Extinction

screamed, too, and cut to the right, away from the buildings. She couldn’t stop at the research station. She couldn’t upload the files. The Guoanbu agents were right behind her. She had no choice except to run into the rain forest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What? How did you…?”

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

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

They were halfway there when the Athena exploded.

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

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

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

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

SEVENTEEN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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