He took a deep breath. “I’m trained in the martial arts. I can disarm one of the soldiers the next time they come into the room. If I’m lucky, I can kill two or three of them. But this complex is heavily guarded. When we entered the Operations Center I observed seventeen men with shaved heads, and there may be more. Our chances of escaping with the children aren’t good.”
Layla frowned. She’d also seen the platoon of lobotomized soldiers when she entered the complex. It was hard to imagine how she and Wen could defeat all of them. The soldiers were well armed, and Supreme Harmony was probably linked to every surveillance camera in the Operations Center.
But then she remembered something else she saw when the Modules had escorted her down the complex’s long corridor: the room crowded with computer terminals and screens.
She cupped her hands around Wen’s cheeks and pulled him closer. “There’s a room less than fifty meters from here, a computer room. You just need to get us in there. Then we’ll barricade the door, and I’ll take care of the rest.”
Wen looked puzzled. “I don’t understand,” he whispered. “What will you—”
“I’m going to hack into Supreme Harmony.”
FORTY-EIGHT
Unfortunately, the tunnel to Beijing’s Fangshan District wasn’t as wonderfully straight and wide as the Changping tunnel. The Communist cadres who’d built this particular spoke of the Underground City had apparently worked in fits and starts, digging the tunnel in sections that didn’t quite align. Every mile or so the corridor narrowed to a bottleneck less than three feet across, and Kirsten had to slow the scooter to a crawl so they could squeeze through the gap and proceed to the next section. Worse, the tunnel’s walls were pockmarked and crumbling, and in some places the concrete had given way altogether, spilling huge mounds of dirt across the slab floor. In those spots Jim and Kirsten had to get off the scooter and haul it over the earthen mounds. Then they took their seats again, Jim behind Kirsten, and rode cautiously forward.
With all the stopping and starting, their average speed dropped below ten miles per hour. Jim hated the slow pace, but there was one good thing about it: He didn’t have to shout above the roar of the scooter’s engine. This made it easier to tell Kirsten what had happened at the Great Wall and what he’d learned about Supreme Harmony. She bombarded him with questions for almost an hour, clearly reluctant to believe that the surveillance network had developed a mind of its own. Jim could see why she was skeptical. He wouldn’t have believed it either if he hadn’t seen the network in action, the Modules and drones working in perfect synchrony.
Kirsten finally fell silent, taking some time to think. Meanwhile, Jim reached into his pocket and pulled out the Dream-catcher, the small metal disk that Arvin had ripped out of his scalp. Jim rubbed the disk on his pants to remove the last bits of gore from its surface. Then he connected it to the USB port of Arvin’s flash drive.
The disk must’ve been programmed to automatically download its contents, because when Jim linked the drive to his satellite phone and looked at the screen, he noticed a new entry on top of the list of files: 07222013. It was today’s date, he realized, July 22, 2013. Opening the file, Jim saw that it held Arvin’s final memories, all the images the old man had perceived in the last twelve hours of his life: a view of Tiananmen Square, a close-up of Chairman Mao’s corpse, a panoramic vista of the Juyongguan section of the Great Wall. Jim scrolled down until he reached the very last of Arvin’s memories. He saw an image of the dark, dank room inside the watchtower. Then Jim saw a close-up of his own face, which was so flushed and frantic he barely recognized it. Then he clicked on a link to another set of memories and saw a woman’s face, haughty and beautiful. Her skin was pale, her lips were bright red, and her eyes were black. Her hair was also black, with scattered silver highlights. But when Jim looked closer he saw that it wasn’t really hair at all—the woman’s head was covered with writhing black snakes. What he’d thought were highlights were actually the snakes’ eyes and fangs.
Jim was still staring at the image when Kirsten braked the scooter. He looked up, but of course he couldn’t see anything in the pitch-black tunnel. “What is it?” he asked. “Another bottleneck?”
“Worse. The tunnel’s blocked.”
Jim disconnected the flash drive and disk from his satellite phone. Then he turned on the phone’s flashlight function, which put a bright white display on the screen. Holding the phone in the air, he saw an earthen wall in front of them. It rose ten feet to the tunnel’s ceiling, where the concrete had buckled.
He dismounted from the scooter and walked toward the wall of packed soil. Raising his prosthetic arm, Jim poked the dirt. Then he slammed his mechanical fist into it. The wall was solid, immovable. The tunnel’s ceiling had probably collapsed years ago and the dirt had been settling ever since. “Shit,” he said, turning to Kirsten. “This isn’t good.”
“We’ll have to go back to Grand Central Station and pick a different tunnel.”
Jim grimaced. It would take at least an hour to return to the maze of tunnels under central Beijing, and by then there was a good chance that Supreme Harmony would know where to look for them. Once the network tracked down Frank Nash, the Modules would find out where he’d hidden Arvin’s flash drive. Then they’d start searching the Underground City.
Kirsten turned around. “Come on, let’s go. We don’t have a choice.”
“Hold on.” Jim extended the knife from his prosthetic hand. He raised it high and sank the blade into the earthen wall. “I want to see if the wall’s solid all the way to the top.”
He lifted himself off the floor, kicking toeholds into the dirt. It was a piece of cake compared with climbing the Great Wall. Soon his head brushed the tunnel’s ceiling. He raised his sat phone again and shone its light on the jagged breach in the concrete. Luckily, it wasn’t as wide as he’d thought. The concrete on the left side of the ceiling was still intact, and the dirt just below it was loose and powdery. Jim retracted his knife and plunged his prosthetic fingers into the uppermost part of the earthen wall, just below the intact section of the ceiling. He was able to sink his whole hand into the powdery dirt and sweep it to the floor.
“Hey!” Kirsten yelled. “What’s going on up there?”
“We might be able to get through. I have to do some digging.”
“What can I do?”
“You can help me keep my balance. Stand behind me and brace my legs.”
Kirsten raised her hands and gripped the back of his thighs. Now he didn’t have to worry about falling backward.
She let out a grunt. “I hate to tell you this, Jim, but you gained some weight.”
“It’s the prosthesis. It’s a little heavier than a normal arm.”
“It’s not your prosthesis. It’s your ass.”
“All right, all right. I’ll start my diet tomorrow.”
He started digging with his prosthetic arm. Its hard fingers clawed the wall like the teeth of a bulldozer, and the motors in his wrist and elbow hummed at a higher pitch as they shoveled out chunks of earth. He tried to sweep the dirt to the side, but some of it sprinkled on Kirsten’s hair. “Hey!” she yelled again. “Watch it!”
“Sorry.”
“Was that payback for the comment about your ass?”
“Not at all. You can talk about my ass as much as you want.”
Soon Jim established a steady rhythm. His tireless prosthesis excavated the dirt, making the hole deeper and wider. He held the phone in his left hand, using the light from the screen to guide his efforts. Kirsten stood behind and below him, supporting his legs. After a while she adjusted her grip, and her fingers dug into his hamstrings.
“You know, I still don’t understand what you’re planning to do,” she said, her voice turning serious. “Tell me again why we’re going to Yunnan Province?”
“That’s where the Supreme Harmony project started. The main servers for the network are in a lab complex there.”
“And you’re aware how far away Yunnan is?”
“About fourteen hundred miles. A little more if we avoid the main highways.”
“That’s a hell of a long drive, Jim. Wouldn’t it make more sense to head for one of the U.S. consulates?
