

He detached his prosthetic arm from the neural control unit on his shoulder. Then he stowed it in the duffle and pulled out the model he’d designed for combat. He’d hoped he’d never have to use it. He’d killed enough men during his years in the army and didn’t want to add to his total now. But the people in this compound were Americans. Some of them were arrogant shits, but they were his countrymen.

Jim clamped the combat prosthesis to the neural control unit. This mechanical arm was heavier than his normal one because it contained a machine gun and a hundred bullets. The gun’s targeting system was linked to the microprocessors implanted in his shoulder, which relayed the commands from his brain. He’d designed the prosthesis so that it could aim and fire as soon as he identified a target. The signals went directly to the arm’s motors, making the reaction time almost instantaneous.

While Kirsten ducked behind an armored vehicle, Jim ran toward the breach in the mud wall. The insurgents poured through the gap, but he picked them off as they rushed into the courtyard. The prosthesis worked exactly as designed. Jim looked at the targets and they died. By the time he reached the wall, half a dozen bodies sprawled inside the breach. Then Jim started firing through the gap. His eyes panned across the startled faces of the Afghans, who staggered backward as the bullets ripped into them. The deadliest feature of the prosthesis was the intimidation factor. It was scary as hell to face a guy with a machine-gun arm. He mowed down all the insurgents within twenty feet of the wall. The rest turned around and ran back to their trucks.

Jim lowered his arm and disengaged the targeting system. He looked with revulsion at the prosthesis, which gave off waves of heat. Of all his inventions, he liked this one the least.

Turning around, he saw Hammer come toward him. The bastard had a big smile on his face. But before Hammer could say anything, Jim heard a ululating scream from above. A lone Afghan fighter, left behind by his comrades, jumped down from the top of the wall and knocked Hammer to the ground. Kneeling on the agent’s chest, the Afghan pulled a knife from his belt and raised it high. But before the jihadi could slit Hammer’s throat, Jim whacked him in the head with the heavy prosthesis, knocking him out.

Hammer seemed shaken. Eyes wide, he jumped to his feet and backed away from the unconscious Afghan. After a few seconds, though, he regained his composure. He turned back to Jim and pointed at his prosthesis. “That’s a nice piece of equipment.”

Jim knew this was as close as the agent would ever get to saying thank-you. “You’re welcome,” he replied.

Hammer stood there awkwardly for a moment. Then he brushed the dirt off his pants. “You know, as defense contractors go, you’re not so bad. Ever consider doing some work for our Science and Technology division? The pay’s decent.”

Jim frowned. “No thanks. I talked to Arvin Conway, remember? So I know how your agency treats its contractors.”

“What are you talking about? Arvin’s happy as a pig in shit. We gave him the export exemption he wanted. Now he can make billions off the Chinese.”

“He didn’t want to do the deal. You forced him into it.”

“Is that what the geezer told you?”

“He said you threatened to shut down his company if he didn’t go along.”

The CIA agent chuckled. “He was blowing smoke. The technology swap was Arvin’s idea from the beginning.”

Kirsten came toward them, grinning with relief, but Jim focused on Hammer. “It was Arvin’s idea?”

“He told us the Chinese had developed the cyborg insects, and we could get our hands on the surveillance system if we agreed to allow the export of his retinal and pulvinar implants.”

Jim was confused. He looked carefully at Hammer, trying to figure out if the agent was telling the truth. “I don’t believe you.”

“If you want, I’ll show you the paperwork. Arvin’s lawyers drew up the contract a year ago and we just renewed it. That’s why I had to go to California this week. I had to sit in Arvin’s big, empty lab for three hours while he gave me a fucking lecture on artificial intelligence.”

That sounded like Arvin. The old man loved the sound of his own voice. “Arvin told me that you never came to his lab. That you always met elsewhere.”

“You want me to describe his desk? It’s got a piece of paper with lots of zeroes and ones on it. That’s what I stared at the whole time while he lectured me.”

Jim frowned. He didn’t understand it. “Why would Arvin lie to me?”

“Beats me.” Hammer shrugged. “Why don’t you ask him?”

Yes, Jim thought. That’s exactly what I’ll do.

TWENTY

Layla was drowning. The surface of the water was three feet over her head and rising faster than she could climb the ladder. Frantic, she let go of the rungs and swept her hands downward, trying to propel herself to the surface. She caromed painfully against the hull of the freighter and then against the concrete wall of the lock. Her vision started to darken. She felt an overwhelming urge to open her mouth and let the water rush in

But then a pair of strong hands grabbed her by the armpits and pulled her up. Her head popped above the surface and she took an excruciating breath. The man with the strong hands lifted her as if she were a rag doll and passed her to another man standing at the lip of the concrete bathtub. She collapsed beside him, gasping and heaving. It took her a few seconds to realize that the men standing around her were Asian. And they were carrying assault rifles.

“Jesus,” she gasped. Her bewilderment was so complete, she felt like laughing. “I thought… you wanted to kill me.”

“We did,” one of the men replied. “But we just got new orders.”

Then the man hit her in the head with the butt of his rifle, and Layla blacked out.

TWENTY-ONE

From the courtyard of Camp Whiplash, Jim used his satellite phone to make a call to Pasadena. It was 8:00 P.M. in California, but he managed to speak to a receptionist working late at Singularity, Inc. She said Arvin Conway was traveling and couldn’t be reached.

Jim felt a knot of suspicion in his gut. He remembered how uneasy Arvin had been during their conversation in his laboratory, especially when they were examining the visual memories picked up by his pulvinar implant. When Jim had told him to concentrate on thinking about the CIA agent, Arvin’s mind had wandered all over the map, almost as if he was trying to thwart the search by thinking of anything but the agent’s face. Arvin hadn’t wanted Jim to find Hammer. And now Jim wanted to know why.

Meanwhile, Kirsten used her own satellite phone to call Fort Meade. She ordered the NSA analysts on her staff to track down Conway. In less than five minutes, they had some information for her.

“Arvin left the country,” Kirsten told Jim. “He also wire-transferred a hundred million dollars from the corporate account of Singularity, Inc., to his private bank account in Switzerland. Basically, he drained the company dry. He took every cent that Singularity got from its investment bankers.”

“Where did he go?”

“China. His Learjet arrived in Beijing four hours ago.”