the NSA director. She was intensely patriotic—her parents had fled China’s Cultural Revolution in the late sixties and immigrated to the United States just before she was born—and she firmly believed the agency’s mantra: Better, more complete information would make the country safer. Jim saw her infrequently now, only once or twice a year. She worked such long hours that she didn’t have much of a social life. As far as Jim knew, she had no boyfriends and few women friends either.
On the fifth floor, another guard led Jim to Kirsten’s office. It was a large room, but for security reasons it had no windows. As soon as Jim stepped inside, Kirsten rushed over and hugged him. She was a pretty, athletic forty-three-year-old with shoulder-length black hair. She wasn’t tall, but she was lean and limber and moved with a dancer’s grace, even when she was wearing the dull, gray business suits that were de rigueur at the NSA. She had a dancer’s powerful muscles, too, and when she hugged Jim it was a serious, steadfast embrace. “Thank God you’re all right,” she said. “I can’t believe this happened.”
It was always a surprise to Jim when he noticed how attractive Kirsten was. When they met twenty years ago, he was twenty-nine and she was twenty-three and the gulf between them was so great that they naturally fell into the standard military roles of commander and subordinate. And Jim was so in love with his wife at the time that he honestly never thought of Kirsten in a sexual way. But he saw her that way now, and it was a little disconcerting, like lusting after your kid sister. After a few seconds he stepped back and Kirsten let go of him. “I can’t believe it either,” he said. “I’m worried, Kir. Really worried.”
“Sit down,” she ordered, pointing at a chair in front of her desk. “I’ll make you some coffee.”
While he sat in the chair, Kirsten went to her coffee machine, which was the kind that brewed one cup at a time. She searched for a mug and chose one of the little packages of coffee grounds and then inserted the package in the machine, and as she did all this Jim stared with satisfaction at the rather stylish pair of glasses on her face. He’d built those glasses for her. Hidden in the black frames were two miniature video cameras, with their tiny lenses and electronics built into the earpieces. The cameras were connected to minuscule radio transmitters that wirelessly sent the video feeds to electrodes implanted in her eyes.
Without those glasses, Kirsten would be blind. The blast from the Nairobi bomb had ruptured her retinas, killing the rod and cone cells that detect light. The doctors at Walter Reed had said she’d never recover her vision, but further tests showed that the explosion hadn’t damaged her retinal ganglion cells—the nerves that collect the signals from the light-detecting cells—so Jim knew there was hope. When he went to Caltech to work with Arvin Conway, he heard about a device called the retinal implant, which had been developed in the 1990s. The implant simulated the functions of the rod and cone cells by delivering video images to the injured retina. After receiving the video feed from the miniature camera, the implant reproduced the pixilated images on a grid of electrodes attached to the back of the eye. The electrodes sent pulses to the adjacent ganglion cells, which carried the signals through the optic nerve to the brain. Although the earliest implants were crude—they enabled blind people to see only fuzzy, colorless shapes from the video feeds—by 1999 the experiments had proved that artificial eyesight was possible.
At that time, Jim was still learning the basics of bioengineering, but he convinced Arvin to pursue the further development of the retinal implant. Improving the quality of artificial vision became one of Arvin’s favorite projects, and Jim contributed to the effort by designing miniature cameras that could be hidden in the glasses. He worked just as hard on the retinal implants as he did on his prosthetic arms. Finally, after several years of steady progress, the improved implants could deliver vision that was roughly as good as normal eyesight. Arvin’s company, Singularity, Inc., introduced the devices commercially, and at Jim’s insistence Arvin offered the system for free to all the blind veterans who could benefit from it. Kirsten was one of the first to take advantage of the offer. Although she’d thrived at the NSA despite her handicap, she knew she could rise higher in the organization if she recovered her eyesight.
Afterward, Jim visited Kirsten every six months or so to make small repairs and upgrades to the device, and during those visits they always promised to get together for drinks or dinner. But they never did. Their lives were moving in different directions. Kirsten was aiming for the top, the highest ranks of the intelligence community, while Jim was content to keep working with wounded veterans. There was nothing keeping them together anymore except the occasional repairs to the camera-glasses. And the device worked so well, it didn’t really need that much attention.
Once the coffee was ready, Kirsten stirred in a generous amount of sugar and handed the mug to Jim. Then she sat down behind her desk, which was impeccably neat. The only items on it were her computer, her STE secure telephone, and a copy of today’s
“What about forensics? Did they find anything that can identify him?”
She shook her head. “Not even dental work.”
“I’m telling you, Kir, this guy was good. Fast and well-trained. He had a Beijing accent, lots of long
“Don’t worry, I believe you. But the folks at the Bureau aren’t so sure.”
“What about finding Layla? We have to get her into protective custody.”
Kirsten frowned. “The FBI’s already looking for her. InfoLeaks is driving everyone crazy, and the Pentagon’s been pushing the Bureau to find your girl so they can figure out how she’s getting her information. But Layla’s pretty clever. You taught her too well.”
“If we can’t find her, we should at least try to warn her. We should get in touch with someone at InfoLeaks and tell them Layla’s in danger. Maybe she’ll come to her senses and turn herself in.”
“Maybe, maybe not. She might think it’s a trick.” Kirsten pointed at the newspaper on her desk. “InfoLeaks is at war with the whole government now. Did you see today’s story? About the attempt to arrest Schroeder in Mexico?”
Jim nodded. Gabriel Schroeder was the wealthy German activist who’d founded InfoLeaks. The Justice Department had issued a subpoena for Schroeder’s arrest, charging him with possessing stolen documents, and the State Department had convinced a dozen countries to extradite the man if he set foot on their shores. But Schroeder had evaded capture so far by operating from a high-speed megayacht that stayed in international waters. The boat had satellite links to servers around the world, making it difficult for the government to shut down his operations. “I saw something on the Web about a navy plan to intercept Schroeder at sea,” Jim said. “Any truth to that?”
Kirsten shifted in her seat, crossing her slim legs. Jim sensed the distance between them, the separate paths they’d taken. “Sorry, Jim. That’s classified. I can neither confirm nor deny.”
“Well, I hope they do it soon. I hope they grab Schroeder and beat the shit out of him until he says where Layla is. Then maybe we can get to her before the Guoanbu does.” He closed his eyes for a moment and prayed silently. Then he turned back to Kirsten. “I’ve been going through the InfoLeaks Web site, trying to find out why the Chinese are doing this. I figured Layla must’ve gotten her hands on one of their documents, but so far I haven’t found anything like that on the Web site. InfoLeaks has two hundred thousand documents about the war in Afghanistan but not a single damn one about China.”
Kirsten turned to her computer and reached for the mouse. “Okay, I can help you there. Before InfoLeaks posts a document on its Web site, they sometimes send copies of the file to their volunteers around the world. If the document is encrypted, the volunteers pitch in to decipher it. And sometimes they translate the documents, too. Because the messages to the volunteers are transmitted by satellite links, the NSA can intercept them. Legally, believe it or not. Come here, take a look.”
Jim rose from his chair and came around her desk. Although the interception itself might be legal, he knew Kirsten was bending the rules by letting him see the communications. “Thanks, Kir. I appreciate this.”
She clicked on one of the icons on her computer screen. “After I got your phone call, I ordered my staff to look at the recent communications on the InfoLeaks network. It turns out that yesterday afternoon they distributed a big batch of files to their Mandarin-speaking volunteers. Sixty-nine documents in all. Here’s the list of file names.”
Jim looked over her shoulder at the screen, which showed a sprawl of Chinese characters. He didn’t recognize all of them—his Mandarin had grown rusty since he’d left the NSA—but he remembered certain characters very well. “That’s Guoanbu,” he said, pointing at the screen. “These are Guoanbu documents.”
Kirsten nodded. “Specifically, they’re reports by analysts in the Guoanbu’s Second Bureau. Nothing’s
