commands. When the gunshot blasted the electronics in Jim’s Terminator arm, the neural control unit on his shoulder had automatically searched for another prosthesis it could link to. Jim should’ve realized this would happen. He’d designed it that way.
He started yelling as loudly as he could. Yin smiled, obviously enjoying himself, but Jim wasn’t yelling from the pain. He was trying to drown out the noise of the prototype arm, which he was maneuvering behind Yin’s back. He sent a command that turned the wrist joint and pressed the adhesive fingertips to the bench’s surface. Then he bent the elbow, which dragged the upper part of the arm across the wood. Next, he lifted the hand and stretched it toward his supine body, moving it to within five feet of his shoes. Then he pressed the fingers to the bench again and dragged the prosthesis a little closer.
Meanwhile, Yin reached for the tool rack on the wall behind the bench and took down one of the high-speed drills. “It’s time to get serious, Colonel Pierce. If you don’t cooperate now, I’ll start drilling holes in your remaining arm. Three holes for every question you don’t answer. Does that sound fair?”
“Okay, okay! I’ll tell you what you want.”
“Good, let’s make this quick.” Yin selected a quarter-inch bit and inserted it into the drill. “How did your daughter infiltrate Supreme Harmony? Who helped her download those documents from the network?”
“She didn’t need any help. She’s a hacker. She can break into anything.”
Yin looked at him for a few seconds, frowning. Then he sighed. “I warned you. This is going to hurt.” He flicked the drill’s power switch.
Turning to the vise, he looked down at Jim’s left arm. At the same instant Jim maneuvered his prosthetic hand next to his own feet and grabbed the toe of his right shoe. He stretched the arm once more, and the mechanical fingers scrabbled up his right leg, dragging the rest of the prosthesis along. Fortunately, the whirring of the drill was loud enough to cover the noise. As Yin selected a spot on Jim’s forearm and lowered the drill, the fingers reached Jim’s right hip. He grasped it firmly and swung the upper part of the arm toward his shoulder.
At the last moment Yin saw something out of the corner of his eye. He swiveled his head and stared in bewilderment as the prosthesis locked onto Jim’s shoulder. Then Jim pivoted his torso and punched Yin’s chest, extending the knife from his hand at the same time. He aimed for the heart, just as they’d taught him in Ranger school. The blade sank home and Jim gave it a twist.
Yin dropped the drill and clasped both his hands around the prosthesis, but his skewered heart had already stopped pumping. He died before he could comprehend what had happened to him. Jim retracted the blade and the man fell to the floor with the look of bewilderment still on his face.
Breathing hard, Jim used the prosthesis to release his left arm from the vise. Then he untied the wires binding his legs and took out his cell phone to call the police. But before dialing 911 he sat on the edge of the workbench for several seconds, rubbing his left arm and staring at the corpse. Judging from Yin’s accent and skills, Jim could guess who the man worked for. He was an agent for the Guoanbu, China’s Ministry of State Security. Back when Jim worked for the NSA, the Guoanbu was one of his chief adversaries, a ruthlessly efficient intelligence agency that divided its time between spying on the United States and terrorizing dissidents in China. And now it was pursuing his daughter.
TWO
Layla Pierce was dancing at an outdoor concert in the SummerStage amphitheater in Central Park. It was a steamy July evening in New York City and the place was packed. The band was apparently quite popular, although Layla had never heard of them before. Someone had told her the band’s name a few minutes ago, but she’d forgotten it already. She was stoned, so she was having a little trouble with her short-term memory.
Whatever the name, she liked their music. A pair of guitar lines tangoed with each other, repeating the same steps with growing volume and fury. Layla danced with the guitars, trying to match their undulations within her cramped niche in the crowd. Luckily, she was small—five foot even, a hundred and two pounds—so she didn’t need a lot of space. She wore her usual clothes, black pants and a black T-shirt. Her hair was black, too, dyed black and cut short. Her body was boyish—skinny and flat-chested—making her look more like a teenager than a woman of twenty-two. All in all, she was no Miss America, and yet several men and a few women in the crowd tried to dance with her. They smiled and sidled closer and mirrored her movements, but Layla just closed her eyes and turned away. She wasn’t interested in either boys or girls tonight. She was dancing with the guitars.
She knew no one there. Although she’d lived in New York for the past six months, she hadn’t made many friends. The problem was, she didn’t have a real job, or a real home either. Every month or so she moved from one apartment to another, taking nothing with her but a change of clothes and her MacBook Pro. She was one of the most experienced hackers working for InfoLeaks, but the Web site couldn’t afford to pay her, so she lived off the charity of the volunteers who supported the site. They let her sleep on their couches and share their organic food, at least until the novelty wore off. Most of them wanted to talk politics and get her involved in their boycotts and petition drives, but Layla had no interest in that stuff. Her only interest was hacking. She had a weird obsessive hatred of secrecy, and she got an equally weird thrill from breaking into networks and learning things she wasn’t supposed to know.
Layla had started hacking in high school, but it was just a hobby until two years ago. During her sophomore year at MIT she helped InfoLeaks unscramble an encrypted video that showed an American helicopter strafing a crowd of Afghans. She found this assignment more interesting than any of her computer-science courses, so she dropped out of college and joined the InfoLeaks underground. Since then she’d hacked into dozens of networks and downloaded thousands of classified files. She’d targeted the Pentagon, the State Department, the Saudi monarchy, and the Russian Federal Security Service. Her latest job was breaking into a Chinese government network rumored to hold files about the mistreatment of political dissidents. An anonymous source, code-named Dragon Fire, had opened a digital backdoor that gave her access to the network, allowing her to download a batch of encrypted documents. She’d started decrypting them several days ago and finally finished this afternoon, but because the documents were in Mandarin she still didn’t know what they said. So she’d forwarded the files to InfoLeaks, which would find Mandarin-speaking volunteers to translate them.
And now, to celebrate the job’s completion, she was pretending for a few hours that she was a real New Yorker, a young hip woman enjoying an outdoor concert with her young hip friends. She surreptitiously relit her joint and concentrated on the music. The duet of the guitarists turned cacophonous, with loud random notes spilling from the amplifiers. But there was a pattern in the randomness. There was always a pattern. Layla saw the music as a stream of binary code, a long line of zeroes and ones floating over the crowd. It was like an encrypted file, a scrambled mess of data, and it was Layla’s job to decipher it, to make sense of the noise. So she did the same thing she always did when decrypting a document: She hunted for the encryption key, the special sequence that would unscramble the data. And after a few seconds she saw it: a string of exactly 128 ones and zeroes, floating in the air right beside the music. The key specified the algorithm that would unlock the code, converting the hideous nonsense into beautiful, readable information. She reached into the air and grabbed the key. The zeroes and ones glowed in her hand.
Then the song ended and the key disappeared. The band played another song, but it wasn’t as good. The joint was no longer in Layla’s hand; she must’ve dropped it while reaching for the key. She tried to keep dancing, to recapture that ecstatic moment, but her buzz had already worn off. She drifted away from the crowd, all those happy young people, and left the amphitheater. She couldn’t pretend anymore. She was different from the others. She’d always been different.
It was ten o’clock. Layla went to the dark, wooded area behind the stage and fished in her pockets for another joint, but all she found was an inch-long stub. She lit it anyway and listened to the distant music, which sounded trite and pointless now. Then the band finished its set and the crowd filed out of the amphitheater, heading for the lights of Fifth Avenue. But Layla walked in the opposite direction, going deeper into the park.
She finished her joint while strolling down an asphalt pathway that meandered under the trees. Then she heard a voice behind her: “Hey, baby, want another? I got smoke.”
She looked over her shoulder and saw the guy’s silhouette, bulky and tall. She called out, “No thanks,” and walked a little faster.
