turned on his satellite phone. This last image gave him a jolt. Supreme Harmony was homing in on the information it wanted. It was rifling through his memories to find the encryption key that would decipher Arvin Conway’s file. Hundreds of images flashed in quick succession, and then the movie froze on one in particular, a view of the sat phone screen that revealed a list of files stored on the device. At the top of the list was CIRCUIT, Arvin’s diagram showing the location of the Trojan horse.
Jim’s alarm was so strong, it disrupted the image. The sat phone’s screen flickered for a moment as if hit by an electrical surge. All at once Jim realized he wasn’t powerless. His emotions could alter his memories. With enough effort, maybe he could take control of the projector. Focusing his will on the list of files, he imagined a mighty hand grasping the image and thrusting it deep underground. Then he replaced it with another memory, the picture of Medusa. He was hoping that Supreme Harmony would retrieve the image and convert it to the shutdown code, but unfortunately his recollection of it was fuzzy. Medusa appeared in bits and pieces: first her mouth, then her eyes, and then one of the snakes sliding across her brow.
Before the picture could fully materialize, he felt a bolt of pain. Everything went black and he tumbled through the darkness. He couldn’t see a thing. The projector had stopped and the theater was silent, but Jim sensed that Supreme Harmony was still there. The network was all around him. It knew what he’d tried to do, and now it was angry.
After a while, the darkness lifted, but the pain stayed with him. He saw a whirlwind of images scattering in all directions. His recent memories of China and Afghanistan hurtled out of sight, and older scenes rushed into view: He was in the workshop at his home in Virginia, he was eating dinner alone in front of his computer, he was drinking a shot of Jack Daniel’s while staring at the telephone. Supreme Harmony was rummaging through his brain, tossing everything aside in its search for the encryption key. Although Jim could bury this secret, he couldn’t delete it, and the pain got worse as the network dug deeper.
The movie took a huge leap backward, and he saw himself as a six-year-old running away from his father, who strode across their living room with a leather belt in his hand. Then he was a plebe at West Point, marching across the parade grounds. He ran obstacle courses, slithered through the mud, slept on his feet, dangled from a parachute. Then he was in the 75th Regiment, and his dread steadily increased as he relived his army years. He was at Fort Benning, then Panama, then the deserts of Kuwait. Then he was in Somalia, and the pain became unbearable. He was pinned down behind the charred wreckage of a helicopter that lay on a street in Mogadishu. Hundreds of Somali militiamen were converging on his position, and their rocket-propelled grenades whistled through the air. One of his men was already dead and another was dying. And all the while Jim felt Supreme Harmony beside him, probing his every thought. Beneath the screams and explosions and gunfire, he heard the network’s persistent voice:
The theater went dark again. Jim was writhing in agony, but he refused to give up. He pushed his secret even deeper into the darkness. They won’t get it, he vowed. They’ll have to kill me first.
Then the pain eased. He wasn’t in Somalia anymore. He was in civilian clothes and standing in the middle of an office. It was an ordinary State Department office, just like a hundred others around the world—gray carpet, white walls, drab desks. On the wall was a framed photograph of President Clinton, and on each desk was an outdated, government-issue computer. But the office workers weren’t sitting at their desks. They crowded by the window, looking outside.
Jim opened his mouth, ready to shout an order, but then someone in the crowd turned around. It was a young girl, only seven or eight years old.
“Daddy?” she said.
It was Layla. Her adult voice came from the little girl’s mouth. She looked around the office, taking everything in. “I don’t remember this place,” she said. “Do you know where we are?”
Jim knew. Although the others were turned away from him, he recognized them from behind. The brunette in the army uniform was Captain Kirsten Chan, a twenty-eight-year-old intelligence officer assigned to Jim’s NSA team. And the blonde in the yellow sundress was his wife, Julia. Their son, Robert, stood beside her, his nose pressed to the glass.
“Daddy, can you hear me?” Layla’s voice was frightened. She said she didn’t remember this office, but on some subconscious level she probably did. “Where are we?”
They were in a bad place, the worst place in the world. It was the morning of August 7, 1998. They were on the fourth floor of the American embassy in Nairobi, and a Toyota truck had just stopped outside the embassy’s gate.
SEVENTY-EIGHT
Supreme Harmony observed the deployment of the Dongfeng 41 nuclear missiles. Each three-stage rocket lay horizontally on a mobile launcher, an eighteen-wheel flatbed designed to transport the Dongfengs out of their underground base in Hebei Province. Five minutes ago, the new general secretary had issued the launch order, and now Supreme Harmony was using the base’s security cameras to watch the Second Artillery Corps move the thirty missiles into position.
This base—dubbed
The network had already prepared itself for the American counterstrike. Nearly all its Modules in China had taken refuge in shelters outside the blast zones. Supreme Harmony had also strengthened its communications system by installing hardened equipment that could withstand the electromagnetic pulses caused by nuclear explosions. Because of these precautions, the network anticipated that at least a hundred of its Modules would survive the nuclear exchange. And because Supreme Harmony had accumulated a large stockpile of implants, it could make up for any losses by incorporating some of the human survivors. Amid the chaos, it would dispatch its Modules to every part of the globe, seizing control of any governments that managed to outlast the apocalypse.
In the Politburo’s shelter outside Beijing, Modules 73 and 152 sat in the conference room with the other members of the Standing Committee, who anxiously monitored the launch preparations. On the opposite side of the globe, in southern Pennsylvania, Modules 156 and 157 entered the Raven Rock Mountain Complex, a bunker for top Pentagon officials. And deep inside the Yunnan Operations Center, Modules 32 and 67 adjusted the mix of sedatives being administered to James T. and Layla A. Pierce. The implantation procedures had been successful, and the retinal and pulvinar implants were functioning normally. As soon as Supreme Harmony extracted the information it needed, the Modules would lance the patients’ thalami to cut the neural connections that sustained individual consciousness. Then the father and daughter would become Modules 175 and 176.
Outside the Operations Center, the network’s infrared cameras observed the burning fuselage of a UH-60 Black Hawk tumbling down the western slope of Yulong Xueshan. The other helicopter was two kilometers away from the center’s entrance and closing in at fifty meters per second. Supreme Harmony alerted the platoon of Modules at the fortifications, ordering them to aim their shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles at the remaining Black Hawk. Although the network could no longer guide the missiles toward the helicopter’s transponder, which had shut down, the Black Hawk was now close enough that the Modules could employ their laser-guidance systems. But as the Modules prepared to launch their SAMs at the helicopter, the network detected an incoming missile apparently fired by the Black Hawk a few seconds ago. Supreme Harmony ordered the Modules to take cover inside their fortifications. The concrete pillboxes could withstand a direct hit, and they were equipped with portholes to allow the Modules to return fire.
The incoming missile didn’t hit the pillboxes, however. It didn’t even explode. It arced above the
