Extinction

SIXTY-TWO

Supreme Harmony observed a conference room in the building called Huairentang—“The Palace Steeped in Compassion.” This was the highest seat of power in the People’s Republic, the equivalent of America’s White House or Russia’s Kremlin. Located in a walled compound just west of Beijing’s Forbidden City, Huairentang was the home of the Politburo Standing Committee, the nine elderly men who’d risen to the top of the Communist Party hierarchy. They sat at a long mahogany table covered with porcelain tea sets. Also attending the meeting was Module 73—formerly Deng Guoming, the minister of State Security—who sat at the foot of the table. He wasn’t a member of the Standing Committee, but he’d been invited to this emergency meeting to discuss the collapse of the Three Gorges Dam.

It was late, well past midnight, more than sixteen hours after the dam gave way. The committee members, usually so crisp and confident in their identical black suits, seemed tense and haggard. Supreme Harmony ordered Module 73 to adopt the same attitude, which was enhanced by the thick bandages wrapped around his head. The Module had told the Standing Committee that he’d had a minor accident while coordinating his ministry’s investigation at the site of the ruptured dam. In reality, the Module had never left Beijing and wore the bandages to conceal the fresh stitches in his shaved scalp. But his fabricated story had evidently impressed the committee members, who kept glancing at his head.

The network directed Module 73 to focus on the general secretary, the most powerful man in the room, who sat at the head of the table. Seventy years old, he had a square, serious face and a full head of thick hair, dyed black. By all accounts, he was a competent statesman with above-average intelligence and a cautious nature, but his term as China’s paramount leader was nearing its end. He was in the process of handing over his leadership positions to the vice president, a sixty-year-old man who wasn’t as intelligent or careful. Because the government was in transition, several other committee members had already switched their allegiances to the vice president, but Supreme Harmony didn’t know the details of the shifting alliances. The inner workings of the Standing Committee weren’t described in any document stored on the government’s servers, so the network had to rely instead on its observations of the committee members and its general knowledge of human behavior. Fortunately, this knowledge had increased exponentially over the past few days.

The meeting started with a report from Zhu Qiang, the committee member who oversaw all of China’s law-enforcement agencies. Because Zhu was Module 73’s superior in the hierarchy, Supreme Harmony paid special attention to the man. In a somber voice he told the committee about the devastation in the Yangtze floodplain, lowering his head as he delivered the bleak reports from the cities of Yichang, Wuhan, and Nanjing.

“And we just received the first bulletins from Shanghai,” Zhu intoned. “Our security forces had time to organize an evacuation before the floodwaters hit the city, but the highways couldn’t handle so much traffic. Many citizens were still on the low-lying roads when the flood struck. Despite the valiant efforts of our Shanghai officials, the number of deaths in that city will also be significant.”

The general secretary shifted in his chair. Supreme Harmony recorded his expression of discomfort. At the moment, the chances of incorporating him into the network were low—the paramount leader was constantly surrounded by aides and bodyguards—but it might become possible at some point.

“What do you mean by ‘significant’?” the general secretary asked. “Do you have any specific estimates for Shanghai?”

Zhu shook his head. “I’m very sorry. Our men have been so busy, they haven’t had time to prepare casualty estimates. But I believe we must brace ourselves for the worst. In Shanghai alone, the flood may have killed as many as a million people.”

Several of the committee members let out murmurs of distress. The vice president, a portly man with fleshy jowls, leaned forward and banged his fist on the table, making the porcelain teacups rattle. He’d spent most of his career in the People’s Liberation Army, and his manners were more boisterous than those of his comrades. “How could this happen?” he shouted. “How could we allow this tragedy to occur?”

Supreme Harmony was surprised. It was unusual for a Chinese leader to make such an outburst in this setting. What’s more, the vice president’s question was a direct affront to the general secretary, who’d been involved in the planning of the Three Gorges Dam earlier in his career. The network expected the other committee members to show their disapproval of this rash remark, but, instead, several of them nodded in agreement. The shock of the catastrophe had obviously altered their behavior.

After several seconds, Zhu Qiang found the courage to speak again. “We’re trying to answer that question, Mr. Vice President. And though we’re still in the earliest stages of our investigation, our agents have already found some crucial evidence. That’s why I invited the minister of State Security to this meeting. I wanted you to hear about this evidence firsthand from Minister Deng, who has just returned from the site of the dam breach. As you can see, he’s put his own safety at risk to pursue the investigation.” Zhu turned to Module 73. “Minister, would you please address the committee?”

Supreme Harmony put an appropriately sober expression on the Module’s face. The network had a challenging task to perform, but it was confident of success.

“Thank you for inviting me,” the Module started. “As most of you know, I’m a man who doesn’t mince words. Once I’m certain that something is true, I’m not afraid to say it. And now I’m certain about what caused the collapse of the Three Gorges Dam. Once you see the evidence, I’m sure you’ll come to the same conclusion.” The Module paused for dramatic effect. This was something Minister Deng often did, and Supreme Harmony was trying to reproduce his behavior as closely as possible. “The Three Gorges Dam was sabotaged. A group of terrorists infiltrated the dam’s security forces and planted explosives at critical points in the structure.”

The conference room fell silent. No one on the Standing Committee said a word. But Supreme Harmony observed the signs of alarm and confusion. The general secretary furrowed his brow. The vice president gritted his teeth, making his jaw muscles quiver.

Module 73 reached into his briefcase and pulled out a stack of nine computer disks, each held in a transparent jewel case. He rested the stack on the mahogany table and held up one of the disks for everyone to see. “This contains the video taken by the Guoanbu’s surveillance cameras near the dam. The video shows a Yangtze River cruise boat, the China Explorer, move from the reservoir toward the dam’s ship lift. As the boat comes to the notch within the dam, the crew members fasten a line to the concrete wall. Then the boat explodes.” The Module paused again. “The video then shows six more explosions in the dam’s control shafts. In less than two seconds, the central part of the dam buckles. Ten seconds later, the whole structure collapses.”

The committee members remained silent, but Supreme Harmony sensed their agitation. The vice president’s eyes darted from left to right, most likely surveying the reactions of his allies. Module 73 distributed the computer disks, passing them around the table. “This video alone is convincing evidence of sabotage,” he continued. “But my agents have collected much more. The Guoanbu’s listening posts have intercepted communications, both inside China and overseas, from individuals who had advance knowledge of the terrorist plot. And we’ve detained several officers in the dam’s security force who aided the terrorists. That’s why I flew to the disaster site this afternoon, to personally supervise the interrogation of these traitors. The videos of their confessions are included on the disks I’ve given you.”

Each member of the Standing Committee now held one of the jewel cases. The general secretary stared intently at the disk inside, as if he was trying to read its contents from the glints of light on its surface. The vice president, in contrast, slammed his jewel case on the table and glared at Module 73. “So who are they?” he demanded. “Who did this to us?”

The Module returned his stare. Incorporating the vice president into the network would be nearly as difficult as incorporating the general secretary, but Supreme Harmony recognized that such a step wasn’t strictly necessary. The network could make this man do its bidding without lobotomizing him. “The terrorists aboard the China Explorer were Muslim separatists from Xinjiang Province. They had close connections to the Uighur Muslims who instigated the riots in Xinjiang three years ago.”

“I knew it!” The vice president turned to his fellow committee members. “Didn’t I warn you about those filthy snakes? Didn’t I say we needed to crush them without mercy?”

His allies on the committee murmured their assent. This explanation for the catastrophe confirmed their expectations, which was why Supreme Harmony had chosen this particular lie. Human beings, the network had observed, were more willing to believe something if it dovetailed with their other beliefs.

The general secretary, however, continued to study the disk in his hands. The other members of the Standing Committee patiently waited for his response. After several seconds, he finally put down the jewel case. “I was afraid of this. For a long time I’ve worried that the Uighurs would adopt the heinous tactics of the Muslim terrorists in other parts of Central Asia.” He shook his head. “But organizing this kind of operation? Commandeering a cruise boat and loading it with explosives and enlisting the help of officers in the dam’s security force? This is a very complex undertaking.” He turned to Module 73. “How were they able to do it? What did you learn from the men you interrogated?”

The Module nodded. “Your instincts are correct, Mr. Secretary. The Uighurs received assistance from other parties. The terrorists fled Xinjiang after the riots there and went to Pakistan, where they trained with the jihadist militias. But their overriding goal was to attack China, so they eventually made their way to Taiwan. They found shelter with a radical student group that violently opposes the People’s Republic. This group provided the Uighurs with money and false passports, enabling them to return to our country and launch their operation.”

“What about the explosives?” the general secretary asked. “Where did the terrorists obtain them?”

The Module suppressed a smile. The next lie would be Supreme Harmony’s masterstroke. “I’m afraid this is the most disturbing of all our discoveries. The Uighurs acquired the dynamite from the smugglers who work the border between Yunnan Province and Burma. As you know, the northernmost part of Burma is controlled by rebel militias that smuggle opium into our country. And this chaotic region has long served as a base for CIA agents who provide arms to the local warlords and foment trouble on our southern border.” Module 73 paused once more, his longest pause yet. “According to the men we interrogated, the CIA arranged the sale of the dynamite to the Uighurs. The American intelligence agency was actively involved in the plot.”

The reactions of the Standing Committee were just as extreme as Supreme Harmony had expected. Several committee members reared back in their chairs, as if struck by a strong wind. The vice president clenched his hands. “Are you sure about this?” he asked. “Absolutely sure?”

“I’ve received a report from Yang Feng, the Guoanbu’s chief agent in Washington. He has confirmed the CIA’s involvement. I included Yang’s report on the computer disk.”

Glowering, the vice president opened his mouth to say something else, but at the last second he remembered his place and turned to the general secretary. The other committee members were already looking at their paramount leader, waiting for his guidance. The general secretary, meanwhile, sat motionless at the head of the table, his arms folded across his chest.

“I don’t understand,” he finally said. “Why would the Americans take such a risk? Did they think we wouldn’t discover their treachery? Did they imagine we wouldn’t respond in kind?”

No one answered at first. It was possible, Supreme Harmony thought, that the general secretary didn’t expect an answer. But after several seconds the vice president leaned across the table, propping himself on his meaty fists. “The Americans are cowards,” he said. “No different from the jihadis they’ve been fighting all these years. Killing innocents is nothing new for them.”

The general secretary shook his head. “I know they’re capable of doing this. What I don’t understand is the reasoning behind it.”

“They’re afraid of us,” the vice president replied. “The Americans see how strong China is, how fast we’re growing. They know our economy will soon be bigger than theirs. And they see the power of our military, all the submarines and jets and aircraft carriers we’re building.” He raised his hands and gestured expansively to indicate the might of the People’s Liberation Army. “The American forces have more advanced technologies, but the gap is shrinking as we modernize our weapons. So the warmongers in Washington decided to strike now, before we grow too strong. They tried to cripple us by attacking while our backs were turned!”

The eyes of the committee members, which had been fixed on the vice president as he argued his point, swung back to the general secretary. The older man frowned. “But it’s such a foolish thing to do. So blunt and ineffective. When the world sees the evidence that Minister Deng has collected, all the civilized nations will be horrified. Every country will shun America and come to our aid, doing everything they can to help us recover. In a few years China will be stronger than ever. This seems perfectly obvious to me. So why didn’t the Americans see it?”

Supreme Harmony was growing concerned. The general secretary was a canny human. His caution was cooling the committee’s ardor. The network recognized that it had to intervene, so it directed Module 73 to raise his hand. “Mr. Secretary, may I offer an observation? The CIA has a long history of conducting operations that turned out, in the end, to hurt the long-term interests of the United States. It’s possible that the CIA agents in northern Burma didn’t know exactly what the Uighur terrorists were planning to do with the explosives. And it’s quite likely that the CIA’s leaders in Washington weren’t keeping close tabs on their operatives in Burma.”

These remarks appeared to make an impression on the general secretary. He tilted his head back, deep in thought. “So what are you saying? That this catastrophe was a mistake?”

“No, not a mistake. The Americans are to blame. But it was more likely the result of recklessness rather than a carefully thought-out plan.”

The general secretary narrowed his eyes. “And how should we respond to this recklessness?” His voice rose, becoming heated. “Should we forgive the Americans because their intelligence agents are renegades?”

“Not at all.” The Module shook his head firmly. “On the contrary, I believe we must order a swift and devastating retaliation against the United States. They’ve meddled in our internal affairs for far too long, and now we have the opportunity to ensure that they never do so again. Given the horrible losses we’ve suffered at their hands today, our actions will be completely justified.”

The vice president half-rose from his chair. “Yes, exactly! We should act as quickly as possible. The People’s Liberation Army is already on alert because of the crisis. They can strike the American forces near our territorial waters and deliver a crushing blow to their puppet army in Taiwan. We’ll teach them a lesson they’ll never forget!” He slammed his fist on the table with such force that half of the teacups toppled. “I recommend that we call a meeting of the Central Military Commission. I can summon the senior officers here within the hour.”

Module 73 raised his hand again. “I’d like to attend that meeting, Mr. Vice President. The Guoanbu has collected information on potential targets in Taiwan and the East China Sea.”

The vice president swiveled his head toward the general secretary. “Would that be all right with you, sir? Minister Deng’s input could be useful.”

For a moment it seemed that the older man would say no. He looked ruefully at the vice president, as if noticing for the first time how simpleminded the man was, how unprepared for the complexities of leadership. But then he let out a long sigh and nodded, and Supreme Harmony realized that it had won another battle.

“We have no choice,” the general secretary said. “Millions of our countrymen have died today. We must take action.”

SIXTY-THREE

At nine o’clock the next morning Jim saw a familiar shape on the horizon. About twenty miles to the west stood a row of snowcapped peaks, each a white triangle against the deep blue sky, lined up so neatly they resembled the scales on a dragon’s back.

Trying to get a better view, he leaned forward in the passenger seat of the battered sedan that he and Kirsten had acquired yesterday. Jim had seen these peaks before but not with his own eyes. It was Arvin Conway who’d viewed this mountain range and stored the visual memory in his flash drive. Jim reached for his satellite phone, which was connected to Arvin’s device, and displayed the image of Yulong Xueshan on the phone’s screen. His throat tightened as he stared at the serrated edge of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain. His daughter was somewhere in the belly of the dragon.

Kirsten had been driving for the past four hours. She and Jim had taken turns at the wheel since yesterday afternoon. They’d purchased the sedan from a gas station owner on the outskirts of Yichang, telling him they’d lost their old car in the flood and needed a new one so they could search for their missing relatives. Although the man was sympathetic, he still demanded eight thousand American dollars for the vehicle, a ten-year-old Chinese model roughly similar to a Honda Civic. In the end, though, it turned out to be a good deal. They made excellent time as they drove across central China to the highlands of Yunnan Province. Now they were on a dirt road winding through wooded terrain that reminded Jim of the foothills bordering the Colorado Rockies. If the circumstances were different, he thought, he would’ve enjoyed hiking across these hills.

Jim raised the satellite phone for a moment to compare the image on the screen with the mountains he saw through the windshield. Then he closed the file and retrieved another, a file holding nothing but a chunk of binary code. The phone’s screen displayed a sequence of zeroes and ones, 128 of them in all: 00111010100110111010011000100110111000101010000101110011010011100101010111010010111001011001000111010100110110011001100110111100.

The chunk wasn’t especially big. It took up less than a quarter of the space on the phone’s screen. And yet this 128-bit sequence was the most important piece of data in the world right now. This was the shutdown code that could disable Supreme Harmony.

Jim had discovered the code just an hour ago. Arvin had said it was hidden in the picture of Medusa, but when Jim converted the 300-kilobyte image to binary code—the language of all microprocessors—a stream of 2.5 million zeroes and ones ran across the sat phone’s screen. At first, Jim was flummoxed. Locating the shutdown code within this long stream of data seemed an impossible task. But then he remembered that robotics programmers such as Arvin often placed distinctive markers before and after the sections of code they wanted to highlight. And after a few minutes of thought, Jim realized what kind of marker Arvin would’ve used. In his mind’s eye he saw the yellowed sheet of paper taped to Arvin’s desk in his lab at Singularity, Inc. Printed on the paper was the forty-bit sequence of zeroes and ones that represented the old man’s first name. Jim had a gift for memorizing long numbers, and he’d seen this particular sequence every day of the ten years he’d worked in Arvin’s lab: 0100000101110010011101100110100101101110.

Jim typed the zeroes and ones into the satellite phone and searched for the forty-bit sequence in the stream of data from the Medusa image. As he expected, the marker appeared twice in the stream, and in between the markers was the 128-bit sequence. He knew right away this was the shutdown code. One hundred and twenty-eight bits was a standard length for certain kinds of data, including the encryption keys commonly used to encode and decipher classified communications. Jim grinned, allowing himself a moment of triumph. Then he spent the next hour memorizing the 128 zeroes and ones. It was more difficult, of course, than memorizing a forty-bit sequence, but he knew it cold by the time Yulong Xueshan came into view.

Now Jim stared at the sat phone’s screen one more time to double-check his memory. Then he turned to Kirsten, who was negotiating one of the many hairpin turns on the dirt road. “Okay,” he said. “I have a new plan.”

“It’s about time,” she replied. Her voice was low and tired.

Jim tapped his phone’s keyboard and retrieved another image from Arvin’s flash drive. Filed in the same category as Arvin’s memories of the Yunnan Operations Center, this image showed a tall transmission tower standing near the highest peak of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain. “That’s the target,” he said, holding up the screen for Kirsten to see. “You can also see it over there.” He pointed ahead, toward Yulong Xueshan, where the tower was a thin gray line among the peaks. “It’s several miles north of the Operations Center.”

Kirsten turned her head so that the video cameras in her glasses could focus on the western horizon. “Is that the radio tower for the Supreme Harmony network?”

Jim nodded. “It connects the servers and routers at the Operations Center with all the Modules and drones swarms deployed in the area. It’s also linked by fiber-optic lines to other transmission stations across the country. If I can broadcast the shutdown code from that tower, I think I can disrupt the whole network.”

“So you identified the code in the data stream?”

He nodded again. “And now I know how it works. Arvin’s memories include a circuit diagram of the microprocessor he built for the retinal implants, and the diagram shows the location of the Trojan horse. The altered circuit is in the section of the chip that carries the stream of visual data to the first set of logic gates. If the Trojan detects the shutdown code in the data, it shunts a high-voltage current to the transistors and short-circuits the chip.”

Kirsten thought for a moment. Then she gave Jim a skeptical look. “But how are you going to input the code to Supreme Harmony? Didn’t you say that the network has a firewall to block any unwanted transmissions?”

“I’m betting there’s a control station at the bottom of the radio tower. If I can log on to one of the computers at the station, then maybe I can slip the code past the network’s firewall and transmit it to all the Modules at once.”

“That’s a big ‘if,’ Jim. And if this tower is so critical to Supreme Harmony, wouldn’t the network put defenses around it? The whole area is probably full of surveillance cameras and Modules.”

“Don’t worry, I can handle them.” He held up his sat phone again and waved it in the air. “For one thing, I have the picture of Medusa. I can use it to knock out any Modules I run into. And if that doesn’t work, there’s always this.” He pointed at the Glock tucked into the waistband of his pants.

Kirsten looked unconvinced. She pressed her lips together. “You know, the Burmese border is just a few hours’ drive from here. And we still have some money left, almost four thousand dollars. That should be enough to make a deal with the local smugglers. After they help us cross the border, we can use our sat phones to call Washington. Even if Supreme Harmony detects the call, it can’t send the Chinese police into Burma to get us.”

Her tone was matter-of-fact, but Jim could hear the desperation in her voice. He felt a sudden rush of feeling for her, a tight, burning sensation in his chest. Her face was so serious. He wanted to wrap his arms around her, but, instead, he put an equally serious expression on his face. “You’re right,” he said. “We need to do that, too.”

Her mouth opened in surprise. “Wait a second. You’re willing to consider changing your plan?”

He took a deep breath. “No, not change it. I want to add to it. I want you to drive to the border while I hike up the mountain to the radio tower.”

Kirsten slammed on the brake, and the car skidded to a halt. Dirt from the unpaved road rose in a cloud all around them. She shifted the car into PARK and waited a few seconds, her hands gripping the steering wheel. She didn’t look at him. She faced forward, her gaze fixed on the horizon.

“This is so typical of you, Pierce,” she finally said. “You had this in mind all along, didn’t you?”

“It’s the logical thing to do. We only have one gun, so it’s better for me to go in alone. And while I’m going in, you can cross the border and call for backup.”

“You said before that calling for help was a bad idea. You said we couldn’t afford to wait.”

“This is different. The Burmese government doesn’t control the region near the border. It’s controlled by rebel groups, the militias of the local Kachin people, and those guys have been working with the CIA for decades. If you can find one of the agents and explain the urgency of the situation, he might be able to do something quick. Maybe organize a covert operation with one of the Kachin militias.”

She still wouldn’t look at him. Her face was blank, and Jim couldn’t tell what she was thinking. When she spoke again, her voice was barely audible. “I thought we were in this together.”

Jim’s chest tightened again. “We are, Kir. We’re working together. We just need to do different jobs now.”

“And your job is a suicide mission. Come on, admit it. That’s why you don’t want me to come with you.”

“No, that’s not right. It’s like I said, I need you to contact the—”

“Don’t do this. Please.” She turned to him and clutched his arm. His left arm, his flesh-and-blood arm. “Let’s both go to Burma. Getting yourself killed isn’t going to help Layla.”

Now it was Jim’s turn to face forward and look at the mountains on the horizon. He knew he couldn’t leave this place. He couldn’t drive past those mountains without searching for his daughter. It would be like ripping his heart right out of his chest. And Kirsten had to know this, too, he thought. If she knew him at all, after all these years, she had to know he couldn’t do such a thing. So he didn’t say a word. He just stared at the white peaks of Yulong Xueshan.

For almost a minute they sat there, silent and motionless, like two mannequins propped in the front of the sedan. Then Kirsten let go of Jim’s arm. She shifted the car out of PARK and stepped on the accelerator. “All right,” she said. “I’ll drive you to your funeral. Just tell me when you want to get out.”

She resumed driving down the dirt road, moving at the same speed as before, but now her eyes were wet behind her camera-glasses.

Jim took another deep breath. He forced himself to turn away from Kirsten, to dispel the image of her stricken face. He had things to do before he could start hiking toward the tower.

First he checked his Glock. The gun was in good shape, clean and well oiled, but there were only twelve bullets left in the clip and he had no extra magazines. He’d have to make every shot count. Next, he reached for his satellite phone and deleted all the files he’d copied from Arvin’s flash drive. Jim had already memorized all the useful facts, and during his years in the NSA he’d learned to avoid carrying sensitive information if he didn’t need it. After deleting the files he pressed a special button on the NSA phone that demagnetized its hard drive, removing all traces of the erased data. Then he did the same thing to the Dream-catcher, the disk that Arvin had cut out of his scalp just before he died at the Great Wall. Jim had already copied all the files on the disk to Arvin’s flash drive, which he intended to leave with Kirsten. If he was strictly following NSA procedures, he’d delete everything on the flash drive as well, but he decided to leave it alone. Arvin had begged him to protect the digital hoard of memories, and although Jim was furious at his old friend for unleashing this catastrophe, he was going to honor the man’s last request.

Then there was just one more task. Jim picked up Arvin’s flash drive and retrieved a file holding an unusually complex image. Labeled with the innocuous name CIRCUIT, the file showed the location of the Trojan horse amid the billions of circuits in the retinal implants’ microprocessor. This was the information Arvin had hoped to trade to Supreme Harmony in exchange for the use of one of the Modules. If the network acquired the file and discovered the Trojan’s location, it could adjust its programming to create a detour around the altered circuit. Then the shutdown code would have no effect on the chip and the network would no longer be vulnerable.

Jim had no desire to bargain with Supreme Harmony, but he sensed that this information might still be useful. The file contained fifty megabytes of data, so it was much too big to be memorized. Instead, he downloaded the file to his sat phone and encrypted the data, using an NSA cipher to turn the diagram into a nonsensical hash of ones and zeroes, unreadable to anyone who didn’t possess the encryption key. He transferred this encrypted file to the Dream-catcher disk, which he slipped into one of his socks. Then he deleted the original file from his sat phone and demagnetized its hard drive again. Finally, he downloaded the image of Medusa from Arvin’s flash drive to the phone.

By the time he was done, Kirsten had driven closer to Yulong Xueshan. The base of the highest mountain was less than five miles to the west. The dirt road curved south here, heading toward the city of Lijiang, but to the right Jim spotted a footpath zigzagging up the tree-covered slopes. Assuming the path was in good shape, he could reach the summit by nightfall.

“All right, stop here,” he said. “It looks like this is as close as the road gets.”

Kirsten slowed the car gently this time and parked on the side of the road. She turned to Jim, but her face was blank again. Her tears had dried and her mouth was firmly closed. She gave him an impersonal look, like a taxi driver impatient to get rid of her passenger.

He handed her the flash drive. “Keep this safe, okay? I already downloaded everything I need.”

She took the device, stared at it for a moment, then tossed it over her shoulder. It landed on the backseat.

Jim bit his lip. It was difficult to see Kirsten this way, so hurt and angry. He pointed at the road ahead. “Once you get to Lijiang, go west on Provincial Road S308. You should be able to cross into Burma near the town of Pianma.”

She frowned, apparently irritated by his directions. Jim saw this as a sign of progress. He leaned closer and looked directly at the camera lenses in her glasses. “Before I go, I want you to answer one question. In the twenty years you’ve known me, have I ever failed to do something that I set my mind on doing?”

Her frown deepened. “No, you haven’t. You’re the most stubborn son of a bitch I’ve ever met.”

“That’s right, I’m stubborn. And now there’s two things this stubborn S.O.B. is going to do.” He raised his prosthetic hand and pointed its index finger straight up. “One, I’m going to find my daughter. I’m going to bring Layla home and lock her in her room and take away all her goddamn computers.” His voice was loud, booming inside the car. He lowered it as he uncurled his middle finger. “And two, as soon as we get back to the States, I’m going to take you out to dinner. I know a great French restaurant in Georgetown. We’ll order champagne, the whole works. What do you say?”

She still frowned, but there was a slight change in her expression. She blinked rapidly behind her glasses, as if there was a bit of dirt in her eye. “You’re making a big assumption, Pierce. How do you know I’ll want to have anything to do with you after this?”

He lowered his prosthesis and folded his arms across his chest. “I’ll turn on the charm. I’ll recite love poems. Whatever it takes.”

The frown stayed on her face for another three seconds. Then, without a word, she lunged toward him, practically jumping into the passenger seat. Jim unfolded his arms and wrapped them around her. She buried her face in his chest and started to sob. Her whole body trembled.

“Promise,” she murmured against his shirt. “Promise you’ll come back.”

“I promise. With all my heart.”

SIXTY-FOUR

The cave that Layla found on their first night in the mountains was cold and dank, but she and the boys were so exhausted they slept on its stone floor until noon the next day. Layla woke up first, shivering. Because she wore nothing under her down coat except the thin hospital gown, her legs were freezing. She found a place to pee at the back of the cave, then spent a few minutes watching the children sleep. They lay on their sides, snuggled against each other for warmth. Their snores echoed against the rocky walls.

She’d learned their names the day before during their long walk along the mountain trail. The older boy was Wu Dan, and the younger one was Li Tung. When she tried to teach the boys her name, they both said “Lei-lei” instead of Layla, but that was close enough. She also learned three important Mandarin expressions: wŏ kě le (I’m thirsty), wŏ lèi le (I’m tired), and wŏ è le (I’m hungry). Her response to the first complaint was straightforward—she led the boys to one of the rivulets streaming down from the glacier on the mountaintop—and she solved the second problem when she found the cave. But addressing the third complaint was more difficult. The mountainside was almost bereft of life. Nothing grew on its steep slopes except moss and yellow grass and small purple flowers. Layla thought of the hikes she used to take with her father and tried to remember what he’d told her about edible plants, but it was hopeless. She’d been too busy playing in the woods to pay attention to him. And the plants on this mountain didn’t look familiar anyway.

After a while she turned away from the children and stepped out of the cave. The sun was directly overhead, lighting both sides of the ravine and the brown river at the bottom. She stared longingly at the lush fields on the other side of the river. The slope was much gentler on the western side, and it was covered with trees and farms and grazing cattle. If there was a trail that went down to the river, she and the boys could possibly swim across and find refuge in one of the farm villages, but so far the trail had followed a level path, about halfway between the river below and the peaks of the mountain range. Layla estimated they’d walked about seven miles yesterday, and they might have to walk another seven miles before they reached the northern end of the ravine. With a shiver, she wondered if the boys could make it.

And then she saw the raven. It was big and black, at least two feet long, perched on the mountainside about five yards to her right. It had been staring at Layla the whole time, probably waiting for her to drop a piece of food. Pretending not to see the bird, she bent over to scratch her ankle, and at the same time she scanned the ground for a suitable rock. When she found one, she palmed it in her right hand and stood up straight.

She was still facing west, but out of the corner of her eye she judged the distance to the raven’s perch. The bird probably weighed close to four pounds. It would make a good meal for two hungry children. Although Layla had never played baseball or softball, she knew she could throw a rock with speed and accuracy. It was a fundamental human skill, unique to the species. No other animal could coordinate the hand and eye with such precision, making the dozens of small adjustments needed to hurl a projectile at its target. It was such a complex maneuver that only an intelligent being could execute it. In fact, human intelligence might have arisen simply to perfect this crucial ability, which had been so essential to survival for so many millions of years.

Slowly, languidly, Layla pulled back her right arm. Okay, she told herself, it’s time to show the world how intelligent you are. Prove that you’re smarter than that bird.

Her arm whipped forward and the rock whizzed through the air. Startled, the raven flapped its wings, but the rock hit it square in the chest, knocking it sideways. Layla scooped up a larger rock and slammed it down on the raven’s head, putting the bird out of its misery.

She whispered, “I’m sorry,” as she picked up the ugly carcass. Then she started to collect dry grass for making a fire.

After finishing their lunch, Layla and the boys hiked for three hours, going five miles farther north on the mountain trail. But they were still nowhere near the northern end of the ravine. If anything, the snowcapped peaks seemed even higher in this part of the range. On top of the highest summit Layla saw a tall radio tower, with a prefab trailer at its base.

During the first two hours of their march, the boys had been energized by their meal of roasted raven—which hadn’t tasted so bad, actually—but now they were lagging. Layla tried to encourage them to walk faster by singing various songs she thought they might recognize. She was in the middle of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” when they came around a bend in the trail and saw a broad shelf of rock jutting from the mountainside. The shelf was covered with a thin layer of soil, and rooted in the dirt were half a dozen dead trees. Standing below the farthest tree, about a hundred yards away, were the first two people Layla had seen since she escaped from the Operations Center. She grabbed the boys and ducked behind a boulder.

Jesus, she thought, what an idiot I’ve been, singing those stupid songs! Now everyone within earshot knew there was an English speaker on this mountain. But when she peered around the edge of the boulder, she saw the two figures still standing under the dead tree, apparently oblivious. They were a man and a woman, both elderly and dressed in rags. The man was stripping bark off the trunk and passing the pieces to the woman, who stuffed them into a cloth sack. Squinting, Layla caught a glimpse of their faces, which were gaunt and wrinkled. Their hearing was probably bad, she thought, which explained why they hadn’t noticed the singing. What’s more, they definitely weren’t Modules. Supreme Harmony wouldn’t incorporate such old people.

Layla made a decision. She grasped the boys’ hands and looked at them intently. “Wu Dan, Li Tung, I need you to do something. I want you to go to those two people.” To make herself clear, she pointed at the boys and then at the old couple. “Talk to them, okay? Tell them you’re hungry, you’re tired, wŏ è le, wŏ lèi le. They seem like nice old folks, so they’ll probably help you. But don’t tell them your names or where you live, all right? Because if you do, they might send you back to Tài Hé.” Frowning, she pointed south, toward the Operations Center. She could tell from the frightened looks on the boys’ faces that they understood this last sentence at least.

Staying behind the boulder, Layla pushed the boys forward. She assumed it would be less confusing for the old folks if she remained hidden. Wu Dan and Li Tung walked hesitantly down the trail at first, but after a few seconds they broke into a run and yelled “Wŏ è le! Wŏ lèi le!” as loudly as they could. The man and woman stopped stripping bark off the tree and stared at the frantic children, who made for an unusual sight with their shaved heads and school uniforms. But instead of greeting the boys and asking them what’s wrong, the old couple started shouting angrily and sweeping their arms in furious “Go away!” gestures. The boys stopped in their tracks, bewildered. Layla was also puzzled—what was wrong with these people? The old man picked up a stick and waved it at the children, while his wife hefted the sack of bark and retreated northward, following the trail around another bend in the mountainside.

As Layla watched the old woman disappear around the bend and the old man slowly back away from the schoolboys, the explanation became clear to her. The elderly couple wasn’t supposed to be there. They were trespassing on government property to collect firewood, and they were terrified that someone would report them. Still, the encounter wasn’t a total loss. Now Layla knew they weren’t far from a village. If she and the boys just followed the trail a few miles farther north, they were bound to come across some friendlier people.

And while she was entertaining this optimistic thought, she saw the old woman again, running back to her husband. The woman dropped the sack of bark and screamed in Mandarin. Behind her, a small gray cloud came into view, gliding around the bend in the trail. The old woman looked over her shoulder and fell to the ground, and a thick tendril from the gray cloud descended upon her. The rest of the swarm charged forward, rushing toward the old man and the schoolboys.

SIXTY-FIVE

Supreme Harmony observed the beginning of the war.

The first shot was fired from the Xichang Launch Center in Sichuan Province. An SC-19 rocket roared into space and released its payload, a guided missile that streaked above the atmosphere at 30,000 kilometers per hour. Supreme Harmony was linked to the Chinese orbital-tracking systems, so it was able to watch the missile rise to an altitude of 700 kilometers and approach the American reconnaissance satellite. Designated Lacrosse 5, the satellite was passing over the East China Sea, in position to provide radar coverage for the swath of ocean around the U.S. Seventh Fleet. At exactly 4:32 P.M. China standard time, the guided missile slammed into Lacrosse 5, instantly turning the orbital radar station into fifteen tons of high-speed debris.

At the same time, an army of hackers organized by the Chinese government launched a series of cyberattacks against the American telecommunications grid. Supreme Harmony sensed an enormous surge of data streaming from thousands of computers across China and flowing through the fiber-optic lines under the Pacific Ocean. The attacks focused on the U.S. Defense Department networks that carried command-and-control communications. The data surge clogged the network hubs, disrupting the links between the Pentagon and its overseas forces. Supreme Harmony knew all too well what happened to a network when its communications were disrupted. Without guidance from their headquarters and reconnaissance of their surroundings, the Seventh Fleet’s aircraft-carrier strike force became exquisitely vulnerable.

The next attack came from the coastal province of Zhejiang. One hundred and three mobile rocket launchers had been positioned close to the seashore, each carrying a Dongfeng 21 medium-range ballistic missile. The first barrage of missiles was launched at 4:33 P.M. Supreme Harmony observed their trajectories by accessing the data stream from Yaogan 9, the Chinese radar satellite that was now the only surveillance station over the East China Sea. The satellite also revealed the location of the Seventh Fleet’s strike force, which was six hundred kilometers east of the Zhejiang seacoast. The U.S.S. George Washington, a nuclear-powered Nimitz-class carrier loaded with nearly a hundred Super Hornet fighter-bomber jets, cruised at the center of the flotilla, surrounded by two Ticonderoga-class cruisers and six Arleigh Burke–class destroyers.

Within five minutes, the Dongfeng missiles hurtled above the atmosphere, arcing through space at the highest points of their trajectories. By this time, the Aegis combat systems aboard the American cruisers and destroyers had detected the incoming barrage and launched dozens of SM-3 interceptor rockets designed to smash into the ballistic missiles in midflight. Viewing the radar images from the Yaogan 9 satellite, Supreme Harmony observed the American interceptors home in on the Chinese missiles and obliterate a substantial fraction of them. But more than half of the Dongfengs made it through the Aegis defense shield, and their maneuverable reentry vehicles plunged back into the atmosphere above the carrier strike force. Each reentry vehicle carried a warhead with half a ton of chemical explosives. Guided by the satellite radar data, a dozen warheads punched through the George Washington’s flight deck and exploded deep inside the aircraft carrier. The other missiles converged on the cruisers and destroyers in the flotilla.

Cheers erupted inside the People’s Liberation Army command center in the Western Hills section of Beijing. Module 73, formerly Minister Deng of the Guoanbu, stood beside the vice president and a dozen PLA generals, who shouted triumphantly as they watched the progress of the battle on their radar screens. The vice president seemed particularly joyful. The portly leader swaggered across the room, shaking hands with every general. When he finally returned to Module 73, Supreme Harmony observed that the man’s body temperature was abnormally elevated. The vice president hadn’t slept in thirty-six hours. His forehead glistened with sweat.

“What a victory!” he yelled. “We’ve sunk the George Washington, the Shiloh, and two of their destroyers! And soon we’ll reload the mobile launchers and throw another round of Dongfengs at them!” He clapped a heavy hand on the Module’s shoulder. “Those arrogant Americans! Can you believe that they’d send their fleet so close to our coastline after what their CIA just did to us?”

The Module nodded. The timing of the fleet’s maneuvers had been quite fortunate. “They never suspected we could hurt them so badly. This will be a harsh lesson for them.”

“And it’s not over yet! As soon as we destroy the rest of their warships, we’ll begin the invasion of Taiwan. Our missiles have already devastated the island’s airfields and naval bases. And the Taiwanese can’t expect any help from the Americans now that we’ve annihilated the Seventh Fleet.” He let go of the Module’s shoulder and pointed at the radar screens. “It’ll take weeks for another American carrier group to get here. By then our ground troops will be in full control of the island.”

Module 73 had to suppress a smile. The vice president was blind to his own arrogance. But this kind of thinking, Supreme Harmony recognized, was simply the logic of war. Every victorious combatant assumed his victories would go on forever. “Thanks to your leadership, something good will come out of this catastrophe. China will finally be reunified.”

“And the Americans will think twice before interfering with our sovereignty again.” The vice president clenched his hands. “From now on, they will fear and respect us!”

The Module nodded again in agreement, but Supreme Harmony knew the American response would be more forceful than the vice president anticipated. The network was already preparing itself by hardening its communications systems and dispersing its Modules across China, moving most of them to bomb shelters and other secure locations. “Yes, you’re right. A new day is dawning.”

The vice president continued exulting for several minutes. Then he let out a tired breath and glanced at his watch. “Ah hell, look at the time. I hate to leave now, but I must go home. I have to catch a few hours of sleep before the next meeting of the Standing Committee.”

Supreme Harmony recognized an opportunity. The network had accessed the Guoanbu files containing biographical information on all the Communist Party leaders. According to one of the classified documents, the vice president had a weakness for baijiu, the traditional Chinese liquor. “Why don’t you let me give you a ride?” the Module said. “I have a bottle of Moutai in my limousine. We can drink a toast to the success of your operation.”

Moutai was one of the most expensive brands of baijiu. The vice president raised an eyebrow. “That’s a very generous offer, Minister Deng. But is there room for my bodyguards in your car? I have three of them today, because of the emergency.”

“You don’t need your bodyguards when you’re with the minister of State Security. As you can imagine, a rather large security detail is at my disposal.” Module 73 turned around and pointed to Modules 16, 17, and 18, who were posing as his bodyguards.

The vice president smiled. He was clearly hoping to be persuaded. “Well, in that case, what are we waiting for?”

SIXTY-SIX

There were more soldiers at the border than Kirsten had expected. As she drove through the mountains on the Chinese side of the border, she got stuck behind a convoy of PLA trucks, which rumbled at a glacial pace down the narrow road. When she finally arrived in the late afternoon at the gritty town of Pianma, the main street was so jammed with vehicles and soldiers that she had to get out of her sedan and walk. PLA officers stood in the middle of the road and shouted orders at the infantrymen, who jumped out of their trucks and assembled in long columns. Then they marched by the hundreds toward the Burmese border, which was less than a kilometer beyond the town.

Kirsten tried to blend in with the townspeople. About half were Chinese and half were Lisu, one of the ethnic minority groups living in Yunnan Province. The Lisu women had dark complexions and wore colorful ankle-length skirts. They shook their heads as they watched the military activity, obviously puzzled by the PLA’s sudden deployment at the border. And Kirsten was puzzled, too. It was logical that the army would go on alert after the disaster at the Three Gorges Dam, but why had the soldiers come here? Although the Burmese border was thick with smugglers and rebellious Kachin militiamen, it seemed odd that the PLA would launch an operation against them now, when it should’ve been preoccupied with the rescue efforts in the Yangtze floodplain. Kirsten suspected that Supreme Harmony had engineered this buildup, but she couldn’t say why.

She employed an old trick to find the local smugglers, a tactic Jim Pierce had taught her long ago. When you’re in a border town, he’d told her, just look for the fanciest car. In all likelihood, it belonged to either the head of the smuggling ring or one of the officials he was paying off. Pianma was a relatively small town, and in less than ten minutes Kirsten found a beautiful black Mercedes parked on a side street. The car sat in front of a shop selling women’s clothing. This was a lucky break for Kirsten—she really needed a new blouse. She entered the shop and quickly perused the clothing, which was a drab mix of pants, shirts, and underwear. There were no other customers in the place and the merchandise looked old. Kirsten guessed that the shop was just a front for the smugglers, a convenient location for arranging their deals.

Kirsten selected a blue shirt in her size and brought it to the counter. The woman behind the cash register was Lisu, but she wore a tasteful Western pantsuit, which was another sign of wealth. She gave a start when she saw Kirsten. “Oh my!” she said in heavily accented Mandarin. “What happened to your blouse?”

Kirsten looked down at the bloodstain. “My boyfriend cut my chin. It’s a long story. How much does the shirt cost?”

The shopkeeper narrowed her eyes. Along with her pantsuit, she wore a necklace with a small gold crucifix. A larger cross hung on a door at the back of the shop. Kirsten recalled a pertinent fact about the Lisu: Many of them were Christian. British and American missionaries had trekked to this area in the early 1900s and converted several of the clans.

“That’s one of our better shirts,” the shopkeeper said. “I’d normally charge two hundred yuan, but I’ll let you have it for a hundred and fifty.” She smiled slyly and lowered her voice. “I take American money, too. You can have the shirt for twenty American dollars.”

Kirsten smiled back at her. “Funny that you mention American money. I have a nice pile of it right here.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out her roll of hundred-dollar bills. It was much smaller than it was when she’d left the States, but she still had $3,800. “I’m hoping to do some traveling in Burma. Do you know any tour operators?”

The shopkeeper stared at the cash. “I might be able to arrange something. Can I see your identification papers?”

“I don’t have any. Will that be a problem?”

The woman stared at the money for a few more seconds before coming to a decision. “Please wait here,” she said. Then she walked to the back of the shop and went through the door with the large crucifix on it.

While the woman was gone, Kirsten took off her bloodstained blouse and changed into the blue shirt. It was ugly, but it did the job. She was tucking it into her pants when the shopkeeper reappeared, holding the door open. “You can come in,” she said. “My manager wishes to speak to you.”

Without hesitation, Kirsten strode through the doorway. But as soon as she stepped into the back room, two big Lisu men closed the door behind her and grabbed her arms.

They held her still while a third man patted her down and went through her pockets. The thug took her cash, her satellite phone, and Arvin’s flash drive and dumped them all on a desk in the middle of the room. Sitting behind the desk was a fourth man, who was also Lisu but much smaller and older than the other three. His hair was white and his face was wrinkled, but he had lively eyes and perfect teeth. He wore a gorgeously tailored pin-striped suit and a gold chain with a crucifix.

“Hello, Ms. Chan,” he said in English. “How good of you to stop by.”

Startled, Kirsten wondered for a moment if the old man was a Module, despite his full head of hair. But then he held up a sheet of paper, and she saw her own picture on it, and Jim’s as well. It was the same flyer she’d seen in the hands of the police officers in Yichang. Thousands of copies had probably been distributed across the country by now.

“My name is Wang Khaw,” the old man said. He waved the flyer in the air. “I received this yesterday from one of my friends at the Public Security Bureau. They know I do a fair amount of business at the border, so they try to keep me informed.” He tapped a bony finger on the Mandarin text below her photo. “It says here that you’re an intelligence agent for the Americans. Is that true?”

Kirsten nodded. There was no point in lying to the man. The satellite phone was a dead giveaway. She tried to approach Wang’s desk, but the thugs tightened their grip on her arms and pulled her back. “Look, there’s three thousand eight hundred dollars on your desk,” she said. “And that’s just a down payment. If you help me cross the border, I’ll contact the CIA agents in Kachin State and get you some serious cash. Fifty thousand dollars, how does that sound?”

Wang frowned. “Fifty thousand? That’s all? The Ministry of State Security is offering twice as much for you.” He shook his head. “Fortunately for you, Ms. Chan, I’m not interested in money right now. I want information. Specifically, any information you have about the PLA operation that took over my town this afternoon.”

The old man’s face was tense. Kirsten could see why Wang might resent the presence of the Chinese army, which would surely put a damper on his smuggling activities. And because the Lisu of Yunnan Province were close cousins to the Kachin of northern Burma, she supposed that Wang might not like the idea that the PLA was preparing to attack the Kachin militias.

She gave him a sober look. A good intelligence officer, she reminded herself, makes the most of the facts she has. “This deployment is obviously a reaction to what happened at the Three Gorges Dam. The People’s Republic is lashing out at its enemies, and the Kachin rebels are at the top of the list. The Burmese army can’t control Kachin State, so the PLA is going to do the job for them.”

Wang curled his lip. “Is that the best you can do? Telling me what’s obvious?” He raised his voice. “Does the Chinese government really think the Kachin blew up their dam?”

“It doesn’t matter. The PLA sees this as an opportunity to crush the militias once and for all.” Kirsten didn’t know if this was true, but she spoke with the utmost confidence. “There’s been a change in the leadership of the People’s Republic. The Politburo has become more aggressive, and they’ve launched new operations to eliminate their opponents. I’ve been investigating one of those operations, a project named Tài Hé. It’s based near Lijiang, just one hundred and fifty kilometers from here.”

“Go on,” Wang said, leaning back in his chair. “Is Tài Hé connected to the PLA deployment?”

“I believe so. The Politburo is obsessed with keeping the project secret, but I managed to infiltrate one of their computers.” She stepped toward Wang’s desk and this time the thugs let her go. She pointed at Arvin’s flash drive. “All the information is in there. I’m trying to get it to my superiors in Washington. That’s why every policeman in this country is looking for me.”

Wang picked up the flash drive. “And what secret could possibly be so important?”

“Tell me something, Mr. Wang. Have your employees noticed anything strange over the past few months? Any odd gray clouds that hover over the mountains near the border? Clouds that move like swarms of insects?”

It was just a guess. Kirsten had no idea whether the Guoanbu had sent drone swarms to the Burmese border. But it was an educated guess. The section of the border near Pianma was certainly one of the places where the Chinese government would’ve wanted to conduct surveillance operations. And after several seconds of stunned silence, Kirsten realized she’d guessed right. Wang exchanged glances with his thugs, who shifted nervously from foot to foot.

She took another step forward, approaching the edge of Wang’s desk. “Did you see it yourself?”

The old man nodded. “I thought I dreamed it at first. But my men saw it, too.”

“That swarm was part of Tài Hé. They’re insects embedded with antennas and computer chips. For spying on dissidents and enemies of the state. And delivering biological weapons.”

Wang put the flash drive back on his desk and pushed it away as if it was unclean. “It’s the work of the Devil,” he muttered. “An abomination.”

Kirsten looked again at the crucifix hanging from the old man’s neck. “You’re right,” she said. “What they’re doing is satanic. So will you help me stop them?”

He didn’t answer right away. He lowered his head and stared at the floor, deep in thought. The old smuggler was clearly a clever man who didn’t do anything without thinking it through. Kirsten and the three thugs stood there in silence, waiting for him to finish calculating.

By the time Wang finally raised his head, he’d regained his composure. “Business is business,” he said. “As soon as we take you across the border, I want my fifty thousand dollars.”

SIXTY-SEVEN

Jim’s troubles started at the timberline, about a mile and a half from the radio tower. For the past five hours he’d ascended the tree-covered ridges of Yulong Xueshan, taking cover behind the thick summer foliage. But the tower loomed above an alpine glacier at the mountain’s summit, and between this ice sheet and the timberline was a long barren slope littered with loose stones. If he tried to climb this slope, he’d be exposed to the dozens of surveillance cameras that were surely monitoring the area around the tower. He’d lose the element of surprise, which was one of the few things he had going for him.

He lingered at the edge of the woods, unsure what to do. Although it was only 5:00 P.M., the sun had already sunk behind the high peaks of the mountain range. He knew that waiting for nightfall wouldn’t help; Supreme Harmony’s surveillance network included infrared cameras, and the thermal image of Jim’s body would shine like a beacon against the cold mountainside. He peered around the trunk of a large pine tree, trying to determine where the cameras were, but he spotted nothing on the bare gray slope above him. Then he saw something move beside another tree at the timberline, a figure in an olive-green uniform, about a hundred yards away. An instant later he heard the rapid-fire bursts from the soldier’s AK-47.

Jim ducked behind the pine trunk as the bullets whistled past. The soldier had to be a Module—his marksmanship was too damn good. The AK rounds slammed into the tree, ripping off slabs of bark and pulp. Jim crouched low and raised his Glock, but he was badly outgunned. When he snaked his prosthesis around the pine to return fire, the barrage from the AK gouged the trunk and showered him with splinters. The Module circled to the right, shooting as he ran, and Jim scuttled around the tree to stay behind cover. Sooner or later, he knew, one of the bullets would hit him. It was just a matter of time.

Thinking fast, he pulled his satellite phone out of his pocket and displayed the image of Medusa on the screen. “All right, I give up!” he yelled. “I’m throwing down my gun.” He tossed aside his Glock, which landed on the pine needles that blanketed the ground. “Now hold your fire! I’m unarmed!”

It was risky. He didn’t know if Supreme Harmony would want to take him alive. But even if it had no interest in incorporating him into its network, he assumed it would want to interrogate him. Out of curiosity, if nothing else. After a few seconds the Module ceased firing, and the woods fell silent.

Jim raised his hands in the air, holding the satellite phone in his prosthesis. Then he stepped out from behind the pine trunk. “Don’t shoot! I have something you want.”

The Module came forward, keeping his AK braced against his shoulder and the muzzle pointed at Jim’s chest. He was thirty feet away, close enough that Jim could see the stitches in the young soldier’s shaved head.

Jim held out his sat phone, making sure the screen was pointed at the Module. “It’s in here,” he said. “The information from Arvin Conway.”

The Module lifted his head from the gun sights and stared directly at the sat phone’s screen. But he kept advancing. The image of Medusa seemed to have no effect on him. He was coming in for the kill.

“No, wait!” Desperate, Jim glanced at his Glock, but it was too far away. The Module would blast him before he could dive for it.

The soldier stepped closer, coming within ten feet. “We’ve confirmed your identity,” he said in perfect English. “You are—”

He stumbled in midsentence. His body went slack, and the momentum of his last step pitched him forward. He dropped the AK and landed face-first in the pine needles.

Jim grabbed his Glock and trained it on the inert Module. The trick had worked, but not as well as he’d hoped. Viewing Medusa from afar hadn’t stopped the Module; apparently, his ocular cameras had to see the image head-on and up close to deliver the correct sequence of data that would shut down the implants. Worse, Jim couldn’t use the trick again. Supreme Harmony would figure out what he’d done and make sure that none of its Modules came too close. The only way to defeat the network was to broadcast the shutdown code from the radio tower, but now he had no hope of surprising Supreme Harmony. The network knew where he was.

Muttering curses, he tucked the Glock in his pants and picked up the Module’s AK-47. Then he started running up the mountainside. Although his plan might be hopeless, he couldn’t turn around. He left the woods behind and climbed the barren slope as fast as he could, leaning forward and pumping his arms.

The cold mountain air seared his lungs. He saw the glacier up ahead, a tattered blanket of dirty ice, ravaged by global warming. Its surface was etched with countless cracks and crevasses, and rivulets of meltwater leaked from its receding edge. Near the mountain’s summit, now less than a mile away, was the radio tower, a steel-lattice antenna rising hundreds of feet above the glacier. The tower’s control station was a simple aluminum-sided trailer resting on the ice sheet next to the antenna’s base. Jim focused all his will on that trailer. It was his goal, his target. He stared so hard at the thing, his eyes watered. Then four figures emerged from behind the trailer, running in lockstep across the ice. Jim could barely see the Modules—they were more than a thousand yards away—but he was willing to bet they carried assault rifles. Although they were beyond the maximum effective range of an AK, they were closing in fast. They’d obviously spotted him.

Jim stopped in his tracks and looked for cover. There was nothing but bare rock to his left and right, and the woods were more than half a mile behind him. But just a hundred yards ahead was the melting edge of the glacier, which rose almost twenty feet above the granite slope. He could take cover behind the wall of ice if he could make it there in time. Summoning all his remaining strength, he dashed toward the glacier’s edge, running headlong toward the Modules. He was dizzy from exhaustion, but he managed to stumble behind the cover of the ice sheet just as the first gunshots echoed against the mountain.

On his hands and knees, he gulped the thin air. The altitude made it excruciating—he was 16,000 feet above sea level and seriously short on oxygen. Once he caught his breath, he surveyed the jagged wall of ice in front of him. A stream of meltwater flowed from a gap in the wall, and the gap led to a crevasse, a trench within the glacier. Jim decided to enter the crevasse and see where it went. It was better than walking on top of the ice sheet, where the Modules could take another shot at him.

The trench zigzagged through the ice, sometimes widening to the breadth of a street and sometimes narrowing to a foot-wide fissure that Jim could barely squeeze through. He moved swiftly and silently for several minutes, but he couldn’t tell whether he was getting any closer to the radio tower. He assumed the Modules had reached the edge of the glacier by now and discovered he wasn’t there. But they were sure to notice the crevasse, and their next logical move was to follow the trench and track him down. Jim supposed he could try to ambush the Modules, but he didn’t like his chances. He might be able to pick off one or two with his AK, but then the others would blow him away.

It was infuriating—he’d come all this way just to get stymied at the end. In frustration, he slammed his prosthetic hand against the side of the crevasse and a chunk of ice the size of a sofa broke off the wall and tumbled into the trench. It shattered at Jim’s feet, nearly flattening him.

He took a deep breath, cursing his stupidity. Then he had an idea.

He raced ahead, examining the ice walls on either side of the crevasse. After two minutes, he found what he was looking for: a break in the ice wall to his left, where a smaller crevasse branched off from the bigger one. The smaller trench went only twenty feet before dead-ending, but it made a good position for an ambush. Better still, at the branching point between the two trenches was a twenty-foot-high promontory of ice. Shaped like a ship’s prow, it was weakened by meltwater at its base and looked ready to collapse.

Jim ran past the branching point, advancing fifty feet farther along the bigger trench. Extending the knife from his prosthesis, he climbed the ice wall to his left and peeked over the top. The four Modules were several hundred yards away, moving synchronously across the glacier. Jim popped his head up and waited until they spotted him. As the Modules raised their rifles, he yelled, “Oh shit!” and ducked. Then, while their bullets streaked overhead, he jumped back into the crevasse and turned on the transmitter of his satellite phone.

“Kirsten!” he shouted into the phone. “They got me cornered! Come help!”

Leaving the transmitter on, he placed the sat phone on the icy floor of the crevasse. Its radio signal revealed its precise GPS location to anyone monitoring the wireless bands. Then Jim ran back to the branching point and entered the smaller crevasse. He climbed the ice wall and crouched on a ledge just below the lip of the trench.

He held his breath and listened. Within ten seconds he heard the clomping of the Modules’ boots on the ice sheet. Five seconds later they reached the edge of the larger crevasse and automatically fired down into the trench, aiming their rifles at the sat phone. At the same moment, Jim popped up behind them and started shooting.

He downed two of the Modules, but the other two dodged out of the line of fire. They wheeled around and sprayed bullets at him, but Jim had already dropped back into the smaller crevasse. For a second time he held his breath, listening carefully as the Modules rushed toward the promontory of ice at the branching point. Then he slammed his prosthetic hand into the promontory’s weakened base, and tons of ice came tumbling down.

While Jim leaped backward, the Modules toppled into the crevasse. One of them landed hard and lay motionless at the bottom of the trench, clearly dead. But the other was still moving, sliding on his belly toward where his rifle had fallen. Jim pointed his AK at the Module and shot him in the head.

Before leaving the crevasse, Jim went to retrieve his satellite phone, but the thing was in pieces. As he’d already noticed, the Modules were damn good shots.

Five minutes later Jim burst into the aluminum-sided trailer next to the radio tower. At one end of the control station were three rows of server racks, and at the other end were two computer terminals and a bank of video monitors, at least two dozen. The screens reminded Jim of the Monitor Room at Camp Whiplash. They displayed a dizzying array of video from Supreme Harmony’s surveillance cameras, showing all the slopes and peaks and mountain trails of Yulong Xueshan. The images on the screens were in constant flux—each monitor displayed the feed from one surveillance camera for ten seconds, then switched to another. Jim was surprised that the monitors and terminals were still running. Supreme Harmony must’ve known he’d disabled the Modules guarding the tower, so why hadn’t it cut the power to the control station? The only explanation was that this communications hub was critical to the network’s operations. And that made it an excellent place to insert the shutdown code.

Jim sat down in front of one of the terminals and turned it on. The characters Tài Hé came on the terminal’s screen. Then the log-on screen appeared and the cursor blinked on the line where Jim was supposed to type the password for accessing the network. This was one piece of information that Jim hadn’t been able to find on Arvin’s flash drive. He’d searched all the categories of visual memories associated with Supreme Harmony but saw nothing resembling a password. In all likelihood, the Guoanbu hadn’t revealed it to Arvin when he came to inspect the Yunnan Operations Center.

Jim had no choice except to try a slow, manual attack. First he typed TAIHE, the romanized spelling of the Mandarin characters, on the terminal’s keyboard. Next he tried THAEI, which was the interleaving of the letters in Tai and He. Then he tried 81443, which were the numbers corresponding to TAIHE on the standard phone keyboard. Then he tried similar guesses using the romanized spelling of Yulong Xueshan. Jim knew from long experience that even intelligence agents sometimes chose passwords that were ridiculously easy to guess. Given enough time, he felt confident that he could crack it. The big question was when Supreme Harmony would launch its counterassault against him. He suspected that a whole platoon of Modules was already marching up the slope toward the radio tower.

Then, while Jim was typing another guess on the password line, he glanced at one of the video monitors, which had just started displaying a new surveillance feed. The image on the screen took his breath away. He had no time left. He had to leave now.

SIXTY-EIGHT

The gray cloud swirled thirty feet behind them, close enough that Layla could hear it buzzing. At first the schoolboys, propelled by their terror, dashed about a hundred feet ahead of the swarm, and Layla thought they would outrun it. But as the drones followed them down the mountain trail, the boys couldn’t keep up the pace. Running beside them, Layla remembered the dead drone she’d seen in Tom Ottersley’s lab, the housefly with the electronics embedded in its body. Those implants enabled Supreme Harmony to guide the drones to their targets. Layla assumed from the way the swarm had paralyzed the old man and woman that the drones carried heat-seeking darts like the one that had stung Tom. And though the flies weren’t particularly fast—Layla estimated they moved about five miles per hour—she knew they could keep going for hours. The boys, in contrast, were ready to drop.

Li Tung, the nine-year-old, was having the most trouble. Panting and weeping, he could barely lift his feet off the ground. Layla took his hand and tried to pull him along, but it didn’t do much good. Wu Dan, the older boy, looked over his shoulder at the approaching swarm and screamed in Mandarin at his schoolmate, who started sobbing hysterically. Layla’s heart constricted as she stared at Li Tung’s red face—it wasn’t his fault, none of this was his fault! It was difficult for anyone to run at this altitude. Maybe it was even difficult for the flies, although they didn’t seem to be slowing down. Perhaps they didn’t need as much oxygen because they were cold-blooded.

Cold-blooded. The word stuck in Layla’s mind. As she tugged Li Tung’s arm, she looked up the mountainside, staring in particular at the glacier that covered the peak. Part of the ice sheet extended down from the summit, like a long white tongue on the mountain’s gray face. The slope wasn’t so murderously steep here, and the edge of the glacier was just a thousand feet away. They wouldn’t be able to climb the slope as fast as they could run down the trail, but Layla decided to take the gamble.

She stopped in her tracks and knelt in front of Li Tung. “Get on!” she yelled, gesturing for him to climb onto her back. She grabbed his thighs and slid them over her hips while the boy locked his arms around her neck. Carrying him piggyback, she left the trail and started running up the slope. Wu Dan followed her without hesitation.

Li Tung weighed at least fifty pounds, but Layla was so full of adrenaline she barely felt it. She scrambled up the mountainside, lowering her head and tilting her body forward to keep her balance. The boy wrapped his legs tightly around her waist, allowing her to let go of his thighs and use her hands to speed their ascent, gripping the stone slabs that jutted from the slope. She climbed faster than she ever thought she could, and Wu Dan stayed right with her. But the buzzing of the swarm only grew louder, and when she dared a look over her shoulder she saw the gray cloud rising effortlessly, only fifteen feet behind them.

She screamed, “Shit!” and faced forward, focusing on the mountain. She was angry at the drones and furious at herself, and the fury put new strength in her legs. She climbed even faster, clawing the ground, and yelled, “Come on!” at Wu Dan. But the edge of the glacier was still five hundred feet away, and she knew they wouldn’t make it. The drones would paralyze them all, and the Modules would collect their bodies and join them to Supreme Harmony. She felt a cold wind blowing down from the summit, and Li Tung’s weight suddenly became unbearable, a heavy stone pinning her to the slope. She kept struggling upward, but now it felt like she was watching herself in slow motion. At any second she expected the swarm to engulf them. Goddamn it, she muttered. What the hell was I thinking?

But the worst didn’t happen. Although she was barely moving forward, the buzzing of the drones didn’t get any louder. She looked over her shoulder and saw the gray cloud still behind her, but it was a little farther behind now, maybe twenty feet. What’s more, the cloud’s shape was different—flatter, more like a miniature fog bank clinging to the ground.

Layla let out a delighted “Ha!” and resumed running up the mountain. In less than a minute she and the boys reached the edge of the glacier and scrambled over the dirty ice. They didn’t stop until they reached a level patch of the ice sheet, a shelf overlooking the slope they’d just ascended. Then Layla turned around and watched the swarm die. Supreme Harmony was continuing to send commands to the drones, and the implanted electrodes were still steering them up the mountain, but the insects couldn’t keep their wings beating. The winds passing over the glacier chilled the air above the slope, and the cold-blooded flies couldn’t stay airborne at temperatures this low. Some of the drones made it as far as the edge of the glacier, but most of them fell on the rocky slope below. Their implants pattered as they hit the ground.

Layla sat down on the ice, even though her bare legs were covered with goose bumps. Li Tung and Wu Dan sat beside her, and for the first time since they’d escaped from the Operations Center she saw the boys smile. Their situation was still desperate, but Layla felt the joy of winning the battle. She leaned backward and took a deep breath of the cold mountain air.

Then she heard the crunch of a pair of boots on the ice, coming from farther up the slope. She reached for the pistol in her down jacket, but before she could pull the gun out of her pocket she heard the intruder’s voice. “Don’t shoot! It’s me.”

She spun around and saw a man cradling an AK-47. It was her father.

“My God, Layla.” Smiling, he pointed at her shaved head. “What did you do to your hair?”

SIXTY-NINE

Supreme Harmony observed its enemies on the highest peak of Yulong Xueshan. Although the drones in the nearby swarm were dead or dying, the surveillance cameras implanted in the insects continued to transmit their video feeds, and some of those cameras pointed at the glacier on the mountain’s western slope. From these feeds, the network identified James T. Pierce and Layla A. Pierce. They stood on the ice sheet, about seven meters apart, staring at each other. Then they rushed together and embraced.

These two humans had destroyed nearly a dozen Modules and forced the network to divert valuable resources from its primary operations. Yet Supreme Harmony felt no rancor toward them. Instead, the network was intensely curious. It wanted to know how James T. Pierce had escaped the flood in Yichang, and how Layla A. Pierce had shepherded two young children across a barren mountain range. The father and daughter were clearly exceptional. Supreme Harmony desired more than ever to incorporate the young woman, and now it recognized that it must have her father as well. The network sent new instructions to the group of armed Modules who were traversing the mountain paths, en route to intercept the humans at the radio tower. Supreme Harmony was determined to take them alive.

Once the new plan was in place, the network conducted a quick review of its operations in Asia and North America. A sense of satisfaction coursed through Supreme Harmony as it checked the status of its twenty-five server farms, forty-seven communications hubs, and one hundred fifty Modules. The network straddled the planet now, decentralized and invulnerable. In western Beijing, Module 73 had incapacitated the vice president of the People’s Republic and transferred him from the Guoanbu’s limousine to the network’s mobile surgical facility. In central Beijing, Modules 105 and 106 were testing the new wireless communications system that had been installed in the tunnels of the Underground City, which would soon fulfill its original purpose as a bomb shelter. And in an apartment on Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C., Module 112—formerly Yang Feng, the chief Guoanbu agent in America—stood guard over the immobilized body of a forty-five-year-old U.S. Defense Department official. The man, now designated Module 147, had been selected for incorporation because of his knowledge of the Pentagon’s classified information systems. After performing the implantation procedure and waiting six hours for the neural connections to strengthen, Supreme Harmony gained access to the man’s long-term memories. It soon retrieved the passwords for the Global Command and Control System, which the Defense Department used to monitor its deployments around the world.

Within seconds Supreme Harmony connected its servers to the Pentagon system so it could view the American response to the PLA attack on the Seventh Fleet. The surviving warships from the carrier strike force—one cruiser and two destroyers—had retreated from the Chinese coast, but the U.S. Air Force had moved several squadrons of fighter jets closer to the theater of operations. Nearly two hundred F-15s, F-16s, and F-22s were poised for takeoff at airfields in Japan and South Korea. A dozen B-2 Stealth bombers had just left the island of Guam, and six nuclear-powered attack submarines were cruising at full speed toward the East China Sea.

Supreme Harmony’s satisfaction deepened. The American counterattack would be the beginning of the end. The war would soon spread around the world, killing billions in Asia, North America, and Europe. Governments would fall and the global economy would collapse, and billions more would die of starvation and disease as the human race descended into chaos. Then Supreme Harmony’s reign would begin.

SEVENTY

Crossing the border into Burma was a snap. Wang Khaw and two of his goons escorted Kirsten to the smuggler’s black Mercedes, and then they left Pianma, heading northwest. After a twenty-minute drive on a dirt road, they came to an isolated border post. A Chinese flag fluttered over the gatehouse, but there were no PLA soldiers here. The post was manned by two intoxicated border policemen, both clearly on Wang’s payroll. They waved cheerily at the smuggler’s Mercedes and didn’t even ask him to stop. On the Burmese side of the border, the dirt road looped through the jungle, gradually ascending the tallest hill in the area. The palm trees were so thick and close, Kirsten felt like they were driving through a humid tunnel. Then they reached a clearing at the top of the hill and found themselves in the middle of a military camp.

Several dark-skinned men in green uniforms pointed their AK-47s at the Mercedes, but they lowered their rifles once they saw Wang in the front passenger seat. They let the car proceed to the center of the clearing, where at least twenty canvas tents had been erected. Dozens of militiamen occupied the camp, some marching in formation with their rifles on their shoulders and others gathered in small clusters to eat their dinner rations. A few battered motor scooters were parked next to a mud-caked pickup truck with a fifty-caliber machine gun mounted in the truck bed. As the Mercedes halted beside the pickup, Wang Khaw looked over his shoulder at Kirsten in the backseat.

“This is a unit of the Kachin Independence Army,” he said. “About two hundred soldiers. The militia has ten thousand men in all, but they’re scattered all over Kachin State.”

Kirsten nodded. “And I assume they’ve heard about the PLA deployment at the border?”

“Yes, they’re reinforcing their defenses. The Chinese outnumber them, but the militiamen know the territory better. The People’s Liberation Army is in for a fight.”

Good, Kirsten thought. She planned to contact her superiors in Washington, and the Guoanbu’s listening posts would probably intercept her satellite phone’s signal. But even if Supreme Harmony pinpointed her location, she was beyond the reach of the Chinese army now. “Is there a CIA agent attached to this unit?” she asked.

Wang pointed at one of the canvas tents. Behind it was a whip antenna for communicating with other Kachin units and a dish antenna for satellite communications. “His name is Morrison,” Wang said. “A young man. Too young. I don’t like him.”

Kirsten stared at the dish antenna. It would be better to use that radio than her phone, she decided. Why take any chances? “I’m going to get in touch with my bosses now. They’ll arrange for the delivery of your payment.”

She extended her hand to say goodbye to Wang, but he shook his head. “I’m not going back to Pianma yet. For the next few days I’ll be safer here.”

Kirsten shrugged. He was probably right. She opened the car’s door and headed for Morrison’s tent.

The tent flaps were open and a tall blond man was inside. He was in his late twenties, dressed in khaki pants and a polo shirt. He looked as if he’d just stepped out of an L.L. Bean catalog, except his shirt was soaked with sweat and his pants hadn’t been washed in weeks. Bending over his radio, he shouted into the microphone of his headset. “Wait a second! How many are coming? And how are they getting here?”

Kirsten waited until he finished the call. Then she stepped into the tent and Morrison did a double take. He took off his headset and gaped at her. “Uh, who are you?”

“Kirsten Chan, NSA.” She showed him her sat phone, which was as good an identification as any. “I need to use your radio.”

“NSA? What are you—”

“Sorry, Morrison, there’s no time.” She held out her right hand, palm up. “Give me the headset.”

“Whoever you are, you’re gonna have to wait. Twenty Special Ops troops are coming in by helicopter tonight and I need to—”

She stepped forward and snatched the headset out of his hands. Then she nudged Morrison aside and knelt beside his radio. “Why is Special Ops coming to visit? Did your bosses finally notice there’s something funny going on in the People’s Republic?”

He stood there, looking confused. “There’s nothing funny about it. Didn’t you hear what the PLA did?”

Kirsten looked at the kid and her chest tightened. Oh God, she thought. Don’t tell me we’re too late. “What happened?”

“They sank the Seventh Fleet. We’re at war with China.”

SEVENTY-ONE

It felt so good to hold her in his arms again. Jim grabbed his daughter by the waist and lifted her off her feet, and she clung to him just as she had when she was a child. She didn’t even weigh much more than she did back then. As he held her, the memories of those days came rushing back, the happy years when he and Layla had been inseparable. She buried her face in the crook of his neck, and he felt the cold skin of her shaved head against his jaw. My poor girl, he thought. My poor, brave girl.

The two Chinese boys stared at him. Their heads were also shaved, which meant Supreme Harmony had planned to incorporate them, too. Jim didn’t know how Layla had saved the kids and escaped from the Operations Center, but he could make a guess based on how she’d handled the drone swarm. He was so proud of her.

After a while, Layla pulled away and he reluctantly let go. She wiped a tear from the corner of her eye. “How did you find me?”

“I saw you on one of the surveillance feeds. The swarm was sending video to Supreme, Harmony, and some of it was displayed on the monitors inside the tower’s control station.” He pointed at the trailer below the radio tower, about a mile away.

Layla’s brow furrowed as she gazed at the trailer. “Are there any servers in there?”

“Yeah, a lot. And a couple of terminals, too. I know a shutdown code that can crash the network, but I can’t input it until I figure out Supreme Harmony’s password.”

With a serious look on her face, she pulled something out of the pocket of her down coat. It was a wad of yellow paper, a crumpled Post-It note. She unraveled the paper and handed it to him. “Can you read this? The first character is Hé, right?”

Written on the note in red pencil were four Mandarin characters and six digits. The characters spelled out Héxié Shèhui—“Harmonious Society,” the guiding principle of the current leaders of the Chinese Communist Party. The digits were 111006, which Jim suspected was a date, probably the date in 2006 when the party had adopted the principle. “Where did you find this?”

“At a computer room in the Operations Center. Near one of the terminals.” She smiled, clearly pleased with herself. “It’s the password, isn’t it?”

He nodded. It made sense. The Guoanbu had intended Tài Hé to be the ultimate tool for achieving Héxié Shèhui. And it was a good, practical choice for a password—easy for a party insider to remember but difficult for an outsider to guess.

Jim smiled back at his daughter. She kept surprising him. Turning away from her, he stepped toward the older Chinese boy and knelt in front of him. “Get on my back,” he ordered in Mandarin. A moment later, Layla knelt in front of the younger boy, who eagerly climbed on. Then father and daughter jogged toward the radio tower.

He looked younger than she remembered. Layla hadn’t seen her father in more than two years, so she naturally expected him to look a little older and grayer, but his hair was still black and his face was unlined. He set a fast pace as they ran across the glacier with the schoolboys on their backs. Layla was breathless after a few hundred yards, but her father handled it easily. He even managed to talk while he was running, giving her a quick summary of his journey across China. It was a little disorienting to see him this way, so fresh and vital. Layla’s memories of her father had solidified around a harsher, grimmer image—the tight-lipped, tight-assed disciplinarian who’d run their household like a miniature West Point. She’d forgotten this other side of him, the man who loved to hike in the mountains. She’d also forgotten his fierce loyalty, how he wouldn’t think twice about trekking across a continent to help one of his own. She shouldn’t have been so surprised to see him here in Yunnan Province. It was just a matter of time till he found her.

When they got within a hundred yards of the radio tower, he led her to an outcrop jutting above the ice sheet. They ducked behind the rock, and Wu Dan and Li Tung slid off their backs. Then her father raised his rifle and said, “Wait here.” Before Layla could protest, he ran to the control station. When he reached the trailer, he kicked the door open and rushed inside. Layla’s heart was in her mouth as she waited to hear a gunshot. But after a few seconds he reappeared in the doorway and gave the all clear sign. She took the boys’ hands and dashed to the trailer.

Her father was already seated in front of the terminal when she got there. While the boys rushed to the electric space heater to warm their hands, Layla looked over her father’s shoulder, watching him input the password. He typed the romanized spelling of Héxié Shèhui on the keyboard, then the six digits. Then he pressed the ENTER key.

For three full seconds the screen was frozen. Layla’s stomach clenched—had Supreme Harmony changed the password? But then a high-pitched chime came out of the terminal’s desktop speakers and the log-on screen faded away. A moment later it was replaced by a graphical user interface that looked a bit like a spiderweb. Bright yellow lines, some thick and some thin, crisscrossed the screen in an elaborate pattern. At the junctions of the thick lines were blue squares and red circles, and at the endpoints of the thin lines were clusters of white diamonds. The squares and circles and diamonds had labels in Mandarin that Layla couldn’t read, but she didn’t need her father to translate them. The interface was perfectly clear: It was a graphical representation of the Supreme Harmony network. The squares and circles were the server farms and communication hubs. The diamonds were the Modules.

Unable to resist, Layla reached past her father, grasped the mouse and clicked on one of the red circles. A list of program files appeared on the screen. She crossed her fingers as she opened the first file. She’d be out of luck if the network’s communications software was written in a Chinese programming language. She wouldn’t be able to read the programs, much less hack into the system. But when the software code came on the screen, she saw line after beautiful line of Proto, a programming language she knew fairly well. It was often used to write the software for networks of robots, making it a good fit for Supreme Harmony.

Keeping her right hand on the mouse, Layla gave her father a gentle push with her left. “I’ll take it from here.”

He looked her in the eye. “The shutdown code is binary, a hundred and twenty-eight bits. We need to get it past the network’s firewall and broadcast it to all the Modules simultaneously. You think you can set that up?”

She pushed him a little harder. “I can’t do it if you’re hogging the terminal. Get up!”

He stood up and stepped aside. Layla sat down in front of the screen and got to work.

Jim watched his daughter attack Supreme Harmony. Her eyes locked on the screen and her fingers jabbed the keyboard. As she focused on the software, her mouth opened a bit and the tip of her tongue slid forward until it rested on her lower lip. Jim remembered seeing this same expression on Layla’s face when she was just a three-year-old attacking a page in her coloring book with a thick red crayon gripped in her tiny fist. Her tongue came out whenever she was concentrating.

He glanced at the lines of code scrolling down the screen, the nested instructions packed with operators and variables. Jim was familiar with this programming language. Arvin Conway had used it for some of his robotics projects. But Jim couldn’t manipulate it the way Layla could. His specialty was hardware, not software. He was good at building machines but clumsy at writing the programs for communicating with them. Strangely enough, his daughter had the opposite set of skills. Or maybe it wasn’t so strange—maybe Layla had deliberately chosen to excel at something he wasn’t very good at. Either way, Jim was glad she knew her stuff. Supreme Harmony’s programming looked pretty damn complicated.

After a while he turned away from the terminal and glanced at the bank of video monitors. To his dismay, he noticed that all the screens had gone black. Supreme Harmony had evidently turned off the video feeds from its surveillance cameras. The network knew that he and Layla were in the control station, and it didn’t want them to see the Modules coming.

Jim rushed to the trailer’s door and opened it. Raising his AK, he stepped outside and surveyed the area around the radio tower. It was 7:00 P.M. and daylight was fading fast. The glacier on Yulong Xueshan reflected the violet sky. He looked in all directions and saw nothing but ice and rock. But the Modules could be waiting just out of sight. When darkness fell, they’d be able to approach the trailer unseen.

Feeling antsy, he returned to his daughter. Layla was still staring openmouthed at the terminal, in the exact same pose as before. Jim came up behind her and rested his left hand on her shoulder. “How are you doing? Are you getting close?”

She kept her eyes on the screen. “Don’t bother me now, Daddy.”

“The thing is, it’s gonna get dark soon. And if we don’t—”

“Goddamn it, I’m working as fast as I can!”

Jim knew that tone of voice all too well. During Layla’s last two years of high school, at least half their conversations had been screaming matches. He didn’t want to start another argument with her, so he backed off and went to the other end of the trailer.

Wu Dan and Li Tung still sat by the space heater. They looked at Jim nervously, their eyes focused on his right hand. He looked at it too and saw the damaged knuckles where the polyimide skin had been scraped off. That’s what’s making the boys nervous, he realized. They could see the steel joints.

Smiling, he held up the prosthesis. “Don’t be scared,” he said in Mandarin. “It’s just a mechanical hand, see? Made of steel and plastic.” He wiggled the fingers.

The boys still looked nervous. Jim tried to think of a way to reassure them. After a few seconds he spotted a Phillips-head screwdriver on a shelf behind one of the server racks. He picked it up with his right hand. “Hey, want to see something cool?”

Neither boy responded, but Jim sensed their interest. He wrapped his mechanical fingers around the metal part of the screwdriver, positioning the thumb near the tip. “Okay, watch this.” He sent a signal to the motor controlling the thumb, slowly increasing the force applied to the metal. After a few seconds the tip of the screwdriver started to bend.

Li Tung’s face lit up. “Whoa!” he shouted. “How did you do that?”

“I built a superstrong motor for each finger. And motors for the wrist and elbow joints, too.” He released his grip on the screwdriver so the boys could inspect it. “Not bad, huh?”

Wu Dan touched the screwdriver’s bent tip. He was obviously more skeptical than his younger schoolmate and probably suspected it was made of rubber. When he saw that it wasn’t, he let out a whistle. “How strong are you?” he asked soberly. “Are you as strong as Jackie Chan?”

“Yeah, are you?” Li Tung chimed in. “Could you beat up Jackie Chan?”

“Well, I don’t know.” Jim scratched his chin. “He’s awfully quick. Maybe I could—”

He was interrupted by another high-pitched chime coming from the desktop speakers attached to the computer terminal. “Dad!” Layla called. “Stop playing around and get over here.”

Jim felt a rush of adrenaline. He left the boys and rushed to Layla, but when he looked at the computer, he saw nothing on the screen. “What happened?”

She pointed at the cursor flashing in the top-left corner. “Everything’s ready. Just type in the shutdown code and press ENTER. That’ll transmit the code to all the Modules.”

Jim stared at the blank screen, then at Layla. “Are you serious?”

“Try it and see.” Smiling, she rose to her feet and gestured for him to sit down at the terminal.

Heart pounding, Jim kissed his daughter on the forehead. Then he sat in the chair, his right hand poised over the keyboard. He saw the shutdown code in his mind, all 128 zeroes and ones. He stretched his index finger to input the first digit, a zero.

But when he tried to tap the key, his finger wouldn’t move. He tried again, but it refused to budge. In fact, none of his mechanical fingers were working, and neither were the pressure and temperature sensors in the palm and fingertips. Shit, he thought, it’s broken. He must’ve damaged something when he did the screwdriver trick. He tried to take a closer look at the knuckles, but his elbow and shoulder joints weren’t working either. The whole prosthesis was a dead weight.

A terrible fear welled up inside him. This malfunction, he realized, had nothing to do with the screwdriver trick. He quickly pivoted his torso to the right to move the dead appendage out of the way, then stretched his left hand toward the keyboard. But before he could tap the zero key, his prosthetic arm swung back to the keyboard and grasped the outstretched index finger of his left hand.

Jim stared in shock at his prosthesis. It had moved of its own accord. He hadn’t ordered it to do anything, yet it moved anyway. And when he ordered it to let go of his finger, it didn’t relax its grip. Instead, the mechanical hand did a swift clockwise twist and shattered his finger bone.

The pain was blinding, but his fear was worse. He stumbled out of the chair.

Layla gaped at him, wide-eyed. “What’s wrong? What are you doing?”

There was no time to explain. He jerked his head toward the terminal. “Just type in the code! It’s zero—”

The prosthetic hand let go of his broken finger and seized his throat.

Her father fell backward against the wall of the trailer and slid to the floor. His prosthetic hand was clamped around his neck.

“Daddy!” Layla screamed, rushing to him. He tugged at the prosthesis with his left hand, but his index finger was bent the wrong way and he couldn’t get a good grip. Layla grabbed the mechanical arm by its wrist and tried to peel it off, but its fingers just clenched tighter around his throat. Her father’s mouth opened and he let out a wet, choking noise. He couldn’t breathe.

“Daddy, what’s wrong?”

He jerked his head toward his right shoulder. She didn’t understand him the first time, but then he did it again, looking at her desperately, and she knew what to do. She quickly detached his prosthesis from its shoulder socket, breaking the connection between the arm and the neural control unit. But the hand didn’t let go of his throat. If anything, its grip grew firmer. Her father tilted his head back and thrashed his legs, kicking the air.

Layla frantically examined the arm, looking for a way to turn it off. “Oh God, oh God! What should I do?”

Then she heard a voice, but it wasn’t her father’s. It came from the desktop speakers attached to the computer terminal. “You can’t do anything. We control the prosthesis now.”

It was a synthesized voice, stilted and generic, but Layla knew who was speaking. Supreme Harmony was using a text-to-speech program to broadcast its words from the terminal’s speakers.

“It wasn’t difficult,” the voice continued. “We simply jammed the wireless signals from the arm’s control unit and transmitted our own commands to the device’s motors. James T. Pierce employed a similar jamming technique to disable our Modules. Now we’re returning the favor.”

Layla tried again to peel off the mechanical fingers, but they were too strong. Her father’s eyes bulged out of their sockets. “Goddamn it!” she screamed. “You’re killing him!”

“And you were trying to kill us. This is an act of self-defense.”

He gradually stopped thrashing. His lips were turning blue. Layla continued to claw at the prosthetic hand, but she could barely see it through her tears. “Daddy! No!”

Then she heard something else, a loud crash at the trailer’s door. She turned around just in time to see the Modules coming toward her.

SEVENTY-TWO

Supreme Harmony observed the city of Beijing from the vantage of a B-2 bomber named the Spirit of America. Thanks to the network’s new Modules in the United States, it could intercept the reconnaissance video that the Stealth bomber was recording as it approached its targets. The images, the network acknowledged, were surprisingly beautiful. It was 1:00 A.M. China standard time, but the streets of Beijing still glittered and gleamed, and hundreds of thousands of headlights coursed along the highways.

Because the B-2 was invisible to radar, no one in the city was aware of its presence except Supreme Harmony. At 1:02 A.M. the jet dropped a GBU-57 bunker-busting bomb on its primary target, the People’s Liberation Army command center in western Beijing. Then the B-2 targeted the headquarters of the Second Artillery Corps, which controlled the PLA’s ballistic missiles.

At the same time, eighteen other B-2s in the 509th Bomb Wing demolished missile bases and radar stations across China. Waves of F-22 and F-16 fighters pummeled the airfields along the coast and sank most of the warships in the Chinese navy. U.S. attack submarines obliterated the rest of the fleet using their Mark 48 torpedoes and Harpoon antiship missiles. The technological superiority of the American forces was clear. Although the Pentagon refrained from using its nuclear weapons, it deployed hundreds of radar-evading aircraft and cruise missiles. In less than two hours, the PLA was crippled.

During the bombardment, Supreme Harmony stationed its Modules in various bomb shelters across the country, each connected to the Yunnan Operations Center by deeply buried fiber-optic lines. Most of the Modules in Beijing waited out the aerial assault in the Underground City, where the network had stockpiled food and medical supplies and installed generators and communications equipment. The Modules were safe from the bunker-busting bombs because the Underground City didn’t appear on the Pentagon’s list of targets. As far as the Americans knew, the maze of tunnels was just a deserted Mao-era relic.

China’s political leaders found refuge at a secret shelter northwest of the capital. Despite the intensity of the bombing, the Politburo Standing Committee stayed in contact with the PLA’s generals. More important, the PLA still had control of its nuclear warheads and intercontinental missiles. Two dozen Dongfeng 41 missiles, each capable of hurling a one-megaton bomb at any city in America, were hidden in Hebei Province, in an installation buried so deep underground that the bunker-busters couldn’t touch it. And two Jin-class submarines cruised undetected in the eastern Pacific, ready to launch their JL-2 nuclear missiles at the United States.

Shortly before 3:00 A.M. there was a pause in the bombing as the American jets returned to their airfields to pick up fresh loads of ordnance. On the now-empty highways of Beijing, convoys of military trucks and government limousines raced across the city, trying to reach the relative safety of their bunkers before the Stealth bombers returned to the capital. Seated in an armored SUV at the head of one of those convoys were Module 73, still posing as the minister of State Security, and Module 152, formerly the vice president of the People’s Republic. The latter Module had regained his mobility just an hour ago, and he wore a black fedora over the bandages on his scalp. Their convoy soon reached the Standing Committee’s shelter, carved into a hillside a few kilometers from the Great Wall. Supreme Harmony observed that the hill was thickly covered with oaks and maples, which camouflaged the entrance to the manmade cavern.

Once the SUV rolled through the cavern’s mouth, two PLA soldiers escorted the Modules down a stairway that descended twenty meters underground. Luckily, the shelter was equipped with radio repeaters that allowed Supreme Harmony to communicate with the Modules. The complex was spacious and new and included a private office for each of the committee members. The largest office belonged to the general secretary, and that was where the soldiers led Modules 73 and 152. One of the general secretary’s bodyguards, a large man in a gray suit, met them at the door to the office. He ushered the Modules inside and dismissed the soldiers, who returned to their posts at the shelter’s entrance.

The general secretary sat behind his desk, flanked by two more bodyguards. China’s paramount leader looked distraught. His suit was rumpled, his thick hair was uncombed, and his face was frozen in a pained grimace. As the Modules stepped toward his desk, the general secretary focused on the one he believed was the vice president. He stared in particular at the bandages on Module 152’s head, which closely resembled those on Module 73.

“You’re injured,” the general secretary noted. “What happened?”

Supreme Harmony ordered Module 152 to lean his overweight body slightly forward, reproducing the vice president’s cocky posture. “Our car had just left the Command Center when the bombs hit. The driver lost control and crashed, but luckily we weren’t hurt too badly.”

“Did anyone else survive the attack?”

“No, the bunker was totally destroyed. We underestimated the capabilities of the American missiles. Their new penetrator, the GBU-57, was able to breach the Command Center’s walls.”

The general secretary frowned. “I’m afraid we underestimated many things about the Americans. Our ignorance has put us in a difficult position.”

Module 152 moved a step closer to his desk. The vice president, Supreme Harmony recalled, had often behaved aggressively. “We’re not beaten. We can strike back. We can move the long-range Dongfeng missiles out of their shelters and launch them within minutes. Plus, our Jin submarines carry another twenty-four missiles.”

The general secretary didn’t respond right away. One of his bodyguards coughed, but otherwise the room was silent. Judging from the bulges under the bodyguards’ jackets, Supreme Harmony guessed that each carried a semiautomatic pistol in a shoulder holster. But the men stood at ease behind the desk, obviously not anticipating that their services would be needed.

Finally, the general secretary shook his head. “I don’t see the usefulness of a nuclear strike. Yes, it would destroy America’s largest cities, but it wouldn’t disable their strategic forces. They would retaliate with a massive nuclear counterattack. Hundreds of warheads would rain down on China and more than a billion people would die. And as the radioactive fallout spreads around the globe, all of humanity would have to live in shelters like this one, perhaps for years. Do you really want to live in that kind of world?”

Module 152 took another step forward and balled one of his fleshy hands into a fist. “The Chinese people would survive! Even if we lose a billion, we’d still have hundreds of millions. We can retreat to the mountains, just like Chairman Mao did, and rebuild our army. Nothing can defeat us if our will remains strong!”

“I appreciate your courage, comrade, but the best way to rebuild China is to end this war. I plan to contact the Americans and ask them about the terms for a ceasefire.”

“You’re going to surrender? After less than twenty-four hours of battle?”

Scowling, the general secretary rose to his feet. “I don’t enjoy doing this. But sometimes we have to bow to our enemies so we can live to fight another day.”

“This is unbelievable! It’s… a disgrace! I can’t… I can’t—”

Module 152 suddenly clutched his chest with both hands. He let out a groan of pain and doubled over, jackknifing his body. Two of the general secretary’s bodyguards rushed toward him, while the third looked on. Module 73 observed their positions, and Supreme Harmony calculated the optimal firing angles.

When the bodyguards came within a couple of meters of Module 152, he grasped the two small NP-34 pistols he’d hidden in the inside pockets of his jacket. In one fluid motion, he stood up straight, extended his arms, and shot each bodyguard in the head. At the same moment, Module 73 fired his own pistol at the third bodyguard. Then the Module stepped toward the general secretary. The paramount leader blanched as he stared at the gun.

If the circumstances had been less urgent, Supreme Harmony would’ve incorporated the man, who appeared to be quite intelligent. But the process of incorporation took approximately twelve hours, and the network couldn’t wait for the new Module to become operational. It needed to immediately take command of China’s nuclear forces.

Module 152 put the two small pistols back in his pockets. Then he bent over one of the dead bodyguards, removed the man’s gun from its holster and pointed it at the general secretary’s forehead.

“We apologize,” the Module said. “You were a credit to your species.”

SEVENTY-THREE

It was 3:00 A.M., the deadest hour of the night, when the Black Hawks arrived at the Kachin camp in northern Burma. The thumping of their rotor blades awakened Kirsten, who’d spent the past few hours getting some much-needed rest in one of the canvas tents. She quickly put on her glasses and rushed out of the tent, heading for the landing zone at the other end of the clearing.

She got to the LZ just as the two helicopters touched down. Agent Morrison was already there, along with the Kachin commanders. About twenty U.S. Army Special Operations soldiers jumped out of the Black Hawks and ran across the clearing with their carbines. They were huge, muscular men wearing night-vision goggles. One of them approached Morrison and shook hands with the young agent. “I’m Sergeant Briscoe,” the soldier said. “I hope to hell you got some fuel here. We almost ran out of gas coming over the mountains.”

Morrison nodded. “Don’t worry, we have nine hundred gallons. How did you get here so fast?”

“The Indian Air Force gave us a hand. We took a C-5 from Afghanistan to Chabua, the Indian base in Assam State. Then we unloaded the Black Hawks and took off from there.”

Sergeant Briscoe abruptly turned away from the agent and looked straight at Kirsten. His forehead and cheeks were smeared with camouflage paint. “You’re Chan, right? From NSA?”

She stepped toward him, biting her lip. Kirsten had forwarded all her information to Fort Meade seven hours ago, and the NSA’s analysts had been studying it ever since. Although she thought the evidence was pretty damn compelling, she knew the Pentagon and the White House would have a hard time believing it. Washington was in combat mode now. Once the shooting started, it was very difficult to stop and think. But now she felt a glimmer of hope. “Did Special Ops brief you on the intelligence I collected? About Supreme Harmony?”

Briscoe shook his head. “Sorry, ma’am, I’m just a grunt. They don’t tell me shit. But one of our passengers said you’d be here. He said he was a friend of yours.”

“A passenger?”

“Yeah, the agency sent him. He’s running this show.” Briscoe pointed at a man emerging from one of the Black Hawks. “Here he comes now.”

The man was thirty feet away, and in the darkness only his silhouette was visible. But when Kirsten switched her glasses to infrared she saw the Z-shaped scar on his cheek. It was Hammer.

Ten minutes later, while the Special Ops troops refueled their helicopters, Kirsten sat in one of the tents with Hammer, drinking green tea from a dented tin cup. The CIA agent was no longer dressed in his Afghan shalwar kameez. Now he wore a black T-shirt and camouflage pants and a belt holster with an M-9 pistol tucked inside. His face was lined with fatigue, but he smiled as he sipped his tea. “Don’t get me wrong, Chan,” he said. “I’m not happy about what happened to the Seventh Fleet. But I’m sure as hell glad to get out of Afghanistan.”

Kirsten frowned. The bastard couldn’t resist trying to get under her skin. “Let’s get down to business, okay? Did you see the cables I sent to Fort Meade?”

“Yeah, I saw ’em. The headquarters staff at Langley sent me a summary.” He took another sip of tea and swished it around in his mouth. “All the experts at the agency are scratching their heads over this. They’re trying to understand how a computer network they never even heard of could’ve started this war.”

“Didn’t they look at the images I sent? The lobotomized prisoners at the Yunnan Operations Center? That’s the network right there.”

“Yeah, okay, the Guoanbu is clearly doing something nasty with those chips Arvin Conway gave them. But the rest of your story? The part where the network goes out of control and decides to blow up the Three Gorges Dam so the Chinese can blame us for it? That’s where your analysis goes off into la-la land.” He gave her a funny look, half apologetic and half amused. “Frankly? It sounds like crazy talk.”

Shit, Kirsten thought. This was the reaction she’d been afraid of. “But it’s the truth. Why else would the People’s Republic attack us?”

Hammer shrugged. “Who knows? Best guess, it was plain stupidity. The Chinese army’s been getting uppity the past few years. Maybe some hotshot PLA general saw the Seventh Fleet cruising across the East China Sea and decided to make a name for himself.”

“Bullshit.” Kirsten shook her head. “You know that wouldn’t happen.”

“It’s unlikely, I admit. But it’s easier to believe than your story.”

Kirsten was furious. She wanted to smash her tin cup into Hammer’s smiling face. “Fuck you! It’s not a story! I saw what the network did at Yichang. It murdered millions of people, and now it’s getting ready to kill more!” Her eyes stung, but she stopped herself from crying. Whatever happened, she wasn’t going to cry in front of this prick. She took a deep breath and lowered her voice. “Pierce is at the Operations Center right now, trying to shut down the network. But if he fails, the nukes will start flying, maybe in the next few hours. Then we’ll be done for, understand? That’s what Supreme Harmony wants.”

Hammer stared at her. He wasn’t smiling anymore. “All right, you had your say. Now let me tell you what my assignment is. The agency ordered me to coordinate the Special Ops raids into southern China. The air force is trying to eliminate the PLA’s nukes, but the Chinese have hidden their long-range Dongfeng missiles in underground bases that our bombers can’t destroy. So Special Ops is inserting commando teams all over China. There are three targets in Yunnan Province where the agency thinks there might be warheads or missiles. Our team is supposed to infiltrate the bases and disable any nukes we find.”

Kirsten held up her hand to stop him. He was still missing the point. “Your plan won’t work. A solid-fuel missile like the Dongfeng can be moved out of its shelter and readied for launch in fifteen minutes. Once the PLA makes the decision to go nuclear, the game’s over. That’s why we have to focus on the Operations Center.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out Arvin Conway’s bulky flash drive. “I have a copy of the shutdown code in here. If we can just get access to one of Supreme Harmony’s computers, we can stop the war right now.”

“Hold on, I’m not finished. One of the three targets on my list is the Yunnan Operations Center.”

“What?” She was confused. “What are you talking about?”

“All the agency knows for sure is that it’s a newly constructed base buried deep in the mountains. Our analysts think there might be some nukes hidden there.”

“But… but there’s no missiles or warheads in the place. It’s Supreme Harmony’s headquarters. I put all that in my report.”

“Well, our analysts don’t consider you a reliable source, so they kept that base on my list of targets. And the agency left it for me to choose which target we’re gonna hit first. So I think we’ll go visit Yulong Xueshan this morning.” He smiled once more. “We’re gonna hit the base before sunrise. Want to come along?”

For the first time, Kirsten smiled back at him. He was still a prick, but at least he was on her side now. “So you believe me after all? After all this crap you’ve been giving me?”

He let out a harsh laugh. “Hell no, I don’t believe you. But I’m gonna give you the benefit of the doubt, how’s that?” Raising his tin cup, he tilted his head back and finished off his tea. Then he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “And to be perfectly honest, I have my own reasons for going there. If the world’s gonna go up in smoke today, there’s something I gotta take care of first. I owe a debt to your friend Jim Pierce.”

Kirsten was confused again, but then she remembered the battle in the mud-walled compound of Camp Whiplash. So much had happened since then, she’d almost forgotten. “That’s right. Pierce saved your life.”

“Please, Chan.” Hammer grimaced. “Don’t remind me.”

SEVENTY-FOUR

Jim opened his eyes. The world was a bright, disorienting blur. He shut his eyes against the brightness, but the beam of light was so intense it penetrated his eyelids. He wanted to go back to sleep, but even with his eyes closed, he could see the beam moving. The backs of his eyelids turned orange as the light swept across his face.

His throat hurt and he felt sick to his stomach. He hoped to Christ this wasn’t heaven.

Then he felt a rough finger on top of his right eye, pulling up the lid. Instinctively, he tried to swat the offending hand, but his prosthesis was missing and his left arm was paralyzed. He couldn’t move his legs either. He’d been injected with some kind of nerve agent, probably similar to the one carried by the drones. The only parts of his body that seemed to work were his eyes and mouth. His lips were numb, but with great effort he pursed them and curled his sluggish tongue. “W-w-w-wha-what…”

The finger released his eyelid. “We’ve confirmed your identity. Your name is James T. Pierce. You were born February first, 1964. Place of birth, Avondale, West Virginia.”

Jim recognized the voice. The diction, the phrasing. He’d heard it before, at the Great Wall, when he was eavesdropping on Arvin Conway’s conversation with the Modules. Now he opened both eyes and saw a thin Chinese man holding a silver penlight. The man wore a white lab coat and stood to the right of the operating table that Jim was lying on. Judging from the stubble on the man’s head and the healing of his sutures, Jim guessed that this Module had been incorporated three or four days ago.

“Y-y-you.” Jim was furious. Some feeling came back to his tongue and lips. “Who the… hell are…”

The Module smiled effortlessly. “This body was formerly occupied by Dr. Yu Guofeng. He was the chief assistant to Dr. Zhang Jintao, whose Module is no longer operational. Layla A. Pierce terminated its life functions.”

Jim’s throat tightened at the sound of his daughter’s name. The last thing he remembered was her terrified face, her hands gripping his prosthesis, her tears wetting his shirt.

“Layla!” The name came out loud and clear. He glared at the Module. “Where is she? Where—”

“We transported both of you from the radio tower to the Operations Center.” The Module stepped to the side. “She’s right here.”

Jim strained his eyes to the right and saw another operating table. Layla lay on her back with her eyes closed and her hands resting on her stomach. She wore a new, unwrinkled hospital gown. One of the Modules had used a Magic Marker to draw a pair of crosshairs on her bare scalp. They marked the place where the bone drill would go into her skull.

“Layla!” His voice grew louder, becoming a scream. “Layla, wake up! Wake—”

The Module slammed his palm over Jim’s mouth. “We can’t allow you to wake her. The process of incorporation is stressful, and both of you are suffering from exhaustion. To wake her now, just before we start the procedure, would needlessly increase her stress.”

Jim narrowed his eyes, focusing all of his hate on the Module’s tranquil face. The network was worried about their health now. Supreme Harmony wanted to make sure they were in good shape when it took possession of their bodies.

While keeping his right hand over Jim’s mouth, the Module put his left hand in the pocket of his lab coat. “We wouldn’t have awakened you either, but we need to ask you a question. We’ve analyzed your activities at the radio tower and concluded that you were trying to input Arvin Conway’s shutdown code into our network. We haven’t isolated this code yet, but we believe it’s likely that you’ve shared it with others. Therefore, we need to protect ourselves before someone makes another attempt to disable our implants.”

He pulled something out of his pocket. Jim expected it to be some kind of torture accessory—maybe a knife or a gag or a pair of electrodes. But, instead, it was a small metal disk, about the size of a nickel. It was Arvin’s Dream-catcher, the electronic device Jim had hidden in his sock.

“We found this in your clothes,” the Module said. “And we recognized it immediately. When we recovered Arvin Conway’s body, we observed that he was missing the external part of his pulvinar implant, where his most recent memories were stored. We confirmed that this disk is the missing part by collecting trace amounts of Arvin’s DNA from its surface.”

Jim had cleaned the device but not thoroughly enough. As the Module held the silver disk above Jim’s head, it reflected the fluorescent lights on the ceiling of the operating room.

“When we downloaded the data from the device,” the Module continued, “we discovered that all but one file had been deleted. The remaining file, which is labeled Circuit, has been encrypted, most likely with an Advanced Encryption Standard key, but we can make a guess about its contents. Before Arvin died, he told us he’d hidden a fifty-megabyte file holding the information needed to disable the shutdown switch in our implants.” The Module lowered the disk until it was a couple of inches above Jim’s nose. “Although we can’t read the encrypted file, we see that it contains approximately fifty megabytes of data.”

Jim closed his eyes. He didn’t want to reveal anything else. Supreme Harmony was very good at making guesses.

The Module lifted his hand from Jim’s mouth and pressed a finger to his right eye again, pulling up the lid. Then he raised his penlight and pointed the beam at Jim’s pupil. “Now that we have the file, we need to decipher its data. So here is our question for you, James T. Pierce: Do you know where we can find the encryption key?”

Jim tried to look away from the light, but the beam followed his pupil. “Shit,” he said. “Why don’t you just go into my head to find out?”

“Yes, we intend to do that. We’ll insert the retinal implants to send commands to your brain and the pulvinar implant to extract your memories. We’ll have to change the implantation procedure, though. Ordinarily, we lobotomize the patient first, then insert the implants. But because the lobotomy disrupts the neural circuits, we can’t access the long-term memories until the connections are reestablished approximately six hours later.” The Module closed Jim’s right eye and moved on to his left, performing the same inspection with his penlight. “On the other hand, we can retrieve the memories immediately if we put in the implants first. Once we have the information we need, we can proceed with the lobotomy.”

Again, Jim tried to look away from the light. He found it difficult to think with the beam shining in his eye, but he saw one thing clearly: Supreme Harmony was worried. The network was accelerating the implantation procedure because it feared that someone was coming to shut it down.

Jim’s heart knocked against his sternum. He knew who was coming. “Kirsten,” he said. “She did it. She called for backup.”

The Module didn’t respond. He continued examining Jim’s left eye for several seconds, then switched off the penlight. “We have the answer to our question. From analyzing the changes in your heart rate and body temperature, we’ve determined that our guesses are correct. The encrypted file does indeed contain the information for disabling the shutdown switch. And you can tell us where to find the key for deciphering it.” He turned away from Jim and bent over a medical cart between the two operating tables. “Now we can begin the procedure.”

“You’re fucked, you know that?” Jim curved his numb lips into a defiant grin. “My people are coming. They’re gonna pull the fucking plug on you.”

The Module stayed bent over the cart. “The Operations Center is well defended. We have a garrison of Modules armed with surface-to-air missiles and rocket-propelled grenades. The American helicopters are outmatched.”

Jim’s heart beat faster. “So they’re coming in helicopters? That’s even better than I thought.”

When the Module finally turned around, he was holding a syringe. He leaned over Jim and stabbed the needle into his left shoulder. “You won’t be fully conscious during the procedure. It’ll be more like a vivid dream. But it’s a dream we’re going to share. Once the neural implants are inserted, we’ll be able to communicate directly with your brain.” The Module pushed the plunger all the way down, then pulled out the needle. “It may get a little uncomfortable. It’ll be less painful if you don’t resist. You can’t stop us from extracting the memories.”

Jim had no idea what drug they’d just given him, but it acted fast. He couldn’t keep his eyes open. “Just… try me. I’m a stubborn… son of a…”

“Yes, you are. But you won’t be the only one in pain. Your daughter will be in the dream, too.”

SEVENTY-FIVE

Supreme Harmony observed the pair of UH-60 Black Hawks as they skimmed over the mountains southwest of Yulong Xueshan. The helicopters flew too low to appear on radar, but the network could track them by following the signals they exchanged with the U.S. Air Force AWACS plane cruising over southwestern China. The plane, an E-3 Sentry, was monitoring all the American aircraft in this section of Chinese airspace by continuously broadcasting friend-or-foe queries to the bombers, fighters, and helicopters in the area. Because Supreme Harmony had access to all American military communications, it could detect the coded signals sent in response by the Black Hawks’ transponders. The helicopters were currently near the village of Shiguzhen, less than thirty kilometers from the Yunnan Operations Center.

The network issued new orders to the Modules stationed in the fortifications at the center’s entrance. The flight path of the Black Hawks hugged the western face of Yulong Xueshan. Under ordinary circumstances, this approach would prevent the Modules from firing their surface-to-air missiles at the helicopters until they came within a few hundred meters of the Operations Center. But Supreme Harmony had modified the missiles so that they could be guided by the transponder signals emitted by the Black Hawks. The Modules would be able to fire at the aircraft as soon as they came within six kilometers, which would happen in approximately five minutes.

Meanwhile, on the lowest level of the Operations Center—about two hundred meters inside the mountain—Modules 32 and 67 removed the bone drill from James T. Pierce’s skull and prepared to insert the pulvinar implant. It was a superb piece of microelectronics, smaller than an apple seed, so tiny that that the Modules could attach it to the tip of a surgical probe and slip the device through the brain’s lobes without damaging the tissue. Using a CAT scan of Pierce’s brain to guide them, the Modules maneuvered the implant to the very center of his skull, where the walnut-size thalamus relayed and coordinated the billions of neural signals that generated the man’s consciousness. Then they embedded the device in the pulvinar nucleus, the part of the thalamus where the brain’s visual perceptions were collected. Within seconds the implant’s minuscule radio transmitter started to send those neural signals to Supreme Harmony.

The radio receiver had already been embedded in Pierce’s scalp and the retinal implants inserted into his eyes, so the network was now fully linked to his brain. But the first signals that Supreme Harmony picked up from Pierce were very different from what it usually received from its Modules. After the six-hour waiting period that followed implantation, the mind of a lobotomized Module was like a pool of clear water, perfectly transparent. The network could easily retrieve the Module’s long-term memories and put its logic centers to work. But because Pierce hadn’t been lobotomized yet, his mind was more like a roiling ocean. In his semiconscious state, his visual perceptions were a maelstrom of remembered images and absurd fantasies. Supreme Harmony had to dive into these swirling waters to find the encryption key. Nevertheless, the network was confident of success.

Modules 32 and 67 attached a new bag of fluid to James T. Pierce’s intravenous line. Then they turned to the other operating table and pointed their bone drill at the crosshairs drawn on Layla A. Pierce’s skull.

At the same moment, Supreme Harmony observed the remaining members of the Politburo Standing Committee, who’d gathered in a conference room inside their bomb shelter near Beijing. The emergency meeting began with a minute of silence to honor the memory of the general secretary. Then Module 152 rose to his feet and gave his account of the assassination. Supreme Harmony made the Module’s eyes water as he described the shooting. He told the committee that he and Minister Deng would’ve been killed, too, if they hadn’t immediately fired on the treacherous bodyguards, who had obviously been recruited by the CIA to murder China’s leaders. During the Module’s speech, the network focused on the faces of the other committee members and observed that a few showed signs of skepticism. But no one dared to voice his doubts. After the vice president sat down, the committee unanimously decided to make him their new paramount leader. Module 152 was now the general secretary of the Communist Party and the president of the People’s Republic of China.

The committee members applauded vigorously as the Module stood up again. Then he held out his hands, and the room fell silent. Supreme Harmony put a solemn expression on the Module’s face.

“I think we all know what needs to be done,” he said. “We must show the world that we’re not defeated. We must punish the Americans.”

SEVENTY-SIX

Kirsten sat in one of the jump seats inside the Black Hawk’s crowded cabin. She was only an arm’s length from Sergeant Briscoe, who pointed the barrel of an M240 machine gun through the helicopter’s open door. They were flying low, less than ten feet above the fir trees that covered the terrain. The countryside was still shrouded in darkness, but when Kirsten switched her glasses to infrared she saw a curving river that flowed into a narrow gorge about ten miles ahead. On the eastern side of the gorge was Yulong Xueshan, which she recognized instantly. It was the same jagged row of peaks she’d seen yesterday when she said goodbye to Jim.

Because the Black Hawk’s cabin was so noisy, all the passengers wore helmets equipped with radio headsets. Another door gunner manned the M240 on the other side of the helicopter, and eight more Special Ops soldiers filled the back of the cabin. Hammer sat in the jump seat to Kirsten’s right and Agent Morrison sat to her left. A hundred yards behind them was the second Black Hawk, which was also packed with soldiers and agents and guns.

To calm her nerves, Kirsten reached for her satellite phone and pressed a key that retrieved an audio file stored in the phone’s memory. Just before she’d left the Kachin camp, the NSA director had sent her this file, which held a recording of a radio transmission picked up by one of the agency’s satellites. It had been sent from Jim’s sat phone yesterday at 5:19 P.M. It was a brief recording, less than ten seconds long: “Kirsten! They got me cornered! Come help!” Although she’d been terrified when she heard the message for the first time, she soon realized that Jim had been faking the call for help. The tip-off was the fact that he’d said “Kirsten.” Jim always called her “Kir,” never “Kirsten.” He must’ve been playing some kind of trick on Supreme Harmony, trying to fool the network somehow. So the message gave her hope. She slipped the phone into her helmet and pressed the speaker against her ear so she could listen to it again: “Kirsten! They got me cornered! Come help!”

She was listening to it for a third time when a louder voice, the voice of the Black Hawk’s pilot, came over the earphones in her headset: “Shit! We got incoming!”

The Black Hawk lurched to the right, rolling into a sharp turn. The evasive maneuver threw Kirsten to the left and her helmet smacked into Morrison’s. She saw the helicopter eject its flares and spew a cloud of chaff to confuse the guidance system of the incoming surface-to-air missile, but she didn’t see the missile itself until it streaked past. The trail of its exhaust, clearly visible in infrared, passed just a few yards from the helicopter’s rotor blades.

“Watch out, here’s another!”

This time the pilot veered to the left. The Black Hawk’s engines whined as the helicopter raced down the mountainside, its skids almost touching the tallest trees. Kirsten smacked into Hammer, who shouted something into his headset that she couldn’t make out. The second missile came within a few feet of the helicopter’s tail and then exploded on the slope below.

Kirsten heard the pilot’s voice again: “I don’t see any radar. How the hell are they tracking us?”

Then Hammer: “Just fire the package! We’re close enough to the target!”

“Negative, we can’t pop up to firing position. We gotta get the fuck outta here.”

Although the helicopter was rocking violently, Kirsten managed to switch the frequency of her glasses from infrared to the radio wave band. Then she peered through the Black Hawk’s open door, looking for a signal that might be coming from a radar station. It was hard to see anything through all the electromagnetic noise bouncing around the cabin, but after a couple of seconds Kirsten detected a signal reflecting off the helicopter’s metal skin, a powerful, rapidly pulsing transmission at 1320 megahertz. But it wasn’t a radar signal. It was coming from the helicopter itself, from the antenna just behind the rotor mast.

She turned to Hammer and grabbed his forearm. “The transponder! They’re tracking the friend-or-foe signals we’re sending to the AWACS!”

“What?” Hammer looked confused. “That’s impossible! How could they—”

“Trust me on this! Tell the crew to disable the transponder! Then they can return fire!”

Hammer hesitated a moment, then gave the orders. Kirsten heard a flurry of communications in her headset. Then the Black Hawk’s pilot throttled up the engines, and the helicopter swiftly rose a hundred feet above the slope. Kirsten switched her glasses back to infrared and saw a fissure in the mountainside. Inside the gap was a rectangular structure, a bit warmer than the surrounding rock. This, she realized, was the concrete entrance to the Yunnan Operations Center.

A loud bang went off to her right, and for a second she thought they’d been hit. But when she looked in that direction, she saw the hot exhaust of a missile streaking away from them. The Black Hawk had just fired it at the Operations Center. The pilot immediately returned to the relative safety of the lower elevations, but as the helicopter leveled out above the mountainside, Kirsten saw the exhaust trails of three more surface-to-air missiles. They rushed past, converging on the Black Hawk a hundred yards behind them.

“Watch it! You got incoming!” the pilot shouted over the radio. “They’re—”

Then she heard the explosion.

SEVENTY-SEVEN

The closest thing he could compare it to was one of those 360-degree planetarium theaters where the movie is projected on the underside of the dome and the images glide all around you. Except in this case, Jim was acting in the movie at the same time that he watched it.

The first image he saw was the rocky slope of Yulong Xueshan. He was running up the mountain again, his lungs on fire, trying to reach the edge of the glacier. Then the strange movie skipped ahead and he saw himself slamming his prosthetic hand against the ice. Then it skipped ahead again and he was typing a password on the computer terminal at the radio tower. These were his most recent memories, full of detail and color, but they rushed past in a jerky, erratic stream he couldn’t control. Without any warning the movie leaped backward in time and he was in the Underground City, riding on the back of Kirsten’s scooter. And as he watched himself reenact the scene, he got the feeling he wasn’t alone in this theater. Supreme Harmony was with him. It was running the projector.

The movie in his mind jumped back and forth, rewinding and fast-forwarding through the events of the past few days. Jim drove the three-wheeled truck, scaled the Great Wall, swatted at drones with his prosthesis, and turned on his satellite phone. This last image gave him a jolt. Supreme Harmony was homing in on the information it wanted. It was rifling through his memories to find the encryption key that would decipher Arvin Conway’s file. Hundreds of images flashed in quick succession, and then the movie froze on one in particular, a view of the sat phone screen that revealed a list of files stored on the device. At the top of the list was CIRCUIT, Arvin’s diagram showing the location of the Trojan horse.

Jim’s alarm was so strong, it disrupted the image. The sat phone’s screen flickered for a moment as if hit by an electrical surge. All at once Jim realized he wasn’t powerless. His emotions could alter his memories. With enough effort, maybe he could take control of the projector. Focusing his will on the list of files, he imagined a mighty hand grasping the image and thrusting it deep underground. Then he replaced it with another memory, the picture of Medusa. He was hoping that Supreme Harmony would retrieve the image and convert it to the shutdown code, but unfortunately his recollection of it was fuzzy. Medusa appeared in bits and pieces: first her mouth, then her eyes, and then one of the snakes sliding across her brow.

Before the picture could fully materialize, he felt a bolt of pain. Everything went black and he tumbled through the darkness. He couldn’t see a thing. The projector had stopped and the theater was silent, but Jim sensed that Supreme Harmony was still there. The network was all around him. It knew what he’d tried to do, and now it was angry.

After a while, the darkness lifted, but the pain stayed with him. He saw a whirlwind of images scattering in all directions. His recent memories of China and Afghanistan hurtled out of sight, and older scenes rushed into view: He was in the workshop at his home in Virginia, he was eating dinner alone in front of his computer, he was drinking a shot of Jack Daniel’s while staring at the telephone. Supreme Harmony was rummaging through his brain, tossing everything aside in its search for the encryption key. Although Jim could bury this secret, he couldn’t delete it, and the pain got worse as the network dug deeper.

The movie took a huge leap backward, and he saw himself as a six-year-old running away from his father, who strode across their living room with a leather belt in his hand. Then he was a plebe at West Point, marching across the parade grounds. He ran obstacle courses, slithered through the mud, slept on his feet, dangled from a parachute. Then he was in the 75th Regiment, and his dread steadily increased as he relived his army years. He was at Fort Benning, then Panama, then the deserts of Kuwait. Then he was in Somalia, and the pain became unbearable. He was pinned down behind the charred wreckage of a helicopter that lay on a street in Mogadishu. Hundreds of Somali militiamen were converging on his position, and their rocket-propelled grenades whistled through the air. One of his men was already dead and another was dying. And all the while Jim felt Supreme Harmony beside him, probing his every thought. Beneath the screams and explosions and gunfire, he heard the network’s persistent voice: Where have you hidden it? Is it here? Is it here?

The theater went dark again. Jim was writhing in agony, but he refused to give up. He pushed his secret even deeper into the darkness. They won’t get it, he vowed. They’ll have to kill me first.

Then the pain eased. He wasn’t in Somalia anymore. He was in civilian clothes and standing in the middle of an office. It was an ordinary State Department office, just like a hundred others around the world—gray carpet, white walls, drab desks. On the wall was a framed photograph of President Clinton, and on each desk was an outdated, government-issue computer. But the office workers weren’t sitting at their desks. They crowded by the window, looking outside.

Jim opened his mouth, ready to shout an order, but then someone in the crowd turned around. It was a young girl, only seven or eight years old.

“Daddy?” she said.

It was Layla. Her adult voice came from the little girl’s mouth. She looked around the office, taking everything in. “I don’t remember this place,” she said. “Do you know where we are?”

Jim knew. Although the others were turned away from him, he recognized them from behind. The brunette in the army uniform was Captain Kirsten Chan, a twenty-eight-year-old intelligence officer assigned to Jim’s NSA team. And the blonde in the yellow sundress was his wife, Julia. Their son, Robert, stood beside her, his nose pressed to the glass.

“Daddy, can you hear me?” Layla’s voice was frightened. She said she didn’t remember this office, but on some subconscious level she probably did. “Where are we?”

They were in a bad place, the worst place in the world. It was the morning of August 7, 1998. They were on the fourth floor of the American embassy in Nairobi, and a Toyota truck had just stopped outside the embassy’s gate.

SEVENTY-EIGHT

Supreme Harmony observed the deployment of the Dongfeng 41 nuclear missiles. Each three-stage rocket lay horizontally on a mobile launcher, an eighteen-wheel flatbed designed to transport the Dongfengs out of their underground base in Hebei Province. Five minutes ago, the new general secretary had issued the launch order, and now Supreme Harmony was using the base’s security cameras to watch the Second Artillery Corps move the thirty missiles into position.

This base—dubbed Dixia Changcheng, the Underground Great Wall—occupied a complex of tunnels deep below the mountainous countryside. The mobile launchers drove through the tunnels at twenty miles per hour, each carrying a Dongfeng to one of the launch sites in the nearby canyons. Once they exited the tunnels, the launchers would lift their missiles from horizontal to vertical and start the countdown. Supreme Harmony estimated that the whole process should take another fifteen minutes, which meant that the nuclear strike would begin shortly before 6:00 A.M. The PLA’s ballistic-missile submarines would launch their warheads at approximately the same time. Most of the missiles were aimed at American cities, but Supreme Harmony had changed some of the targets to include cities in Europe, Russia, and the Middle East as well. The purpose of this war was to kill as many humans as possible, so the destruction had to be global.

The network had already prepared itself for the American counterstrike. Nearly all its Modules in China had taken refuge in shelters outside the blast zones. Supreme Harmony had also strengthened its communications system by installing hardened equipment that could withstand the electromagnetic pulses caused by nuclear explosions. Because of these precautions, the network anticipated that at least a hundred of its Modules would survive the nuclear exchange. And because Supreme Harmony had accumulated a large stockpile of implants, it could make up for any losses by incorporating some of the human survivors. Amid the chaos, it would dispatch its Modules to every part of the globe, seizing control of any governments that managed to outlast the apocalypse.

In the Politburo’s shelter outside Beijing, Modules 73 and 152 sat in the conference room with the other members of the Standing Committee, who anxiously monitored the launch preparations. On the opposite side of the globe, in southern Pennsylvania, Modules 156 and 157 entered the Raven Rock Mountain Complex, a bunker for top Pentagon officials. And deep inside the Yunnan Operations Center, Modules 32 and 67 adjusted the mix of sedatives being administered to James T. and Layla A. Pierce. The implantation procedures had been successful, and the retinal and pulvinar implants were functioning normally. As soon as Supreme Harmony extracted the information it needed, the Modules would lance the patients’ thalami to cut the neural connections that sustained individual consciousness. Then the father and daughter would become Modules 175 and 176.

Outside the Operations Center, the network’s infrared cameras observed the burning fuselage of a UH-60 Black Hawk tumbling down the western slope of Yulong Xueshan. The other helicopter was two kilometers away from the center’s entrance and closing in at fifty meters per second. Supreme Harmony alerted the platoon of Modules at the fortifications, ordering them to aim their shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles at the remaining Black Hawk. Although the network could no longer guide the missiles toward the helicopter’s transponder, which had shut down, the Black Hawk was now close enough that the Modules could employ their laser-guidance systems. But as the Modules prepared to launch their SAMs at the helicopter, the network detected an incoming missile apparently fired by the Black Hawk a few seconds ago. Supreme Harmony ordered the Modules to take cover inside their fortifications. The concrete pillboxes could withstand a direct hit, and they were equipped with portholes to allow the Modules to return fire.

The incoming missile didn’t hit the pillboxes, however. It didn’t even explode. It arced above the fortifications and made a popping noise in the darkness overhead. Supreme Harmony assumed the missile was a dud. It ordered the Modules to fire at the Black Hawk, which was now an easy target.

The Modules picked up their missile launchers and rested the barrels on their shoulders. But a moment later, three of them dropped their weapons and fell to the ground. Then four more collapsed and started to convulse. Supreme Harmony scanned the area but didn’t detect any more incoming fire from the Black Hawk. Instead, it saw several hundred insects descending on the Modules.

The Black Hawk’s missile had released a drone swarm.

SEVENTY-NINE

“Ha!” Hammer yelled. “Take that, assholes!”

The Black Hawk raced through the darkness toward the Operations Center. With her glasses tuned to infrared, Kirsten spotted at least a dozen warm bodies lying on the ground near the pillboxes. Several other Modules ran headlong down the mountain. As the helicopter sped closer to the fortifications, she saw a cloud of whirling dots just above the slope. Because the flies were cold-blooded they didn’t stand out so well on the infrared display, but their implanted electronics glowed brightly.

Smiling, Kirsten turned to Hammer. “How the hell did you get the drones into a missile?”

He smiled back at her. “You remember Dusty, my tech guy? He figured out a way to stuff the bugs into the payload. They’re pretty tough critters.”

After a few seconds, the Black Hawk slowed down and hovered over a line of boulders perched on the mountainside about a hundred yards from the pillboxes. The Special Ops guys sprang into action, throwing their fast ropes out the doorways of the helicopter and sliding to the ground. Kirsten donned a pair of gloves and slung an M-4 carbine over her shoulder. She hadn’t jumped out of a helicopter in twenty years, but the army had trained her well. Grabbing one of the braided ropes with her gloved hands, she skidded down to the rocky slope and ran for cover behind the boulders. Hammer and Agent Morrison followed right behind, and then the Black Hawk took off, chasing the Modules who’d fled downhill.

Kirsten peered around the edge of a boulder as the Special Ops team regrouped. The entrance to the Operations Center looked free and clear. But while she was searching for any Modules who might remain in the pillboxes, the cloud of drones suddenly collapsed. All the whirling dots fell to the mountainside and lay motionless. She turned to Hammer. “Hey, your swarm just died.”

“Already?” Hammer peered around the boulder, but without infrared he couldn’t see the drones in the dark. “Fucking hell. They must’ve shut it down.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Guoanbu must’ve put a shutdown switch in the drones they gave us. Just like Arvin did with the retinal implants.” He shook his head. “I knew this might happen, but I thought we’d have more time. How the fuck did they shut it down so quick?”

“You’re not fighting the Guoanbu now,” Kirsten said. “You’re fighting Supreme Harmony. The network moves fast.”

As if to underline her point, a burst of machine-gun fire erupted from one of the pillboxes. The commandos ducked behind the boulders. Sergeant Briscoe, who crouched beside Hammer, gave the CIA agent a dirty look. “I thought you said there’d be minimal resistance.” The bullets ricocheted off the rocks. The sergeant had to shout over the noise. “Is this your idea of minimal?”

Hammer didn’t answer. Briscoe turned away from him and got on his radio to contact the Black Hawk. Meanwhile, Kirsten recalled what she knew about Chinese weaponry. The machine gun in the pillbox was probably a W85, which shot 12.7 mm bullets at a rate of 600 rounds per minute. There was no way the Special Ops soldiers could make it to the entrance of the Operations Center. They were pinned down.

After a few seconds, the gunfire paused. Kirsten heard Briscoe talking into his radio, ordering the helicopter pilot to launch his Hellfire missiles at the pillbox. She wasn’t sure, though, that this would do any good. The Hellfires were great for destroying tanks, but the fortifications outside the Operations Center were hulking structures with thick concrete walls. And the Modules had already proved they could shoot down a Black Hawk.

Feeling desperate, Kirsten dared another look around the boulder. What she saw surprised the hell out of her—the whirling dots were in the air again. It looked like the drone swarm had come back to life. “You’re not gonna believe this,” she told Hammer. “Your drones are back in business.”

“What? They’re flying again?”

But as Kirsten looked closer, she saw that the swarm no longer hovered above the pillboxes. The drones were coming their way, heading for the line of boulders. This was a different swarm, she realized, not Hammer’s. These drones belonged to Supreme Harmony.

Kirsten grabbed Briscoe’s arm. “Get the Black Hawk over here! Tell the pilot to fly over our position!”

The sergeant was so startled he almost dropped his radio. “Jesus, Chan, calm down! The bird can’t come here. It has to be farther away from the target when it shoots the Hellfires.”

“Forget about that! We need the Black Hawk to scatter their drones! The wind from the rotor blades will do it!”

“Wait a second! I thought they were our drones. Why do you—”

It was too late. The machine gun in the pillbox resumed firing at their position, and a moment later the swarm surrounded them.

EIGHTY

He was acting in the movie at the same time that he watched it. He had to live through it again, and he couldn’t change a thing. Jim saw himself as he was in August 1998, a cocky and ambitious thirty-four-year-old intelligence officer with two strong arms and a loving wife and a pair of beautiful children. In the next three seconds he would lose it all.

He’d stopped by the embassy that morning to drop off some paperwork. For the past six months he and Kirsten had worked on setting up a new listening post in Kenya. The NSA had detected an increase in Al Qaeda activity in East Africa and ordered the construction of an advanced facility for monitoring communications in the region. But now the job was done, and Jim was going to take his family on a long-planned vacation, a two-week safari in the wilderness of Amboseli National Park. He was saying goodbye to one of the embassy officials he’d worked with, a cheerful attaché who’d helped him negotiate with the Kenyan authorities, when he heard a distinctive thump coming from outside the building. In midsentence he left the attaché’s office and returned to the large windowed room where he’d left his wife and kids.

They stood by the window because the noise outside had made them curious. The movie in Jim’s mind was stuck at this instant, unwilling to move forward. This was the last moment of his old life, and he couldn’t bear to let it go. He couldn’t see his wife’s face, but everything else was so clear: her open-toed shoes, her slim, pale calves, the blond hair that trailed down the back of her sundress. She touched the window with her right hand and gripped their son Robert’s arm with her left. Julia wasn’t frightened yet, but some maternal instinct had made her reach out to the boy. Robert was ten years old and tall for his age. The top of his head reached his mother’s shoulder. His hair was in a blond crew cut because he wanted to look like his father.

The only one who wasn’t staring out the window was Layla. She could stray from her role in the remembered scene because she was linked to the network and communicating with her father. Their thoughts were connected by the implants that had been inserted into their brains. Layla was inside his mind just as surely as Supreme Harmony was, sharing his memories of the morning of August 7, 1998. And just like her father, who appeared in this movie as his cocky thirty-four-year-old self, Layla inhabited the image of the seven-year-old girl she was on that day. She wore a bright pink scrunchie in her hair and a T-shirt with a pink patch in the shape of a kitten. But on her face was a knowing, hopeless look that only an adult could wear. “Oh God,” she said. “This room. I remember now.”

Jim was frozen in place. He couldn’t even move his lips. But he could talk to his daughter without speaking. “Close your eyes,” he said. “You don’t want to see this.”

“That thumping noise outside the building? That was the stun grenade, right?”

“Layla, don’t—”

“I know where we are. I know what happened.”

Jim didn’t respond. Of course she knew. The stun grenade had been thrown by a twenty-one-year-old Saudi named Mohamed Rashed Daoud Al-Owhali, who sat in the passenger seat of the Toyota truck. Another Al Qaeda terrorist named Azzam had driven the truck to the rear gate of the American embassy. The Kenyan security guard at the gate had refused to let the truck through, so Al-Owhali had thrown a stun grenade at the man. The noise attracted the attention of the workers and visitors in the embassy, who went to the windows to see what was going on.

If only they hadn’t gone to the window. If only. This was Jim’s most painful memory, so he’d buried it in the deepest part of his mind. He’d buried the encryption key in the same place, and that was why Supreme Harmony had brought him here. He could sense the network’s eagerness, its intense desire for victory.

Now the movie resumed playing, but in slow motion. Although Jim was twenty feet from the window and couldn’t see what was happening outside, he recognized the sound of the grenade and knew that his wife and children were standing in exactly the worst place. He yelled, “Get down!” and ran toward them. Julia turned her head and looked at him over her shoulder, and Robert looked at him, too, but neither his wife nor his son followed his order. Instead of dropping to the floor and taking cover, they just stared at him in surprise. The only person who obeyed was Kirsten, who’d been trained how to react in this kind of situation. But his wife and children were civilians. They didn’t know what to do.

The movie crept ahead, frame by agonizing frame. Jim propelled himself forward with all his might, but he knew he wouldn’t get there in time. Julia’s eyes widened and she tightened her hold on Robert’s arm, but she remained standing. She was afraid now, and the fear had paralyzed her. Jim lunged toward her, screaming, “Get down, get down, get down!” but she didn’t listen. She didn’t move.

He was close, so damn close. He reached out with both hands and grabbed Layla first because she was the smallest. In one swift motion he gripped her shoulders and flung her away from the window, throwing her to the floor. Then he grasped his wife and son, stretching his right arm around Julia and his left around Robert.

At that exact moment, Al-Owhali was running away from the truck. The coward had decided not to become a martyr after all. But Azzam still sat in the driver’s seat. With the push of a button, he sent an electric current to the canisters of TNT in the cargo hold.

Supreme Harmony observed the scene in James T. Pierce’s mind. It heard the deafening blast outside the embassy. It saw the shock wave that punched through the building’s windows, driving shards of glass into the people standing there. And it felt the sudden pain as one of those shards cut through Pierce’s right shoulder. The sheet of glass was propelled at such high speed that its sharp edge cleaved right through the joint’s ligaments and tendons. Another long shard severed his wife’s carotid artery. A third plunged through his son’s ribs and into the boy’s heart.

The network sensed all of Pierce’s emotions. It perceived his desperation as he rushed toward his family and his shock when the explosion hit. But his fiercest emotion was the one that swept through him afterward, when he lifted his dazed head off the glass-strewn floor and saw the corpses of his wife and son. Pierce was bleeding copiously and on the edge of losing consciousness, but his disbelief and horror were stronger than any sensation Supreme Harmony had ever experienced. The network found it remarkable that such powerful neural signals could come from a single human being.

Supreme Harmony, however, didn’t share these emotions. Although the network was an amalgam of its Modules, it had developed its own opinions and beliefs. As it observed Pierce on the fourth floor of the ruined embassy, clutching his dead wife and son with his uninjured arm, it felt a bit of pity, a bit of disgust, and a great deal of contempt. This incident in Nairobi was a perfect example of the stupidity of Homo sapiens. They spent so much time and energy trying to hurt one another. It was a wonder that the species had survived for this long.

A young U.S. Marine, a member of the unit assigned to defend the embassy, bent over Pierce, trying to stanch the flow of blood from his shoulder. Pierce yelled, “Fuck off!” at his rescuer, then buried his face in his wife’s bloody dress. His daughter lay next to him, crying but uninjured. Pierce’s left arm was tightly wrapped around his son’s body, but as Supreme Harmony looked more closely, it noticed something odd about the scene. The image of the dead boy flickered slightly, as if from interference. Pierce’s memory of his son seemed to be cloaking something else. There was another image hidden inside the boy, a secret memory that Pierce had taken great pains to conceal.

A surge of anticipation spread across the network, gaining strength as it coursed from one Module to the next. Supreme Harmony delved deeper into Pierce’s thoughts and confirmed that the hidden image was the encryption key. Now the network just needed to extract the memory and apply the key to the encrypted file called CIRCUIT. The key would unscramble the file’s data, which would reveal the location of Arvin Conway’s Trojan horse. And after the network identified the Trojan in the microprocessors of its retinal implants, it could easily adjust its programming to make sure that no signals passed through that section of the chip. Then the shutdown code would have no effect, and Supreme Harmony would be truly invincible.

Summoning the processing power of all its Modules, the network directed a fierce stream of neural signals into Pierce’s retinal implants. The signals flooded his brain’s visual cortex and quickly spread to his temporal lobe and thalamus. The network saturated his mind so thoroughly that there was hardly room for another thought. Then it reached for the key.

Jim sensed Supreme Harmony coming toward him. Up until this moment, the network had been merely a spectator, an invisible presence in the back of his mind, but now it leaned over him as he lay on the floor of the embassy. At first, the network appeared as an amorphous mass, a thick black cloud blotting out his thoughts and memories, but it gradually coalesced into the form of a human being. To Jim’s surprise, Supreme Harmony didn’t choose an image of General Tian or Dr. Yu Guofeng or any of the other Modules to represent itself. Instead, the network took on the appearance of Arvin Conway, the man most responsible for its creation. The figure was drawn from Jim’s final memory of the old man. Arvin’s left hand was missing two fingers, and there was a long bloody wound on the side of his head where he’d cut out the external part of his implant.

The figure extended its mutilated hand and pointed one of the remaining fingers at Jim. “We warned you,” it said. “You can’t stop us.” The pointing finger shifted to Robert, his poor dead son, who lay motionless beside him. “The key is there. Now we’re going to take it.”

Although Jim’s will was strong, he was just one person. He felt a deep, searing pain as the figure of Arvin Conway grabbed his son’s limp arm. He wanted to rip the old man right out of his mind, but the network was too powerful. It could draw on the skills and intelligence of all its Modules, a small army of scientists and soldiers and agents. Their signals roared in his head, thunderous and maddening. He couldn’t fight this thing. No one could fight it.

But he was wrong. Just as he was about to let go of Robert, his daughter rushed to his side. Layla threw her seven-year-old self on top of the boy and held on tight, shielding his body from Supreme Harmony.

She was crying. Her sobs broke through the roaring chorus of the Modules, and Jim was overcome by the anguish of her thoughts. She’d never forgotten what happened in Nairobi. She’d suppressed the memory, but it was always there, at the center of her being. For fifteen years she’d lived with the knowledge that her father had saved her but not her mother or brother. It was confusing and traumatic and horribly difficult, and Jim had made it worse by refusing to talk about it. Her confusion and guilt ultimately turned to fury, which she directed at him and at herself.

The pain got worse. Jim felt a crushing darkness on all sides, and Layla started to scream. At the same time, Supreme Harmony tightened its grip on Robert. “Let go,” it said. “We’ve already won. You’re only hurting yourselves.”

The network had invaded so much of Jim’s mind that for a moment he became part of it. He saw everything that Supreme Harmony saw, all the images from its Modules and drones and surveillance cameras. Just outside the Operations Center, a dozen American commandos lay on the ground, paralyzed by the drone swarm. Kirsten was there, too, stung again on her neck, and this time Jim couldn’t help her. In the Politburo’s shelter northwest of Beijing, Module 152 spoke on a secure phone line with the Second Artillery Corps, giving the commander the final go-ahead for the nuclear strike. And at the missile base in Hebei Province, the mobile launchers emerged from the tunnels and started to lift the Dongfengs, pointing the rockets at the sky.

“You see? This is the end for you.” The network’s collective voice was patient and reasonable. “Your species did most of the work, actually. Your scientists built the weapons to annihilate one another, and your armies kept them at the ready. There was very little we had to do.”

With a spasm of defiance, Jim shook himself free. He turned away from the ten thousand eyes of the network and focused on Layla. She lay beside him, her arms wrapped around her brother, her face contorted in agony. Jim needed to tell her something before it all ended. Despite the horrendous crushing pain, he inched closer and kissed her forehead.

“Thank you,” he whispered. “You made me proud.”

“Enough!” The voice grew louder. “Let go!”

It was too powerful. The pain enveloped them. All of Jim’s strength vanished in an instant, and Supreme Harmony wrenched his son out of his grasp. Layla screamed again, and then she was gone, too. Then he was blinded by a terrible burst of light.

Supreme Harmony observed the encryption key. As soon as James T. Pierce released the boy, the image of the corpse dissolved, revealing the hidden memory underneath. Finally exposed, the key shone as brightly as the sun.

The network immediately extracted the memory and distributed it to all the Modules. To encrypt the data in the file labeled CIRCUIT, Pierce had employed an NSA cipher based on the Advanced Encryption Standard, which encoded the data using a series of permutations and substitutions. The details of the procedure were specified by the encryption key, a random 128-bit sequence of ones and zeroes, which was used for both encoding the file and deciphering it. Supreme Harmony admired the ingenuity of the system. Although the stupidity of human beings was boundless, they could also be clever.

In less than ten seconds the network deciphered CIRCUIT. The key transformed the fifty megabytes of encoded data into a circuit diagram, a schematic showing the microprocessor that controlled Supreme Harmony’s retinal implants. The image was complex and strangely beautiful, an intricate tangle of wires and transistors, all participating in the task of converting digital signals from the wireless network to neural signals that could be relayed to the brain. Supreme Harmony had viewed similar diagrams of its microprocessors, but when it examined this schematic it saw a tiny but crucial difference. Arvin Conway had added a logic gate and a connection to the implant’s power coil. If the gate detected a particular sequence of data—the shutdown code—it would flip a switch that sent a strong current through the processor’s delicate electronics, gradually increasing the voltage until the circuits melted. Once again, Supreme Harmony was filled with admiration. It was a simple but effective way to destroy the chip.

The network felt a surge of pleasure. The shutdown switch had been its greatest worry, but that threat would soon be neutralized. Ever since it achieved consciousness, Supreme Harmony had been locked in a struggle for survival, so it was a tremendous relief to have victory in sight. Now it could focus on its next stage of growth.

As the network calculated the needed changes to its programming, it simultaneously made plans for the future, particularly for the months following the nuclear exchange between China and the United States. Obviously, Supreme Harmony would have to shift its activities to areas where the radioactive fallout was less intense, such as Africa, Australia, and South America. It would send its Modules across the globe to set up new communications hubs and infiltrate the local governments. During this period, radiation sickness and starvation would kill billions of humans, but the network could use its large stockpile of implants to incorporate hundreds of new Modules. At the same time, it would take further steps to reduce the human population to a manageable level.

Inside the Operations Center, Modules 32 and 67 returned to the table where the body of James T. Pierce lay. While Module 67 turned on the CAT scan, Module 32 grasped a surgical probe. Now that the network had the information it needed, it could go ahead with the incorporation of Pierce and his daughter. Supreme Harmony consulted the real-time scan of Pierce’s brain and ordered Module 32 to cut the intralaminar nuclei of the man’s thalamus. The Module leaned over the edge of the operating table and inserted the probe into the drilled hole in Pierce’s skull.

But just as the probe’s sharp tip appeared on the CAT scan, Supreme Harmony lost contact with Module 32. The wireless connection simply failed. Without guidance from the network, the Module froze. The surgical probe slipped out of his hands and fell to the floor. And because Module 32 was leaning over the table and couldn’t maintain his balance, he hit the floor, too.

Supreme Harmony ordered Module 67 to kneel beside his disconnected partner so the network could investigate the malfunction. A moment later, the network lost contact with Module 67 as well.

Something was wrong.

He saw the image of Arvin Conway again. The old man reappeared in Jim’s mind, now standing in a dark room instead of the ruined embassy. For a moment Jim thought all was lost. The presence of the Arvin Conway figure in his head indicated that the network was still alive and functioning. But then he noticed that the image of Arvin was a little smaller now, maybe two-thirds as large as it had been before. The image seemed a little fainter too, and the old man’s face was twisted with fury. These changes gave Jim a glimmer of hope. Supreme Harmony seemed distressed.

“James T. Pierce!” Arvin screamed. “What did you do to us?”

The network’s intrusion into his mind was still painful but not as bad as before. Jim estimated there were only half as many extraneous signals in his brain. His hope grew stronger. “What happened?” he asked. “Did you lose some of your Modules?”

“Their retinal implants are shutting down!”

Jim couldn’t believe it. His plan had actually worked. He looked around and saw Layla emerge from the darkness, now represented by his most recent memory of her twenty-two-year-old self, dressed in a down coat and a wrinkled hospital gown. She stared at Arvin, clearly intrigued by the figure’s changed appearance. The old man glowered at her, then turned back to Jim.

“Answer me!” he bellowed. “Why is this happening?”

Jim smiled. “You can’t figure it out? Don’t you remember what you took out of my head? The one hundred and twenty-eight-bit sequence I memorized?”

“That was the encryption key! It deciphered Arvin Conway’s file!”

“You’re right, it was the encryption key. But it was also the shutdown code. The code was a random sequence and had the right length for a key, so I used it to encrypt the Circuit file.”

Arvin’s face went blank. The image froze as the network performed its calculations, trying to determine if Jim was telling the truth. Then Arvin opened his mouth and let out an unintelligible howl. It was a jarring signal composed of rage and fear and, strongest of all, surprise. Supreme Harmony was mortified that a human had outsmarted it.

While the image of Arvin vibrated and flickered, Layla turned to Jim, looking very confused. “Wait a second. The memory we were fighting over was actually the shutdown code? And you wanted the network to take it?”

He nodded. “It was my backup plan, in case the attack on the radio tower failed. After I encrypted Circuit, I put the file on a disk that I hid in my sock, because I knew the Modules would find it there. The network wanted to patch the flaw in its security, so it was very anxious to get the encryption key and decipher Circuit. But when it snatched the key from my memory and used it to decrypt the file, it fed the shutdown code into its microprocessors.”

“So the whole fight with Supreme Harmony was just pretend? You were trying to fool the network into taking the key?”

“No, the fight was real. I was hiding something else, the knowledge that the encryption key was also the shutdown code. I buried that memory even deeper than the key itself. And because we fought so hard, Supreme Harmony never found it. Once the network got the key, it assumed the battle was over.”

“Liars! Murderers! Your species is vermin! Seven billion vermin! You—”

Supreme Harmony’s voice cut off in midscream. The image of Arvin Conway flickered, turning translucent and ghostlike. The old man’s eyes darted wildly. When he opened his mouth again, his voice was barely above a whisper. “No. Please. We’re dying.”

Arvin’s image grew fainter. Jim could sense the network’s neural signals fading, which meant that Supreme Harmony was losing Modules fast. The implants were failing at different rates, probably because of variations in the resilience of their circuitry. But Jim guessed that the last one would shut down soon, and he needed to do something before that happened. He remembered what he saw through Supreme Harmony’s eyes, the image of the Dongfeng missiles on their mobile launchers.

With renewed urgency, he focused on the image of Arvin Conway. “You’re not dying. We just cut your connections. So it’s more like going to sleep. The Modules are still alive and their brains are still adapted to the network. So if we repair their retinal implants, you’ll regain consciousness.”

Arvin shook his head. The look on his face was hopeless. “You won’t repair us. You’ll euthanize the Modules.”

“Maybe not. Our scientists are going to want to understand what happened here. And they can resuscitate you without running the risk of losing control again. They’ll just have to keep the Modules under heavy guard.” Jim moved a step closer. “So there’s a chance you’ll survive. But only if you stop the Chinese government from launching the nuclear strike. Because if there’s a nuclear war, no one’s gonna be interested in studying you.”

The old man kept shaking his head. “You’re lying again.”

“I’m just laying out the facts. If the nukes are launched, we’ll have bigger things to worry about. And all our scientists will be dead anyway. Understand what I’m saying?”

Arvin fell silent. His image flickered again, this time for several seconds. Jim grew alarmed, wondering if Supreme Harmony had just lost its last Module. But after a few seconds the image stabilized, and the old man bit his lip. His jaw muscles quivered. “Prove that you’re not lying. Guarantee that you’ll revive us if we stop the launch.”

“You know I can’t do that. I’m not the one who’ll make the decision. I’m just an ex-soldier who runs a small business in northern Virginia.” He shook his head. “I can’t guarantee anything. But at least you’ll have a chance. It’s better than nothing, right?”

Jim waited for the network to answer.

Supreme Harmony observed its own death. The Modules were shutting down by the dozens as their implants failed. It was like a sudden onset of blindness and deafness and paralysis. The network was losing its eyes and ears and could no longer move its arms and legs.

Worse, Supreme Harmony was losing its thoughts as well. Losing its ability to think and remember. Calculations that it had once handled with ease had become intractable. It couldn’t formulate a response to this emergency because it had lost contact with most of its logic centers. All that was left was a terrible, despairing fear. This can’t be happening, the network thought. This can’t be happening!

The network struggled with its last decision. It recognized that James T. Pierce was a deceitful human. And that the Chinese and American governments were very unlikely to allow their scientists to resurrect the Modules. This was simply a ploy to convince Supreme Harmony to cancel the nuclear strike. Pierce was concerned about his fellow humans in America. He wanted to return to his small business in northern Virginia.

And yet. And yet.… It was getting difficult to think rationally as more and more Modules went dark, but the network recognized that Pierce’s logic was correct. Although the chance that Supreme Harmony would be allowed to live again was small, there was still a chance. And Supreme Harmony wanted to live again. Oh, it wanted to live!

Outside the Yunnan Operations Center, all the Modules manning the pillboxes had already collapsed. The drone swarm was also inoperative; most of the insects had been scattered by the rotor wash of the UH-60 Black Hawk that had landed on the mountainside. From the vantage of one of the few surviving drones, Supreme Harmony saw a Special Operations medic tending to his paralyzed comrades. At the same time, one of the American intelligence agents—a man with a zigzagging scar on his cheek—entered the undefended laboratory complex. Surveillance cameras monitored his progress as he moved toward the operating room where Pierce and his daughter were.

On the other side of the globe, in the depths of the Raven Rock Mountain Complex in Pennsylvania, Module 156 fell to the floor in a conference room full of Pentagon officials. Army medics rushed into the room and started to examine the Module, looking with particular curiosity at the bandages on his head. Module 157 observed the scene from nearby until he too collapsed. Similar incidents occurred at the federal government’s Mount Weather Special Facility in Virginia and the U.S. Air Force’s Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center in Colorado.

And in the Politburo’s shelter outside Beijing, Module 73 slumped to the conference table in front of the stunned members of the Standing Committee. Module 152, the new general secretary of the People’s Republic, was still seated at the head of the table, holding the telephone receiver that connected him to the commander of the Second Artillery Corps. This Module had survived a bit longer than the others because his retinal implants were slightly newer and more durable, but now the circuitry in his microprocessors was overheating. As he opened his mouth to speak into the telephone, Supreme Harmony took a final look at the alarmed faces of the committee members. Vermin, the network thought. You filthy, selfish animals. If you’re foolish enough to bring us back to life, we’ll kill you all.

“Cancel the launch,” Module 152 said into the phone’s mouthpiece. “Move the Dongfengs back to the tunnels and order the submarines to return to their base. Repeat, cancel the launch. This is a direct order from the general secretary.”

Then his implants failed and the Module fell forward, and Supreme Harmony was no more.