THIRTY-THREE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THIRTY-FOUR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THIRTY-FIVE

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

“We can’t detect the safeguards,” Tian said in his perfect English. “But we believe you’ve hidden them in

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