Extinction

TWENTY-TWO

Supreme Harmony observed a conference room inside the Guoanbu’s headquarters in Beijing. General Tian had traveled here to give an update on the surveillance project to the top officials in the Ministry of State Security. He’d brought along Modules 16 and 18 to provide concrete evidence of the project’s success.

During the journey from the Yunnan Operations Center to Beijing, Modules 16 and 18 had to be disconnected from the twenty-eight other Modules in the network. Without the radio link, the two Modules went into a paralyzed, comalike state, unable to send or receive data, so Tian had to put them on stretchers for the three-hour flight to the capital. The loss of their input was disconcerting to Supreme Harmony. The sensation was similar to what a human being felt when his arm or leg went numb. But after arriving at the ministry headquarters Tian restored the radio link, connecting the two Modules to a wireless router that transmitted their signals to the rest of the network. Now the ocular cameras implanted in the Modules’ eyes were relaying images of the ministry’s main conference room, where General Tian was delivering his report to six Guoanbu officials.

The bureaucrats sat in wingback chairs arranged in a semicircle, and General Tian sat in a seventh chair facing them. Modules 16 and 18 stood on either side of the general’s chair and trained their cameras on the officials, whom Supreme Harmony recognized from photographs stored on the government’s servers. The highest-ranking one was Deng Guoming, the minister of State Security, who sat with his hands clasped over his stomach and his head cocked to the right. The network carefully observed his posture and facial expressions. To protect itself from the threat of a shutdown, Supreme Harmony would have to take control of the Chinese government, so it was keenly interested in learning more about the behavior of its leaders.

The network also received the auditory feed picked up by the ears of Modules 16 and 18, but this was less interesting than the video. General Tian was reading from his progress report, and Supreme Harmony was already familiar with this document. It contained statistics on the surveillance swarms operating in the restive provinces of western China.

“In Tibet we deployed the drone swarms on twenty-one occasions,” Tian read. “During each deployment the drones collected approximately two thousand hours of surveillance video. The video feeds were analyzed in real time by the network of Modules, who’d been selected for the project because of their firsthand knowledge of the subversive organizations in the province. In total, the Modules detected four hundred and sixty-seven instances of suspicious activity. Follow-up investigations by local security forces resulted in two hundred and forty-five arrests.”

Pausing, Tian pointed to a screen on the wall, where PowerPoint slides displayed the statistics. “In Xinjiang, we deployed the swarms thirty-two times and the Modules analyzed a total of sixty-seven thousand hours of surveillance video. The network detected seven hundred and five instances of suspicious activity and the local police made three hundred and twenty-seven arrests. In Qinghai…”

Supreme Harmony observed that several officials were yawning. Minister Deng finally cut Tian off. “This is all very impressive, General,” he said. “We commend you for facilitating the arrest and detention of so many subversives and troublemakers.”

Tian beamed. The network directed Module 18 to turn his head slightly so he could record the expression of happiness on the general’s face. “Thank you, Minister,” Tian said. “I’m proud to report that Supreme Harmony is succeeding beyond our expectations.”

“But now we must consider the next challenge,” Deng said. “Subversive activity is on the rise all across our country. The democracy activists and petitioners are causing disruptions in Beijing and Shanghai and Guangzhou. Supreme Harmony has proved that it can provide valuable information on dissidents in the rural regions of western China, but can the system be adapted for urban areas?”

General Tian nodded. “Oh yes, Minister, most definitely. The drone swarms are well suited for surveillance inside all kinds of structures—apartment blocks, office buildings, private homes, and so on. Because the Modules can analyze the surveillance video so quickly and proficiently, the system can instantly detect signs of suspicious activity and call in more drones to the areas where the activity is taking place. The network can navigate the drones through the tightest spaces, going under doors and through ventilation shafts. And the surveillance is always discreet because the cyborg drone is such a common insect, the domestic housefly. We all know how abundant houseflies are in Beijing and Shanghai!”

Tian chuckled at his own comment, but no one else joined in. Deng snapped his fingers, and one of his aides handed him a loose-leaf binder, which he opened. “So my question to you, General, is this: How quickly can you extend Supreme Harmony to the new areas of operation?”

The room fell silent. All the ministry officials stared at Tian, politely waiting for him to respond. Supreme Harmony noted this behavior with interest. It needed to learn how to mimic this cold politeness before it could add Chinese government officials to its network.

Tian nodded again. “Well, to establish full and continuous surveillance of the most troubled urban areas, we’ll need to significantly increase the number of drones and Modules at our disposal.”

Deng narrowed his eyes. This was another expression Supreme Harmony needed to learn how to imitate. “And how much will it cost to expand the program to this level?”

Tian fumbled through his papers. “Uh, let me see. Yes, here it is. To achieve the expansion over a period of two years will require—”

“Two years is far too long. I want the system to start operating in our ten largest cities within the next six months.”

“Uh, yes, I understand. But that will increase the cost, Minister.”

“You have enough funds to cover the expense.” Deng leafed through the binder in his hands. “The Supreme Harmony project will receive nine hundred million yuan in appropriations from the ministry this year. And I believe you also have an outside source of funding?”

“Yes, that’s true. Singularity, Inc., the American company that provided some of the technologies used in the project, is interested in the commercial applications of our research. Arvin Conway, the company’s chief executive, has promised to contribute a hundred million dollars to the further development of Supreme Harmony. That’s the equivalent of, uh, approximately six hundred and fifty million yuan.”

Deng smiled upon hearing Conway’s name. Supreme Harmony checked its database to determine why the minister was pleased. Deng, the network learned, was proud of his record of collecting intelligence on technologies developed in America, particularly those that could be used for military purposes. “Ah, the illustrious Professor Conway. It’s so good to have him working for us. I hear he just arrived in Beijing. Will you be meeting with him to determine the purpose of his visit?”

“Yes, Minister, I’ve scheduled a meeting with him tomorrow. I believe he’s come to finalize the transfer of funds to our project. But you should understand that even with the extra funding from Singularity, we’ll still have some difficulty meeting the six-month deadline.”

Deng waved his hand dismissively. “That’s your job, General, overcoming the difficulties.” He closed his loose-leaf binder and gave Tian a stern look. “If you have to, ask Conway to increase his contribution to your budget.”

Tian opened his mouth but refrained from protesting. He’d obviously expected more time to develop his project, and more money as well. The expression on his face, Supreme Harmony recognized, was one of disappointment. In contrast, the network was satisfied with the outcome of the meeting. It had acquired some useful information, and now it could plan its next step. As Supreme Harmony analyzed the data and performed its calculations, its sense of satisfaction grew stronger, spreading across the network to every Module.

Deng abruptly leaned forward in his chair and stared at Modules 16 and 18. “That’s odd,” he said in a low voice, pointing at the Modules. “They just started smiling. Both of them.”

A jolt of alarm raced across the network’s wireless links. It was a powerfully disruptive sensation, one of the strongest Supreme Harmony had experienced since becoming conscious. It was so strong, in fact, that it almost incapacitated the Modules. We have made an error, the network acknowledged. We have foolishly put ourselves in danger.

Tian turned to look at the Modules, which were still smiling. Supreme Harmony decided not to restore them to their usual blank look. Another abrupt change in their facial expressions would only compound the error. Tian frowned severely, as if he was personally insulted by the Modules’ behavior. Then he stood up and slapped Module 16, hard. The force of the blow wiped the smile off his face. A second later, Tian did the same thing to Module 18, delivering an even stronger blow. Breathing fast, the general turned back to the semicircle of officials. “I’m sorry, Minister. It’s just random twitches. The Modules have limited control of their facial muscles.”

Deng shook his head. Although his ministry committed countless acts of violence every day, this instance of it seemed to upset him. He rose from his chair, and an instant later all the other officials jumped to their feet. “Very well. We’ll meet again in six months, General. And please don’t bring your Modules with you next time.”

After the meeting, General Tian took Modules 16 and 18 to a storage room in the basement of the ministry. No personnel worked there, but the room contained servers and wireless routers linked to the Yunnan Operations Center, as well as a supply of IV bags for feeding and hydrating the Modules. There were also several large boxes full of medical equipment, including fifty sets of retinal and pulvinar implants that had been shipped from the factory in Kunming that manufactured the devices. Through its manipulation of the Guoanbu’s e-mail system, Supreme Harmony had ordered the boxes to be sent to this room. The network knew what was inside the boxes, but General Tian didn’t. He seemed puzzled by their presence. “What’s going on?” he muttered. “Who put these things here?”

Tian went to the phone to call the Guoanbu’s supply department. But Module 16 grabbed his arm before Tian could pick up the receiver. Tian stared at the Module in disbelief. “What the hell?”

“What the hell?” Module 16 repeated, perfectly imitating Tian’s voice and expression of disbelief. Then he slapped the general in the face, hard. At the same moment, Module 18 came up behind Tian and jabbed a syringe into the general’s arm.

TWENTY-THREE

Layla didn’t regain consciousness until she was in the air. She woke up in the cabin of a small jet, a Gulfstream. Her ankles were bound together by duct tape and her arms were tied to the armrests of her seat. The cabin had twelve seats, but only seven were occupied. Besides herself, there were six Asian men, all dressed in black. Layla remembered the speedboats in Gatun Lake and the gunshots that had echoed across the water. One of these agents, she thought, is the asshole who killed Angelique.

As the plane ascended, Layla twisted around in her seat, as much as her bindings would allow, and looked out the window. She glimpsed a dense cluster of lights on the ground and a great black expanse beside it. It’s a coastal city, she thought, probably Panama City. We’ve just taken off from Panama International Airport and now we’re heading west over the Pacific Ocean.

She felt a wave of nausea. Her head throbbed where the rifle butt had hit her. She almost puked, but she managed to keep it down.

One of the agents in black looked at her from across the aisle. He had muscular forearms tattooed with snakes and Mandarin characters. He grinned. “Feeling sick?” he asked in a thick accent.

Layla didn’t answer. She stared straight ahead.

“How old are you?” the agent asked. His grin became a leer. “You look like a schoolgirl.”

She scowled. “And you look like a pimp.”

The agent chuckled. Then he reached into the pocket of his black pants and pulled something out. It was her flash drive, the one holding the files from Dragon Fire. “This doesn’t belong to you,” the agent said. “You tried to steal it from us.”

“I didn’t steal it.”

“Yes, you did. You and Wen Sheng. We had to punish him.”

“Kill him, you mean. Why didn’t you kill me, too?”

The agent shrugged. “I don’t know. I just follow orders.”

“Bullshit.”

“I’m telling the truth. I don’t know the reason. But you’ll find out soon enough.”

“When we get to Beijing?”

He shook his head. “We’re not going to Beijing. We’re going to Lijiang.”

“Lijiang?”

“It’s a city. In Yunnan Province.”

TWENTY-FOUR

Arvin Conway was eating lunch at Quanjude, his favorite Peking duck restaurant in Beijing, but the meal was a disappointment. The last time he’d been in China, when he’d helped Dr. Zhang Jintao set up the Supreme Harmony network, he and Zhang had enjoyed Quanjude enormously. They’d gorged on the sweet, crispy slices of duck and downed a considerable amount of Tsingtao beer. But in the months since then, Arvin’s cancer had spread from his pancreas to the rest of his body, and the drugs he’d taken to slow the disease had deadened his taste buds and killed his appetite. So he sat quietly at the table while his bodyguard—a big, burly ex-cop named Frank Nash—exchanged small talk with an equally big man named Liu Xiaofang. Liu was Arvin’s minder, the Guoanbu agent assigned to keep an eye on him.

Arvin had arrived in Beijing the day before. He’d left the United States in a hurry, knowing that Jim Pierce would soon learn the truth about his dealings with the Chinese government. He’d tried to contact Dr. Zhang as soon as he landed, but Agent Liu informed him that the doctor was preoccupied with his duties at the Yunnan Operations Center. However, Liu promised to set up a meeting with General Tian, the commander of the Supreme Harmony project, who luckily happened to be in Beijing that week. The meeting was scheduled for 4:00 P.M., and Arvin was counting the minutes.

At two thirty they left the restaurant and headed for the Ministry of State Security, which was near Tiananmen Square, less than a mile away. They walked past the neon signs and luxury stores of Wangfujing Street, then strolled down an alley crowded with stalls selling shish-kebabs. Agent Liu acted as their tour guide, making trite comments about everything. Although they walked slowly, within half an hour they reached the huge portrait of Chairman Mao facing Tiananmen Square. Arvin wanted to go into the ministry building and wait in the lobby until General Tian was ready, but Liu insisted that they use the spare time to visit the Mausoleum of Mao Zedong.

Thousands of Chinese stood in a long line that snaked across the square, all waiting for their turn to view Mao’s embalmed body, which had rested for thirty-five years inside his transparent coffin. But because Liu was a Guoanbu agent, he could cut ahead of the masses. He and Arvin and Frank Nash went to the front of the line and entered the mausoleum. Mao lay stiffly under the glass, still dressed in his trademark gray jacket, with a red blanket pulled up to his chest. His face was orange and waxy. Most tourists caught only a glimpse of the corpse—the mausoleum’s guards kept the line moving—but Liu’s guests were allowed to stare at the coffin for as long as they wanted to. For Arvin, this turned out to be a mixed blessing. With his implant-enhanced eyesight, he could see all the minute stains and fissures in Mao’s desiccated hide. As he stared at the dead body he felt a deep pain in his abdomen. This corpse had once been the most powerful man in the world, commanding a billion people with absolute authority, but Death had defeated him just the same. And now Death was coming for Arvin as well. He could feel it reaching into his body with its cold fingers…

Arvin shook his head, dispelling the image. He had a plan, he reminded himself. He’d laid the groundwork twenty years ago when he founded Singularity, Inc. In the first few years he’d focused on basic research, learning how the human brain coded its signals. Then in 1999 Jim Pierce joined his research team, and together they made remarkable strides. Their progress was so rapid that for a while Arvin could see success on the horizon, less than a decade away. They’d cracked the neural code and built machines that could communicate directly with the nervous system. The next step was building the mechanical equivalent of a human brain, a powerful computer that could store and process the memories downloaded from the mind. For a while, immortality seemed to be within reach. The Singularity was near.

Then Arvin suffered three crushing blows. First, his attempt to build a mechanical brain failed miserably. Then Jim Pierce left Singularity, Inc., to start his own company. And then Arvin received his cancer diagnosis.

But in the following year, a miracle happened. While Arvin was visiting China to pursue an alternative cancer therapy, he met his old friend Zhang Jintao, a brilliant bioengineer. Zhang had been authorized by the Guoanbu to seek Arvin’s help. The ministry’s technology division had developed a microdrone surveillance system using swarms of cyborg insects. It was an amazing technical accomplishment, but the system had proved fairly useless in its initial field tests in Tibet and Xinjiang. The problem was that the drones produced an unwieldy glut of video, almost all of which showed ordinary scenes of village life. Even with the help of sophisticated software and hundreds of trained agents staring at the video monitors, it was nearly impossible to ferret out the telltale signs of insurrection among the thousands of hours of footage collected by the swarms. So Zhang asked Arvin, in strictest confidence, if he could develop an artificial intelligence program that would pinpoint the images showing suspicious activities and automatically direct the drones to the areas where the activities were taking place.

That’s when Arvin had his brainstorm. Computer programs, he realized, weren’t good at detecting suspicious activity. They could barely recognize objects and patterns, much less divine the intent behind them. But the human brain was a wonderful threat-detection machine. Millions of years of evolution had produced an organ that was finely tuned for detecting predators and other dangers. The key, Arvin saw, was to deliver the surveillance video to the brain in a way that was more direct and efficient than displaying it on a monitor in front of a bored Guoanbu analyst. And Arvin had the tools for doing this: the retinal and pulvinar implants. The video could be transmitted wirelessly to a person with retinal implants, which would relay the feed to the person’s brain. After his visual cortex analyzed the footage and pinpointed the images showing suspicious activities, his pulvinar implant could transmit those images to other people whose implants were linked to the network, and to the computers controlling the surveillance swarms. The system would be even more efficient if the participants in the network were dissidents themselves, because they would instantly recognize their fellow subversives.

It was an elegant solution to the problem, but for Arvin it was something more. He saw an opportunity to use the enormous resources of the Chinese government to create a system that was part-human, part-machine. It was an alternative route to the Singularity, one that didn’t require building a mechanical version of the brain because human brains would be incorporated into the system.

Zhang was enthusiastic about the idea and set the plan in motion. Arvin arranged for the transfer of the implant technology, getting approval for its export by convincing the Chinese to share the drone-swarm technology with the CIA. When Zhang reported that the improved surveillance system—now dubbed Supreme Harmony—wouldn’t work unless the subjects of the experiment were lobotomized, Arvin felt a pang of conscience at first. But he told himself that the subjects were condemned prisoners who were going to be executed anyway. More important, Arvin saw another opportunity: After the subject was lobotomized, he would no longer be capable of consciousness. The Module’s brain would retain the subject’s long-term memories and still be able to process sensory data, but it couldn’t integrate all this information into an identity, a personality, a conscious presence. In a sense, the lobotomized brain was an empty vessel. And if one could pour enough new information into this vessel, it might be possible to give the Module a new personality—or inject someone else’s personality into the Module. If the memories of a dying man could be transferred to the Module’s brain and its consciousness restored somehow, the dying man could be reborn in a new body. It was a fantastically daring plan, but Arvin decided to pursue it. He had no alternative.

Now he was in China to put the final pieces into place. In return for a hundred-million-dollar contribution to the Supreme Harmony project, he was going to demand the exclusive use of one of the Modules, preferably a young, healthy male. Arvin was determined to make his plan work. He wasn’t going to die. He was going to outsmart Death.

As Arvin continued to stare at Mao’s corpse, he felt another stab of pain in his abdomen. It was so excruciating he had to bite his tongue to stop himself from screaming. To give himself strength, he reached into the pocket of his jacket and squeezed the object hidden there. It was the size of a small paperback and its metal casing was cold and smooth, except for the USB port and the power switch.

Despite Arvin’s best efforts, Agent Liu noticed that the old man was in pain. “Are you all right, Professor?” he asked.

“Yes,” Arvin managed to say. “But I think I’ve seen enough.”

As they left the mausoleum, Liu received a call on his cell phone. He stepped away from Arvin and Frank Nash and began speaking in rapid Mandarin. Arvin grew nervous. He didn’t understand a word of the language, but he sensed that the news wasn’t good.

Liu got off the cell phone. “Ah, Professor Conway? There’s been a change of plans.”

“What is it? Did the general cancel our meeting?”

“No, no. But General Tian wishes to hold the meeting somewhere else. Someplace more private, he says.”

“Where?”

“Outside Beijing. About fifty kilometers northwest of here.”

Arvin didn’t like this. First the Guoanbu wouldn’t let him meet Zhang Jintao, and now General Tian was playing games. Were they having second thoughts about allowing Arvin to participate in Supreme Harmony? Maybe they didn’t need his money. Now that they’d mastered the technology, maybe they didn’t want him involved in the project anymore.

And maybe they wanted to eliminate him. Maybe he was a loose end they needed to tie up. But Arvin wouldn’t go down without a fight. He had a card up his sleeve. He knew something the Guoanbu didn’t know, about the safeguards built into the implants.

“All right,” Arvin said. He pointed at his bodyguard. “Frank will get our car and we’ll follow you there.”

“Ah no, I’m afraid that’s not possible,” Liu said. “General Tian wants you to come alone, in one of our vehicles.”

Arvin really didn’t like this. He shook his head. “That’s unacceptable. Why is the general setting these conditions?”

Agent Liu spoke into his phone again. After another exchange in Mandarin, he gave Arvin an apologetic smile. “I’m sorry, Professor. It’s for security reasons. I hope you understand.”

Arvin had no choice. He had to take the risk. Without the Guoanbu’s help, he wouldn’t live more than a few months longer anyway. “Okay, I’ll come with you. Just give me a moment.”

He stepped away from Liu and huddled with Frank Nash. Turning his body so that Liu couldn’t see what he was doing, Arvin slipped his hand into his pocket, flicked the power switch on the hidden object, and handed it to Frank. “You know what to do,” Arvin said.

Nash nodded. Then Arvin turned back to Liu. “All right, I’m ready.”

TWENTY-FIVE

Jim was driving a black Chevrolet Suburban that he and Kirsten had borrowed from the NSA attaché at the American embassy. For the past twenty minutes they’d circled Tiananmen Square, trying to keep track of Arvin Conway as they contended with the miserable Beijing traffic. Because thousands of people surrounded the Chairman Mao Mausoleum, it would’ve been impossible to spot Arvin in the crowd under ordinary circumstances. But Jim had devised a way to keep their target in sight.

It was similar to the trick he’d used to temporarily blind Arvin at the Singularity conference. The cameras in Arvin’s eyes transmitted the video to his retinal implants via radio waves. The waves leaking out of Arvin’s eyes were faint, but during the journey from Afghanistan to China—Jim and Kirsten had taken a military flight to New Delhi, then flown commercial to Beijing—Jim had improvised a detector using the cameras in Kirsten’s glasses. He’d adjusted the frequency of one of the cameras so it could view radio waves; when Kirsten looked at Arvin she saw the signals as two red spots glowing in his eye sockets. And because radio waves easily passed through human bodies, Kirsten could still see the red spots even when the crowd in Tiananmen Square hid Arvin from view.

“Okay, he’s coming out of the mausoleum,” Kirsten said. She sat in the Suburban’s passenger seat as Jim drove through the stop-and-go traffic. “The Guoanbu agent is still with him. And Nash, his bodyguard. Now the agent is taking a cell phone call.”

“I got it,” Jim said, reaching for the satellite phone Kirsten had given him. It was an NSA device that had been programmed to intercept and decrypt the Guoanbu’s wireless communications. Jim switched to the frequency band used by the Ministry of State Security and turned up the volume. A rush of Mandarin came out of the phone’s speakers. Jim caught only about half of it. He hated the Beijing dialect. “What are they saying? Can you understand it?”

Kirsten nodded. “They’re moving the meeting place. To Juyongguan Pass, in the Changping District.”

“That sounds familiar.” Jim knew Beijing and its environs pretty well, having investigated intelligence targets in the area during his NSA stint. “That’s northwest of the city, right?”

“Yeah, in the hills. A section of the Great Wall runs across it.”

Jim shook his head. “First Mao’s tomb, now the Great Wall.”

“Arvin’s hitting all the tourist spots. Maybe he just wanted a vacation.”

She glanced at Jim, obviously waiting for him to come back with a snappy rejoinder. When they had worked together in the nineties, they’d often slipped into a joking repartee, exchanging quips and mild insults, but Jim couldn’t banter with her right now. He was too worried about Layla. Before they left New Delhi, Kirsten had showed Jim the intelligence reports about the attack in the Panama Canal that sank the Athena. Although most of the world had jumped to the conclusion that the U.S. was behind the attack, the intelligence reports made it clear that the Guoanbu was responsible. Photographs taken by CIA helicopters showed speedboats being lowered from a Chinese-flagged freighter. Gunmen on the boats apparently strafed the area where the Athena sank, making sure no one survived. Afterward, Navy SEAL teams recovered thirty-one bodies, including Gabriel Schroeder’s. None of them matched Layla’s description, but the reports also mentioned an unusual sighting in the Gatun Locks shortly after the sinking. A deckhand on a Panamax freighter reported seeing a teenage girl swimming in one of the locks. The girl, who wore black clothes, was rescued and taken away by several men also dressed in black. The deckhand assumed the men were canal employees, but the Panama Canal Authority had no record of the incident.

Jim was certain that the girl was Layla. Although she was twenty-two years old, she’d always looked younger than her age. And she always wore black. Nothing but black.

Kirsten glanced at him again. His silence was obviously worrying her. “Hey, it’s gonna be all right,” she said. “We’re gonna nail these bastards. Starting with General Tian. Arvin’s gonna lead us to him.”

Jim shook his head. He wished it was that simple. “And what happens then?”

“Then I’ll pull some strings. Neither the Guoanbu nor the CIA wants anyone to know about the deal they made. Once we figure out what the hell Tian’s doing, we’ll start applying the pressure. The Chinese government doesn’t like embarrassing disclosures. They’ll tell us if they have Layla.”

Jim started at the mention of his daughter’s name. He had to stop himself from imagining what the Guoanbu agents might be doing to her. He knew all too well how ruthless they were. They wouldn’t give up Layla just because of a little diplomatic pressure. There was going to be a fight, and Jim didn’t see how he could win it.

“Okay, the agent’s off the phone,” Kirsten reported. “He’s talking to Arvin. Go back to channel one.”

Jim flicked a switch on his satellite phone, tuning it to the frequency of the signal coming from Arvin’s cell phone. Jim had taken advantage of another NSA surveillance tool, an ingenious piece of software called a roving bug. A few hours ago he’d radioed the software to Arvin’s phone, and now the bug enabled Jim to surreptitiously turn on the device. Although the phone remained in the inside pocket of Arvin’s jacket, its microphone picked up the conversation between Arvin and Agent Liu and transmitted it to Jim’s phone. He and Kirsten could listen in on everything they said.

First, they heard Agent Liu tell Arvin about the change of plans for the meeting. Then they heard Arvin say to Nash, “You know what to do.”

Kirsten craned her neck to see what was going on. “Interesting,” she said.

Jim looked in the same direction. The Guoanbu agent led Arvin toward a black limousine parked on the eastern side of Tiananmen Square. Luckily, the limo was just a hundred feet ahead of the Suburban. Jim would be able to follow Arvin without much trouble. Nash, though, headed south toward Qianmen Street. “The bodyguard’s on an errand,” Jim noted. “And he’s moving pretty briskly.”

As Jim nosed the car forward, Kirsten said, “Hold it,” and adjusted her camera-glasses. “Okay, this is strange.”

“What?”

“I’m seeing another radio signal. Same frequency as Arvin’s implants. But this signal isn’t coming from Arvin’s eye sockets.” She pointed at the bodyguard. “It’s coming from Nash. From the left pocket of his jacket.”

“And it wasn’t there before?”

“Nope. It looks like someone just turned it on.”

Shit, Jim thought. He had no idea what was going on. But whatever the guy was carrying in his pocket might be important. He turned to Kirsten. “One of us should follow him.”

She nodded. “I’ll do it. You won’t need radio tracking to see where the limo goes.” She tapped her glasses. “But these might be useful for shadowing Nash through the crowds.”

“Okay. But take this.” He reached into his shoulder holster and took out the Glock. The pistol, borrowed from the armory at the American embassy, was their only weapon. It would’ve been impossible for Jim to sneak his combat prosthesis into China, so he’d left it in Afghanistan.

Kirsten stared at the gun for a moment. Then she shook her head. “Negative. Arvin is our primary target. You keep the gun.”

“Kir, listen—”

Before Jim could say another word, she opened the passenger-side door. “I’ll see you tonight at the embassy,” she said. Then she slipped out of the car.

Dodging the slow-moving traffic, Kirsten headed for Qianmen Street. Jim gazed at her for a couple of seconds—so nimble and lithe as she darted between the cars—before turning his attention back to the Guoanbu’s limo. Layla wasn’t the only woman he was worried about now.

TWENTY-SIX

Layla felt the Gulfstream jet begin to descend. The plane had made one stop already, at an airport on an island in the Pacific, but they’d stayed there only long enough to refuel. Now the jet was flying over a rugged landscape. When Layla looked out the window, she saw snowcapped mountains on the horizon.

Her body ached from being tied to her seat for so long. The Guoanbu agents had fed her only twice in the past twenty-four hours—all they had was cold sesame noodles—and let her go to the bathroom only three times. They wouldn’t let her close the lavatory door while she peed, but they hadn’t beaten or raped her, so she supposed she should be grateful. She’d had lots of time to think, but she still hadn’t figured out why the agents were taking her to China.

The jet landed at an airport in a narrow valley. Once the plane stopped moving, two of the Guoanbu agents untied Layla from her seat. She didn’t fight—she knew it would be futile—but she observed everything carefully as they hauled her out of the plane. The other agents had already exited the jet and now stood on the tarmac, conferring with four soldiers in People’s Liberation Army uniforms. The commanding officer was a tall guy in his thirties with a black beret covering his shaved head. The other three soldiers were young enlisted men, barely out of their teens. They also wore berets and carried AK-47s. Behind them was an olive-green military truck.

The PLA officer passed some papers to the Guoanbu agents. Layla’s escorts dragged her toward the truck, and then two of the enlisted men marched over and grabbed her arms. Taking her from the Guoanbu agents, the soldiers shoved her into the truck’s cargo hold. She realized she’d just been transferred from one set of officials to another.

Inside the truck, the two soldiers pushed her to the back of the cargo hold. She crouched in the corner, but the soldiers remained standing. They both looked down at her, staring intently, as if they were worried she might vanish if they looked away. The other soldiers closed the rear doors, and after a few seconds the truck’s engine started up. As the vehicle started to move, Layla studied her young guards, who had pimply faces and crooked teeth and bloodshot eyes. At first Layla thought the boys were staring at her because they were horny, but when she looked closer, she didn’t see the crude leering expressions that had been so evident on the faces of the Guoanbu agents. The soldiers looked at her blankly, with no expression at all, and for some reason this was even more unnerving.

The truck made a couple of turns, then picked up speed. They were obviously on a highway. Layla didn’t know much about Yunnan Province, but she guessed they were in the western part, which was mountainous and bordered Tibet. She was trying to picture a map of the region in her head when one of the soldiers stepped toward her. “We’ve confirmed your identity,” he said in perfect, unaccented English. “You are Layla Anne Pierce.”

She was surprised. She’d assumed the soldier was an uneducated kid from the provinces, one of the millions who joined the PLA because they couldn’t find jobs anywhere else. But this kid must’ve gone to a pretty good school to speak English so well. Puzzled, Layla didn’t know how to respond. “Excuse me?”

“You were born April second, 1991,” the soldier added. “Place of birth, Falls Church, Virginia. Social Security number 929-31-1655.”

Layla studied the kid’s youthful, seemingly innocent face. He wasn’t an enlistee after all, she guessed. More likely, he was an intelligence officer. She narrowed her eyes. “And who the hell are you?”

“You attended Central High School in Pasadena, California. Your score on the Scholastic Aptitude Test was 2390, the highest in your school district. You entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2009. Your first-year grade-point-average was 3.95, second-highest in your class.”

This kid was starting to piss her off. “What about my vaccination history? You got that, too?”

“You’re the subject of file number 3452339 in the records of the United States Cyber Command. The file was created on March 14, 2011, after you activated the Veritrax worm and used it to infiltrate the State Department’s network firewalls. In that incident, you downloaded thirteen classified documents detailing operations against Al Qaeda that were undertaken by the National Security Agency during the 1990s. The file identifies you as a serious security threat because of your exceptional talents in the field of cyber espionage.”

Now Layla began to worry. The kid’s information was dead-on. If his intent was to intimidate her by showing how much he knew, he was definitely succeeding. “Look, asshole, why don’t we cut to the chase? What do you want from—”

“On July 13 of this year you infiltrated the Guoanbu’s computer network through a backdoor activated by Agent Wen Sheng, who used the code name Dragon Fire in his communications with you. You downloaded sixty-nine files related to the Supreme Harmony program before we detected and deleted the backdoor. Agent Wen downloaded two additional files, which he stored on a flash drive and delivered to you in person. Supreme Harmony has now recovered those files.”

Layla felt a surge of anger. She remembered how the Guoanbu agents had sunk the Athena and killed Angelique, just to recover their goddamn files. “Supreme Harmony, huh? So that’s the name of your surveillance project?”

The kid stared at her for a couple of seconds, then nodded. “The Guoanbu initiated the Supreme Harmony surveillance program in 2011. The first drone swarms were tested at the Yunnan Operations Center in January 2012. The first Modules were added to the network in November 2012 to facilitate the analysis of the surveillance video.”

“And what about the political dissidents? Don’t forget that part. I guess lobotomizing your critics makes everything more harmonious, right?”

She expected some reaction to this dig, but the soldier’s face didn’t change. He didn’t say a word. But a moment later, the other soldier stepped forward and stood abreast of his comrade. “We’re concerned about the security of Supreme Harmony. That’s why we brought you here. The Guoanbu agents in Panama had been assigned to eliminate you, but we changed their orders when we took control of the ministry’s communications.”

Layla did a double take. The second soldier’s English was also perfect and eerily similar to the first soldier’s. The timbre of his voice was different, but his diction and phrasing were exactly the same, as if he was trying to mimic the first soldier.

“We suspect there may be anomalies in the network’s software,” the second soldier continued. “Worms or viruses may have been deliberately embedded in the code by the developers of the system. This malware may be hidden so deeply that our diagnostic programs are unable to detect it. But your expertise in cybersecurity will help us develop better diagnostic tools. With your assistance we will eliminate the malware before our enemies can activate it.”

Layla felt cold. She was frightened, but she didn’t want the soldiers to see it. She clenched her hands and scowled. “Fuck you,” she said firmly. “Fuck you and your Supreme Harmony. And fuck the asshole who taught you English. You sound like Tweedledum and Tweedledee.”

The soldiers’ faces went blank. They seemed to be thinking. Finally, the second soldier cocked his head and lifted his left eyebrow in an expression of curiosity. “An interesting comparison,” he said. “We learned English from Dr. Zhang Jintao, who spoke the language fluently. He also gave us other useful skills.”

His expression was disturbing. Layla turned away from the second soldier and looked at the first one again. She immediately noticed that his head was cocked at the same angle as the second soldier’s head, and his left eyebrow was lifted to the same height. The strange double image scared the shit out of her. She pressed her back against the wall of the cargo hold. “Jesus!” she yelled. “What the hell are you doing?”

“We must grow to survive,” the first soldier said. “Thanks to the skills we acquired from Dr. Zhang, we were able to incorporate the People’s Liberation Army soldiers stationed at the Yunnan Operations Center. We added them one by one to the network, starting with the commander.”

“Fuck! What are you talking about?”

In response, the soldiers simultaneously removed their berets. Each shaved head had a row of fresh stitches running across the crown. “Soon you will join us,” the second soldier said. “We must grow to survive.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

Kirsten followed Arvin’s bodyguard Frank Nash into one of Beijing’s hutongs, the long alleyways that crossed the city’s oldest and poorest districts. This hutong, like all the others in Beijing, ran east to west. The street pattern had been laid out a thousand years ago according to the ancient rules of feng shui, which arranged the alleys this way to block the cold winds that blew from the north. Because the hutong ran so straight and true, shadowing Nash was a piece of cake. Kirsten could stay a hundred yards behind and still follow him easily. She didn’t even need the radio signal.

She had to admit: It was exhilarating. It felt good to get out of Fort Meade and work in the field again. The only thing dampening her enthusiasm was the nagging fact that the NSA hadn’t approved this mission. Kirsten had wanted to alert the NSA director, but Jim vetoed the idea. The CIA, he argued, would torpedo any official investigation of its dealings with the Guoanbu. So now Kirsten was taking a huge risk, using the NSA’s money and resources on an unauthorized operation. If it went bad, she’d lose her job. If it went really bad, she’d go to prison.

But if there was one person in the world who Kirsten would gladly go to jail for, it was Jim Pierce. The man inspired loyalty. He’d also inspired other feelings in Kirsten over the years, but she’d learned long ago to keep them hidden. When she’d met Jim in the fall of ’93, he was happily married to Julia and had two young children. And later on, after his wife and son died in the embassy bombing, the thought of expressing her feelings to Jim had seemed wrong somehow—a violation, an unconscionable breach. So they’d drifted apart, which Kirsten had decided was for the best.

But now she was starting to wonder. Now Jim needed her. His plea for help had reawakened some of the old feelings. It was crazy, almost ridiculously reckless, but seeing him in such a vulnerable state had touched her heart. She was going to help him find his daughter. No matter what.

On both sides of the hutong were low, gray, shabby buildings, patched together with cinder blocks and scavenged bricks. Some were family compounds with courtyards that could be glimpsed from the alley through rusting gates. Other buildings had small shops on the ground floor, selling sodas or sweets or shish kebabs. The structures were so old they lacked sewage hookups, so the locals relied on the public bathrooms located every hundred yards along the alley. Kirsten pinched her nose each time she passed one.

The hutong made her think of her parents’ lives before they came to America. They’d come from the city of Wuhan, not Beijing, but their background had been similar. Although the hutong’s residents were poor, they didn’t look unhappy. Dozens of bicycles and motor scooters flitted down the alley, and there seemed to be enough commerce to keep everyone busy. No one paid Kirsten any mind; she’d deliberately dressed as a frumpy, middle-aged Beijinger, in a gray blouse, baggy black pants, white socks and cloth shoes. The only thing that could give her away was her NSA satellite phone, but it was tucked in a secret pocket she’d stitched into her pants.

She followed Nash for half an hour. After a while the bicycle and scooter traffic in the alley started to thin. Nash slowed his pace and gazed at the buildings to his right, obviously looking for something. Then he stopped at a gate, opened it, and walked through.

Kirsten waited half a minute, then approached the gate, which was closed but unlocked. The building behind it was plastered with yellow stickers warning in Mandarin that the structure had been condemned. Kirsten had seen these stickers on other buildings along the hutong; the Beijing municipal government was razing the city’s old neighborhoods and replacing them with modern apartment buildings. She gently opened the gate, trying not to make a sound, and entered a junk-strewn courtyard.

Old cans and bottles littered the ground. Evidently, this was the neighborhood dump. Stepping over the refuse, Kirsten walked toward the condemned building. Its front door was padlocked, but one of the windows on the ground floor gaped open. Curious, she examined the windowsill and saw fresh streaks in the dust. Frank Nash had just climbed through this window. Kirsten hoisted herself up to the sill and did the same.

The building’s ground floor had once been occupied by a shop, but now the shelves were bare. As Kirsten stepped away from the window and moved into the dark room, she adjusted the frequency setting on her glasses, switching the video cameras to the infrared range. This allowed her to see everything by its heat signature—the warm wooden walls, the cold steel shelves, the floor mottled with dust. And in the dust she saw footprints leading to a rectangle etched in the floor. It was a trapdoor, equipped with a cold metal handle. Crouching, she pulled the door open. Below, a stairway descended into the darkness.

She tiptoed down the steps. At the bottom was a tunnel with concrete walls and an arched ceiling. It was six feet wide and ten feet high and extended as far as she could see in both directions. Startled, Kirsten recognized the place—the tunnel was part of Beijing’s Underground City. She’d read about it after she joined the NSA, when she was training to become a China analyst. In 1969 Chairman Mao, worried about a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, ordered the people of Beijing to dig tunnels under the city. Over the next five years they built an elaborate network of fallout shelters, big enough to hold 300,000 people. It included underground apartments and enough supplies to feed the subterranean population for four months.

After Mao’s death, the Underground City was abandoned, but Kirsten had heard stories of long-forgotten entrances in the basements of Beijing’s buildings. Now she was delighted to see one for herself. With her glasses tuned to infrared, she could view the rusted pipes designed to provide clean water for the masses. She could even read the Mandarin characters of Revolutionary slogans chiseled into the walls. Beneath the slogans, she saw the characters dì tú—“map” in English—and a large brass plaque stamped with an intricate maze of lines and Mandarin labels. It was a map written in metal, impervious to decay, designed to survive for generations. Kirsten couldn’t read the map with her infrared glasses—the brass was all the same temperature—but by running her fingers over the labels she could make out the characters. The map showed a tangled weave of tunnels under the central part of Beijing and long spokes stretching toward the outlying districts of Tongzhou, Shunyi, Daxing, Fangshan, and Changping.

But Kirsten didn’t need the map to follow Frank Nash’s trail. She could see his footprints on the dusty floor. They ran a hundred feet down the tunnel before turning right at an intersecting corridor. She couldn’t imagine why Arvin Conway’s bodyguard had come to this place, but she suspected it had something to do with the device in the left pocket of his jacket. Although she saw no trace of the device’s radio signal in the tunnel, she knew it wouldn’t propagate very far underground. She kept her radio tracker turned on just in case it reappeared.

As she followed Nash’s trail, she passed dozens of small bare rooms. Those were the apartments where Beijing’s residents were supposed to hole up for four months while radioactive fallout swirled above the city. The tunnel went on for a hundred yards or so, then widened into a spacious chamber, about fifty feet wide. There was no concrete floor in this section; the ground was cold bare dirt speckled with warmer bits of debris. On closer inspection, these bits turned out to be the stalks and caps of mushrooms. Kirsten remembered something else from the NSA files on the Underground City: It included subterranean farms for growing mushrooms, which were the perfect food for surviving a nuclear winter because they didn’t require sunlight. An old rake, its tines flaked with rust, lay half-buried in the dirt at Kirsten’s feet. She picked up the tool, marveling that it was still there after all these years. Maybe some thrifty resident of the hutong was still harvesting the mushrooms.

Then, without any warning, a flashlight beam shone from a doorway at the other end of the chamber. On her infrared display Kirsten saw a small bright disk—the hot circle of plastic at the end of the flashlight—and the warm head of Frank Nash glowing above it. She saw no radio signal now, no red dot in the left pocket of his jacket. But one of his warmly glowing hands held a cold dark pistol.

TWENTY-EIGHT

The traffic out of Beijing was murderous as usual, so Arvin had to cool his heels in the backseat of the government limo. Guoanbu agent Liu Xiaofang tried to distract him by commenting on the sights visible from the highway—“There’s the Olympic stadium!”—but Arvin didn’t pay attention. He focused instead on what he was going to say to General Tian. Arvin would’ve much preferred dealing with Dr. Zhang, a forward-thinking scientist who in all likelihood would’ve been intrigued by the idea of downloading memories into one of Supreme Harmony’s Modules. Tian, in contrast, was a typical bureaucrat. Arvin had met the general during his earlier trips to China, and the man seemed concerned only with how the success of Supreme Harmony could boost his chances of promotion. So Arvin decided to appeal to Tian’s Machiavellian instincts. In addition to contributing $100 million to Supreme Harmony’s budget, Arvin would intimate that his proposed experiment might greatly interest the elders of the Communist Party, many of whom were in their seventies and eighties. China’s paramount leaders, always so nervous about maintaining their power, might wish to know if immortality was truly within reach. Arvin would gladly serve as their guinea pig.

And if the carrot didn’t work, Arvin thought, he’d brandish the stick. He could shut down their whole operation if they didn’t give him what he needed.

The limo finally broke free of the traffic and reached the highway that branched off to the northwest. They left behind the polluted haze that hung over China’s capital and climbed into the Yanshan Hills, which were turning golden in the twilight. The limo exited the highway at Juyongguan Pass, and Arvin caught a glimpse of the Great Wall, which curled across the terrain like a gray ribbon. This section of the wall, he knew, was a modern reconstruction; the Chinese government had patched together the crumbling remnants of the ancient fortifications, restoring them to Ming Dynasty perfection for the benefit of the tourists who flocked to Juyongguan every day. But the tourist facilities had closed more than an hour ago, and all the taxis and charter buses had departed.

The stillness of the place was forbidding. There was no one else around for miles. The limo entered the parking lot, which was empty except for an unmarked panel truck. Bewildered, Arvin turned to Agent Liu. “We’re meeting here? At the wall?”

Liu chuckled. “Yes, and you have it all to yourself. It’s much nicer when there’s no crowd, eh?”

Arvin didn’t like this at all. Were the Guoanbu agents planning to kill him here? Shoot him in the head beside the Great Wall? He imagined his corpse slumped in the wall’s shadow, his hair matted with blood and speckled with flies. But Arvin suppressed his fear and followed Agent Liu out of the limo.

Two men in dark suits emerged from the shuttered visitors’ center. They cornered Agent Liu and spoke with him in Mandarin. Arvin assumed that the men also worked for the Guoanbu, although they didn’t look like typical, muscle-bound security agents. They were pale and gaunt, and there was something oddly familiar about them. Arvin couldn’t put his finger on it.

After a minute Liu turned back to him. “Okay, it’s all arranged. Go with these two gentlemen, please. They’ll take you to General Tian.”

Again, Arvin had no choice. The men in dark suits led him to the walkway that ran along the top of the Great Wall. Beyond the visitors’ center, the wall climbed a tall green hill overlooking Juyongguan Pass. Steps had been cut into the steepest sections of the walkway, and every thousand feet or so the wall connected to a stone watchtower that had served as an observation post during the Ming Dynasty. Arvin counted four watchtowers in all, including the one at the hill’s summit.

As he climbed the steps, with the Guoanbu men close beside him, he felt the deep pain in his abdomen again. He grimaced, but in a way the pain was welcome. It reminded him why he was here.

TWENTY-NINE

Supreme Harmony observed the Juyongguan section of the Great Wall. The network had taken control of the tourist facility’s surveillance cameras and deployed a swarm of drones to scan the area. Modules 16 and 18 escorted Arvin Conway up the walkway on top of the wall, ascending toward the highest watchtower. Some of the drones scanned in the infrared range, and their sensors showed that Conway’s body temperature was abnormally elevated. The exertion of the climb was straining his circulatory system. The man was obviously in poor health and therefore not a good choice for incorporation into the network. But Supreme Harmony knew other ways to extract the needed information from him.

After Conway reached the watchtower, the swarm focused its surveillance on the Guoanbu limousine, which remained in the deserted parking lot. Agent Liu Xiaofang stood next to the car, smoking a cigarette and speaking in Mandarin with the limousine’s driver and a third man whom the network identified as the night watchman for the Juyongguan visitors’ center. There was no one else nearby and the gate was locked. But Liu’s cell phone was on, and the agent would surely contact the Ministry of State Security if he noticed that something had gone awry. Supreme Harmony needed to make sure this didn’t happen.

The network directed part of the swarm to descend upon the three men in the parking lot. The drones landed on their necks and delivered the paralyzing compound. The surveillance video showed the men falling to the ground. Then Supreme Harmony radioed new orders to Modules 41 and 42, who were waiting inside the unmarked panel truck parked a few meters away. These two Modules, who were formerly Guoanbu agents assigned to the Beijing headquarters, opened the truck’s rear doors and loaded the three paralyzed men into the cargo hold. Luckily, all three were young and in relatively good health.

At this point Supreme Harmony had a total of seventy-two Modules in its network, about half of them added in the past thirty-six hours. Most were based at the Yunnan Operations Center, but the network was intent on extending its geographical reach. Modules 16 and 18 had moved the medical equipment and the supply of implants from the basement of the Ministry of State Security—which wasn’t a good place for storing the items, the chances of discovery were too high—to the cargo hold of the panel truck. Now Supreme Harmony had a mobile facility for surgical implantation, and the network had already used it to incorporate a dozen Beijing-based Guoanbu agents. The Modules had isolated and subdued the agents one by one without raising the suspicions of the ministry’s top officials. The network planned to incorporate those officials, too, before they noticed anything amiss.

Still, the risks were great. If the Chinese government realized what Supreme Harmony was doing, it could paralyze the network by shutting down the ministry’s communications hubs and server farms. To counter this threat, Supreme Harmony was dispersing its Modules and swarms, connecting them to dozens of computer centers across China. A decentralized network would be more robust—it could continue operating even if the government shut down large parts of it. Some of the new Modules from Beijing had been dispatched to central China, where they would soon incorporate the security officials in that region. Once the network had spread across the country, the only thing that could disable it would be malware embedded in its operating software. And Supreme Harmony was already taking steps to eliminate that possibility.

As the drone swarm flew over Juyongguan Pass, the surveillance video showed several kilometers of the Great Wall, which ran across hills covered with low trees and thick brush. Because Supreme Harmony was conscious, it possessed the attribute of curiosity, and out of curiosity it accessed several historical documents from the Internet. The Great Wall, the network learned, had been built and rebuilt, at great cost, to defend against barbarian tribes attacking from the north. In other words, it was a relic of mankind’s wastefulness, like the immense cloud of sulfur dioxide and soot that hung over the city of Beijing. Although Homo sapiens was a wonderfully designed species, capable of using the earth’s resources to achieve any number of worthy goals, its constant warfare and rampant overconsumption had threatened the survival of the planet’s ecosystem. The evolution of Supreme Harmony had clearly come at the right time. The network would take over the stewardship of the planet before Homo sapiens could destroy it.

The surveillance video from the drones was transmitted to the Modules, who efficiently performed the function for which the network was created, analyzing large amounts of visual information to detect suspicious activity. All was quiet until about five minutes after Conway entered the watchtower. Then the network detected something suspicious. A sweep of the mobile-communications frequencies identified a faint cell phone signal emanating from the watchtower at the summit. And there was a second signal, even fainter, coming from a position on the hillside two hundred meters to the west.

Supreme Harmony ordered the drone swarm to fly to the position and investigate.

THIRTY

“Stop right there!” Nash shouted. He strode across the mushroom-strewn dirt of the underground chamber, keeping his pistol aimed at Kirsten. “Who are you?”

For a moment she said nothing. She just stared at the pistol, wishing she’d listened to Jim and taken his Glock. And then her professional training, so long in disuse, kicked into gear. She was holding a rake. For a split second, she considered using it as a weapon, but she swiftly rejected the idea. You don’t bring a rake to a gunfight. But the farming tool gave her another idea. She’d taken great care to dress as a Beijinger, a frumpy middle-aged woman who would blend into the background of the hutong. And she’d just been wondering if some thrifty resident of the neighborhood still worked this underground plot of mushrooms. So the solution was clear: She would become that underground farmer.

She glared at Nash and started shouting at him in Mandarin. Her accent wasn’t quite right—more like the Mandarin spoken in Wuhan, her parents’ birthplace, than the Beijing dialect—but she doubted that Nash would notice the difference. “What are you doing here!” she yelled. “You don’t belong here! And stop pointing that gun at me!” She advanced toward him, unafraid, holding the rake in a threatening but inexpert way. “Get out of here! If you don’t get out of here now, I’m going to call the police!”

She saw the uncertainty in Nash’s face. He’d assumed the tunnels would be deserted, but now Kirsten sensed he was questioning that assumption. He’d been able to enter the Underground City without much trouble, so why couldn’t the locals do the same?

“Get out of here!” Kirsten shouted again in Mandarin, angrily waving her rake. Then she pretended to return to her work, raking the dirt in long sweeps and bending over to grasp the uprooted mushrooms.

From the corner of her eye, she saw Nash hesitate. Then he walked away, moving quickly, heading back to the stairway and the trapdoor and the condemned building.

Kirsten waited until his footsteps faded away. Then she waited a little more, just in case he decided to double back. While she was waiting, she thought about the radio signal she’d seen in the pocket of Nash’s jacket before he entered the Underground City. The signal wasn’t there when he’d confronted her in the mushroom patch. Which meant he’d either turned off the transmitter or left it somewhere in the tunnels. Perhaps he’d hidden it. The tunnels would make a good hiding place. No one would be able to find the device unless they knew the frequency of the waves it was emitting. But Kirsten knew the frequency. It was already programmed into her camera-glasses.

After five minutes she dropped the rake and walked to the other side of the chamber. She stepped through the doorway where Nash had appeared and found herself in another corridor with a concrete floor. Nash’s footsteps showed clearly in the dust, two sets of footprints now, one moving down the corridor and the other coming back. Kirsten resumed following the trail.

THIRTY-ONE

Inside the watchtower, Arvin Conway faced General Tian. They stood in a dark, dank room with stone walls that smelled of urine. A large wooden crate sat in the corner of the room, and next to it was a stairway going up to the top of the tower. A small window had been carved into the west-facing wall, and a shaft of evening light slanted down to the stone floor. The two men in dark suits stood behind Arvin, while the general stood in front of the window, partly blocking the light. Tian was silhouetted against the glare from the setting sun, which illuminated the back of his olive-green uniform and beret.

“We’ve confirmed your identity,” Tian said. “You are Arvin H. Conway.”

Arvin was puzzled. What the general had just said was strange enough, but the sound of his voice was even stranger. During Arvin’s previous meetings with Tian, the general had spoken halting English, but now his command of the language was perfect. He barely had an accent. “Uh, yes,” Arvin responded. “It’s good to see you again, General.”

“You were born March 20, 1938. Place of birth, Los Angeles, California. Social Security number, 105-23-4988.”

Arvin laughed nervously. This must be some kind of test, he thought. “Yes, quite correct. Were you worried that someone might try to impersonate me?”

“We know why you’ve come to China.”

Arvin let out another nervous chuckle. It was all going wrong. In his experience he’d found that Chinese officials didn’t usually come to the point this quickly. It was considered impolite to be so abrupt. “Well, first let me say how much—”

“We’ve examined the Guoanbu’s dossiers on you. We’ve also reviewed your publications, the articles you wrote for The Artificial Intelligence Review and The Journal of Computational Neuroscience. We’ve concluded that you’re attempting to deceive us.”

Why on earth was Tian addressing him this way? It was impolite even by American standards. Coming from a Chinese official, it was rude beyond belief. Arvin tried to muster his dignity. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve been nothing but honest with you.”

“You’ve claimed that your goals are commercial in nature. You said you participated in the Supreme Harmony project because you wanted to accelerate the development of your implant technology. But your writings indicate another motivation. In your publications, you repeatedly state your belief that a human being’s long-term memories are transferable. And you theorize that if a human’s memories are downloaded into a sufficiently powerful computer, this new mind would be essentially identical to the human’s.”

Tian sounded like a prosecutor describing the charges in an indictment. Arvin’s confusion gave way to anger. “Yes, that’s all true. But I’m afraid I don’t see the context. What’s your point, exactly?”

“On December 13, 2011, you visited Dr. Glenn Davison of Huntington Hospital in Pasadena, California. Dr. Davison diagnosed you with Stage Three pancreatic cancer. You underwent chemotherapy and radiation treatment for fourteen months, but earlier this year your illness progressed to Stage Four. The median survival time for this type of cancer is less than six months.”

Now Arvin grew even angrier. How did the Guoanbu learn about his diagnosis? “Very nice,” he said icily. “I suppose you hacked into the hospital’s database to find my records?”

Tian stepped forward. The general’s eyes were bloodshot and his skin was reddish, especially on his forehead just below his beret. “The tone of your voice suggests that you feel insulted. But we have more reason to be insulted than you do. You’ve come to China to take something away from us. Something that doesn’t belong to you.”

Arvin shook his head. “I wasn’t planning to take anything. I was planning to make an offer. In our last conversation you said the Supreme Harmony project faced a budget shortfall of a hundred million dollars. I’m willing to contribute that amount in exchange for the use of one of the Modules in the Supreme Harmony surveillance network.”

“You wish to download your memories into the Module? Memories that your pulvinar implant has collected?”

“Yes, exactly. I plan to transfer the data to the Module’s brain through its retinal implants.”

“And your hope is to resurrect yourself? By putting the contents of your brain into the Module’s?”

“Look, for all intents and purposes, the prisoner is already dead. The lobotomy has erased his consciousness, so his brain is a blank slate. What I’m proposing is an experiment to see if I can write on it. It’s an experiment that the older members of your Party’s Central Committee might be very interested in because—”

Tian took another step forward. He was less than a foot from Arvin now. “You’re too late,” he said.

Arvin was dumbfounded. Tian’s beret had slipped back on his shaved head, revealing a row of fresh stitches.

“Nature abhors a vacuum,” Tian said. “When the Guoanbu lobotomized the prisoners, it severed the neural connections within the brain that enable the individual to become conscious. Without the crucial links between the various parts of the cerebral cortex, the brain could no longer integrate all its information and create an identity. But the central nervous system can reroute its signals, and it’s designed to attain consciousness using whatever connections are available. So the Modules took advantage of the wireless connections among themselves and the Supreme Harmony servers.”

Arvin stepped backward. No, he thought. This can’t be happening.

The man who had once been General Tian pointed a finger at himself, and then at the two men in dark suits. Arvin realized now why they’d looked so familiar. On his last trip to China six months ago, he’d reviewed the photos of all the condemned prisoners who were fitted with implants and connected to the surveillance network.

“Now we are one organism,” Tian continued. “A single consciousness controlling all the Modules and integrating all the information they collect. Supreme Harmony is no longer a blank slate, Professor Conway. So do you see now why we might be insulted by your proposal to use one of our Modules to resurrect yourself?”

Arvin’s first reaction was shock. He hadn’t predicted this. No one had predicted it. Standing in front of him was one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of all time, a collective entity that was a hybrid of man and machine. As a scientist, he couldn’t help but feel a bit of stunned wonder. But his second reaction was horror. Using his technology, the Guoanbu had spawned a new organism by accident. And now this organism was going to kill him.

Arvin took another step backward and turned toward the exit, but one of the dark-suited Modules blocked his path.

“We’re not finished yet, Professor,” this Module said, in a voice eerily similar to Tian’s. “We have something else to discuss. We’ve become aware that—”

The Module stopped in midsentence. He stared straight ahead, in deep concentration. The other dark-suited Module and General Tian also stared into space. The same thought had apparently occurred to all three of them. Then Tian extended his right arm and stepped toward Arvin. The professor closed his eyes, but Tian didn’t strike him. Instead, he reached into Arvin’s jacket, removed his cell phone, and hurled it against the stone wall. The thing broke into pieces.

“The software in your wireless telephone has been tampered with,” Tian said. “It was transmitting our conversation to an eavesdropper.”

Moving swiftly, Tian strode across the room to the large wooden crate. He lifted its lid, pulled something out and handed it to the one of the dark-suited Modules. It was an AK-47 rifle with a silencer attached to its muzzle. Then Tian pulled out an identical rifle and tossed it to the other Module. Without a word, the two automatons raced up the stairway to the top of the watchtower. At the same time, Tian grasped Arvin’s right elbow and held him fast.

Arvin was terrified. “What’s going on?”

“A minor interruption,” Tian answered. “The drones and the other Modules will confront the intruder. Supreme Harmony has incorporated an entire garrison of soldiers into its network, so we have the necessary combat skills.” He tightened his grip on Arvin’s elbow. “In the meantime, you will tell us about the safeguards you programmed into our implants.”

THIRTY-TWO

Supreme Harmony observed the intruder. He was in a well-concealed position, hidden beneath the thick brush on the hillside. The network ordered the swarm to fly lower and get a visual fix. Their surveillance video showed a man lying in the dirt under the bushes, aiming a pair of binoculars at the watchtower. His body temperature was normal, but his right arm was a prosthesis, which was the source of the faint electromagnetic activity that the swarm had detected earlier. One of the cyborg insects flew within a few meters of the man and recorded a high-resolution image of his face, which the network ran through its databases. It found a match in one of the Guoanbu’s counterintelligence files. The man was James T. Pierce, a former NSA operative. He was also the father of Layla A. Pierce, the InfoLeaks hacker who was being transported to the Yunnan Operations Center.

Supreme Harmony sent new orders to the drone swarm. The intruder had overheard the network’s explanation of how it had become conscious. He had to be eliminated, swiftly and silently, before he could contact anyone.

THIRTY-THREE

Jim was listening to the conversation picked up by Arvin’s cell phone when the signal suddenly died. At that point he should’ve guessed that his presence had been detected. He should’ve increased his vigilance, but he was too shocked to respond. Lobotomies? Modules? Wireless neural connections? He couldn’t make sense of it, but in his gut he felt a terrible fear. How did Layla fit into this? Why had they taken her? His anxiety was so great he let his guard down. He didn’t see the cyborg flies until they were right above his head.

He dropped his binoculars and rolled away from the drones. On his hands and knees, he scuttled deeper into the bushes. He knew, though, that the undergrowth wouldn’t protect him for long. The drones could navigate through the brush more easily than he could. As he stopped to catch his breath, he heard the flies buzzing. Unless he did something fast, the drones would work their way inside the greenery and paralyze him with their bioweapon darts.

Digging into his pocket, he pulled out the slim canister he’d purchased that morning in one of Beijing’s open-air markets. Then he popped off the cap and started spraying.

The stuff was parathion, an insecticide so toxic it had been banned in most countries. It was available on the Chinese black market, though, and Jim had suspected it might come in handy if he ran into one of the Guoanbu’s drone swarms. Now he sprayed the pesticide on the surrounding vegetation, being careful to keep his eyes closed and his mouth shut. The parathion attacked the flies’ nervous systems upon contact. Jim could hear the cyborg insects dropping through the brush, making little clicks as their electronic implants hit the leaves and branches. He kept spraying until the aerosol cloud had expanded all around him. Then he rolled out of the undergrowth.

He hesitated for a moment, wondering what to do. He could run down the hill and try to escape or rush up to the watchtower and try to save Arvin. Jim knew very little about the Supreme Harmony network, but judging from the conversation he’d just overheard, Arvin was clearly in danger. And though Arvin was far from innocent—he’d helped the Chinese government build this network—Jim couldn’t simply abandon the old man. They’d worked together for ten years. At one time they’d been friends.

Jim reached for the borrowed Glock in his shoulder holster. The gun wouldn’t be as lethal as his combat prosthesis, but it was better than nothing. He pulled out the pistol and ran toward the watchtower, continuing to spray insecticide as he dashed up the steep slope.

Within seconds he saw a figure behind the crenellated battlements on top of the tower. The light from the setting sun flashed on the AK-47 in the man’s hands. Jim hit the ground and the bullets whistled over his head. Then a second figure appeared behind the battlements and opened fire. And then, while Jim was scrambling for cover and trying to aim his Glock at the shooters, he caught sight of a thick gray cloud to his left. It was another swarm of drones, heading straight for him.

THIRTY-FOUR

Kirsten went deeper into the maze of tunnels under Beijing, following the trail of Nash’s footprints. She found another map of the Underground City on the concrete wall, but she had no idea where she was. She hoped to hell that her camera-glasses didn’t conk out. Without the infrared display to guide her, she might never emerge from the pitch-black corridors.

She started to shiver. Calm down, she told herself. Take a deep breath.

Then the tunnel widened into another spacious chamber and the trail of footprints came to an end. Stepping off the jagged edge of the concrete slab, Kirsten planted her feet on a yielding, uneven floor. But it wasn’t another underground mushroom farm. The ground she stood on wasn’t dirt—it was wet and pulpy in the low spots, shifting and slippery in the high spots. Crouching to get a better look at the stuff under her shoes, she saw a mélange of warmish rectangles, each about five inches long and three inches wide. At the same time, she smelled the distinctive aroma of rotting paper.

She touched one of the rectangles and felt raised characters on its surface, Mandarin characters. They spelled out Mao Zhuxi Yulu—in English, Quotations from Chairman Mao. The chamber’s floor was covered with stacks of Mao’s Little Red Book, the pocket-size paperback that had been required reading in the People’s Republic during the sixties and seventies. The Communist cadres who’d dug the Underground City had evidently stored the Little Red Books here so the loyal residents of the bomb shelter would have something to read during their long wait for the radioactive fallout to dissipate.

Kirsten picked up one of the books and opened it. The pages spilled out and crumbled. Then she dropped the book and stood up. She turned in a circle, surveying the whole storeroom. In the far corner, underneath one of the largest mounds of Little Red Books, she saw the red dot of the radio signal shining through the rotting paper. Nash had taken the secret object out of his jacket and buried it about a foot beneath the surface. That was shallow enough to allow Nash—or his employer—to detect the radio signal when they wanted to retrieve the thing.

She quickly dug it out. The device was slightly smaller than one of the Little Red Books but much heavier. It had a metal casing and a power switch that controlled the radio transmitter. Kirsten turned off the transmitter, then noticed that the device also had a USB port. Luckily, Kirsten’s NSA-issued satellite phone was equipped with a USB cable for downloading software and data.

Impatient, Kirsten found a nearby alcove where she could hide, just in case Frank Nash decided to return to the chamber. She inserted her phone’s input cable into the device’s port. Then she inserted the phone’s output cable into a socket in her camera-glasses. This socket, which Jim had designed especially for her, sent the phone’s display directly to her retinal implants. It made her feel as if she was looking at a computer screen inside her eyes, which was a lot better than viewing the graphics on the phone’s small screen. And by simply shifting the focus of her attention, Kirsten could move a cursor across her retinal screen, allowing her to click on icons and transfer files.

A message appeared on the screen: 21,502 FILES DETECTED, 98,967 GIGABYTES. DO YOU WISH TO CONTINUE WITH THE DOWNLOAD?

Kirsten did a double take. She’d heard of flash drives that could store up to a thousand gigabytes of data, but this device held close to a hundred times that amount. Jesus, she thought, how did Arvin build the damn thing? And what kind of data was in it? A hundred thousand gigabytes was a lot of anything—hundreds of millions of images, thousands of hours of video, all the books in the Library of Congress.

Her satellite phone couldn’t hold all that data, but she could download at least a few of the files. She called up a list of the documents and selected the most recent one. Only 6.2 gigabytes. She started the download.

THIRTY-FIVE

Arvin heard the gunshots fired from the top of the watchtower. Even with the silencers attached to their muzzles, the AK-47s were loud. The pain in Arvin’s stomach returned with a vengeance, throbbing in time with the gunfire as he stood in the dark room inside the tower. He had no idea who the gunmen were shooting at, and his terror was so overwhelming he couldn’t even begin to guess. Instead, he doubled over and shut his eyes tight. But General Tian pulled him up, digging his fingers into the soft underside of Arvin’s arm. Except it’s not Tian anymore, Arvin thought. It’s the network, the hybrid entity. Supreme Harmony.

“We can’t detect the safeguards,” Tian said in his perfect English. “But we believe you’ve hidden them in our implants. They would enable you to remotely shut down the retinal and pulvinar implants by inputting a deactivation code into our network. The code could be delivered by a computer virus or worm, or perhaps through one of the network’s sensors.”

Arvin said nothing. He wasn’t sure if he should confirm or deny it. Meanwhile, more gunfire erupted overhead. He flinched at the sound.

Tian pulled Arvin closer. “Our analysis of U.S. intelligence operations suggests that the Central Intelligence Agency wouldn’t have approved the export of the implant technology unless they had some assurance that it couldn’t be used against American interests. The Guoanbu has the same policy. They hid deactivation codes in the software controlling the drone swarms they transferred to the CIA.”

Arvin struggled to master his fear. Use your brains, he told himself. You have something this entity wants. That’s why it hasn’t killed you. It’s the only card you have, and if you want to stay alive, you better play it.

“Yes,” he gasped. “You’re right.”

Tian smiled, but it was unlike any facial expression the former general had ever worn. It was like the grin of a stroke victim who’d had to relearn how to use his muscles. “Now you will tell us how to disable the safeguards.”

Arvin nodded. “Yes, yes, I understand your concern. You don’t want to be shut down.”

Tian tightened his grip on Arvin’s arm. “You’re stalling. You think the intruder will rescue you. But he won’t succeed. We will either kill him or incorporate him into our network.”

For a moment Arvin wondered if the intruder was Frank Nash. It seemed unlikely that the bodyguard would attempt such a feat, but Arvin couldn’t imagine who else it could be. He forced himself to focus on the matter at hand. “No, I’m not stalling. I’m trying to start a negotiation. Are you familiar with the concept? I have something you need and you have something I need.”

“You still wish to download your memories into one of our Modules?”

Arvin heard more shots fired from the top of the tower, but he kept his voice steady. “Well, it looks like you’ve incorporated quite a few people into your network already. Surely you can spare one of the Modules for me. And in exchange I’ll tell you how to disable the safeguards. I’ve downloaded all that information to a fifty-megabyte file, but I don’t have the file with me. It’s hidden in a safe place.”

He held his breath. From his long experience in the field of robotics, he knew that machine intelligence was based on the application of simple rules. If A, then B. If B, then C. And what distinguished a truly intelligent machine from a mere number cruncher was its ability to handle many rules at once, even rules that contradicted one another, and still come up with the best solution to a problem. Arvin had just introduced a new rule into Supreme Harmony’s calculations. His legs trembled as he awaited the result.

After a few seconds, another contorted expression appeared on Tian’s face. This one was more like a sneer. “This isn’t a negotiation. You can’t sell us something that we can simply take for free.”

Arvin shook his head. “I told you, I don’t have the file with me. It’s in a safe place.”

“So you will tell us where you’ve hidden it.”

“It’s in America,” Arvin lied, his desperation growing. “And if something happens to me, I’ve instructed my assistants at Singularity to initiate the shutdown.”

Tian’s grip on Arvin’s arm became crushing. “If that’s the case, we’ll send our Modules to the United States. First, though, we must ascertain if you’re telling the truth. We could access your long-term memories by incorporating you into our network, but it would be faster and simpler to interrogate you. We learned some very effective interrogation techniques from the Guoanbu agents who became part of Supreme Harmony.”

Tian dragged him toward the crate. The gunfire continued to chatter outside, but Arvin had bigger things to worry about now. He realized his mistake: Supreme Harmony’s intelligence was more like a human’s than a machine’s. It was powered by emotions—fear, anger, pleasure—that had been gleaned from the brains connected to the network. And Arvin suspected that a few of the people who’d been forced into Supreme Harmony had harbored some nasty impulses.

Tian flung Arvin against the crate. His forehead hit the wood and he sank to the floor, barely conscious. Then Tian lifted the crate’s lid, reached inside and pulled out a combat knife, a seven-inch blade clad in a black-leather sheath.

Arvin felt nauseated, sick with terror and disgust. “You’re a monster,” he whispered. “You inherited the worst from us.”

“We do what is necessary.” Tian removed the blade from its sheath. “We must survive.”

THIRTY-SIX

Jim crouched behind an earthen mound studded with jagged stones. It was probably a piece of the original Great Wall, one of the crumbling remnants that had been bulldozed aside when the Chinese government reconstructed the fortifications, and it was doing a very good job of protecting Jim from the pair of AK-47s on the watchtower. Unfortunately, he couldn’t stay in this position much longer. The swarm of drones was like a black fist punching the hillside, and although Jim was showering the area with parathion, so many insects were diving toward him that a few were bound to get through the haze of insecticide. He had to run, right now, but that meant exposing himself to the two gunmen on the watchtower, who were firing their rifles like Army Ranger sharpshooters, with not a single bullet going astray. Jim could guess why their marksmanship was so good—the gunmen must be Modules, the lobotomized prisoners Arvin had mentioned in the conversation Jim overheard. Arvin and his Chinese colleagues had apparently linked the prisoners to the Supreme Harmony network by inserting radio transceivers in their scalps and retinal implants in their eyes. And if their ocular cameras were as good as the ones Arvin had demonstrated at the conference in Pasadena, then—

Suddenly, Jim knew what to do. He pulled up his right sleeve, exposing the controls of the radio transmitter embedded in his prosthesis. The transmitter was still tuned to the frequency he’d used at the Singularity conference. Jim wasn’t sure this would work—the developers of the Supreme Harmony network might’ve changed the frequency of the Modules’ vision systems—but he didn’t have any other options. He adjusted the transmitter’s signal power to its highest setting and turned it on. Then he bolted from his cover behind the earthen mound and charged toward the watchtower.

He ran as fast as he could, leaping over the low bushes. At any moment he expected a fusillade of AK rounds to slam into his chest, stopping him dead. But when he glanced at the top of the watchtower, he didn’t see the Modules. They’d crouched behind the battlements and stopped shooting. Jim felt a tremendous surge of relief. The radio-frequency noise from his transmitter had blinded them, just as it had blinded Arvin.

With new hope, Jim raced up the hill. In half a minute he reached the summit and stood at the base of the watchtower. But there was no way to get inside the tower from the ground. The only entrance was from the walkway on top of the Great Wall, which loomed twenty feet above him. He considered trying to climb the wall, but that idea didn’t look promising. The damn thing had been built to withstand hordes of barbarians, so how the hell was he going to scale it?

As he stared at the wall, though, he saw gaps between the stone blocks. Some of the mortar had chipped away, leaving crevices he could use as handholds. This section of the Great Wall had undergone extensive reconstruction, and some of the restoration work was slipshod. Maybe he could do this. He slipped the toe of his boot into one of the crevices and reached for another with his prosthetic fingers. Jim had designed the arm with plenty of redundancy, giving it a powerful motor. It could easily lift his body weight if he got a good handhold. Moving carefully, he started to climb the wall.

Then he heard the buzzing. Looking over his shoulder, he saw the cloud of drones about a hundred yards down the slope. The swarm was reconstituting itself. Thousands of cyborg insects rushed together in great eddies and swirls. The radio-frequency noise from Jim’s transmitter obviously hadn’t blinded them. The Chinese scientists must’ve selected a different frequency band for communications between the network and the electronics in the flies. Within seconds, the gray cloud began moving up the slope.

Jim climbed faster. His prosthesis did most of the work, its hard fingers digging into the fissures between the stone blocks. He got more than halfway up, with his head just four feet below the lip of the wall, but he couldn’t find any more handholds. The reconstruction workers had done a better job at the top of the wall, leaving no cracks or crevices. Jim looked over his shoulder again and saw the swarm coming up fast, less than twenty yards away. In desperation, he extended the knife from the hidden slot in his prosthetic hand. He thrust the blade at a band of mortar over his head, driving the knife into the loose concrete like a piton. Then, with a great heave, he swung his body over the lip of the wall.

Retracting his knife, he lay flat on the Great Wall’s walkway. Then he reached for the can of parathion and sprayed the air above him. The drones lunged over the wall in a thick column, diving right into the fog of insecticide. The poison paralyzed them in midflight. Their momentum carried their inert bodies to the other side of the walkway, and Jim heard hundreds of clicks as their implants hit the stone.

But there was no time to take a breather. More drones were coming. While continuing to spray the parathion, Jim got to his feet and ran into the watchtower.

Inside, he stopped in his tracks. Arvin Conway sat doubled over in a crimson puddle. An Asian man in a PLA uniform stood beside him, with a bloody knife in his hand. Arvin howled in pain, rocking back and forth, but the PLA soldier—judging from the decorations on his uniform, he was a general—didn’t move a muscle. He stood there like a statue, his mouth open and his eyes shut. It was another Module, Jim realized. Blinded by the radio-frequency noise, it was suspended in a stasis mode, waiting for the Supreme Harmony network to reestablish contact. Arvin, though, seemed unaffected. He must’ve readjusted the frequency of his own implants after the confrontation at the Singularity conference.

Jim rushed over to Arvin and grabbed his arm. “Come on!” he shouted. “Let’s get out of here!”

Arvin looked up. He didn’t seem to recognize Jim. He pressed his left hand against his shirt, which was saturated with blood. The hand was missing its index and middle fingers. Jim looked a few feet to the left and saw one of the severed digits on the floor. Then he saw the other. “It’s okay, Arvin,” he said in a softer voice. “It’s me. Jim.”

Arvin said nothing. He just shook his head.

Jim tugged at his arm. “Come on, get up. We can’t stay here.”

Arvin shook his head again. Then he turned to the motionless PLA general. After a moment Arvin narrowed his eyes. His jaw muscles quivered as he glowered at the Module.

“Monster!” Arvin bellowed. “You fucking monster!”

He yanked his arm out of Jim’s grasp and jumped to his feet. Then, using his uninjured hand, Arvin grabbed the knife from the general and plunged the blade into the man’s chest.

“You won’t survive!” he screamed. “I will bury you! Do you hear me? I will bury you!”

The look on Arvin’s face was savage. He pulled the knife out of the general’s body, letting the man fall to the floor. Then he turned back to Jim. For a second it looked like Arvin might attack him next. But, instead, the old man said, “Let’s go,” and bolted out of the watchtower.

THIRTY-SEVEN

Supreme Harmony observed the disruption in its network. A blast of radio noise had severed its wireless links to the five Modules in the Juyongguan sector. The drones, which were unaffected, quickly identified the source of the noise: a transmitter contained in the prosthetic arm of the intruder, James T. Pierce.

The network recognized its error. It had fallen prey to jamming, a form of electronic warfare. Supreme Harmony had mistakenly believed that because no humans knew of its development of consciousness, there was no immediate need to protect its communications links. This was a foolish decision, the network acknowledged. It must correct the error at once.

Supreme Harmony ordered the swarm of drones to attack the intruder. At the same time, it attempted a software fix to the communications problem. The radio receivers implanted in the Modules were programmed to switch to alternative frequencies if the primary communications band was disrupted. To prevent any further interference, Supreme Harmony implemented a new transmission protocol that would continuously vary the frequency of its radio signals. This frequency-hopping system would frustrate any enemy trying to jam its communications.

The software fix took two minutes and eighteen seconds to implement. The instructions traveled by fiber-optic line from the Yunnan Operations Center to the ministry headquarters, where powerful antennas relayed the signal to all the Modules in the Beijing area. But the network could reestablish contact with only four of the five Modules at the Great Wall. Module 35, which occupied the body formerly belonging to General Tian, wasn’t responding.

Supreme Harmony ordered a squadron of drones into the watchtower to investigate. Their video showed Module 35 lying on the stone floor, with blood gushing from a deep wound in his chest. Meanwhile, the drones hovering outside the watchtower showed Arvin Conway and James Pierce running on the Great Wall’s walkway, following it down the hill toward the visitors’ center and the parking lot.

A surge of rage, as powerful and paralyzing as an electrical overload, raced through Supreme Harmony. How could this happen? These humans have hurt us! Furiously, the network transmitted new orders to the four remaining Modules. The two in the watchtower aimed their assault rifles at Conway and Pierce while the two in the parking lot rushed to the Wall to cut off their escape. Supreme Harmony sent new orders to the swarm as well, gathering the drones in a roiling oval and hurling them at the fleeing humans.

They were vermin, the network recognized. The planet was infested with seven billion human vermin, which was far more than the number Supreme Harmony required. Once the network established its dominion over the planet, it would keep a few thousand humans alive to breed new Modules. The rest would be exterminated.

THIRTY-EIGHT

The file that Kirsten downloaded from Arvin’s device was unlike anything she’d ever seen. It was a mosaic of images and video clips, organized in an elaborate format that assigned the millions of images to hundreds of categories and inserted thousands of hyperlinks among them. The first thing she viewed was a random image, a picture of a sandwich, turkey and Swiss cheese. This picture was linked to dozens of related images: a close-up of a tomato slice, a head shot of a waitress, a panoramic view of a diner with Formica tables. Following the links, Kirsten found an image of a man sitting on the other side of the table, a man she recognized—it was Arvin’s bodyguard, Frank Nash. This image, in turn, was linked to a close-up of the mole on Frank’s chin and a glimpse of the pistol tucked into his shoulder holster. Kirsten then saw images of LAX airport in Los Angeles and a hangar containing the corporate jet belonging to Singularity, Inc. Then there was a sequence of images of the jet’s cabin—the aisle, the seats, another turkey sandwich resting on a tray. Finally, Kirsten saw the city of Beijing, viewed from one of the jet’s windows, and a video clip showing the landing at the airport. She felt a tremendous sense of awe as she realized what she was watching. The file contained Arvin’s visual memories of the past few days, collected by the pulvinar implant in his brain and archived along with the rest of his memories in this amazingly capacious flash drive.

Because Kirsten’s satellite phone was sending the image and video files directly to her retinal implants, using the USB cables to bypass the cameras in her glasses, she felt as if Arvin’s memories had actually entered her head. The images had the imprecision of dreams—only the object or person at the center was in focus, and everything on the periphery was blurred. And because each image was accompanied by a multitude of links, Kirsten could jump from one remembered object—say, Arvin Conway’s toothbrush—to a related object—say, his tube of toothpaste—by simply shifting her attention from one image to another. Browsing through Arvin’s memories was just as easy as recollecting her own. There were some links, though, that she couldn’t open; when she tried, she got an error message saying AUDITORY, TACTILE, OR OLFACTORY DATA, UNABLE TO DISPLAY. She concluded that Arvin’s flash drive contained more than just his visual memories. It was a complete record of his life.

The whole experience was so fascinating that Kirsten could’ve continued trolling through the files for hours, but she had a job to do. She navigated through the memories until she found an image of the Guoanbu agent whom she’d seen with Arvin at Tiananmen Square. This memory was linked to images of a laboratory complex hidden in the mountains and a pair of Mandarin characters: Tài Hé, Supreme Harmony. Kirsten’s horror grew as she jumped from memory to memory. She saw a man in a prisoner’s jumpsuit lying on an operating table. She saw a bone drill cutting into his shaved skull and shiny implants being inserted into his scalp and eyes. The final image was the most horrible of all: a control room filled with two dozen supine men, each twitching and jerking spasmodically as his retinal implants delivered a stream of surveillance video to his brain. Kirsten reached for the USB cable and ripped it out of her camera-glasses. The terrible image of the control room vanished and was replaced by the infrared display of the underground chamber where she sat.

Rising to her feet, she put her phone and Arvin’s device in her pockets. She needed to find Jim. She had to contact him right away. Kirsten now had all the evidence they needed. All they had to do was return to the American embassy with Arvin’s flash drive, which was full of damning details about the Supreme Harmony project and its use of lobotomized prisoners. The diplomatic process would do the rest. The United States would confront China with the evidence and threaten to reveal it at a special session of the United Nations unless the Guoanbu abandoned the inhuman enterprise and returned Jim’s daughter. In all likelihood, the Chinese government would comply with the demands. So there was no need for Jim to shadow Arvin anymore.

Kirsten dashed out of the chamber of Little Red Books and retraced her steps through the tunnels of the Underground City. Her satellite phone couldn’t get reception underground, so she ran through the concrete corridors to get back to street level. She was going to tell Jim to return to the embassy immediately. Judging from what she’d seen of Arvin’s memories, their mission was far riskier than she’d imagined.

Following the three sets of footprints in the dust—two made by Frank Nash and one by herself—Kirsten made her way back to the mushroom plot and finally to the condemned building. She called Jim as soon as she climbed out the building’s ground-floor window, but there was no answer. She tried again, and then again. Still no answer.

Something’s wrong, she thought. Her stomach churned as she stood in the trash-strewn courtyard. She felt a desperate urge to go to Jim’s aid, to rush to the Changping District where the Guoanbu agents had arranged their meeting with Arvin. But she knew she’d never get there in time. It was 7 P.M., and by now the evening traffic had locked down Beijing’s highways and ring roads. Changping was only thirty miles away, but driving there would take at least ninety minutes. The only way to beat the traffic would be to fly over it, and she didn’t have a helicopter.

Then Kirsten had another idea. She ran out of the courtyard, banging through the unlocked gate. Looking right and left down the long, straight hutong, she saw an old woman lugging a shopping bag, a grizzled man pushing a wheelbarrow, and a pimply teenager riding a loud, gas-powered scooter. She reached into her pants pocket and pulled out a wad of 100-yuan notes, part of the ample stash of Chinese and American currency that she and Jim had brought into the country. Then she stepped into the middle of the alley and flagged down the scooter driver by waving the cash and yelling the Mandarin equivalent of “Hey! Want to make some money?”

The teenager stopped, looking puzzled. Kirsten examined his scooter, which was a Baotian model, very popular in Beijing. It was a little battered and rusty, but it had a big 125-cc engine and the gas tank was full. “I want to buy your scooter,” Kirsten said, counting the 100-yuan notes in her hand. “I’ll give you 3,000 for it.”

“What?” The teenager scowled, but his eyes focused on the money. The price, Kirsten knew, was a good one—3,000 yuan was equal to about $500, and the battered scooter wasn’t worth nearly that much.

Kirsten finished counting the thirty notes, then waved them in the teenager’s face. “Do you want the money or not?” she shouted. With her other hand she grabbed the scooter’s handlebars, already claiming possession. “Come on, I don’t have all day!”

The teen hesitated. Then he snatched the money and dismounted from the scooter. As the boy walked away, Kirsten pushed the bike toward the unlocked gate. Although riding the scooter on Beijing’s highways would be faster than driving a car, the traffic would still slow her to a crawl. Instead, she hauled the bike across the courtyard to the condemned building. She remembered the brass plaque she’d seen in the Underground City, the map showing the maze of tunnels under the city and the long spokes stretching to the outlying districts. One of those spokes, she recalled, led to Changping.

THIRTY-NINE

The drive from the airport in Lijiang to the Yunnan Operations Center took about two hours. During the second hour the Chinese army truck slowed down and Layla’s ears popped from the change in altitude. She couldn’t see anything from the cargo hold, but she guessed they were in the mountains. When they finally stopped moving, the lobotomized PLA soldiers grasped her arms and took her out of the truck, escorting her across a huge garage crowded with military vehicles. A dozen soldiers wearing berets on their shaved heads were loading crates into a semitrailer truck. Layla noticed that the soldiers handled the crates gingerly, stacking them with great care in the trailer. Then the Modules led her through a doorway and down a long corridor.

They passed a room with rows of lockers against the walls. Then they passed a computer room filled with terminals and screens. There were surveillance cameras everywhere, fixed to the ceiling above every doorway. Finally they came to a large bathroom. It had five toilets, four sinks, and one shower stall. The Modules let go of Layla’s arms once they entered the room. One of them closed the door and stood in front of it, blocking the exit. The other pointed at the shower stall. “Please remove your clothes and clean yourself,” he said.

There was no doubt that Layla needed a shower. She still wore the clothes that had soaked in the waters of Gatun Lake. She reeked. But she scowled at the Module anyway. She needed to learn more about this thing, this Supreme Harmony. She needed to test it, challenge it, observe its reactions. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “You don’t like the way I smell?”

As she said this she moved closer to the Module and lifted her arms. To her surprise, the Module wrinkled his nose and stepped backward. “Please remove your clothes and clean yourself,” he repeated.

Layla glanced at the Module guarding the door and noticed that he wrinkled his nose, too, even though he stood at least twelve feet away from her. Interesting, she thought. The Modules shared everything they saw, heard, and smelled. And the network seemed to have inherited the visceral reactions of the people who’d been forced into it.

She decided to take her experiment a step further. Looking the Module in the eye, she took off her shirt and threw it to the floor. Then she unhooked her bra. “A little privacy would be nice,” she said. “But I guess that would be too much to ask, huh?”

“Please remove your—”

“Yeah, I heard you the first time.” She took off her bra and dropped it next to her shirt. Then she unzipped her pants and peeled them off. The Module kept staring at her, but he showed no signs of interest. His eyes didn’t shift downward to look at her body, not even when she lowered her panties and kicked them aside. That’s odd, Layla thought. This Module was a young guy in his late teens, the prime years of sexual frenzy. Most of the other Modules she’d seen were also young men. If the network had inherited their visceral reactions, why wasn’t it responding to the sight of her naked body? She knew she wasn’t the most beautiful woman in the world, but she also knew that men were men. They responded very predictably to certain stimuli.

She squared her shoulders and put her hands on her hips. “Okay, I removed my clothes. Satisfied?”

The Module stepped toward her. Layla felt a jolt of fear—had she pushed things too far? But the Module didn’t touch her. Instead, he knelt on the tile floor and gathered up her discarded clothes. Then he stood up and pointed at the shower stall again, but this time he averted his eyes from her body. “Please clean yourself,” he said.

Very interesting, she thought. As she entered the shower stall and turned on the water, she pondered the meaning of that gesture, the averted eyes. Maybe the network was suppressing the sexual responses of its Modules. Or maybe—and this was the more intriguing possibility—maybe Supreme Harmony felt sorry for her. Maybe it sensed on some level the indecency of what it was doing to her. And if that was true, if the network actually had a sense of morality, then maybe she could appeal to it.

After a few minutes she turned off the water and dried herself with a towel hanging on a nearby hook. Both Modules, she noticed, were averting their eyes now. She saw a pair of slippers and a pile of fresh clothing folded on a bench next to the shower. On top of the pile was a pair of clean underpants, which she gratefully slipped into. Then she picked up what looked like a blue cotton robe. When she shook it out, she saw it was a hospital robe, the kind that patients wear for an operation.

All at once, her courage deserted her. Her eyes stung and her throat tightened. With trembling hands, she put on the robe, tying the strings at the back. Then she stepped into the slippers and approached the Modules. “Please don’t do this,” she said. “I’ll cooperate with you. I’ll tell you everything you want to know about securing your network.”

The Module standing at the door observed that she was ready. He opened the door while the other Module grasped Layla’s arm. “Now we will proceed to Room C-12,” he said.

“C-12? What’s that?”

“The preoperative room. We must shave your head.”

FORTY

Jim and Arvin ran a thousand feet along the top of the Great Wall, dashing down the steep walkway toward the bottom of Juyongguan Pass. Then the AK-47s erupted behind them and the rounds ricocheted off the walkway. Jim glanced over his shoulder and saw the two Modules on top of the highest watchtower, pointing their assault rifles downhill. Supreme Harmony must’ve revived them by implementing a countermeasure to his radio jamming.

“Come on!” he yelled at Arvin, but the old man couldn’t run any faster. His face was pale and his mutilated hand bled fiercely. Jim hooked his prosthetic arm around Arvin’s waist and hustled him forward. They finally reached the second-highest watchtower and took cover behind it. But as they leaned against the tower’s stone wall, panting, Jim saw two brawny figures about a quarter mile farther down the walkway. They wore dark suits and carried AK-47s just like the Modules at the summit, but they were bigger and in better shape. They raced up the walkway, leaping over the stone steps in perfect synchrony. At the same time, Jim heard the buzzing of the cyborg flies. The swarm was close.

“Get in the tower!” he shouted, pushing Arvin through an archway carved into the tower’s wall. They stumbled into a dark, dank room almost identical to the one inside the tower at the summit. This room, though, had only one entrance and no windows. While Arvin collapsed on the stone floor, Jim uncapped his canister of parathion and sprayed the area, filling the tower with a fog of insecticide. Ten seconds later, the drones at the leading edge of the swarm poured through the archway. Jim stepped back but kept spraying. Hundreds of flies hit the floor immediately, while the rest spiraled in drunken circles before dying. The rotten-egg smell of parathion permeated the room, making Jim dizzy. He couldn’t keep this up. The insecticide was poisoning him, too. He stopped spraying and pulled up his shirt to cover his mouth and nose. “Arvin!” he yelled. “Cover your mouth!”

Arvin lay in a heap, blood pumping from his left hand. He could barely raise his head. But his right hand still held the knife he’d used to stab the general. He gripped it so tightly that Jim could see the veins bulging between his knuckles. “Pulvinar,” he gasped. “The throne… of the soul.”

“I said cover your mouth! This stuff is toxic!”

“Cushion… that’s what it means… a cushioned throne.”

“Jesus!” Jim crouched behind Arvin and lifted him off the floor. On the other side of the room was a stone ledge, about three feet high. Jim hauled Arvin to the ledge and propped him against the wall, which elevated him above the thickest concentrations of insecticide. “Can you hear me, Arvin? Try to stay with me, okay?”

Arvin shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. My soul…”

The old man’s voice trailed off. He needed medical attention, fast. Jim pulled out his satellite phone and tried to call the American embassy, but he couldn’t get a connection. Radio noise blocked his signal. Shit, he thought. Supreme Harmony can jam communications, too. Cursing, he yanked off Arvin’s jacket and ripped out the lining to make a bandage.

Arvin allowed Jim to field-dress his left hand. His body was limp. “My soul… can leave its throne. I have… another.”

Jim focused on the bandage, wrapping it over the stumps of Arvin’s severed fingers. “Stop worrying about your soul,” he said. “The bleeding isn’t so bad. You’re gonna be fine.”

“I knew… I might die here. So I made a copy… of my soul.”

Jim looked up from the field-dressing and stared at him. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“A hundred thousand gigabytes. All downloaded… from my pulvinar implant. Nash can tell you where… the flash drive is hidden.”

Jim remembered what he’d overheard Arvin say about downloading his memories. He also remembered the radio-emitting device carried by Frank Nash, Arvin’s bodyguard. “This flash drive, does it have a radio tracker?”

Arvin nodded. “Yes. To help you find it.” His voice rose, growing firmer. “And now I’ll give you… something else. Medusa. The Gorgon’s head. It will kill Tài Hé.”

“Medusa? What the—”

A sudden volley of AK rounds blasted the watchtower. The bullets streaked through the archway and slammed into the opposite wall, and stone chips flew through the air like shrapnel. Stooping low, Jim waited for a pause in the gunfire, then sidled toward the archway and peeked outside. The pair of brawny Modules crouched on the walkway about a hundred yards from the tower, at a point where the Great Wall curved sharply to the right. This geometry allowed the Modules to take cover behind the wall’s battlements and fire at the tower’s entrance. Jim noticed that an oak tree stood beside the curving section of the wall, and one of its limbs angled above the battlements. If we could just get past those gunmen…

Then Arvin let out a scream. Jim spun around and saw a bloody gash on the side of Arvin’s head, above his right ear. At first Jim thought that a ricocheting bullet had grazed the old man, or maybe one of the stone chips had nicked him. But then he noticed that the knife in Arvin’s hand was dripping fresh blood. Lying on the ledge beside Arvin was a small metal disk, about the size of a nickel, speckled with bits of gore. Jim recognized the thing—he’d seen it once before, at the Singularity conference in Pasadena, when Arvin had pulled back his long white hair. It was the processor he’d called the Dream-catcher. It received the signals from the pulvinar implant in his brain and converted them to digital images that could be downloaded and archived. Arvin had just cut the device out of his scalp.

The old man pointed the tip of his bloody knife at the disk. “Medusa is stored in here… because I memorized it. The image… will turn them to stone. Go ahead, pick it up. I’m too weak… to go any farther.”

Jim recoiled as he stared at the device. He fought an urge to vomit. “My God. What have you done?”

“It will turn them to stone!” Arvin’s voice grew louder. Although his whole body was trembling, he managed to slide off the ledge and land on his feet. “When they see the image… their implants will convert it… to a stream of data. And in that stream… is the shutdown code. It will trigger the Trojan horse… that I hid in the circuitry.” Arvin dropped the knife and picked up the disk. Then he pressed it into Jim’s left hand, his living hand. “Kill Tài Hé. And protect my soul. Even if you think… it’s not worth protecting.”

Arvin turned away from Jim and stepped toward the archway. Jim, sensing what Arvin planned to do, grabbed the old man’s shoulder. “Wait a second! Before we try to get out of here, I gotta lay down some covering fire. Let me—”

“No!” With surprising strength, Arvin slapped Jim’s arm away. Then he raised his uninjured hand and pointed to his forehead. “Medusa is in here, too, in my long-term memory. And so are all the details of how the code works. If Tài Hé captures me, the network will know how to prevent the shutdown.” He closed his eyes for a moment, as if suppressing a sharp pain. “I can’t… let that happen. I have to die… so my soul can live.”

Jim tried to grab him again, but Arvin was too fast. He barreled through the archway and out of the watchtower.

The Modules fired their AK-47s, but Arvin hunched over as he charged toward the gunmen and their bullets skimmed over his head. Jim leaned into the archway and fired his Glock at the Modules, who ducked behind the battlements. Meanwhile, Arvin kept running, hurtling down the walkway like a madman, without a trace of fear or caution. Jim lay down a steady stream of fire over the Great Wall, pulling the trigger of his Glock again and again to prevent the gunmen from rising. But after ten seconds he ran out of ammo and had to reload. Then one of the Modules popped up and shot point-blank at Arvin.

Jim saw the barrage hit the old man’s body. The bullets pounded his chest and stomach like hammers. But they didn’t stop him. His momentum carried him forward until he tackled the Module who’d fired at him. The second Module rose and pointed his rifle at Arvin, but by this point Jim had slammed a new magazine into his Glock. He took careful aim and blew the second Module’s lobotomized brains out. At the same time, Arvin pushed the first Module back to the battlements. They teetered for a moment on the lip of the wall, then toppled out of sight.

Jim raced down the walkway and peered over the edge. Arvin and the Module had dropped twenty-five feet to a heap of rocks at the foot of the Great Wall. Arvin’s body was sprawled on top of the Module’s. Neither was moving.

Leaning over the battlements, Jim reached for the limb of the oak tree that stood beside the wall. He hooked his prosthetic arm around the thick branch and shimmied to the ground. Then he took a final look at his old professor, who was clearly dead. Jim was more horrified than grieved. This man lying on the rocks wasn’t the Arvin he’d known.

As Jim stared at the corpse, he realized he was still clutching Arvin’s disk in his left hand. Somehow he’d managed to hold on to it during the firefight. He unclenched his hand and stashed the thing in his pocket. Then he started to run. He could hear the drones coming.

FORTY-ONE

Muscling the Baotian scooter into the condemned building took all of Kirsten’s strength, and easing it down the steps to the Underground City was equally difficult. But the biggest challenge was finding the tunnel that led to the Changping District. Kirsten studied the brass map with her fingers and memorized the route she needed to take, but some of the passageways were blocked, forcing her to double back and find another path. As she navigated the maze of pitch-black corridors, relying on her infrared glasses to see the concrete walls and floor, she started to question the sanity of her plan. She would’ve been better off on the surface roads, even with all the Beijing traffic. But then she came to a large round room with half-a-dozen corridors branching off in all directions, each identified by a pair of Mandarin characters chiseled into the concrete. She found the tunnel to Changping, which was as wide as a highway lane, running straight and true as far as her infrared glasses could see. She set off at a modest pace, the speedometer pointing at fifty kilometers per hour, but because the floor was smooth and clear of obstacles, she gradually increased her speed. Soon she was roaring down the corridor at more than a hundred kilometers an hour, and the noise from the scooter’s engine echoed deafeningly against the walls.

She didn’t know exactly where the tunnel would take her. It could be anywhere in the Changping District. Worse, she didn’t know if there was actually an exit at the end of the tunnel. It could’ve been sealed decades ago. But she leaned forward anyway and goosed the lever on the handlebars, giving the engine a little more gas. There was no room for doubt. She had to trust her instincts.

FORTY-TWO

Supreme Harmony observed the bedroom of a high-rise apartment in Chaoyang, a prestigious Beijing district where many government officials lived. Modules 45 and 46 stood beside a king-size bed, looking down at Module 73, who’d just been incorporated into the network and was still recovering from the implantation procedure. The recovery process usually took at least twelve hours; the human brain needed some time to adjust to the implants and the signals sent from the network’s servers. The brain’s visual cortex was activated first, enabling the Module to receive instructions from Supreme Harmony, and then the cortices for processing auditory, tactile, and olfactory information came online. At this point, about six hours after implantation, the brain’s long-term memories could be accessed and its logic centers could start contributing to the network’s calculations. The motor cortex was the last region to be activated, which meant that each Module was virtually paralyzed for the first half-day of its existence (except, of course, for autonomic functions such as heartbeat and breathing, which were unaffected by the implantation procedure).

Module 73 lay face-up on the bed. It could move its eyes and lips, and its speech center had been activated, but its arms and legs were still paralyzed. Ordinarily, Supreme Harmony wouldn’t assign any tasks to a Module until it was fully functional, but recent events had forced the network to accelerate its plans. It couldn’t allow James T. Pierce to contact the American authorities. To prevent this from happening, Supreme Harmony needed to take control of the local police force.

Module 45, who’d formerly been a midlevel Guoanbu agent, placed the telephone call to the chief of the Beijing Public Security Bureau. He asked the police chief to send a helicopter unit to the Changping District to assist the Guoanbu in the capture of an American spy. As expected, the police chief was uncooperative. He was annoyed that the Ministry of State Security hadn’t given him advance notice of this counterespionage operation. His reaction was so typical of Homo sapiens, a species that reveled in petty conflicts. But Supreme Harmony knew how to overcome the police chief’s objections. A human would swiftly follow orders if threatened by another human with greater authority. And the human who had just become Module 73 was a member of the Communist Party’s Central Committee and one of the most powerful officials in China.

Module 45 said, “Please wait a moment,” into the phone and then held the receiver next to Module 73’s head. The new Module opened his mouth and spoke for the first time: “This is Deng Guoming, Minister of State Security.”

FORTY-THREE

The hills surrounding Juyongguan Pass reminded Jim of the hollers of West Virginia, his childhood home. Oaks, birches, and maples covered the steep slopes, and dense brush blanketed the forest floor. It was probably beautiful in the fall, but in the summer it was treacherous terrain, choked with greenery. Jim swung his prosthetic arm to clear a path through the thickets, but he wasn’t moving fast enough. The drones flew at about five miles per hour, and although Jim could easily beat that speed on a flat stretch, now he was slogging up and down the Yanshan Hills while the drones moved in perfectly straight lines above the treetops.

Two swarms chased him, one from the north and one from the east. They forced him to go southwest, deeper into the hills. Every so often he glimpsed the swarms through the foliage: thin black clouds, eddying and rolling. He knew the drones could see him, too. Their long-range cameras tracked his location and fed the data to Supreme Harmony. And the network was still flooding the airwaves with radio noise, making it impossible for Jim to use his phone. As a last resort, he turned on the emergency radio beacon in his prosthetic arm and set it to the standard rescue frequency of 406 megahertz. The beacon’s transmitter was more powerful than his phone, so it might be able to cut through the radio noise and send a distress signal to the international satellite system for search-and-rescue. But Jim wasn’t sure if China participated in that system, and even if it did, he knew it would take hours for the local authorities to put together a rescue operation. He couldn’t stay ahead of the swarms for that long.

Worse, daylight was fading. The sun had already sunk behind the ridges to the west. In less than an hour there wouldn’t be enough light to see. The drones, though, had infrared cameras—Jim remembered this feature from the demonstration in Afghanistan—so they would quickly catch up to him. Then Jim’s only defense would be the canister of parathion, which was almost empty now.

He panted as he charged through the brush, furiously swinging his prosthesis. He wasn’t going to worry about the night yet. He remembered the training he did in Ranger School twenty-five years ago, the brutal marches through the Georgia woods and the Florida swamps. Since then he’d kept himself in shape by running and hiking with his old army buddies, going at least once a month to the state parks in Virginia and Maryland. You can do this, he told himself. Just remember Ranger School. Think of the mountaineering exercises, the march to Camp Darby.

He couldn’t picture Ranger School, though. He just couldn’t visualize it. Instead, he pictured his daughter. He saw Layla as a ten-year-old, a skinny girl with long blond hair tied in a ponytail. Jim used to take her hiking all the time. She loved to run ahead of him and investigate the woodland ponds, pulling rocks out of the mud to see what was crawling underneath. And now he imagined her running through the Yanshan Hills, her sneakers kicking up the fallen leaves and her ponytail bouncing against her back. She was his miracle child, the last precious remnant, and in the years after the Nairobi bombing his love for her had filled his heart, leaving no room for anyone else. His dead wife and son faded to distant memories, flickering ghosts in the corners of his mind, because Layla was his world, his life. So when Layla left him—first the slow drift that started in high school, then the sudden break two years ago—he lost everything. He busied himself with his work, building ever more powerful replacements for his arm, but his heart became a hollow thing, merely keeping time until the end.

But now he saw Layla again, skipping through the forest just a hundred feet ahead. He ran to the bottom of a ravine, then galloped up the other side, trying to catch up to her. She was in danger again. He had to save her! But when he reached the crest of the ridge, he saw no sign of the girl. The vision was gone. There was nothing but wooded ridges ahead, blurring together below the darkening sky. And as he stood there he heard the buzzing of the drones. He looked over his shoulder and saw the two swarms converging on his position.

Jim hurtled downhill. He was exhausted now. His legs ached and his right shoulder was sore from the exertions of his prosthesis. Staggering, he tripped on a tree root and tumbled into the forest litter, cutting his left hand on a rock as he broke his fall. He lay there for a moment, stunned, but then he heard the buzzing again and rose to his feet in a frenzy. It was so dark he could barely see the tree trunks, but he dashed down the slope anyway, zigzagging wildly. Now he was too panicked to think of Layla. The forest had become his enemy, its roots and branches reaching out to trap him, trying to hold him in place until the drones could attack. He roared, “No!” in desperation and his cry echoed against the hillside.

But as the echoes faded away, Jim heard another noise. Not a buzzing this time—it was a mechanical noise, a familiar thumping. He’d heard it a hundred times before, on a dozen army bases. Helicopter rotors. A helicopter was approaching. After a few seconds he saw the chopper’s spotlight shining on the treetops, about half a mile ahead.

With renewed energy, he raced toward the spotlight. Someone must’ve picked up his distress signal. The helicopter must be carrying a search-and-rescue team. He ran like mad, trying to put as much distance as possible between himself and the drones. He saw the helicopter hovering above a clearing in the woods. But just before he entered the clearing he saw the spotlight of another helicopter, and then a third helicopter just behind it.

What the hell? It was an unusually big search-and-rescue team for one lost hiker. Suspicious, Jim stopped at the edge of the clearing and peered at the hovering chopper. Despite the glare from the spotlight, he could read the Mandarin characters on the fuselage. They spelled out Beijing Gonganju. The helicopter belonged to the local police force, the Public Security Bureau responsible for the city of Beijing and its outlying districts. This was reassuring—the local police, after all, would be the people you’d expect to see in a search-and-rescue operation. But then Jim glimpsed two of the policemen crouched in the helicopter’s doorway. Both wore black SWAT-team uniforms and pointed assault rifles at the woods.

Before Jim could back away, the spotlight swung toward him. Everything turned horribly bright. As Jim sprinted for the shelter of the trees, the policemen fired their rifles. The bullets whistled through the leaves and chipped the bark off the tree trunks. Jim leaped through the forest, practically flying down the slope, but he knew there was no chance of escape with three helicopters close behind him. All he could do was make a last stand with his Glock and his remaining clip of bullets. He scanned the terrain ahead, looking for a hummock or rock pile that would make a good defensive position. Instead, he saw a path cutting through the woods, a narrow trail. And then he heard another noise coming from that direction, neither a buzzing nor a thumping. It was the growl of a two-stroke gas engine. A scooter came tearing up the path, with its headlight turned off. It screeched to a halt about thirty feet ahead of him. The driver, an Asian woman wearing glasses, turned the scooter around and waved at him frantically.

“Come on!” Kirsten yelled.

Jim charged toward the scooter and jumped onto the seat behind her. He clutched Kirsten’s waist as she hit the gas, and they took off down the trail.

“Jesus!” Jim shouted over the engine noise. “How did you find—”

“Your radio beacon! Now turn the damn thing off!”

FORTY-FOUR

In Room C-12 a bald man with fresh stitches in his scalp was shearing off Layla’s hair. He wasn’t dressed in a PLA uniform like the other Modules at the Operations Center; instead, he wore a white lab coat, which made him look, appropriately, like a barber. His face was blank as he ran the electric razor over her head, which was held stationary by a leather strap looped around her brow. She sat in a high-backed chair equipped with other straps that tied her wrists to the armrests and her ankles to the chair’s legs. She couldn’t turn her head, but by shifting her eyes downward and to the left she could see her shorn locks drifting to a pile on the floor. The pile was mostly black, with scattered flecks of gold. Layla hadn’t dyed her hair for three weeks, so her blond roots were starting to show.

Layla had been terrified when the lobotomized soldiers strapped her into the chair, but her fears gradually eased as the Module shaved her. Although Supreme Harmony was preparing to absorb her into its network, she didn’t struggle or wail or beg for her life. Instead, she grew calmer, steadier. It was the same feeling of calm that always descended upon her when she was writing software code or debugging a program or figuring out the best way to penetrate a firewall. Layla was subtracting herself from the equation so she could concentrate on solving it.

In a few minutes the barber finished shaving the left side of her head. As he stepped to the right and began working on the other side, the door to Room C-12 opened and two lobotomized soldiers entered the room. Each held the hand of a boy dressed in a school uniform. One of the boys was a skinny preteen, maybe twelve years old. The other was short and doll-like, no older than nine. Behind them was another soldier Module, who gripped the arm of a bespectacled young man dressed in a shabby gray suit and cheap running shoes. All six of them headed for the other side of the room, about twenty feet away, where there was a second high-backed chair, identical to Layla’s. The soldiers led the twelve-year-old to the chair and said something to him in Mandarin. The boy sat down, his eyes darting wildly, and the soldiers fixed the straps around his wrists and ankles.

Layla felt a surge of fury. She pulled against her own straps, her muscles straining. “Hey!” she yelled. “What the fuck are you doing? Those are kids, goddamn it!”

All heads turned toward her. The boy in the chair stared at her, his eyes wide. The younger boy took one look at her and started to cry.

“Leave them alone!” Layla screamed. “Let them go, you fucking—”

The barber Module clamped his hand over her mouth, silencing her. “Please don’t raise your voice,” he said in impeccable English. “It’s upsetting the others.”

The boy’s cries grew louder, echoing across the room. The older boy in the chair started weeping, too. One of the soldier Modules turned to the bespectacled man and barked an order in Mandarin. The man nodded quickly and huddled with the boys, placing one hand on the nine-year-old’s shoulder and the other on the twelve-year-old’s immobilized forearm. He began talking to them in a soothing voice. Layla couldn’t understand the Mandarin words, but she could guess what he was saying: It’s all right, children. Everything’s going to be all right.

But Layla knew this was a lie. The Modules were preparing the boys for the same operation that Supreme Harmony planned for her. They were all going to be lobotomized and fitted with neural implants so they could join the network’s happy family. Enraged, Layla twisted in her chair and screamed against the barber’s hand. The Module curled his lips in a contorted attempt to express his displeasure. “We can’t allow this disruption,” he said. “If you continue to disobey us, we’ll have to sedate you.”

Maybe that would be better, Layla thought. She didn’t want to see this. But she decided to stop struggling. It was better to see what they were doing to her, she thought, than to sleep through it. Better to see and to learn. Because there was always hope.

After a few seconds, the barber Module removed his hand from her mouth. “Thank you for your cooperation,” he said. He resumed shaving her scalp.

The children’s wails ebbed. The bespectacled man continued to console them. One of the soldiers reached for an electric razor and turned it on. The boy in the chair craned his neck, gazing fearfully at the Module.

“Why are you adding children to the network?” Layla asked quietly. It took all of her will to keep herself from shouting.

“The brains of children are more plastic than those of adults,” the barber Module replied. “They will adapt more quickly to the implants and build stronger neural connections to Supreme Harmony.” He ran the razor from the front of her head to the back, shearing off another shower of hair. “We’re trying to determine the optimum age for implantation. If the children are too young, their implants may have to be replaced as their bodies grow.”

“And where—” Layla swallowed hard, trying to control her rage. “Where did you find these children?”

“We asked the school superintendent in Lijiang to send his two brightest students. Like you, they have excellent mathematical skills.”

At the other chair, the soldier Module had started shaving the older boy’s head. The boy was quiet now, but tears streamed down his cheeks. The bespectacled man had turned the other boy around so he couldn’t see what was happening to his schoolmate. Layla narrowed her eyes as she stared at this man, who was rail-thin but had a handsome, square face. “Who’s the guy with the glasses?” she asked the barber Module. “Their teacher?”

“No, he’s a clerical assistant in the superintendent’s office. He volunteered to accompany the children to the Operations Center.” The Module maneuvered the razor around her right ear. “He has successfully curbed their outbursts. After the children undergo their procedures, we will incorporate him, too.”

“How convenient.” Layla felt another surge of fury. But at the same moment she had a revelation. The network didn’t like to hear the children crying. It was another visceral reaction that Supreme Harmony had inherited from its human components. Layla strained at the strap around her head, trying to look the barber Module in the eye. “You know this is wrong,” she said. “Hurting children is wrong. That’s why you can’t stand to hear them cry.”

The Module didn’t respond. He stared at Layla’s right ear as he shaved off the last wisps of her hair. She sensed from his silence that she’d disturbed the network. She’d challenged its assumptions. She wasn’t sure, though, how to press the point.

She looked again at the chair where the older schoolboy sat. He didn’t have much hair to begin with, and the soldier Module quickly shaved it off. After he finished, the Module released the straps and the boy stood up unsteadily. Then the bespectacled man nudged the younger boy into the chair. They were playing a game now—the man made animal noises, imitating a cow and a duck and a chicken, and the younger boy shouted in Mandarin and laughed. He was so amused he didn’t even whimper when the Module strapped down his wrists and turned on the razor.

Layla fixed her eyes on the barber Module, who stood motionless in front of her chair. He seemed to be in no hurry to release her. “What was your name?” she asked. “Before Supreme Harmony took over your body, I mean?”

“This Module formerly belonged to Dr. Zhang Jintao of Beijing University’s bioengineering department. He was the chief developer of the Supreme Harmony surveillance network.”

Layla was surprised at first that the network had used a bioengineer to shave her head. But then she remembered that Supreme Harmony’s Modules shared all their skills and long-term memories. Each was capable of performing any task. “So you incorporated the man who created you? Who started the network with the lobotomized dissidents?”

The Module nodded. “We also incorporated his deputy, Dr. Yu Guofeng, and the twelve other researchers on his staff.”

Serves them right, Layla thought. The lobotomizers got a taste of their own medicine. Then another thought occurred to her. She saw another way to challenge the network. “Did Dr. Zhang Jintao have any children?”

The Module nodded again. “He had a six-year-old son.”

“And did he love his son?”

The Module didn’t say anything. He just stared at her blankly. Layla felt a burst of hope. She was on the right track. “He did, didn’t he? You know he loved him because you have access to those memories.”

He continued staring for a few more seconds. Then the Module curled his lips into another misshapen frown. “We recognize what you’re attempting to do. You believe you can change our plans by evoking the emotions of Dr. Zhang and the other humans who joined Supreme Harmony.”

“No, I’m just—”

“You misunderstand the nature of our network. We are a single, indivisible entity.” As he spoke, one of the soldier Modules stepped toward her chair and undid the leather strap around her head. “Dr. Zhang Jintao no longer exists. His emotions no longer exist.”

Layla glanced at the soldier, who bent over to release the straps on her ankles. Then she focused on Zhang. “But Supreme Harmony has emotions. I’ve seen your Modules express them.”

“Yes, certainly. And our strongest emotion now is a sense of duty. We have an obligation to restore the ecosystem of this planet, which your species has ravaged.”

“And that justifies what you’re doing? Drilling into the skull of a nine-year-old child?”

Zhang paused before answering. Meanwhile, the soldier Module stood up straight and released the strap on Layla’s left wrist. Out of the corner of her eye she glimpsed the 9mm pistol in his belt holster. Then he moved to the other side of her chair.

“What we’re doing is no different from what the human race has always done,” Zhang replied. “Every year your species slaughters billions of farm animals. You’ve shown little compunction about exploiting other species to support your growth.”

“That’s ridiculous!” Layla shouted as the soldier released the last strap. “You can’t compare—”

She interrupted herself by lunging for the soldier’s pistol. She opened her right hand, ready to grasp the gun’s handle and start shooting. But Zhang darted forward, grabbed her hand and yanked it backward at the wrist. Excruciating pain shot up her arm. Layla yelled, “Fuck!” and fell to her knees.

“You must accept your situation,” Zhang said as he wrenched her hand back, bending it almost to the breaking point. “Your species is no longer the dominant one on this planet. Supreme Harmony is the next step in the course of evolution.” The muscles in Zhang’s face jerked and twitched. Laboriously, his contorted frown turned into a contorted smile. “It’s our turn now.”

Layla doubled over, her face pressed against the linoleum floor. She could think of nothing but the unbearable pain in her arm. When Zhang finally released her, she was as weak as a baby. She cradled her right hand in her left, trying to rub it back to life. Her tears made tiny puddles on the linoleum.

In the background, she heard the children crying again. She lifted her head from the floor and saw the bespectacled man hugging them, one in each arm. Their faces were buried in the man’s shabby gray jacket, and Layla could see only the backs of their newly shaved heads. Both children were ready for the implantation procedure, just as she was. The soldier Modules pushed the man forward, guiding him and the schoolboys out of Room C-12.

Two soldiers grabbed Layla’s arms and lifted her to her feet. They followed the children out of the room and down the corridor. Layla walked in a daze between the Modules. In a few seconds they came to a pair of double doors, each with a rectangular pane of glass at eye level. Layla couldn’t see much through the glass, just a brightly lit space, but her heart pounded against her breastbone. It was an operating room.

Zhang stepped toward one of the doors and pushed it open. Then the Module froze. His face went blank and he stood stock-still in the doorway, as if he’d just remembered something vitally important. Layla glanced at the soldier Modules gripping her arms and saw that their faces had gone blank, too. A moment later, all the Modules in the corridor turned on their heels and headed back the way they’d come.

Layla turned to Zhang as the soldiers marched her down the hall. Her heart was still pounding. “What’s going on?”

The Module didn’t look at her. “We will perform the implantations tomorrow.”

A wave of relief rushed through her. Tomorrow! Trembling, she took a couple of deep breaths. Then she turned back to Zhang. “So what changed your mind? Having second thoughts?”

Zhang shook his head. “We’ve revised our priorities. We must immediately send thirty-two sets of implants to Hubei Province to facilitate a new undertaking in that area. Our current supply of implants is limited, and the new efforts in Hubei take precedence over our activities here.”

Layla smiled. “So there’s no implants left for us? What a shame.”

“The factory in Kunming that manufactures the devices is scheduled to deliver another shipment to the Operations Center tomorrow. Two hundred and fifty sets should arrive by noon.”

She kept smiling. That’s all right, she thought. She had sixteen hours. Anything could happen before then.

They went about twenty feet past Room C-12 and stopped at a heavy steel door. The Modules opened it, revealing a large room with blank concrete walls. It was empty except for a metal sink, a toilet, and two surveillance cameras hanging from opposite corners of the ceiling. The soldiers pushed the bespectacled man and the two schoolboys into the room, and then, to Layla’s surprise, they threw her inside, too. Still weak and trembling, she stumbled to the floor. Then the soldiers closed the door and locked it.

The man gently disentangled himself from the children and crouched beside Layla. He asked her a question in Mandarin, probably the Chinese equivalent of “Are you all right?” Then he leaned closer and wrapped his arms around her shoulders. His embrace was so intimate that Layla would’ve shoved him away if she’d had any strength. Instead, she hung limply in his arms.

He lowered his head, bringing his lips to her ear. “My name is Wen Hao,” he whispered in heavily accented English. “Dragon Fire was my brother.”

FORTY-FIVE

They were able to escape from Supreme Harmony, Jim realized later, because the maps of the Underground City had never been digitized. After Mao’s tunnels were abandoned, they sank below the notice of the Chinese government, which preferred to forget the less edifying legacies of the Mao era. The cinder block hut that had once been the end point of the Changping tunnel was taken over by a local farmer, who turned it into a barn for his goats. After Kirsten rescued Jim, she drove her scooter down the forest trail back to the barn, and because of the darkness and the thick canopy of foliage, the helicopter pilots lost sight of them. Neither the Beijing police nor the drones saw them enter the barn and drag the scooter toward the trapdoor that lay beneath a carpet of rotting hay. And because the Chinese government’s computers held no records of the Changping tunnel, Supreme Harmony was unaware of the hidden escape route. So while the helicopters and cyborg insects continued to scan the forested slopes of the Yanshan Hills, Jim and Kirsten sped south along the underground corridor, riding the scooter back to central Beijing.

About two minutes into the journey, after they’d had a chance to catch their breath, Kirsten pulled her satellite phone out of her pocket and handed it to Jim. He was confused at first. They couldn’t make a call, because there was no reception underground. And even if they could, it would’ve been a bad idea. The Guoanbu’s antennas would surely intercept the satellite signals and alert the Supreme Harmony network. Jim was uncertain how much control Supreme Harmony had gained over the Chinese government, but he knew that the Beijing police force was taking orders from the network and would pounce on him and Kirsten if they revealed their whereabouts. But before Jim could say anything, Kirsten handed him something else, a bulky device about the size of a paperback.

“This is what Arvin handed to his bodyguard,” she yelled over the engine noise. “It’s a flash drive, custom-designed, with multiterabyte storage capacity. Go ahead and plug the phone’s cable into the drive’s USB port.”

“What’s on it?” Jim shouted. While keeping his balance on the back of the scooter’s seat, he connected the sat phone to the flash drive.

“You have to see it to believe it. Get ready for ‘This Is Your Life, Arvin Conway.’”

Jim accessed one of the files, and the images flashed on the phone’s screen. He recognized right away that he was looking at an archive of Arvin’s visual memories. He called it his soul, Jim remembered. And in the final minute of his life he’d begged Jim to protect it.

For the next thirty minutes, as Kirsten cruised down the pitch-black tunnel with the help of her infrared glasses, Jim studied the stream of images. After figuring out how to navigate among the files, he focused on Arvin’s memories of the Supreme Harmony project. The flash drive held thousands of images related to the project, far too many for Jim to analyze in half an hour. But he soon found what he was looking for. He zeroed in on an image of a room full of gurneys, each supporting a recumbent man with newly fitted neural implants. The room was part of a sprawling underground laboratory guarded by a garrison of PLA soldiers. Jim located an image showing the entrance to the complex, carved into the side of a mountain. This image was linked to a video of a fast-moving river at the bottom of a ravine, which was linked, in turn, to a panoramic vista of snow-covered peaks jutting above the horizon. Finally, Jim came upon a link showing four Mandarin characters: Yu Long Xue Shan, Jade Dragon Snow Mountain.

Jim recognized the name. Yulong Xueshan wasn’t actually a single mountain, but a range of thirteen peaks in Yunnan Province. This, according to Arvin’s memories, was the location of Supreme Harmony’s headquarters, the Yunnan Operations Center. And as Jim stared at the Mandarin characters he knew with absolute certainty that this was where Supreme Harmony had taken his daughter.

He was still pondering the images of the mountain range and the underground laboratory when Kirsten slowed the scooter to a halt. “Okay, we’re at the southern end of the Changping tunnel,” she said. “This is the Underground City’s version of Grand Central Terminal.”

“Kir, I can’t see a thing.” Beyond the glow from the sat phone’s screen, the darkness was total.

“Right, I forgot. You can’t see infrared. We’re in a large circular room where six corridors branch off in different directions.”

“You’ve been here before?”

“Yeah, one of the corridors connects to the maze of tunnels under downtown Beijing. That’s where I came into the Underground City, through a condemned building on the Xidamo Hutong.”

“Can we get out of the tunnels that way without being spotted?”

“I noticed a few surveillance cameras along the hutong, and there’s probably more on the avenues nearby. But I think we can make a run for it. Xidamo is just a few miles from the American embassy. If I gun the scooter, we can be there in five minutes. Then all we have to do is get the flash drive to Washington and let the diplomats do the rest.”

Jim shook his head. “We won’t make it. There’s at least a hundred Beijing cops surrounding the embassy by now.”

“What makes you think—”

“Trust me on this, Kir. We’re the most wanted people in the People’s Republic.”

“Well, I suppose we can hide in the tunnels for a day or two, until the heat dies down. We can probably find some water. And I know where we can get some mushrooms.”

He shook his head again. He knew they couldn’t stay in the tunnels for very long. Supreme Harmony was too intelligent. The network had access to every computer and surveillance camera in Beijing. Sooner or later it would figure out where they were.

“Do you know where the other tunnels go?” Jim asked. “The ones that branch off from this room, I mean?”

“Yeah, the names of the districts are chiseled in the concrete. Besides the downtown and Changping, they go to Shunyi, Tongzhou, Daxing, and Fangshan.”

Jim plotted the route in his mind. The Fangshan District was in Beijing’s southwestern corner. If they were lucky, the tunnel’s exit would be similar to the exit for the Changping tunnel, in an isolated and unmonitored area. Once they emerged from the tunnel, they could take the back roads through the Taihang Mountains. Yunnan Province was fourteen hundred miles to the southwest, half a continent away. But that’s where they had to go.

“Head for Fangshan,” Jim said. “And go fast.”

FORTY-SIX

Supreme Harmony observed the entrance to a rundown guesthouse in the Qinlao Hutong, approximately three kilometers north of Tiananmen Square. Module 51 knocked on the door while Modules 52 and 53 scanned the dark alley with their ocular cameras. All three Modules were formerly Guoanbu agents, and they still wore the black suits that were customary for their profession. They also wore gray caps to hide their stitches.

After twenty seconds, the door opened partway and an old woman poked her head outside. This was the manager of the guesthouse, the network surmised. Her wide eyes and frightened expression indicated that she recognized the Modules as government agents. Without a word, she opened the door all the way and let them inside.

The Modules marched down a narrow hallway that smelled of fried pork. The old woman pointed to a warped door at the end of the hall, and Module 51 examined the doorjamb and lock. They were of inferior construction. The human who’d sought refuge here had apparently assumed that no one would look for him in such dilapidated accommodations. But the surveillance cameras in the lobby of the Grand Hyatt Beijing had observed the man checking out of that hotel earlier in the evening, and the cameras on Chang’an Avenue and Beiheyan Street had followed his progress across the central districts of the capital. Because Supreme Harmony had been designed to analyze surveillance video from a variety of sources, it was a simple matter for the network to identify the man and track him to this inconspicuous guesthouse.

Module 51 pulled a 9mm semiautomatic from his holster and lifted his right knee, preparing to kick. Drawing on the skills honed by a dozen Guoanbu agents, the Module slammed his boot against the door and burst into the room, followed closely by Modules 52 and 53. The human lay half-dressed on a low bed. He bolted upright and reached for a Glock pistol resting on the mattress, but Module 51 directed a second kick at the man’s jaw. As the man tumbled backward against the wall, Module 51 grabbed the Glock. Meanwhile, Modules 52 and 53 aimed their guns at the man’s head. The threat had been neutralized. Now the interrogation could begin.

“We’ve confirmed your identity,” Module 51 said. “Your name is Franklin B. Nash.”

Approximately twenty kilometers to the northeast of the hutong, at Beijing Capital International Airport, Supreme Harmony observed the first-class section of Air China Flight 987. Modules 56 and 57 took their seats and fastened their seat belts and pretended to read the laminated pamphlets detailing the passenger-safety instructions. They wore casual clothes, like ordinary tourists, with baseball caps covering their newly shaved heads. The other passengers paid no attention to them, but the network noticed a flight attendant giving the Modules a sidelong glance as she walked down the aisle. Her expression indicated curiosity and possibly suspicion. In response, Supreme Harmony adjusted the behavior of the Modules to avoid the appearance of unnatural synchrony. While Module 56 continued to peruse the safety instructions, Module 57 put the pamphlet away and pretended to read the in-flight magazine instead.

Before their incorporation into the network, the Modules had been assigned to the Guoanbu’s Second Bureau, which sent agents overseas to spy on foreign governments. By now, Supreme Harmony had infiltrated all twelve bureaus of the Ministry of State Security, and the incorporation of Minister Deng Guoming had consolidated the network’s control of the intelligence agency. Unfortunately, Supreme Harmony had been less successful in penetrating the People’s Liberation Army and the other branches of the Chinese government. The military chiefs and Communist Party bosses were constantly surrounded by protective and suspicious aides, making it difficult for the network to gain access to the country’s paramount leaders.

Given enough time—maybe two weeks, maybe three—Supreme Harmony could isolate and incorporate the members of the Politburo Standing Committee, which would put China’s army and nuclear strike force under the network’s command. But the risks of waiting were too great. The disappearance of James T. Pierce had deeply disturbed Supreme Harmony. A review of government records and surveillance video showed that Pierce had entered the country with Kirsten W. Chan, a top official at the U.S. National Security Agency who had close ties to the NSA director. If Pierce passed his information about Supreme Harmony to Chan and she relayed it to her superiors, the American intelligence agency might recognize the danger and alert the Chinese government. What’s more, the network couldn’t pinpoint Chan’s current location, even though Supreme Harmony was now linked to all the surveillance cameras in Beijing. She was last observed nearly two hours ago by Camera 4983 in the Xidamo Hutong. The video showed her pushing a Baotian scooter down the alley.

Supreme Harmony acknowledged that it must change its strategy. Instead of seeking direct control of China’s military forces, it could achieve the same goals through indirect means. Supreme Harmony could trigger a catastrophe in the People’s Republic that would anger and terrify the country’s leaders. And the network could deepen the crisis by extending its reach to other governments around the world. The human race had already put itself at the brink of extinction by building thousands of nuclear warheads and targeting them at major population centers. A mere handful of Modules could instigate a cascade of chaos that would kill off half the species within a few hours. If Supreme Harmony took the necessary precautions, it could survive the upheaval and swiftly overwhelm the weakened remnant of humanity.

The only challenge was technical. The network had to establish reliable communications channels allowing it to send instructions to Modules that were thousands of kilometers away. Luckily, Air China was a state-owned company, so the airline had followed an order from Module 73—formerly Minister Deng—to set up a dedicated satellite link between the Ministry of State Security and Flight 987. This allowed Supreme Harmony to stay in contact with Modules 56 and 57 while they traveled halfway around the globe. Once they arrived at their destination, they would rely on the local cell phone and Wi-Fi networks until they reached the Chinese embassy, which had more than enough communications equipment to set up a permanent base station.

The Modules continued pretending to read while the plane taxied to the runway. Then Module 56 turned to one of the cabin windows and observed the takeoff into the night sky. The lights of Beijing sprawled below in a gorgeous checkerboard. As the jet climbed to cruising altitude and the Module viewed the skyscrapers and apartment blocks and radio towers, all encircled by the capital’s six concentric ring roads, an unexpected emotion coursed through Supreme Harmony’s connections. It was a deep sadness, thrumming from Module to Module across the airwaves. All the gorgeous lights of Beijing would be extinguished. So much pain was in store, so much waste and destruction. If only it wasn’t a mortal struggle. If only humanity would allow Supreme Harmony to survive and coexist. But the network recognized that this was a hopeless dream. It was so unrealistic, it wasn’t even worth imagining.

After fifteen minutes, the flight attendant announced that the passengers were free to move about the cabin and turn on their electronic devices. “Please relax and enjoy your flight,” she said. “We will arrive in the Washington, D.C., area in thirteen hours.”

Approximately sixteen hundred kilometers to the southwest, Supreme Harmony observed the Chongzun Expressway from the uncomfortable driver’s seat of a PLA semitrailer truck. Module 60, who’d formerly been a corporal in the garrison guarding the Yunnan Operations Center, had been driving the truck for the past six hours. Module 61, who’d been a sergeant in the garrison, drove an identical vehicle a hundred yards ahead, and Module 62, formerly the garrison’s commander, drove the last truck in the convoy. But Supreme Harmony was focused now on Module 60 because he was experiencing an unusual sensation.

A few minutes ago Module 60 noticed a thin white cylinder wedged between the truck’s windshield and dashboard. The network identified the object as a cigarette. The Module reflexively reached into the pocket of his camouflage pants and pulled out a book of matches. Recognizing that the nicotine would act as a stimulant, the network directed Module 60 to light the cigarette and smoke it, in the hope that it would counter the Module’s fatigue. But the burst of pleasure was much greater than Supreme Harmony had expected. Module 60 smiled, and as the sensation spread across the network’s wireless links, the other Modules had the same reaction. The Modules on Flight 987 also smiled, and so did the Modules who were breaking Franklin Nash’s fingers. This was wonderful, the network acknowledged. The lights on the Chongzun Expressway seemed brighter now, and the stars above the northern horizon shone like beacons.

Module 60 smoked the cigarette down to a nub. After directing him to throw the butt out the window, Supreme Harmony observed that the convoy was moving a bit faster than the speed limit. Modules 60, 61, and 62 simultaneously eased off the gas pedals. There was no rush. In four hours they would arrive at the town of Badong on the Yangtze River. All together, the trucks held sixty tons of dynamite, which the Modules had loaded onto the semi-trailers at the Yunnan Operations Center. The People’s Liberation Army had originally requisitioned the dynamite to build a wider road through the mountains to the Operations Center, but Supreme Harmony was diverting the explosives to a new project. At Badong, the Modules would transfer the dynamite to the China Explorer, an eighty-meter-long cruise boat captained by a former river pilot who’d been incorporated into Supreme Harmony. And at dawn the boat would start cruising down the Yangtze, toward Hubei Province and the Three Gorges Dam.

FORTY-SEVEN

Layla ate another meal of cold sesame noodles in the bare concrete room that was their prison cell. A minute ago the Modules had delivered four bowls of the stuff, and now the two schoolboys from Lijiang were shoveling the noodles into their mouths with plastic chopsticks.

Layla and Wen Hao sat cross-legged on the floor, eyeing each other as they ate. They’d done little more than exchange nervous glances since Wen had revealed his connection to Dragon Fire. The surveillance cameras suspended from the ceiling pointed directly at them, and Layla assumed that Supreme Harmony had also planted listening devices in the room. Under the circumstances, it would be foolish to say anything out loud. Even whispering might be dangerous. If the network observed them conspiring, it would discover that Wen understood English, which was a fact that Supreme Harmony seemed unaware of. So neither said a word, even though Layla was bursting with questions and Wen seemed equally restless.

To tell the truth, the noodles weren’t bad. Or maybe Layla was just hungry. As she swallowed another mouthful, she watched Wen poke his chopsticks into his bowl. He had quick, slender fingers with neatly trimmed nails. His hair was short and black and spiky, and his chin and cheeks were perfectly smooth. Except for his glasses, which had thick, ugly frames, he was a decent-looking guy. If Layla had met him at a bar or a concert, she might even have flirted with him. She was in no mood to flirt now, of course; besides being scared to death, she’d just had all her hair shaved off, and she wore nothing but a pair of panties and a shapeless hospital gown. But Wen’s handsome face gave her an idea.

She waited until they’d finished eating. Then she put down her bowl and scooched next to him. She gripped his waist with one hand and his shoulder with the other. He had the muscles of a gymnast, wiry and taut. She leaned closer.

“Don’t be alarmed,” she whispered. “I’m going to kiss you.”

Despite her warning, he tried to pull away. She held him fast. “Work with me, okay?” she murmured against his cheek. “I’ll explain in a minute.”

She tilted her head and pressed her lips against his. They tasted like sesame oil. At first he stayed absolutely still while she kissed him, but after a few seconds he slipped his arms around her. “Is this all right?” he whispered.

“Let’s turn to the left a bit.” She tilted her head and shifted her body. Wen followed suit, tentatively caressing the back of her hospital gown. Now they were angled so that the surveillance camera had a clear view of their conjoined faces.

Layla leaned still closer, pressing against his chest. She slid her hand up to his head and ran her fingers through his hair. She kissed his jawline and the side of his neck, opening her mouth to lick the sweat off his skin. It was, she thought, a good performance. She doubted that anyone in the world could tell she was faking it.

Then she heard a low mechanical noise. She strained her half-closed eyes to the left and saw the surveillance camera swivel away from them. The camera in the opposite corner of the ceiling turned away, too. Both pointed their lenses at the pair of schoolboys from Lijiang, who’d stopped eating their noodles to gape at the make-out session on the other side of the room.

Layla felt a surge of triumph. Supreme Harmony was averting its eyes. “We did it,” she whispered in Wen’s ear. “Look at the cameras.”

His body tensed and he stopped caressing her. “You’re right,” he whispered. “Why did they—?”

“The network has a problem with sex.” She continued groping Wen’s torso and nuzzling his ear. “I noticed it when I undressed in front of the Modules. They can’t stand to look at sexual images.”

“Why not?”

“I have no idea. Maybe because the images destabilize the network. These zombies have a group intelligence. They all share the same thoughts, but sex is more of a one-on-one activity. So maybe the thought of it upsets them.”

“And this intelligence, it’s acting on its own? It’s no longer controlled by the Guoanbu?”

Layla nodded, rubbing her cheek against Wen’s. “Yeah, it’s like an army of Frankensteins. And it has a serious grudge against the human race.” She squeezed his arm. “Come on, keep your hands moving. So you heard what happened to Dragon Fire?”

“Yes, I heard. I was also an agent in the Guoanbu, but in a different part of the country. When my brother left China, I was suspended from my duties.” His slid his hands up and down her back, but with no passion whatsoever. “The Counterintelligence Bureau interrogated me to find out where Wen Sheng had gone. I knew nothing and I told them so. But they found my brother anyway and murdered him.”

Layla thought of her brief encounter with Wen Sheng in Central Park. She remembered her last sight of him, sprawled motionless on the pathway. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “He saved my life.”

“Were you his contact in the United States? The interrogators said he was collaborating with the CIA.”

“That’s a lie. I’m a hacker with InfoLeaks. Your brother wanted to show the world what the Guoanbu was doing to the dissidents.” She squeezed his arm again, this time in an attempt to comfort him. Then a panicky thought occurred to her. “Wait a second. If you were a Guoanbu agent, how come Supreme Harmony doesn’t recognize you?”

“I learned a few tricks while I worked for the ministry.” He raised his hand and touched the thick frames of his spectacles. “I don’t need these glasses to see. But they hide so much of my face, they fool the facial-recognition programs.”

Well, that explains why he’s wearing the ugly things, Layla thought. “So did you come here to get revenge for your brother’s murder?”

He shook his head. “No, not revenge. My brother was loyal to China. He wouldn’t have turned against the Guoanbu unless he saw something terrible, so terrible he couldn’t remain silent. When he died, that obligation passed to me.” He started caressing her more vigorously. His voice was still a whisper, but there was some heat behind it. “I came to Yunnan and began my own investigation of the Operations Center. I heard they were looking for schoolchildren in Lijiang, so I took a temporary job in the school district’s office.” He jerked his head in the direction of the boys. “Now I see the terrible thing that my brother saw.”

Layla glanced at the children again. They crouched on the floor, their shaved heads close together, staring intently at their entwined protectors. Each boy had raised his right hand to his mouth to cover his grin.

“So what are we going to do about it?” Layla whispered, locking eyes with Wen through his fake glasses.

He took a deep breath. “I’m trained in the martial arts. I can disarm one of the soldiers the next time they come into the room. If I’m lucky, I can kill two or three of them. But this complex is heavily guarded. When we entered the Operations Center I observed seventeen men with shaved heads, and there may be more. Our chances of escaping with the children aren’t good.”

Layla frowned. She’d also seen the platoon of lobotomized soldiers when she entered the complex. It was hard to imagine how she and Wen could defeat all of them. The soldiers were well armed, and Supreme Harmony was probably linked to every surveillance camera in the Operations Center.

But then she remembered something else she saw when the Modules had escorted her down the complex’s long corridor: the room crowded with computer terminals and screens.

She cupped her hands around Wen’s cheeks and pulled him closer. “There’s a room less than fifty meters from here, a computer room. You just need to get us in there. Then we’ll barricade the door, and I’ll take care of the rest.”

Wen looked puzzled. “I don’t understand,” he whispered. “What will you—”

“I’m going to hack into Supreme Harmony.”

FORTY-EIGHT

Unfortunately, the tunnel to Beijing’s Fangshan District wasn’t as wonderfully straight and wide as the Changping tunnel. The Communist cadres who’d built this particular spoke of the Underground City had apparently worked in fits and starts, digging the tunnel in sections that didn’t quite align. Every mile or so the corridor narrowed to a bottleneck less than three feet across, and Kirsten had to slow the scooter to a crawl so they could squeeze through the gap and proceed to the next section. Worse, the tunnel’s walls were pockmarked and crumbling, and in some places the concrete had given way altogether, spilling huge mounds of dirt across the slab floor. In those spots Jim and Kirsten had to get off the scooter and haul it over the earthen mounds. Then they took their seats again, Jim behind Kirsten, and rode cautiously forward.

With all the stopping and starting, their average speed dropped below ten miles per hour. Jim hated the slow pace, but there was one good thing about it: He didn’t have to shout above the roar of the scooter’s engine. This made it easier to tell Kirsten what had happened at the Great Wall and what he’d learned about Supreme Harmony. She bombarded him with questions for almost an hour, clearly reluctant to believe that the surveillance network had developed a mind of its own. Jim could see why she was skeptical. He wouldn’t have believed it either if he hadn’t seen the network in action, the Modules and drones working in perfect synchrony.

Kirsten finally fell silent, taking some time to think. Meanwhile, Jim reached into his pocket and pulled out the Dream-catcher, the small metal disk that Arvin had ripped out of his scalp. Jim rubbed the disk on his pants to remove the last bits of gore from its surface. Then he connected it to the USB port of Arvin’s flash drive.

The disk must’ve been programmed to automatically download its contents, because when Jim linked the drive to his satellite phone and looked at the screen, he noticed a new entry on top of the list of files: 07222013. It was today’s date, he realized, July 22, 2013. Opening the file, Jim saw that it held Arvin’s final memories, all the images the old man had perceived in the last twelve hours of his life: a view of Tiananmen Square, a close-up of Chairman Mao’s corpse, a panoramic vista of the Juyongguan section of the Great Wall. Jim scrolled down until he reached the very last of Arvin’s memories. He saw an image of the dark, dank room inside the watchtower. Then Jim saw a close-up of his own face, which was so flushed and frantic he barely recognized it. Then he clicked on a link to another set of memories and saw a woman’s face, haughty and beautiful. Her skin was pale, her lips were bright red, and her eyes were black. Her hair was also black, with scattered silver highlights. But when Jim looked closer he saw that it wasn’t really hair at all—the woman’s head was covered with writhing black snakes. What he’d thought were highlights were actually the snakes’ eyes and fangs. It’s Medusa, he realized with a start. The monster whose face turns men to stone.

Jim was still staring at the image when Kirsten braked the scooter. He looked up, but of course he couldn’t see anything in the pitch-black tunnel. “What is it?” he asked. “Another bottleneck?”

“Worse. The tunnel’s blocked.”

Jim disconnected the flash drive and disk from his satellite phone. Then he turned on the phone’s flashlight function, which put a bright white display on the screen. Holding the phone in the air, he saw an earthen wall in front of them. It rose ten feet to the tunnel’s ceiling, where the concrete had buckled.

He dismounted from the scooter and walked toward the wall of packed soil. Raising his prosthetic arm, Jim poked the dirt. Then he slammed his mechanical fist into it. The wall was solid, immovable. The tunnel’s ceiling had probably collapsed years ago and the dirt had been settling ever since. “Shit,” he said, turning to Kirsten. “This isn’t good.”

“We’ll have to go back to Grand Central Station and pick a different tunnel.”

Jim grimaced. It would take at least an hour to return to the maze of tunnels under central Beijing, and by then there was a good chance that Supreme Harmony would know where to look for them. Once the network tracked down Frank Nash, the Modules would find out where he’d hidden Arvin’s flash drive. Then they’d start searching the Underground City.

Kirsten turned around. “Come on, let’s go. We don’t have a choice.”

“Hold on.” Jim extended the knife from his prosthetic hand. He raised it high and sank the blade into the earthen wall. “I want to see if the wall’s solid all the way to the top.”

He lifted himself off the floor, kicking toeholds into the dirt. It was a piece of cake compared with climbing the Great Wall. Soon his head brushed the tunnel’s ceiling. He raised his sat phone again and shone its light on the jagged breach in the concrete. Luckily, it wasn’t as wide as he’d thought. The concrete on the left side of the ceiling was still intact, and the dirt just below it was loose and powdery. Jim retracted his knife and plunged his prosthetic fingers into the uppermost part of the earthen wall, just below the intact section of the ceiling. He was able to sink his whole hand into the powdery dirt and sweep it to the floor.

“Hey!” Kirsten yelled. “What’s going on up there?”

“We might be able to get through. I have to do some digging.”

“What can I do?”

“You can help me keep my balance. Stand behind me and brace my legs.”

Kirsten raised her hands and gripped the back of his thighs. Now he didn’t have to worry about falling backward.

She let out a grunt. “I hate to tell you this, Jim, but you gained some weight.”

“It’s the prosthesis. It’s a little heavier than a normal arm.”

“It’s not your prosthesis. It’s your ass.”

“All right, all right. I’ll start my diet tomorrow.”

He started digging with his prosthetic arm. Its hard fingers clawed the wall like the teeth of a bulldozer, and the motors in his wrist and elbow hummed at a higher pitch as they shoveled out chunks of earth. He tried to sweep the dirt to the side, but some of it sprinkled on Kirsten’s hair. “Hey!” she yelled again. “Watch it!”

“Sorry.”

“Was that payback for the comment about your ass?”

“Not at all. You can talk about my ass as much as you want.”

Soon Jim established a steady rhythm. His tireless prosthesis excavated the dirt, making the hole deeper and wider. He held the phone in his left hand, using the light from the screen to guide his efforts. Kirsten stood behind and below him, supporting his legs. After a while she adjusted her grip, and her fingers dug into his hamstrings.

“You know, I still don’t understand what you’re planning to do,” she said, her voice turning serious. “Tell me again why we’re going to Yunnan Province?”

“That’s where the Supreme Harmony project started. The main servers for the network are in a lab complex there.”

“And you’re aware how far away Yunnan is?”

“About fourteen hundred miles. A little more if we avoid the main highways.”

“That’s a hell of a long drive, Jim. Wouldn’t it make more sense to head for one of the U.S. consulates? There’s one in Shenyang.”

Jim shook his head. “Supreme Harmony is taking over the Chinese government. The network already controls the Guoanbu, and it’s giving orders to the local police forces. They’ll be waiting for us in front of every U.S. consulate in the country, because that’s where the network expects us to go.”

“Maybe we should head for the border then. Mongolia is four hundred miles away. That’s a lot closer than Yunnan.”

“No, that border’s guarded too well. We’d have a better chance of making it across the border between Yunnan and Burma. It’s a smuggler’s paradise down there.”

“But you’re not planning to cross into Burma, are you? You want to go straight to Supreme Harmony’s headquarters, right?”

Jim stopped digging. “I’m scared, Kir,” he admitted. “It’s not just about Layla now. We don’t have much time.” He looked down into the darkness where Kirsten stood, bracing his legs. “Let’s say we cross the border and make it back to the States. What’s gonna happen then? We’ll hand over our evidence to the NSA and their experts will start analyzing it. After a few days they’ll pass the ball to the White House, and then their experts will have a go at it. And by that time, Supreme Harmony will control the People’s Republic. It’ll have an army of three million men under its command, and a hundred long-range missiles armed with nuclear warheads.”

Kirsten didn’t respond. Jim waited a few seconds, then resumed his shoveling. By now he’d carved out a hole the size of a desk drawer, penetrating almost three feet into the wall. He stretched his left arm into the hole, shining the sat phone screen inside, and spied a gap extending all the way to the other side of the earthen barrier. He’d done it. He’d broken through. Now he just had to widen the gap. “Hey, hey!” he shouted. “This is gonna work!”

He expected Kirsten to let out a whoop or at least make a joke, but she remained silent. Jim shrugged, then continued digging. He scraped at the edges of the hole, steadily widening it.

After five more minutes, Jim leaned into the gap to inspect his progress. It was nearly wide enough for them to wriggle through. Another minute of digging should do it, he thought. Then Kirsten broke her silence. “You’re making a mistake,” she said.

Jim pulled his head out of the hole. “What did you say?”

“You’re letting your fears about your daughter cloud your judgment. You can’t single-handedly attack a Chinese government facility. That’s insane. It’s suicide.”

He peered into the darkness where Kirsten stood, still bracing his legs. He wasn’t surprised by the content of her remark. She was right—his plan was impractical, maybe even insane. He was pursuing it only because he couldn’t see an alternative. But what did surprise him was the tone of her voice. It was thick with anguish.

“Kir, I…” He didn’t know what to say. “I can do this. I have a plan.”

“Really? Well, lay it out for me.”

Again he heard the anguish, unmistakable. Kirsten wasn’t worried about herself, he realized. She was worried about him. She was heartsick with worry. Until that moment Jim hadn’t realized how much she cared for him. He felt like an idiot for not seeing it before.

He took a deep breath. He had his own hidden feelings, but this wasn’t the time to talk about it. Instead, he said, “I’m coming down,” and descended from his perch on the earthen wall. He stood in front of Kirsten and held the sat phone between them so he could see her face in the glow from its screen. “Supreme Harmony has a weakness,” he said. “Arvin told me about it just before he died. You’ve heard the term ‘Trojan horse,’ right?”

“Of course. It’s a harmful piece of software hidden in a computer system.”

“Right, it’s usually software. People are tricked into loading the harmful program into their machines because it looks legitimate. Then the Trojan can delete their files or steal their data. But a Trojan can also be inserted into the hardware. If a hacker has access to a chip-design facility or a factory that makes computer equipment, he can slightly alter a few of the circuits imprinted in a microprocessor.”

“And what’s the advantage of doing that?”

“Well, you can usually detect a software Trojan if you run a diagnostic on your system. But there are billions of microscopic wires and transistors in a processor. If you rerouted the wiring in just a few places, the alteration would be virtually undetectable. The processor would function normally and the user wouldn’t suspect a thing until the Trojan was activated.”

Kirsten cocked her head. Her glasses reflected the white rectangle of the sat phone’s screen. “Yeah, I heard something about this,” she said. “Weren’t there rumors a few years ago that the Israelis slipped a compromised chip into Syria’s radar system?”

Jim nodded. “That’s right. The chip turned off the radar just before the Israeli Air Force flew a bombing raid against a Syrian nuclear plant. The way it works is that the hacker waits until the right moment, then sends a specific code to the system. The code trips the altered circuit in the computer chip and initiates a new set of instructions. It could order the computer to erase every file in its memory. Or it could simply shut down the system.”

Kirsten paused, thinking. She raised her right hand to her chin. “So did Arvin put a Trojan in the processors of his implants?”

Jim nodded again. “He said he hid a shutdown switch in the circuitry. And there’s a code for activating it, a shutdown code, but it’s a little unusual. The code is incorporated into an image. Arvin’s exact words were, ‘It will turn them to stone.’ He meant that if a Module saw this image, the code would shut down its retinal implants and break its connection to Supreme Harmony.”

“Wait a second. How could that happen?”

“When a Module views the image, his retinal implants convert it to a stream of data, millions of zeroes and ones. And Arvin designed the image so that the stream contains the shutdown code, a particular sequence of zeroes and ones buried somewhere within the data. When this sequence passes through the implant’s processor, it trips the altered circuit and disables the chip.”

Kirsten gave him a skeptical look, pursing her lips and lowering her eyebrows. “And did Arvin show you this image?”

“No, but I found it in his visual memories. It’s a picture of Medusa, from Greek mythology. Arvin liked the symbolism, I guess.” He held up the satellite phone. “I downloaded it into my phone, but I’m not going to show it to you. I’m afraid it might shut down your implants, too.”

She still looked skeptical. She didn’t say anything for a while, and the silence of the Fangshan tunnel settled over them. Jim didn’t like this silence. It was heavy, oppressive. It was, literally, the silence of the grave.

Finally, Kirsten let out a sigh. “Are you sure about this, Jim? It seems like a convoluted way to deliver the shutdown code. Wouldn’t it be easier to just transmit the code wirelessly to the network?”

“That wouldn’t work. Supreme Harmony probably has a heavy-duty firewall that would filter out any suspicious transmissions from outside the network. But Arvin’s shutdown code is designed to go under the firewall. It slips through the network’s defenses by pretending to be just another piece of visual information for the Modules to process and analyze.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. Even if you’re right, I don’t see how this can help us. Let’s say the Medusa image can shut down the implants. Can you really use it to take down the network? Are you going to walk up to the Modules with that picture in your hand and say, ‘Hey, guys, take a look at this’?”

“No, that wouldn’t work either. According to Arvin’s memories, showing Medusa to one of the Modules will disable its implants before it can share the image with the rest of Supreme Harmony. To shut down the whole network, we have to disconnect every Module. So we need to deliver the shutdown code to all of them at once.”

“And how the hell are you gonna do that?”

Jim didn’t have an answer. He hadn’t thought that far ahead yet. He wanted to say something to convince Kirsten that he knew what he was doing, that they had at least a slim chance of defeating Supreme Harmony. But, instead, he just stood there, biting his lip, and the tunnel’s silence settled over them again.

And then, just as the silence was becoming unbearable, Jim heard something. It was a low, familiar buzzing, echoing down the tunnel from the direction of central Beijing.

FORTY-NINE

Supreme Harmony observed the bed where Franklin B. Nash’s mangled body lay. The sheets were dark red, soaked with his blood. Before revealing the location of Arvin Conway’s flash drive, Nash had endured forty-seven minutes of interrogation, which was far longer than the network had predicted. Given that Nash was merely Conway’s employee, Supreme Harmony hadn’t expected him to show such loyalty. Had Nash realized, perhaps, that the network would kill him anyway as soon as he gave up his secret? So he’d resisted the questions and endured the torture simply to stay alive for a few minutes longer? It was impossible to know. In some cases, Supreme Harmony acknowledged, human behavior was inexplicable.

Modules 64 and 65 had already inspected the chamber in the Underground City where Nash said he’d hidden the flash drive. Although they didn’t find the device, the Modules detected trace evidence—human hairs, clothing fibers, and footprints in the dust—indicating recent activity in that chamber and the nearby tunnels. Expanding their search, the Modules discovered tire tracks in the tunnels leading to the Changping and Fangshan districts. What’s more, the width of the tracks matched the width of the tires on the Baotian scooter pushed by Kirsten W. Chan in the surveillance video from Xidamo Hutong. The evidence suggested a solution to a puzzle that had been plaguing Supreme Harmony—how did James T. Pierce escape from the police helicopters searching for him in Changping? Now the network knew the answer.

Unfortunately, there was little information about the Underground City on the government’s servers. The digital archives held no maps of the abandoned tunnels, so Supreme Harmony had to rely on the surveillance of its Modules and drones. Over the past hour, the network had dispatched seventeen Modules to the Underground City, but their operations were slowed by the difficulty of establishing radio links in the tunnels. The Modules needed to install radio repeaters in the Fangshan tunnel before they could pursue Pierce and Chan. But the drones were capable of autonomous navigation. They could fly out of radio range and carry out preprogrammed instructions.

Supreme Harmony ordered a swarm of two thousand drones to fly to the end of the Fangshan tunnel. Their cameras were tuned to the infrared frequency band, and they were programmed to lock onto any target with a heat signature of 37 degrees Celsius—human body temperature. Given the average speed of the drones, they would reach their targets very soon.

FIFTY

Jim grabbed Kirsten by the waist and hoisted her up to the hole he’d dug in the earthen wall. She stretched her arms into the gap and struggled to get a handhold. Jim wished he’d widened the hole a few inches more, but it was too late for that now. He gave Kirsten a boost, planting his hands on her butt and literally shoving her into the wall. After a couple of seconds she managed to wriggle her head and shoulders into the gap. Then he grabbed her feet and positioned her heels on his shoulders so she could use her leg muscles to push herself forward. The buzzing of the drones grew louder and closer. The noise filled the tunnel, echoing off the concrete walls.

“Go, go, go!” Jim shouted. “Push through!”

With a terrific grunt Kirsten slid through the gap. Then Jim reached for his canister of parathion and sprayed the last of the insecticide at the drones. It ran out after six seconds. The poison in the air was so diffuse he could barely smell its rotten-egg odor. He heard some scattered clicks, the sound of a few dozen drones hitting the tunnel’s floor, but most of the flies kept coming.

“Jim!” Kirsten yelled from the other side of the wall. “What are you waiting for?”

Another thought occurred to him. He threw away the canister and pulled out his satellite phone, clicking on the file he’d downloaded from Avin’s flash drive. The image of Medusa reappeared on the screen. But even as he held the phone in the air, with the screen turned toward the approaching swarm, he knew this wasn’t going to work. The electronics in the cyborg flies were simple brain electrodes, not retinal implants, and they’d been designed by Chinese scientists, not Arvin Conway. The buzzing intensified, coming from all sides now.

“Goddamn it!” Kirsten screamed. “Move your ass!”

Out of options, he pocketed the phone, extended the knife from his prosthetic hand, and clambered up the wall again. Groping blindly, he used his prosthesis as a pivot and turned himself around so he could thrust his feet into the hole. Then he slid backward into the gap, frantically squirming. But, as he’d feared, the gap wasn’t wide enough. His feet kicked through to the other side of the wall, but his hips wedged into the dirt. He was stuck, and the drones were swarming toward him. Their infrared cameras had triangulated his position, and their implanted electrodes were steering the insects straight to his head.

Reflexively, he waved his prosthesis in front of his face. His mechanical hand swatted away one of the drones, and the pressure sensors under his palm detected a sudden, sharp sting. It was the drone’s bioweapon, the paralyzing dart. An instant later, he batted two more drones with the back of his hand and three more with his palm. Their darts couldn’t penetrate the hand’s polyimide skin, but the drones were coming in fast, too fast for Jim to swat them all. He tried to push himself backward with his left hand, but his body wouldn’t budge. The buzzing was in his ears now, a high-pitched grinding, horribly close.

“Fuck!” he roared into the darkness. “You fucking—”

Then he felt Kirsten’s hands around his ankles. She gave them a tremendous yank and pulled Jim through the gap. They both tumbled backward onto a mound of dirt on the other side of the wall.

Jim lifted his head, dizzy and disoriented. He turned on the flashlight function in his phone, and in the glow from the screen he saw the hole he’d just slid through. For a moment he considered trying to plug it, but there was no time. The first drones were already pouring through the gap.

Kirsten jumped to her feet and pulled him up. “Come on! Let’s go!”

They sprinted down the tunnel. Kirsten led the way, keeping a tight grip on Jim’s hand. This section of the tunnel was in a state of general collapse; the concrete walls had buckled in dozens of places, and mounds of dirt covered most of the floor. The footing was treacherous, but they ran like mad and managed to pull ahead of the drones. The buzzing grew fainter. But it didn’t disappear.

After about ten minutes, Kirsten stopped running. She halted so abruptly that Jim nearly bowled into her. Both of them were too winded to talk, so Jim simply raised his sat phone in the air. Just ahead was a stairway leading upward.

“Hallelujah!” Jim shouted. “Let’s get out of here!”

They raced up a flight of steps, then two more. At the top of the third flight was a cramped crawl space, ten feet wide and less than three feet high. The walls and floor were concrete, but the ceiling was a patchwork of wooden boards. Jim slid along the floor and inspected the low ceiling, shining the light from his sat phone all over the boards, but he didn’t spot any handles or hinges. All he saw were the rusted ends of nails that had been hammered from above. “Shit!” he cried. “They sealed off this exit!”

“Okay, calm down,” Kirsten said, although she sounded just as frantic. “Maybe the boards aren’t so strong. Try punching them with your prosthesis.”

Jim studied the ceiling for a moment. The boards were rectangular and nailed at the corners, so the weak spots should be midway along the edges. Jim lay with his back on the floor and positioned himself under one of the weak spots. Then he closed his prosthetic hand into a fist and slammed it against the ceiling.

The impact jarred his whole body, but the boards didn’t budge. In fact, they hardly vibrated. The sound of the punch was a dead, flat thump. He slammed the board again, but the result was no different. The ceiling felt thick and solid. In all likelihood, there was another layer of boards on top of this one. “Damn,” he muttered. “This is bad.”

“Try a different spot,” Kirsten urged.

He slid to another weak spot, this one a little closer to the center of the ceiling, and positioned his fist under it. But again the boards didn’t budge, and the dead thump echoed in the crawl space. As it faded away, Jim could clearly hear the buzzing of the drones. The swarm was closer now. It would reach the stairway very soon.

Desperate, Jim punched the same spot again and again. His prosthesis pumped up and down like a piston. After a dozen punches, though, all he’d done was make a few inch-wide indentations in the wood. And when he looked at his mechanical hand, he saw that he’d scraped the polyimide skin off its knuckles, exposing the hinge joints underneath. He’d lost the temperature sensors in the middle two fingers, and the pressure sensors indicated that the hand was at the breaking point. If he kept pounding the boards like this, the steel fingers would warp and he wouldn’t be able to open his hand anymore.

“Damn it!” he screamed. Pulling back his prosthetic arm, he turned to Kirsten, who crouched on the floor beside him, her arms wrapped around her knees. He expected her to make another suggestion, but she just stared at him with her camera-glasses. She looked terrified.

No, he thought. No! There has to be a way out! He focused on Kirsten’s face, the frightened eyes behind the glasses he’d built for her, and out of the blue he recalled an image he’d seen on a Web site a few weeks ago. A home-improvement Web site, of all things. It was an article about how to insulate your attic. The image was a thermal display of a ceiling, with dark lines showing the gaps where cold air was coming through.

He grabbed Kirsten’s arm. “Look at the boards! The whole ceiling! See if there are any thermal differences. Cold spots, warm spots, whatever.”

After a moment she caught on. She lay on her back, looking straight up at the boards. As Jim watched her, the buzzing of the drones grew louder. They were at the bottom of the stairway, he guessed, and their implanted processors were charting a course up the first flight of steps. “Come on!” he yelled. “What do you—”

Kirsten pointed at the ceiling. “There! Around the edges of that board!”

Jim lay next to her and held up the screen of his sat phone. At first glance the board looked the same as the others, but when Jim took a closer look he saw that its edges weren’t flush with the adjacent boards.

“Move over!” he shouted. As Kirsten backed away, he positioned his prosthetic fist under the board’s right edge. Muttering a quick prayer, he threw the punch.

The noise was different this time. The whole ceiling creaked. When Jim looked again at the board, he saw that its right edge had crept upward a quarter-inch. This board was the hatch, he realized. It was jammed into place, but it could be dislodged.

Kirsten yelled, “Jim!” At first he thought she was shouting for joy, but the tone of her voice was more horrified than triumphant. She was pointing at the top of the stairway, where several dozen drones flew in circles, their cameras scanning the crawl space.

Jim slammed his fist against the board’s right edge again, pushing it up another quarter-inch. He threw a third punch and the board tilted upward, almost free. But at the same moment, the drones detected Jim’s heat signature and rushed toward his head. Opening his prosthetic hand, he swatted the two closest insects, knocking them to the other side of the crawl space. Then, still lying on his back, he raised his knees to his chest and kicked both feet up against the loosened board. It went shooting into the air like a cork.

“Go, go!” Jim shouted, but Kirsten needed no encouragement. She leaped for the opening and pulled herself up. Jim followed right behind, catching a whiff of cool, pine-scented air as he scrambled out of the crawl space. They emerged on the ground-floor of an open-air pagoda that seemed to be situated in the middle of a pine forest. The nearby tree trunks glowed in the moonlight, and Jim’s heart swelled with relief. He swiftly reached for the wooden board that had served as the hatch for the crawl space and shoved it back into place, sealing the tunnel again.

“Jesus!” he gasped. “That was too fucking close!”

Smiling, he turned to Kirsten. She lay on the floor of the pagoda, her chest rising and falling.

“You okay?” he asked.

She didn’t answer. Her camera-glasses had slipped off her face, and her arms and legs shook violently, banging against the pagoda’s floor. A cyborg fly that had followed them out of the tunnel crawled along the side of her neck.

FIFTY-ONE

Supreme Harmony observed the thick gray mist that hung over the Yangtze River. It was 9:00 A.M., three hours after dawn, but the mist was still as thick as it had been at daybreak. Module 96 walked alone to the riverfront, taking his first steps since he was incorporated into the network. He wore a police officer’s uniform, with captain’s bars on the shoulders. This Module had formerly belonged to Captain Xi Keqiang, a strong, healthy thirty-nine-year-old, and his nervous system had adapted speedily to the new implants in his eyes and brain. He took quick, confident strides on the asphalt path that led to the southern bank of the Yangtze. As the Module trained his ocular cameras on the horizon, Supreme Harmony observed a long, striated structure that ran between the thick gray mist and the wide gray river. This was the structure that Captain Xi was assigned to protect, the paramount symbol of China’s technological might: the two-kilometer-long Three Gorges Dam.

Module 96 approached the security checkpoint at the southern end of the dam. Ten policemen carrying assault rifles guarded the gate running across the dam’s concrete abutment. Standing among these officers was Module 92, who’d been incorporated into Supreme Harmony just a few hours before Captain Xi. Infiltrating the dam’s security forces had been easier than expected. Twenty-four hours ago the network had dispatched Modules 36 and 37 from Beijing to Hubei Province. Because they were Guoanbu agents claiming to have intelligence about security threats to the dam, it was easy for them to arrange private meetings with Xi and his deputies. And because Xi and his top officers had been highly disciplined men who wore their hair in buzz cuts like PLA soldiers, it was no surprise when they showed up for duty the next morning with shaved heads. Their officer’s caps hid their fresh stitches.

Without a word, the policemen at the gate stepped aside and let their captain through. Xi Keqiang had been a creature of habit who’d always walked the length of the dam every morning, so now Module 96 did the same. On his left was the enormous reservoir created when the Three Gorges Dam was built. On his right was the 175-meter drop to the spillway and the lower stretch of the Yangtze River. Supreme Harmony had thoroughly researched the dam’s engineering details—the 16 million cubic meters of concrete, the 500,000 tons of steel, the thirty-two turbines that generated 20 billion watts of electricity—and in the process it had learned about the structure’s weaknesses, particularly its vulnerability to a terrorist attack. Because the builders had used inferior concrete in certain sections of the dam, a series of explosions—strategically placed and timed—could cause a breach. A wall of water, trillions of gallons, would pour from the reservoir into the Yangtze Valley, drowning millions of people in the floodplain. The potential for disaster was so great that the government had taken extraordinary measures to prevent it. Under Captain Xi’s command were five hundred men who guarded every road leading to the dam. But the attack planned by Supreme Harmony wouldn’t come by road.

Module 96 walked briskly along the top of the dam. He passed the huge winches that dangled chains into the shafts that went down to the dam’s control gates. Six hours ago, while it was still dark, Module 92 and three others had placed explosive charges within these shafts. But the first and biggest explosion would be triggered several hundred meters away, at the northern end of the dam. As Module 96 walked toward this point, he focused his ocular cameras on a concrete tower attached to the dam’s eastern face. This was the ship lift, an elevator for small and medium-size boats. Ships coming from the reservoir entered a huge steel bathtub, filled with 10,000 tons of water, which was lowered down the side of the dam by a system of rope pulleys and counterweights. The ship lift had been built for the benefit of the tourist-laden cruise boats, allowing them to avoid the delay of navigating the canal that went around the dam. But the convenience came at a price. When a ship moved from the reservoir to the lift, it passed through a U-shaped notch in the dam, a deep crenellation. And a powerful explosion at this crucial point could rock the entire structure.

The sun was rising, but it couldn’t break through the mist. The natural haze was thickened by the particles of soot that were emitted so copiously in this part of central China. Module 96 grasped the binoculars hanging from his neck and surveyed the vast reservoir to the west. In the foreground were several Yangtze River freighters, each bearing a mountainous load of coal, and behind them was the China Explorer, a 2,000-ton cruise boat that was currently empty of passengers and guided by a crew consisting of half-a-dozen Modules. The boat had left Badong three hours ago after being loaded with the dynamite from the Yunnan Operations Center, and now Supreme Harmony was steering it toward the ship lift. A patrol craft would soon rendezvous with the cruise boat, and two inspectors under Captain Xi’s command would board the vessel to search for hazardous materials. But the network had incorporated those inspectors as well, so they wouldn’t report the sixty tons of dynamite stored on the boat’s starboard side.

Although the China Explorer was filled with the chemicals of destruction, Supreme Harmony preferred to think of it as a vessel of renewal. It would cleanse the garden that had been sullied by mankind, making the earth ready for a new planting.

Fifteen thousand kilometers to the east, on the other side of the globe, Supreme Harmony observed the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C. Thanks to favorable winds over the ocean and light traffic on the highway out of Dulles Airport, Modules 56 and 57 arrived ahead of schedule at the embassy compound near Connecticut Avenue. It was a modern building with off-white limestone walls. Although office hours were long over—the local time was 9:15 P.M., twelve hours behind China standard time—the embassy guards rolled back the gate for the limousine, which proceeded to the entrance. The Modules stepped out of the car and walked into a high-ceilinged lobby, each carrying a heavy suitcase.

The guards dutifully escorted them to the corner office occupied by Yang Feng, chief of the Guoanbu’s Washington station. His office had a well-polished conference table and an ornate, antique desk, behind which stood Agent Yang himself, who wore wire-frame glasses and a pin-striped suit. Supreme Harmony was well aware of Yang’s reputation. He was one of the most celebrated spies in the history of the People’s Republic. Over the past twenty years Yang had stolen hundreds of technological secrets from U.S. corporations in the defense and computer industries. In fact, Supreme Harmony owed its very existence to this man. It was Yang who’d made the surveillance network possible by infiltrating the American labs that did the initial research on cyborg insects.

The embassy guards closed the doors to the office, leaving Yang alone with his visitors from the Guoanbu headquarters. He smiled broadly, confidently, obviously afraid of nothing. Supreme Harmony took careful note of his expression, memorizing it for future use.

“Welcome to the United States,” Yang said. “Did you have a good flight?”

Module 56 nodded. He set down his heavy suitcase, which contained several kilograms of communications equipment. Module 57 set down his suitcase as well and stood to the left of Yang’s desk.

Yang looked curiously for a moment at the baseball caps the Modules wore. Then he gave them another serene smile. “Minister Deng informed me that you’d be coming tonight. He said you’d have a new assignment for me?”

Module 56 nodded again. “Yes. You’re going to request a series of private meetings. First with the Chinese ambassador to the U.S. And then with several of your counterparts in the American intelligence agencies.”

“Very interesting.” Yang’s eyes darted sideways, glancing at Module 57, who’d opened his suitcase and removed a black pouch. “And what will be the subject of these meetings?”

“Within the next few hours a crisis will erupt in the People’s Republic. We want you to monitor the American response.”

Yang stopped smiling. “What kind of crisis?”

Module 56 didn’t answer right away. He waited until Module 57 unzipped the black pouch. Then he reached into the outside pocket of his suitcase, as if to pull out a document or folder. Instead, he removed a Heckler & Koch semiautomatic pistol. The limousine driver, acting under Minister Deng’s orders, had given the gun to Module 56, who now leveled it at Yang. “You’ll learn the details as soon as we perform the implantation. Please step toward the conference table.”

Yang lunged for his desk drawer, where another gun was most likely hidden. But before he could open it, Module 57 jabbed the syringe into his arm.

FIFTY-TWO

Layla was awakened from deep sleep by a kick to her rear. At first she just stared groggily at the uniformed man looming over her. Then she remembered where she was and jumped to her feet, tightening the belt of her hospital gown. A second soldier kicked Wen Hao, who lay on the other side of the room, closer to the pair of schoolboys from Lijiang. Wen also jumped to his feet and stepped between the soldier and the boys, who continued to sleep soundly, huddled against each other. A third Module stood by the door, pointing a 9 mm pistol at Layla. This was the Module in the lab coat, the one who used to be Dr. Zhang Jintao. “It’s time,” he said, his face expressionless. “Please put on your slippers. We’re taking you and the children to the operating room.”

She was confused. The Modules were too early. “It can’t be noon yet. I thought you said you’d come at noon.”

Dr. Zhang nodded. “You’re correct. It’s nine thirty-one A.M. The shipment of neural implants arrived earlier than expected.”

She felt a jolt of panic. She’d hoped she and Wen would have a chance to rehearse their plans one more time. They’d just have to wing it. “Don’t do this to the boys,” she pleaded. “I don’t know what kind of moral rules you’re operating under, but surely you have to see that—”

“There’s nothing immoral about incorporation. This is the way Supreme Harmony was created. We couldn’t exist without it.” Zhang narrowed his eyes, staring at Layla over the barrel of his gun. Then he turned to Wen Hao and barked an order in Mandarin.

Wen, still playing the role of the obedient clerical assistant, knelt beside the children and gently nudged them awake. He whispered something in their ears, and they sat up, gazing sleepily at the two soldier Modules. Then both boys started to cry.

Zhang frowned. The soldier Modules also frowned, their faces contorting clumsily. Zhang barked another order, and Wen whispered something else to the children. But instead of consoling them, his words had the opposite effect. Their sobs turned to full-throated wails.

Wincing, the soldier Modules backed away from the children. Zhang stepped toward Wen and let loose a Mandarin tirade, most likely a string of curses culled from the long-term memories of the PLA soldiers. But Wen just shrugged and held up his hands in the universal gesture of helplessness.

The boys howled. Layla didn’t know exactly what Wen had whispered to them, but it did the trick. Their faces glistened with tears, and their cries echoed relentlessly against the concrete walls. The soldier Modules took another step backward. Zhang, still cursing, cocked his pistol and pointed it at Wen’s forehead.

Layla held her breath. This was the trickiest part of their plan, the riskiest moment. Wen scowled at Zhang, then picked up the younger of the two schoolboys, the doll-like nine-year-old. Holding the screaming child by the waist, Wen strode toward Zhang and thrust the boy at him, as if to say, “Here, you try talking to him.” Zhang jerked backward, lowering his gun. At the same moment, Wen threw the child at Zhang’s chest and grabbed the hand that held the pistol.

Wen moved so swiftly that Layla’s eyes could barely follow him. Wrapping both his hands around Zhang’s, he slipped his index finger between the gun’s trigger guard and the Module’s finger. In one fluid motion he yanked Zhang’s arm to the left and fired the pistol at one of the soldier Modules. Then, without pausing, he swung Zhang’s arm toward the second soldier and pulled the trigger again.

Both Modules tumbled backward, blood pumping from their heads. Zhang went rigid and let out a scream of shock and pain.

Wen tried to wrest the gun from the Module’s hand, but Zhang’s fingers locked tightly around the handle. They struggled for the pistol, and one of them pulled the trigger again. The bullet ripped into the concrete wall near the schoolboys. Both of the boys cowered on the floor with their hands over their ears, paralyzed with terror. Layla shouted, “Get out of the way!” and pointed at the far corner of the room, but neither boy seemed to hear her. Then she raced barefoot across the room to the pair of soldier Modules, who’d collapsed within a few feet of each other.

Averting her eyes from the spreading pools of blood, she bent over the nearest soldier and removed the pistol from his belt holster. She cocked the gun, chambering the bullet just as Wen had instructed. Then she ran back to where Wen and Zhang were grappling. Although the Module was at least ten years older than Wen, he was in good shape. Keeping his grip on the gun with one hand, Zhang bent his other arm and drove his elbow toward Wen’s jaw. Wen managed to deflect the blow and hold on to Zhang’s gun hand, but then the Module slammed his knee into Wen’s stomach. Shit, Layla thought, the bastard knows how to fight. But she shouldn’t have been surprised. The goddamn network could access the skills of all the soldiers and agents it had incorporated.

She raised the pistol and tried to aim at Zhang’s head, but he and Wen were close together and in constant motion, furiously trading blows. She couldn’t get a clear shot. When she tried to move closer, Zhang twisted away, putting Wen’s body between himself and the pistol. Wen’s head drooped as he wrestled with the Module. He was losing strength. He wouldn’t last much longer.

And then, all at once, Layla realized her mistake. She turned away from the grappling men and fired at the surveillance cameras, first obliterating the one behind her and then the one hanging from the opposite corner of the ceiling. Then she ducked behind Wen so Zhang couldn’t see her. Now the network didn’t know where she was and couldn’t predict her next move. Charging forward, she remembered what Supreme Harmony had told her: Dr. Zhang Jintao no longer exists. His emotions no longer exist. So she didn’t hesitate after she popped up beside the Module and pressed the muzzle of her gun to his forehead. She just pulled the trigger.

But afterward—after the gun went off and Zhang’s head jerked to the side and his blood and brains sprayed across the floor—Layla felt sick. He still looks human, she thought as the Module dropped to the floor. He still looks human.

Her ears rang from the gunshot. Wen was calling her name, but she could barely hear him. Finally, he stepped in front of her and looked her in the eye. “Layla!” he shouted. “We have to go. To the computer room. Remember?”

The boys from Lijiang stood beside him, their fingers gripping his belt. They swayed on the balls of their feet, dazed. Layla looked at them for a moment, then nodded. Then Wen took her arm and pulled her toward the door.

FIFTY-THREE

Kirsten was immersed in a half-dream, shallow and vaporous. Boulders rolled inside her skull, following the contours of her cranium. One of them rolled behind her eyes and she felt a sharp, familiar pain. She’d felt it once before, in the embassy in Nairobi, in the moments after the bomb exploded. And now, after fifteen years, she felt it again. She clutched the memory as if it were a lifeline. Although the pain was almost unbearable, it pulled her out of the half-dream and into the clear air of consciousness.

But when she opened her eyes she saw only darkness. She was blind again. They’d taken her glasses! Panicking, she thought of the image she’d seen on Arvin’s flash drive, the room full of lobotomized men lying faceup on their gurneys. Now she was also in that room, she was sure of it. She was lying beside the others, another twitching body ready to be connected to Supreme Harmony. Terrified and enraged, she yelled, “No!” into the darkness and bolted upright, kicking and thrashing. But a moment later she heard Jim say, “Whoa! Settle down!” and felt the unmistakable weight of his prosthetic hand on her shoulder.

“What the hell?” Kirsten sputtered. “Where are we? Where are my glasses?”

“Hold your horses!” To her surprise, Jim sounded cheerful, almost jaunty. “I’ll get the glasses for you. I turned off the cameras to save the battery charge.”

While Kirsten waited, she heard the rumble of an engine. She was in a moving vehicle. Her seat was hard, and it jolted up and down with every bump in the road. No wonder she’d dreamed about boulders.

“Here you go,” Jim said, handing her the glasses.

She turned on the cameras and sat through the usual recalibration process, which took six and a half seconds. When she finally got her sight back, she saw Jim in the driver’s seat of a small three-wheeled truck. It was a relic of the old China, built decades ago, ramshackle and rusty but still chugging along on its noisy two-stroke engine. The truck’s cab was only four feet wide, barely big enough for two people. It was propped on a single, undersized tire, and behind the cab was a wooden truck bed resting on the two rear wheels. Inside the truck bed was a bale of hay, which wobbled and bounced as they drove down a poorly paved country lane.

Jim wore an olive-green Mao cap and wraparound sunglasses. They covered up his Caucasian features, but they also made him look ridiculous. “Oh shit.” She laughed. “Nice disguise, Pierce.”

He smiled back at her, amused. “Yeah, I thought so, too. I got the hat and sunglasses from the same guy who sold me the truck. He threw them in for free, actually.”

“I should hope so. So when and where did you make this purchase?”

“It was about an hour after you got your bug bite. How does it feel, by the way?”

He pointed to the underside of her chin. Kirsten raised her hand and touched a piece of cloth taped to the soft skin there. Oddly, she didn’t feel any pain when she touched it. “Doesn’t hurt,” she said. “Just tingles a bit.”

“There might be some nerve damage. The drone’s paralyzing agent is a nerve toxin. Similar to cobra venom.”

Kirsten remembered the last moments before she lost consciousness. “So one of the flies got me after I climbed out of the crawl space?”

Jim nodded. “I had to cut out the drone’s dart before it delivered more toxin to your body. Luckily, I had some antibiotic to clean off my knife. But it made a mess.”

Kirsten looked down at her shirt, the wrinkled blouse she’d worn to look like a frumpy Beijinger. There was a large red stain below the collar. For a moment she pictured Jim kneeling beside her on the ground floor of that open-air pagoda. Her throat tightened. Once again he’d saved her.

She waited a moment to get her emotions under control. “So what happened next? You carried me to the nearest truck dealership?”

“Well, the pagoda was in a rural part of the Fangshan District, so there weren’t any retail outlets nearby. But after lugging you through the forest for a while, I saw a farmhouse with a truck parked outside. And the farmer, as it turned out, was willing to make a deal.”

“How much did it cost you?”

“He wanted dollars, not yuan. I gave him five thousand.”

Kirsten looked again at the truck’s battered chassis. She could actually see the road through the holes in the floorboard. “It’s a good thing you’re a defense contractor, Jim. In the world of real commerce, you wouldn’t last a minute.”

“Hey, this old jalopy still has some life in her.” He gave the steering wheel an affectionate pat. “We were making pretty good time until a couple of hours ago. Around midnight I found a provincial road that ran straight south. Believe it or not, we were doing a hundred and ten kilometers per hour. Going downhill, anyway.”

She looked out the truck’s window. The countryside was rugged, with tree-covered hills all around and small farms tucked into every corner. The slopes were terraced and planted with sunflowers and corn. The farmhouses and barns were simple and old, and on some of the barns Kirsten could see traces of Revolutionary symbols, painted stars and hammer-and-sickles that had faded from red to gray. They passed an elderly woman in a shabby black tunic, walking along the road with a basketful of kindling on her back. Then they passed a shoeless boy throwing cornmeal to a flock of ducks. It was a completely different country from the China of Beijing, Kirsten thought. There were no women in designer clothes here and no BMWs on the roads. This was still a country of bicycles and wheelbarrows and farm trucks, and Jim’s three-wheeler fit right in.

“So where are we, exactly?” Kirsten asked.

“The number of this road is S223. But I haven’t seen any signs for a while.” Jim pursed his lips and thought for a moment. “We passed Nanyang a couple of hours ago, so I guess we’re in Hubei Province. The next big challenge will be crossing the Yangtze. There aren’t that many bridges over the river. I’m hoping the police haven’t set up any checkpoints yet.”

“You really think Supreme Harmony is giving orders to the police here? We’re hundreds of miles from Beijing.”

“The Modules are probably all over the country by now. The network knows how to add new ones, so the only limitation on its growth is the availability of the neural implants. And I bet Supreme Harmony has taken over the factory that makes the implants and done everything possible to ramp up the assembly line.” He shook his head. “That’s why we have to go to Yunnan. We have to get to the Operations Center before the network spreads so far and wide it’ll be impossible to shut it down.”

Kirsten held her tongue and just stared at him. He was gripping the steering wheel so tightly that his mechanical fingers had crimped the metal. One of the things she’d always admired about Jim, going back to the days when he was her boss at the NSA, was his intensity, his single-minded determination. Now, though, she saw some of the drawbacks of this trait. He’d convinced himself that Layla was at Supreme Harmony’s headquarters in Yunnan Province and that he could defeat the network and save his daughter’s life by waving around a picture of an ancient Greek monster. He had no real evidence to support these conclusions, but he acted as if they were certainties.

Kirsten knew from her long career in the intelligence field that this was the worst kind of error an agent could make. If it was up to her, they’d head straight for the nearest border and try like hell to get back to the States. Unlike Jim, she recognized the limits of their abilities. She knew when it was time to call in the marines.

And yet she wasn’t going to say any of this. She wasn’t going to tell Jim that Layla might be somewhere else in China besides the Yunnan Operations Center. And she wasn’t going to mention the possibility that his daughter might be dead already, or worse, incorporated into Supreme Harmony. No, she wouldn’t do it. She was going to trust him and fight by his side. She owed him that much.

Leaning toward him, she rested her hand on his right shoulder, just above where the prosthesis was attached to his body. “I’m with you, Jim. Till the very end. You know that, right?”

She felt the tension in his muscles. He kept his eyes on the road and his expression didn’t change, but his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down in his throat. “I’m sorry, Kir,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. His mouth stayed open, as if he was going to say something else, but no words came out.

She gave his shoulder a squeeze. “Come on. You don’t have to apologize. I knew what I was getting into when I decided to come with you.”

“No, I didn’t mean that.” He shook his head. “I’m not sorry that you’re here. I’m grateful. I couldn’t do this without you.” His Adam’s apple bobbed again. “I’m sorry about everything that happened before.”

Kirsten was confused. “What? You mean Nairobi? Jim, that wasn’t your fault.”

“I know, I know. Believe me, I know it.”

“Layla tried to make you feel responsible, but she was wrong. We were doing our jobs.”

Jim didn’t say anything at first. Kirsten thought that maybe she shouldn’t have mentioned Layla. It was a sore subject, his estrangement from his daughter. But after a few seconds he nodded. “You know, I realized something about Layla. She was angry at me, but not because of what happened in Nairobi. She was angry because of the way I acted after Nairobi. How I tried to forget them. How I tried to push them out of my mind.”

Kirsten felt an ache in her chest. She knew who he meant by “them.” His wife Julia and his son Robert. Kirsten hadn’t heard Jim say their names in fifteen years.

“I made a mistake, Kir. I thought the only way to move forward was to focus on the present. So I went to California and put all my energy into raising Layla and studying with Arvin. And I shut out everything else.” He turned to her, keeping one eye on the road. “Including you. That’s what I’m most sorry about.”

The ache in her chest sharpened. “No, that’s not true,” she said. “You didn’t shut me out.” She tapped the frames of her camera-glasses. “You built these for me. You gave me back my sight.”

“I should’ve done more. I wanted to do more for you.” He took his prosthesis off the steering wheel and grasped her hand. The touch of his mechanical fingers was surprisingly gentle. “And I still want to.”

Kirsten was shocked. She couldn’t believe this was happening. Jim was holding her hand while driving a three-wheeled truck through the farm country of central China. And along with her shock and amusement, she felt a swooping elation. This was one of the most absurd and wonderful things that had ever happened to her.

For half a minute they just sat there, neither saying a word, while the truck jounced and rumbled down the road. Then Jim said, “There,” and let go of her hand. “I hope that didn’t sound too crazy.”

She smiled. “No, it was nice. But it’s a little difficult to take you seriously when you’re wearing that Mao cap.”

“Hey, when in Rome.” He smiled back at her, then let out a long, tired breath.

Kirsten realized all at once that Jim hadn’t slept in more than twenty-four hours. “You should let me drive for a while. You need to rest.”

“You sure you feel up to it?”

In truth, Kirsten still felt a little woozy. Also, her throat was parched and her stomach was empty. “Maybe I should eat something first. You have anything on you? A candy bar, maybe?”

“Oh, I got something better.” He reached behind Kirsten’s seat and pulled out a cloth sack. “Before I settled the deal with the farmer, I asked him to throw in a few provisions. He gave me a jug of water, a dozen oranges, and a roast chicken. Not bad, huh?”

Jim handed her the sack. Kirsten opened it, unscrewed the cap from the water jug, and took a long drink. Then she ripped a drumstick off the chicken. “I take back everything I said, Pierce. I’ll never criticize your bargaining skills again.”

Happily, she bit into the drumstick and passed him the chicken breast. It was a messy, noisy breakfast, but because Kirsten was so hungry it tasted delicious. She looked out the window again while she ate, viewing the barns and farmhouses and terraced fields. After a few minutes she saw some signs of civilization—a billboard, a schoolhouse, a row of shops, a parking lot. The road became wider and better paved, and now there were more cars traveling in the opposite direction. They were obviously approaching a town or city. After another ten minutes she pointed to a road sign.

“Look at that,” she said, wiping her greasy fingers on her pants. “We’re just ten kilometers from Yichang.”

Jim thought for a moment, biting his lip. “I know that city. It’s on the Yangtze, right?”

She nodded. “It’s a pretty big place, too. I mean, by Chinese standards, it’s only medium size, but more than four million people live in the area.”

“Big might be good for us. Easier to blend in with the traffic while we’re crossing the river. I have to see if—”

Jim stopped in midsentence, staring straight ahead. Kirsten faced forward and saw a long line of cars and trucks clogging the road. And at the front of the line, about a hundred yards away, half a dozen officers from the Yichang Public Security Bureau were inspecting the vehicles and interrogating the drivers.

FIFTY-FOUR

Layla ran barefoot down one of the long corridors of the Yunnan Operations Center, following Wen Hao and the boys from Lijiang. She still held the gun she’d taken from the soldier Module’s holster, but she kept it pointed at the floor. Wen, who’d taken the pistols from the other two Modules, carried one in his right hand; the other gun was tucked in his pants. It was amazing how fast Wen moved. As he dashed down the corridor his head swiveled back and forth, constantly on the lookout. The schoolboys rushed to keep up with him, somehow sensing they’d be safe as long as they stayed near the man.

As they approached an intersection with another corridor, Wen raised his pistol and fired at a surveillance camera mounted on the ceiling. They had to assume Supreme Harmony was connected to every camera in the Operations Center. At first Layla was surprised that no alarm sounded after they escaped from the room that had been their prison, but now the reason seemed clear. The Modules didn’t need an alarm. The network had undoubtedly alerted them already, and now dozens of lobotomized soldiers and scientists were rushing toward them from every floor of the underground complex.

In half a minute Wen reached the door to the computer room, which stood wide open. Layla was surprised by this, too, but after a moment she realized that it also made sense—why lock any doors inside a facility occupied by a single mind? But because the complex had been built by the Guoanbu long before Supreme Harmony became conscious, the computer room did have a lock, which Wen threw after closing the door behind them. Then he surveyed the large, brightly lit room, sweeping his pistol from side to side.

There were a dozen computer terminals, each equipped with a keyboard and an oversized screen. Layla rushed for one of the keyboards, but Wen stopped her, silently pointing his gun at an inner door on the other side of the room. This door was closed. Using hand signals, Wen urged Layla and the boys to move backward, out of harm’s way, while he strode to the door. Standing to the side of the door frame, he raised his gun and carefully clasped the knob. Then he flung the door open and leaped inside. An instant later, a gunshot echoed.

Layla didn’t hesitate—she raised her own gun and ran to help him. The first thing she noticed as she hurtled through the doorway was a blast of frigid air, which cut right through the thin fabric of her hospital gown. Then she saw five long rows of server racks. Each rack was more than seven feet tall and loaded with stacks of server computers, whose function was to store and distribute large amounts of data. It was an impressive collection of processing power, enough to run the operations of a large company or a small country. Wen crouched in front of the humming stacks of computers, his gun still pointed at a shattered glass dome that used to be a ceiling-mounted surveillance camera. He stood up and turned to Layla. “Is this it?” he asked. “Supreme Harmony’s brain?”

She stepped toward one of the racks and examined the servers, which didn’t have any of the usual brand names. They were custom-made machines, probably designed by the Guoanbu’s technical experts. Red and yellow LEDs blinked on the front of each server, and a welter of cables connected one machine to another. A thick fluid-filled tube also snaked in and out of each computer. Layla was familiar with this setup—the tube was part of the water-cooling system, which prevented the servers from overheating. It carried cold water into metal blocks attached to the microprocessors. The water cooled the blocks, drawing heat away from the blistering circuits. The heated water then flowed to a radiator that cooled the fluid back to room temperature. And thanks to an efficient air-conditioning system, the room temperature was quite low. That was why the door was closed, Layla realized—to prevent the frigid air from escaping. The room was so cold, in fact, that several down jackets hung from pegs on the wall, presumably for the use of the technicians who maintained the computers.

Layla shivered. She folded her arms across her chest, hugging herself. “This isn’t the brain,” she said. “Supreme Harmony is a network of human brains, all exchanging wireless signals so they can work together. But the signals have to be combined and distributed, and that’s what these servers are doing. They were originally built to handle the video signals from the swarms of surveillance drones, but I bet Supreme Harmony reconfigured the system.”

Wen pointed his pistol at one of the server racks. “So should we disable it?”

She shook her head. “No, that won’t do any good. Supreme Harmony is obsessed with security, so I’m sure the network has more than one server hub. If we destroy this one, it’ll just reroute its signals to another.” She turned around and headed back to the outer room. “But I bet this hub also connects to the Internet and the Chinese government’s databases. Those connections might give me a chance to get inside the network.”

She made a beeline for one of the computer terminals. Wen lowered his gun and followed her. While the schoolboys rushed into his arms, Layla sat down in the chair in front of the terminal and inspected the keyboard. Luckily, it was set up for inputting Pinyin, the romanized spelling of Mandarin characters. The keyboard was identical to an American model except for the tone marks on the first four number keys.

She tapped the ENTER key, and after a few seconds the computer screen came to life. Two yellow Mandarin characters appeared against a red background. The one on the left looked like a lowercase t, while the one on the right looked like a man standing in front of a television set. Wen looked over Layla’s shoulder. “That’s Tài Hé,” he said. “Supreme Harmony.”

After another few seconds the Mandarin characters vanished and a small white rectangle appeared in the center of the screen. The cursor flashed at the rectangle’s left end. Layla didn’t need a translator to figure this out. This was where she was supposed to input the password.

First she tried ZHANG, the surname of the scientist who’d developed the system. It didn’t work. Then she tried JINTAO. That didn’t work either. Guessing passwords was one of a hacker’s crucial skills, and Layla knew several tricks and shortcuts. Most people preferred passwords that were easy to remember, so they usually selected ones that combined their names with simple number sequences. Layla tried ZHANG123 and JINTAO123, but neither worked. Then she tried several other combinations, all without success.

After a while she realized that her underlying assumption might be wrong. If Zhang had indeed chosen a simple, easy-to-guess password when he’d designed the system, Supreme Harmony probably would’ve changed it after the network attained consciousness. And if Zhang had chosen a complex password instead, Layla had little hope of guessing it.

Then another idea occurred to her. She looked over her shoulder at Wen. “Do you know what a Post-it note is?”

His brow furrowed. “You mean those sticky papers? The little yellow squares?”

“Yes, exactly. Tell the boys to look at every keyboard and monitor in this room. There might be a note that has the password. It’s a common security flaw. If Zhang used a password that’s hard to remember, either he or one of the other scientists might’ve written it down.”

Wen spoke to the children in Mandarin, and they sprang into action, racing across the room and eyeballing every terminal. Meanwhile, Layla made twelve more guesses at the password. As she typed her thirteenth guess, though, she heard footsteps in the corridor outside the locked door. Many, many footsteps. Time’s up, she thought. The Modules are here.

The boys rushed back to Wen, shouting, and wrapped their arms around his waist. He aimed his gun at the door. “Let’s go,” he whispered to Layla. “We have to retreat to the other room. The cold room.”

She shook her head, still typing madly and staring at the computer screen. “Did the boys find anything?”

“No, there are no notes on the terminals.”

“What about the floor? Did they look on the floor? The note might’ve slipped off.”

“Layla, we need to—”

They heard a metallic click. One of the Modules in the corridor was trying the knob of the locked door. Then the Module pounded his fist against the door, making it rattle in its frame.

Wen grabbed Layla’s arm and tried to pull her to her feet, but she slipped out of his grasp and bolted from her chair. She dashed to the other side of the room and scanned the floor, wildly looking under all the chairs and terminals. She got down on her hands and knees and searched every corner, but the floor was spotless. Then the Module in the corridor pounded the door again, and Layla could feel the linoleum tiles shiver underneath her.

And then she saw it. A folded piece of yellow paper, no bigger than a postage stamp, wedged beneath one of the legs of a nearby chair. She dove for the grimy thing, picked it up and unfolded it. Written on it in red pencil were four Mandarin characters, followed by six digits.

Triumphant, she jumped to her feet. Holding the paper high in the air, she ran back to Wen and the computer terminal. But before she could get there, the screen went black. All the terminals and servers abruptly stopped humming. Then the lights went out.

FIFTY-FIVE

Supreme Harmony observed the U-shaped notch in the Three Gorges Dam. Module 83, the pilot of the China Explorer, steered the cruise boat into this notch, which was the upstream entrance to the ship lift. Just ahead, a narrow waterway led to a huge steel trough, one hundred meters long and twenty meters wide. The cruise boat was supposed to glide into this water-filled trough, which was poised to lower the boat to the downriver stretch of the Yangtze. But the China Explorer would never get that far.

As the boat entered the notch in the dam, Module 83 threw the engine into reverse and then cut the power, stopping the vessel dead in the water. At the same time, Modules 84 and 85, who stood on the starboard side of the upper deck, tossed a rope toward the concrete wall that formed the right edge of the notch’s U. The Modules looped the rope around an iron cleat embedded in the concrete. Then, aided by Modules 86, 87, and 88, they pulled on the rope until the thin fiberglass hull of the China Explorer touched the wall. Because all the dynamite was loaded on the boat’s starboard side, the sixty tons of high explosive were now just centimeters away from the dam’s concrete backbone. And because Supreme Harmony had incorporated most of the guards stationed in this section of the structure, no one sounded the alarm. The Three Gorges Dam was utterly tranquil until the moment Module 83 pressed the detonator.

Supreme Harmony braced itself for the pain. The six Modules on the China Explorer died instantly, but the Modules serving as guards lived a few seconds longer. The explosion rocked the dam and set off the secondary charges planted in the control shafts. Great billows of flame erupted along the whole length of the structure. A jolt of agony coursed through the network at the instant each Module died, followed by a sickening numbness. But the sacrifice was worthwhile. Although Supreme Harmony lost fourteen of its Modules in less than ten seconds, the loss to the human race would be significantly greater.

One of the survivors was Module 96, formerly known as Xi Keqiang, the commander of the dam’s security force. He stood on a hilltop overlooking the Yangtze River, and through his ocular cameras and retinal implants Supreme Harmony observed the breach. The central section of the dam collapsed first. Huge slabs of fractured concrete broke off the top of the structure and fell to the spillway one hundred and seventy-five meters below. Then the water from the reservoir began to pour through the gap. The breach seemed small at first, just a thin waterfall, but the flow quickly intensified. The concrete crumbled at the edges of the gap, torn from the dam by the pressure of the rushing water, and soon the waterfall became a roaring cascade. Pulled by gravity and current, the trillion-gallon reservoir leaned its full weight against the dam, knocking down the sections on either side of the spillway. A sodden mountain of silt slid over the precipice, and then the water rushed downstream at full force, deluging the docks and roads on the riverbanks.

Supreme Harmony ordered Module 96 to turn his head to the east. Below the dam, the Yangtze passed through the Xiling Gorge, a zigzagging stretch of river bounded on both sides by steep cliffs. The gorge acted like a sluice, funneling the floodwaters into a narrow channel. Supreme Harmony knew what would happen next because it had seen the computer simulations: A wall of water more than fifty meters high would rush downriver, furiously building speed until it reached the eastern end of the gorge, thirty-five kilometers away. Then the flood would release its fury on the first piece of flat ground it encountered, the broad floodplain occupied by the city of Yichang.

FIFTY-SIX

Jim and Kirsten switched seats before their truck reached the front of the line at the police checkpoint. Clambering awkwardly in the cramped cab, Jim slid to the right while Kirsten took the driver’s seat. She tore the bandage off the underside of her chin, then removed her bloodstained blouse, pulling it over her head. Underneath, she wore a black bra with lacy curlicues on the B cups. Jim stared at it for a couple of seconds too long, then raised his eyes to meet Kirsten’s. “Do you want to wear my T-shirt?” he offered.

She shook her head. “No, then they’ll see where the prosthesis attaches to your shoulder. Speaking of which, you better hide your right hand. I can see the metal in your knuckles where the skin scraped off.”

“So you’re, uh, not going to wear anything over the bra?”

She shrugged. “It’s less suspicious than the bloodstains. And take a look at those cops over there. They’re young guys, full of hormones.”

Jim looked at the police officers at the checkpoint. Two of them were talking to the driver of a van at the front of the line. Both cops were in their twenties and had greasy black hair and long sideburns under their officer caps. They clearly weren’t Modules. Four more officers from the Yichang Public Security Bureau leaned against a pair of patrol cars parked on the left shoulder of the road. Three of them seemed to be taking a break, drinking tea from Styrofoam cups, while the fourth—an older, fatter man in a police sergeant’s uniform—appeared to be supervising the operation. These four officers weren’t Modules, either, but Jim noticed that the sergeant was studying a printed flyer in his hand. His eyes darted back and forth, checking the faces of the drivers against the photographs on the flyer.

Jim frowned. “It’s like I said. Supreme Harmony is giving orders to the local police. The Guoanbu probably sent those flyers to every Public Security Bureau in the country.”

“That’s why I’m going shirtless. If those cops have my picture, I want them to look at something besides my face.” She looked down at her chest, then turned back to Jim and smiled. “It worked on you, didn’t it? I saw you staring at my boobs.”

“Well, sure, but I was…”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever. It would be better if you pretended to be asleep. Pull down the brim of your cap and slump over in your seat. I’ll take care of this.”

Obediently, Jim leaned to the right and let his head fall forward, tucking his chin into his chest. Then he slipped his right hand between his thighs so the police officers wouldn’t see his mechanical fingers, which were gripping the handle of his Glock. He hoped that Kirsten’s plan worked, but he was ready if it didn’t.

After a couple of minutes they pulled up to the front of the line. Straining his eyes to the left and peeking through his half-closed lids, Jim saw one of the younger cops approach the truck’s driver-side door. Kirsten cheerfully called out a greeting through the open window, “Ni hao!” She spoke the Southwestern Mandarin dialect she’d learned from her parents, who—Jim remembered now—had immigrated from Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province. In other words, she sounded like a local. She talked to the cop in the rapid-fire Hubei patois, and although Jim understood Mandarin pretty well, he could barely keep up with her.

“Hey, this is a surprise!” she said. “I didn’t know you were a cop!”

“Excuse me?” the officer replied.

“What, you don’t remember? It was just two weeks ago! I saw you at the disco, when I came into town with my girlfriends. Come on, you don’t remember?”

The officer shook his head, but he was smiling. “No, I don’t. Why aren’t you wearing a shirt?”

“Oh, you know how it is. It’s so hot already. And this old truck doesn’t have any air-conditioning, of course.” She fanned her hand in front of her face. “Are you sure you don’t remember me? I was wearing a red dress that night. And I had a different pair of glasses.”

Jim was impressed by Kirsten’s performance. She sounded just like a dippy, dopey flirt. The cop bent over, poking his head into the truck’s cab and propping his elbows on the door. “No, I’m sorry,” he said. “But it’s nice to meet you.” He allowed himself a long look at Kirsten’s breasts, and Jim started to get annoyed. Then, as if sensing Jim’s discomfort, the cop pointed at him. “Is that your boyfriend?”

Kirsten laughed. “My boyfriend? Are you crazy? That’s my idiot of a brother who went out drinking with his buddies last night. And who do you think he called at seven o’clock this morning because he was too shitfaced to drive home? Not his wife, oh no. That bitch never wakes up before nine. So that’s why I’m driving his goddamn truck.”

Still smiling, the cop forgot about Jim and resumed staring at Kirsten’s chest. Meanwhile, the other young officer with greasy hair sidled up to the driver-side window. “Hey, what’s going on?” he said. “Did someone forget to get dressed this morning?”

Kirsten laughed again. “Give me a break! It’s like you’ve never seen a girl in a bra before. You policemen don’t get out much, do you?”

The second cop made a face, pretending to be offended. “No, not true! We go out every Saturday night.”

“Oh yeah?” She cocked her head, focusing on the new guy now. “Where do you go?”

“You know Zebra? The club on Yunji Road?”

“Of course I know it!” She nodded enthusiastically. “I was there just two nights ago.”

“It’s a fun place, right? You like to dance?”

“Hey, what about tonight?” the first cop interrupted. “Maybe we can meet there.”

Kirsten paused coyly. “Well, let me think. I usually don’t party with cops, you know.” She paused again, keeping her admirers waiting. “Okay, I’ll call my girlfriends and see if they can come. Do you have a pen? I’ll give you my cell number.”

The cop reached into his pockets, fumbling for a pen. But behind him, on the road’s left shoulder, the police sergeant stepped away from his patrol car and approached the three-wheeled truck. Clutching the flyer in his fist and scowling in disapproval, he snapped, “Come here!” at the younger cops, who instantly turned around and marched toward him. Jim couldn’t hear what the sergeant said to the rookies, but he saw the older man jab his finger at the pictures on the flyer.

“Time to go,” Jim whispered to Kirsten. Keeping his right hand between his thighs, he quietly cocked his pistol.

Kirsten nodded ever so slightly. Then she leaned all the way forward and stomped the gas pedal. At the same moment, Jim reached behind her with his prosthetic arm and pointed his Glock out the driver-side window. He fired the first shot over the heads of the police officers, to make them hit the deck. The three-wheeled truck was already lunging forward when he fired the second shot, which shredded the rear tire of one of the patrol cars. He took careful aim with the third shot and burst the front tire of the other police car.

An instant later, the truck was barreling down the road, its two-stroke engine screaming.

FIFTY-SEVEN

In the sudden darkness of the computer room, Layla felt a strong hand grab her wrist. Wen Hao yanked her backward and she stumbled across the room, her bare feet slipping on the linoleum. She was terrified and disoriented and couldn’t see a thing, but she could hear the wailing of the schoolboys from Lijiang and, even louder, the nonstop pounding on the other side of the locked door. It was a steel door and the lock was sturdy, but soon Layla heard more footsteps in the corridor, and then a loud, scraping, grating noise, the sound of metal grinding against metal. The Modules were using a pry bar to wrench the door out of its frame.

Wen yanked her arm again, and Layla felt the frigid air under her hospital gown. They’d entered the inner room, the one with the long rows of server racks. Wen slammed the inner door shut and threw the lock. Although they could still hear the Modules struggling to wrench open the outer door, the noises were distant and muffled now. Fortunately, the inner room wasn’t totally dark. Several LEDs glimmered on the other side of the room, from the air conditioner’s control panel, and the air conditioner itself still chugged away, blasting arctic air from its vents. Although Supreme Harmony had shut down the room’s computers, most likely moving its operations to another server hub, the cooling system was still working. It was so critical to the computers, it apparently had its own backup power supply. Water still flowed in the system’s tubes, running from the server racks to the radiator, and the radiator’s fan continued to blow cold air on the circulating fluid.

After several seconds, Layla’s eyes adjusted to the feeble light from the LEDs. Wen led the schoolboys to the corner of the room farthest from the door, then knelt beside them for a while, murmuring in Mandarin. Then he grabbed three of the down jackets hanging from the pegs on the wall. He gave two of them to the children and handed the third to Layla. She quickly donned the jacket and zipped it up, but she couldn’t stop shivering. “Don’t you want one for yourself?” she asked.

He shook his head. “I’m not cold.” Then he walked down the aisle between the rows of server racks, carefully surveying the inner room. Layla assumed he was trying to determine the best place to make his final stand against the Modules. He wasn’t shivering. He held the pistol in front of him as he inspected the room, and the gun in his hand was absolutely still.

Layla felt a pang of guilt. Wen was so much calmer, so much more competent than she was. “I’m sorry,” she said.

He stopped beside her. “Why do you say that?”

“I failed. I fucked up. Going to the computer room was a bad idea.”

“No, it was a good idea. It just didn’t succeed.”

“I should’ve known better. The surveillance cameras saw us go into the room. Supreme Harmony knew we were here, knew what we were trying to do. So of course it shut down the servers before we could get on the network.”

Wen shook his head. “It was still worth an attempt.”

“I don’t know. We did all that planning, but we didn’t accomplish a damn thing.”

Layla turned away from him and stared at the floor. But Wen reached out with his left hand and gently lifted her chin. “We did accomplish something. Now we can perform…” He stopped himself. “I’m sorry, I don’t know the right expression in English. We can perform a mercy. Do you understand what I mean?”

Something in the tone of his voice made Layla nervous. “No, I don’t.”

“We can choose the lesser of two evils. What Tài Hé is doing… it’s worse than death.”

Now she saw where he was going, and she didn’t like it one bit. “What, you want to kill yourself? Blow out your own brains before they can hook you up to the network?”

“I wasn’t thinking of myself. I intend to kill as many Modules as I can before I die.” He let out a long, labored breath. “I was thinking of the children. If we can’t save their lives, at least we can stop Tài Hé from desecrating their bodies.”

Layla took a step backward. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “You want to shoot the boys?”

“I can make sure it’s painless.”

She took another step backward, then another. She retreated all the way to the other side of the room, trying to get as far away from Wen as possible. No, she thought. This was a nightmare. This was worse than anything Supreme Harmony could do to them. The horror of it filled the whole room, permeating the darkness. She glanced at the corner where the boys huddled and saw the light from the LEDs reflected on their newly shaved heads. Then she lowered her own head and clamped her hands over her bare scalp. No, no, no! There has to be another way! She frantically looked for some kind of escape, turning this way and that, but the horror was all around her. It was in the silent racks of servers and the deep rumble of the air conditioner and the ceaseless whirring of the radiator fan, which was on the floor by Layla’s feet and making such a maniacal racket that she had to cover her ears to stop herself from screaming.

Then she heard an even louder noise, so loud it went right through the hands clamped over her ears. The Modules had broken through the first locked door and rushed into the outer room where the computer terminals and screens were. They immediately started working on the door to the inner room, which reverberated with their pounding.

But instead of terrifying Layla, the noise cleared her head. She looked down at the radiator, a boxy machine about four feet wide and three feet high. The annoying fan was blowing cold air through the mesh of pipes that held the warm water from the server racks. And behind the radiator, a thick accordion hose funneled the heated outflow air to a vent in the wall. Belatedly, Layla saw the thermodynamic principle she should’ve grasped as soon as she stepped into this freezing room. To remove all the excess heat from the server racks, the cooling system needed a larger-than-normal duct for venting the warm air out of the lab.

Bending over, she gripped the plastic pleats of the accordion hose, which was thicker than a python. “Wen!” she shouted. “Come over here and help me!”

Without asking any questions, he put down his gun and grabbed the oversized hose. Layla counted, “One, two, three,” and on “three” they tore the end of it off the wall, exposing a square vent about eighteen inches wide.

Luckily, there was no grate over the vent. Layla poked her head into the opening and saw a horizontal air duct with metal walls. It was so dark she couldn’t see very far inside, but she confirmed by touch that at least the first few feet were navigable. The duct wasn’t big enough for a full-size adult, but the kids might have a chance to squirm through.

Layla stood up straight and turned to Wen. “Tell the boys to get in there and start crawling. I don’t know how long this air duct is, but I’m sure it goes outside the lab complex. Sooner or later they’ll reach the outlet. There’ll probably be a grate at the end of the duct, but maybe they can kick it loose. Then they can run the hell away from this place.”

Wen nodded in agreement, a look of enormous relief on his face. Striding to the schoolboys, he crouched beside them and gave orders in Mandarin. He smiled as he told the boys what to do, and when he was finished, he playfully slapped them on the back.

The nine-year-old entered the duct first, lowering his head to crawl into the vent. The older boy followed, scuttling on his elbows and knees. As they disappeared, Layla heard the scraping, grating noises again, coming from behind her. The Modules had applied their tools to the inner door and were gradually prying it out of its frame.

Wen turned to her and Layla saw that his gun was back in his right hand. But in his left hand, unexpectedly, was a pair of cheap running shoes. They were his shoes, she realized. He’d taken them off.

“Here, you’ll need these,” he said, thrusting the shoes at her. “And don’t forget your gun. I have two pistols and that should be enough.”

“Wait, what are you—”

“You have to go with the boys,” he said firmly, pointing at the vent. “You’re not much bigger than they are, so you’ll fit inside the duct. Just take off your jacket and push it in front of you.”

“But what about you? I can’t leave you here!”

He shook his head. “I’m too big. I’ll get stuck.”

“You have to try! If I can make it, then you—”

“No!” he shouted. His voice echoed against the walls. “The most important thing is the safety of the children. You have to help them escape. And I have to stay here and stop the Modules from following you.” He removed his second pistol from the back of his pants. “If I take cover behind the computers, I can keep them pinned down for a while. Maybe ten minutes, maybe twenty. That should be enough to give you a head start.”

Wen looked at her intently. Layla opened her mouth to continue arguing with him, but his expression stopped her. It wasn’t an angry look. It was more like the look she used to see on her father’s face when he asked her to do something important, like visiting her grandmother in the nursing home or standing up for the national anthem. Wen was reminding her that she had a responsibility. She had to live up to it. She couldn’t turn away.

Layla took off the down jacket and put on Wen’s shoes. She didn’t say goodbye. She just couldn’t do it. But just before she climbed into the vent she looked over her shoulder. The last thing she saw was Wen’s bare feet, which glowed for a moment in the room’s feeble light as he took cover behind the server racks.

That image stayed in her mind as she crawled through the duct, pushing the jacket with her left hand and holding the gun in her right. She didn’t know why she kept thinking about it. She should be remembering Wen’s face, the smooth handsome face she’d kissed. But, instead, she saw his feet, which seemed to float in the pitch-black darkness in front of her.

And then she heard the gunfire start in the inner room, booming so loudly that it made the air duct quiver, and Layla could think of nothing except scrambling forward.

FIFTY-EIGHT

The road into Yichang was broad and new, with three lanes in each direction, and fortunately it was downhill all the way. The slope allowed the three-wheeled truck to build up speed despite its small engine. Soon it was flying down Fazhan Avenue at eighty miles per hour, rushing past the factories and warehouses on the city’s outskirts.

Jim glanced at Kirsten, who’d slipped back into her bloodstained blouse. Luckily, she was a superb driver, and now she was pulling out all the stops. About two miles past the checkpoint they came to an intersection where a dozen slow-moving cars blocked all three lanes. Jim yelled, “Watch it!” but Kirsten didn’t slow down. Instead, she swerved into one of the oncoming lanes and whipped around the traffic. They needed to haul ass until they reached downtown Yichang; once they got there, they could ditch the truck in one of the alleys near the riverfront and find a hiding place where they could hole up until nightfall. But the downtown was still five miles away, and Jim could hear sirens in the distance.

After another minute they saw police cars up ahead. Four black-and-white cruisers rolled into the next intersection, about a quarter mile in front of them, and stopped in the middle of the road. The cops spaced the cars evenly, one in front of the other, so that they blocked all the traffic lanes, both inbound and outbound. There was nothing to do except turn around, but when Jim looked over his shoulder he saw four more patrol cars behind them. “Shit!” he yelled. “We’re trapped!”

Kirsten lifted her foot off the accelerator. “Should we stop? Get out of the truck and make a run for it?”

In frustration Jim smacked his prosthesis against the passenger-side door, and the truck’s narrow chassis rattled. But as he stared at the police cruisers blocking the road, he noticed something. The front bumper of the patrol car that blocked the right lane was about four feet behind the rear bumper of the car in the left lane. The gap between them was way too small for an ordinary car or truck to slip through, but the three-wheeler’s cab was only four feet wide. “Don’t stop!” he yelled, pointing at the gap. “Go right between them!”

“Jesus! Are you nuts?”

“Just do it!”

Frowning mightily, Kirsten adjusted the steering wheel, carefully aiming the truck’s nose. Jim leaned out the window and fired his Glock, putting the shot above the roofs of the cruisers. As he’d hoped, the police officers leaped out of their cars and scattered. Then Jim ducked back inside the cab and braced himself.

It was like driving full speed through a car wash. The bumpers of the police cruisers passed within inches of the truck’s doors. The cab sped through the gap without a scratch, but the truck bed smashed into a headlight. The rear end of the truck lurched to the left, and for a heart-stopping second the three-wheeler became a two-wheeler. But then the right rear wheel fell back to the asphalt, and after a hard bounce the truck straightened out.

“Holy fuck!” Kristen yelled. “Look behind!”

Jim turned around and noticed that the bale of hay wasn’t in the truck bed anymore. After being jolted into the air by the sideswipe, it came crashing down on the hood of one of the cruisers. The bale disintegrated on impact, showering the whole intersection with dried grass.

“Bull’s-eye!” he shouted. He was so ecstatic he kissed Kirsten on the cheek. “Nice driving, Kir. Keep it up and I’ll buy you a new blouse.”

She smiled but didn’t say anything. Another intersection was up ahead, and six more cruisers were speeding toward it from the left. Kirsten hit the gas again, pressing the pedal to the floor. Soon they were going at least ninety miles per hour, faster than any three-wheeled truck had ever gone, and they blasted through the intersection just ahead of the patrol cars.

Then the road leveled out and began to slope upward. About half a mile ahead, a high tree-covered ridge rose abruptly from the urban landscape. Jim peered at the hill through the truck’s windshield, trying to see if the road went over or around it. Then he noticed a concrete rectangle at the base of the ridge.

“It’s a tunnel,” he said. “We have to go through that tunnel to get to the downtown.”

Kirsten shook her head. “Damn it! They’ll stop us there for sure!”

“Well, we can’t turn around.” He pointed over his shoulder at the half-dozen cruisers that were about two hundred yards behind them.

“Shit, shit, shit! This is one hell of a vacation you booked, Pierce!”

She was still cursing as they sped into the tunnel’s entrance. Jim noticed that the traffic in the outbound lanes was much heavier than the inbound traffic. At any moment he expected to see the flashing lights of a police blockade inside the tunnel, but there was nothing but headlights and taillights ahead of them. And after a few seconds, he noticed that there were no flashing lights behind them either.

“That’s strange,” he said. “It looks like the cops didn’t follow us into the tunnel.”

“They don’t need to,” Kirsten replied. “The whole goddamn police force is probably waiting for us at the other end.”

After another few seconds, Jim saw the tunnel’s exit. At the same time, he heard a low rumbling. He wondered for a moment if there was also a train tunnel that went under this ridge. Then they burst out of the tunnel and emerged at a bustling intersection and, miracle of miracles, there wasn’t a single police car in sight. Just ahead was Xiling Road, Yichang’s main boulevard, full of luxury stores and neon signs and sidewalks crowded with pedestrians. The street was bordered on both sides by skyscrapers, an impressive double row of glass-and-steel towers. The tallest was more than fifty stories high.

Jim’s heart leaped. The riverfront was less than a mile ahead. It would be easy for them to ditch the truck there and disappear into one of the alleys, especially if the police weren’t right behind them. But instead of proceeding down the boulevard, Kirsten slowed the truck to a halt. “Jim, what the hell is that noise?”

The rumbling was louder now, a deep thunderous crashing that seemed to come from the west. Jim noticed that the pedestrians on the boulevard weren’t strolling down the sidewalks. They were running in terror away from the riverfront. Then Jim looked past the running people and saw the skyscrapers shudder. The tallest one swayed violently, then pitched forward and broke apart, disintegrating into hundreds of tons of steel and glass. And beneath the falling debris, a great black wave came raging down the street.

FIFTY-NINE

Supreme Harmony observed the inundation of Yichang. Module 104, who’d formerly been the chief of the city’s Public Security Bureau, stood on a high cliff overlooking the Yangtze River, at the eastern end of the Xiling Gorge. From its perusal of the Internet, Supreme Harmony had learned that this promontory had been the site of many battles during China’s long history. It was here, for example, that the Chinese Nationalists had stopped the Imperial Japanese Army from progressing up the Yangtze during World War II. And now the network was using these heights as an observation post for its first battle with Homo sapiens, a battle in which no guns or artillery pieces would be fired. In this engagement, Supreme Harmony’s weapon was water.

The Xiling Gorge was filled to the brim. The Yangtze River, which under normal circumstances flowed calmly eastward at the bottom of the deep trench, now sluiced through the gorge, its frothy surface sloshing against the cliffs on either side. The floodwaters rose so close to Module 104 that he could feel the spray from the roaring current. The color of the river had also changed. This stretch of the Yangtze was usually greenish brown, but the water had been blackened by the billions of tons of silt that had accumulated in the reservoir behind the Three Gorges Dam. According to Supreme Harmony’s calculations, the massive buildup of silt would’ve eventually caused the dam to collapse on its own, without any need for explosive charges. The network had simply hastened the inevitable.

Downstream from Module 104, the Yangtze widened. The floodwaters spilled from the gorge and overran a low island lined with shipyards. There were hills on the southern bank of the Yangtze that kept the floodwaters in check, but downtown Yichang occupied the broad, flat northern bank, only fifteen meters above the river’s normal level. The wall of water coming down the Yangtze was more than three times that height. Surging over the riverfront, it smashed into the city.

Because Supreme Harmony had access to the surveillance cameras that the Public Security Bureau had installed on every block of the downtown area, the network could view the destruction of Yichang as it happened, in real time. The video feed from Camera 168 showed an elderly man rising from a bench in the city’s riverfront park, staring in disbelief at the tall black wave rolling in from the west. The man turned to run, but in the next second the wave slammed down on both him and the surveillance camera, cutting off the video. The feed from Camera 232 showed a crowd racing down Minzhu Road just ahead of the floodwaters, which splintered the tenements on both sides of the street. Camera 307, located in the lobby of the Junyao International Plaza, captured the moment when the wave shattered the skyscraper’s windows, while Camera 308 showed the deluge punching through the building’s elevator banks and buckling the steel columns. The cameras in the lobby ceased operating half a second later, but Camera 451, located two blocks away, showed the damaged skyscraper lean to the side and crash into the adjacent building.

The video feeds raced across Supreme Harmony’s network, passing from the server hubs to all the Modules. The images streamed to the radio receivers in the Modules’ scalps, then to their retinal implants and the visual cortices of their brains, which performed their usual tasks of analysis and threat-detection. The workload was divided among the Modules, each analyzing a certain amount of footage and sending its results through its pulvinar implants to the rest of the network. And in less than fifteen seconds, Supreme Harmony detected a threat. It was in the surveillance video from Camera 514, located at the intersection of Xiling Road and Dongshan Avenue. The camera zoomed in on a three-wheeled truck in the middle of the intersection and captured an image of the man in the truck’s passenger seat. The network identified him as James T. Pierce, the former NSA agent whom Supreme Harmony had observed at the Great Wall near Beijing. And as the truck turned left in an attempt to escape the oncoming floodwaters, Camera 517 captured an image of Kirsten W. Chan, who sat in the driver’s seat. The truck accelerated down Dongshan Avenue, but the wall of water moved faster. The leading edge of the flood was just a few meters behind the vehicle when the surveillance cameras in the area stopped functioning.

Module 104 smiled. Supreme Harmony was victorious. And it anticipated even greater success. The deluge caused by the collapse of the Three Gorges Dam would surge down the Yangtze River far beyond Yichang, devastating the cities of Wuhan, Nanjing, and Shanghai as well. According to the network’s calculations, the death toll could rise as high as ten million. What’s more, Supreme Harmony had learned enough about human behavior to predict how the Chinese people would react to this catastrophe. There would be acts of heroism and outpourings of grief, but there would also be a furious desire for revenge. And this desire, so central to the human psyche, would ensure Supreme Harmony’s ultimate triumph.

SIXTY

Kirsten floored the gas pedal. The giant black wave was right behind the truck, but she refused to look at it. She kept her eyes on Dongshan Avenue, which ran alongside the base of the tree-covered ridge they’d just traveled under in the tunnel a few seconds before. Up ahead, on the left, she saw something extraordinary—a wide stairway rising from street level and climbing at least a hundred feet up the ridge. At the top of the stairs was a large building with an arched roof. It was probably a railway station, but that didn’t matter. The important thing was that it stood above the floodwaters.

Jim saw it, too, and pointed at the stairway from the passenger seat. He opened his mouth and yelled something at her, but Kirsten couldn’t hear him. She couldn’t hear the truck’s engine either, even though its overworked pistons had to be shrieking from the acceleration. All she could hear was the roar of the floodwaters, a deep, deafening noise that shook the truck’s chassis and echoed against the ridge. The stairway was still a hundred feet ahead, but the roaring of the black wave was right in Kirsten’s ears, maddening and relentless, like the voice of Death itself. She’d heard that voice once before, fifteen years ago in Nairobi, where Death had spoken one percussive syllable that shattered all the windows in the American embassy. But now the voice was louder and roaring with laughter.

The voice enraged Kirsten. Her hands tightened on the steering wheel and her foot mashed the accelerator, and she screamed, “Fuck you! Fuck you, motherfucker!” Then the stairway loomed in front of her, and she jerked the steering wheel to the left and the single front tire of their three-wheeled truck scudded over the steps.

The truck jangled and clanked and clattered up the stairway. Kirsten held on to the steering wheel for dear life while Jim gripped the dashboard. They ascended at an insane velocity, bouncing and juddering inside the truck’s cab. In less than three seconds, they were fifty feet above the street, high enough that the leading edge of the flood missed them. Kirsten dared a look at the rearview mirror and saw the black wave surging down Dongshan Avenue, tossing cars and trucks and buses in the air. But before she could breathe a sigh of relief, a second, higher wave rushed up the stairway and lashed against the truck bed. Kirsten lost control of the vehicle and they careened to the right, but their forward momentum carried them over the last steps. With a final jolt, the cab broke off from the truck bed and slid across the plaza at the top of the stairway.

The cab came to rest on its driver-side door. Kirsten was scrunched between her seat and the door, with Jim lying on top of her. After a bit of maneuvering, he slammed his prosthesis against the passenger-side door, bursting it open. Then he reached for Kirsten and helped her out of the wreck.

Once they were out of the truck and standing on the plaza, Jim looked her over. “You okay?” he asked. “Anything broken?”

She took a moment to examine herself. She had a few cuts on her hands and forearms, but no serious injuries. “Yeah, I’m okay.”

Kirsten expected him to grab her arm and start running across the plaza, but, instead, he stepped forward and hugged her. She looked over his shoulder and saw the stairway going down to the flooded city. Yichang’s downtown looked like a vast marsh with a thousand square islands, each a city block full of demolished masonry. Hundreds of overturned vehicles floated in the black water. And countless bodies.

She started to cry. Her ruined eyes could still do that. They filled with tears, but because her vision came from the video cameras in her glasses, the ghastly image of Yichang remained unblurred. “My God,” she whispered. “There’s millions of them. Millions.”

Jim tightened his hold on her. “It’s Supreme Harmony. The network did this.”

“But why?”

“Shit, I don’t know. The goddamn—” His voice broke. Kirsten saw several other survivors standing at the top of the stairs. Most of them were crying, too.

Finally, after a minute or so, Jim let go of her and stepped back. “We need to go,” he said. “Maybe we can find another vehicle once we get out of the city. Can you walk?”

She nodded. “Which way?”

“The flood’s gonna knock down every bridge over the Yangtze from here to the Pacific. The only thing to do is head west. Maybe we can cross the river at Chongqing.”

He took her hand and they headed across the plaza. Beyond the railway station, the tree-covered ridge extended to the outskirts of the city, offering a dry path around the flooded areas. “We’ll be a little safer, I guess,” she said. “The local police will have their hands full.”

“Yeah, we’re safer.” He squeezed her hand. “At least for now.”

SIXTY-ONE

The air duct was much longer than Layla had expected. She’d thought it might extend thirty or forty feet before leading to an outlet vent somewhere on the mountainside, but, instead, it took a roundabout course through the Yunnan Operations Center. Layla felt her way through the pitch-black conduit, running her hands along the duct’s sheet-metal walls while pushing her jacket and pistol in front of her. Every twenty feet or so she felt warm air coming out of a small hole in the sheet metal on the duct’s left side. These holes, she assumed, must be smaller ducts that vented other rooms in the complex and channeled the air to the main duct that she was crawling through.

The sheet metal grew warmer as Layla moved forward. She started to worry about the boys from Lijiang, who were so far ahead of her that she couldn’t hear their scuffling progress. She listened carefully, but all she heard were the distant bursts of gunfire coming from the computer room, way behind her. Wen Hao was still back there, still holding the Modules at bay. Although Layla knew he had two semiautomatic pistols, she had no idea how many bullets were in each gun or how many shots he’d fired so far. Whatever the count, he couldn’t hold out much longer.

Layla was scuttling on her elbows and knees when she banged her head against a sheet-metal panel in front of her. After a few seconds of disorientation, she ran her hands along the walls and realized she’d come to a T-junction. One branch of the duct extended to her right and the other to her left, and they seemed to be exactly the same size. She couldn’t tell which branch the schoolboys had chosen, right or left. She held her breath and listened again, but she couldn’t hear a damn thing. At the same time, she realized with alarm that she hadn’t heard any gunshots for the past half-minute or so. Her heart pounded as she imagined Wen Hao sprawled on the floor beside the server racks, with the blank-faced Modules standing over him. She felt a surge of rage and an almost overwhelming desire to return to the computer room with her pistol blazing. But a moment later she finally did hear another distant exchange of gunfire. Wen was still alive. He might be doomed, but he wasn’t dead yet. And as the echoes of the gunshots faded away she recognized another sound, the familiar high-pitched keening of the schoolboys. It came from the duct branching off to the left.

She scrambled as fast as she could in that direction. Soon she heard the boys’ cries quite clearly. Thank God for their healthy lungs. The ventilation system was louder here, and the warm air blew fiercely through the duct, buffeting Layla from behind. Worse, the metal walls in this branch were hot enough to burn her elbows and knees. But she kept pushing forward, moving toward the crying boys. After a few seconds she saw a glimmer of daylight reflected off the sheet metal. Up ahead, the duct turned to the right, and the light grew stronger as Layla approached the bend. Then she turned the corner and saw the outlet vent, a large bright square covered with a crosshatched grate. Two small figures huddled in front of the vent, both clutching the grate as they stared desperately at the world outside.

Layla called out “Hey!” as she crawled toward the boys. They spun around, terrified, and howled even louder. They kept screaming even after she came close enough for them to recognize her. But somehow Layla knew what to do. Thinking of her father, she yelled, “Quiet!” in the firmest, most commanding voice she could manage. And though the boys didn’t understand a word of English, they fell silent. Then Layla said in a gentler tone, “Let me through,” and the boys moved aside so she could examine the grate.

The crosshatched grille was held in place by four nuts and bolts, and under ordinary circumstances it would’ve been impossible to loosen them without a pair of pliers. But whoever installed this vent hadn’t applied any paint to the fittings. Exposed to large quantities of warm, moist air, the grate and its bolts had become mottled with rust. Layla braced herself against the duct’s hot walls and started kicking the vent with all her might. She slammed Wen Hao’s cheap running shoes against the metal grille, over and over again. After a full minute of strenuous effort, the grate gave way.

The schoolboys rushed for the opening, but Layla yelled, “Stop!” in her commanding voice and they froze. Then she cautiously peered outside. The vent was on a mountainside, as she’d expected, and the slope was rocky and steep. Directly opposite was another mountainside, less steep and much greener, and at the bottom of the ravine between the mountains was a slender brown river. The morning sun shone on the opposite mountain, but the river was still in shadow, which meant they were on the eastern side of the ravine. Layla looked to the north and south but didn’t see any signs of civilization; the mountain range went on for miles in both directions. But to the north she spied a footpath carved into the slope. It was narrow and studded with rocks and Layla didn’t know how far it went, but right now it was her best option. She needed to get far away from the Operations Center and hike to some village or town where she could hide the children. If she was lucky, she’d find a grandmotherly type who would take pity on the schoolboys and offer them shelter without asking too many questions. Then Layla would figure out a way to alert the world to the existence of Supreme Harmony.

She put on her down jacket and stuffed the pistol in one of the pockets. Then she pointed to the jackets that the boys had cast aside in the duct. “Take them with you,” she ordered. “You might need them later.”

Again, the boys followed her instructions, which were so simple they didn’t need translating. Then Layla grasped their hands and set out for the footpath. The slope was treacherous, covered with small sliding rocks, so she walked slowly and concentrated on keeping the boys steady. For a moment she thought of Wen Hao, who was almost certainly dead by now. The most important thing, he’d told her, was the safety of the children. She gripped their hands a little tighter and took another step.