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: 0011101010011011101001100010011011100010101000010111001101001110010101011101001011100101100100 0111010100110110011001100110111100.
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
