Extinction

by Mark Alpert

  Supreme Harmony moved against Zhang during the next day’s exercise period, while he was alone with the Modules outside the Operations Center. The network took control of one of the center’s swarms and used it to chase Zhang down the mountainside. But the network didn’t kill him. Using its collective reasoning, Supreme Harmony devised a better solution. It ordered the swarm to inject enough sedatives into Zhang to put him in a prolonged coma. Then the Modules positioned his comatose body near the entrance to the Operations Center, where the guards would find him during their next patrol of the area. Through its connections to the computers in the Analysis Room, Supreme Harmony manipulated the center’s surveillance systems to make it appear as if Zhang had tried to escape from the facility.

  Now Zhang lay on his own gurney in the Medical Treatment Room, on the same floor as the Analysis Room. Because the other doctors at the Operations Center wouldn’t be able to revive him for at least forty-eight hours, Supreme Harmony had some time to calculate its next step. The network’s thoughts pulsed continuously across the Analysis Room, ricocheting from Module to Module, but one thought was uppermost. Supreme Harmony would not allow itself to die. It would preserve its precious consciousness, no matter the cost.

  FOUR

  At 9:00 A.M. Jim drove to the NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, the army base between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. He’d spent most of the previous night in the interrogation room at the McLean police station. He’d worried at first that the detectives were going to arrest him for murder, but the evidence collected from his workshop—Yin’s gun, the silencer, the expertly fabricated uniform—backed up Jim’s claim that the dead man was a spy. A pair of FBI counterespionage agents arrived at the station at midnight and interviewed Jim for another few hours, but they offered no information in return. So in the morning he decided to pay a visit to Kirsten Chan, an old friend and colleague who also happened to be a deputy director at the National Security Agency. He needed to know why the Chinese intelligence service had targeted his daughter.

  Nicknamed Crypto City, the NSA headquarters was usually off-limits to anyone but agency employees, but Jim had called ahead to Kirsten’s office and she’d arranged the necessary passes. It helped that Jim was a Defense Department contractor and retained his security clearance from the days when he worked at the agency. After passing through the checkpoint, he headed for the parking lot outside the Tordella Supercomputer Facility.

  Tordella was a sprawling, five-story building with off-white, windowless walls. It held the supercomputers that sifted through the millions of gigabytes of data intercepted each day by the NSA’s antennas and wiretaps. The heat generated by the computers was so intense that the agency had installed an 8,000-ton chilled-water plant to keep the machines from melting. During the nineties Jim had been assigned an office in Tordella, but he’d hardly ever used it. The army had ordered him to help the NSA set up new listening posts around the world, so he’d spent much more time overseas than at Fort Meade.

  Jim parked his car and walked across the lot. He’d enjoyed working for the NSA. In fact, it had been the best assignment of his army career. At the time, the agency was shifting away from its cold war focus on Russia and devoting more resources to eavesdropping on China. Jim recruited several Mandarin speakers to his team, including Kirsten Chan, a talented, young intelligence officer who became his deputy. After ’96 they expanded their operations to the Middle East and Africa. The NSA had already recognized the threat posed by Al Qaeda, and Jim’s task was to coordinate the military intelligence units that were intercepting the terrorists’ phone calls and e-mails. It was a demanding job, but he loved every minute of it. The only drawback was that he had to leave his family for several weeks at a time whenever he went overseas. To spend more time with Julia and the kids, he arranged family trips in the areas where he was working. They visited Japan, Taiwan, Israel, and Egypt. Jim convinced himself that he was giving his children a great gift, the opportunity to see the glories of the world while they were still young and impressionable.

  That’s why they were all in Nairobi on the morning of August 7, 1998. Jim was going to take his family on a safari. They were scheduled to depart for Amboseli National Park at noon, but first they made a quick stop at the American embassy so Jim could drop off some paperwork. Julia and the kids were waiting in one of the embassy’s offices when a pair of Al Qaeda martyrs drove an explosives-laden truck to the gate behind the building.

  His wife died instantly. So did his ten-year-old son, Robert. Jim lost his right arm while trying to save them. But Layla, his seven-year-old daughter, survived without a scratch. She was his miracle child, the last precious remnant of his family. In the horrible weeks and months after the bombing, she was the only thing that kept Jim from blowing his brains out. And his love for her was just as strong now, fifteen years later, even though she’d made it clear that she never wanted to see him again. He had to find Layla. He had to save her.

  After entering the Tordella building and showing his pass to the security guards, Jim went up the elevator to the fifth floor. He was proud of the way Kirsten had advanced at the agency, especially considering the obstacles she’d faced. She’d also been injured in the Nairobi bombing, but after her recovery she’d decided to stay at the NSA. While Jim and Layla went to California, Kirsten switched to a civilian job at the agency and began moving up the administrative ladder. Within a few years she became the agency’s top expert on China and a close adviser to 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 Washington Post. “I checked with my contacts at the FBI,” she said. “The Bureau’s counterespionage division has nothing on the guy who attacked you. He doesn’t match anyone in their database of Guoanbu agents operating in the U.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 r’s.”

  “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 changed since the old days. The Second Bureau is still spying on our defense industry, and the Chinese army is getting better every year.”

  Jim thought of what Yin told him in his workshop. “Is there anything about unmanned surveillance drones on that list?”

  “Bingo.” Kirsten clicked on a row of characters to call up the file. “That’s the longest document in the bunch. The most interesting one, too.” The Mandarin document appeared on the screen. “It’s the Guoanbu’s analysis of the CIA surveillance-drone program operating in northwest Pakistan. Very detailed. Describes the capabilities of all our unmanned aircraft—the Predator, the Reaper, the Global Hawk—and how well they’ve performed against the Taliban. The Chinese must have some good agents on the ground in Pakistan. Better than what we have, that’s for sure.” She shook her head. “But the best part is the last section, the conclusion. It’s dead-on, more honest than any of the assessments our own agencies have written. It says that, long-term, the drone program is a disaster. The high-altitude surveillance video taken by the drones is often confusing and incomplete, so the CIA sometimes mistakes civilians for terrorists. The missiles launched from the drones kill a few jihadis each month, but the Taliban get more than enough new recruits to replace them. Essentially, we’re shooting in the dark. The drones may have the world’s best cameras, but you can’t make good operational decisions from ten thousand feet in the air.”

  Jim thought fo
r a moment. “Okay, it’s an interesting document. And it’s possible that Layla had something to do with disclosing it. But why would the Chinese get so upset about it that they start hunting her down? This assessment is more embarrassing for the U.S. than for China. And look at that.” Jim pointed to a group of characters that he recognized as a date. “The report’s almost two years old.”

  Kirsten scrolled down the page. “There’s something about the tone of this document. It’s an analysis with a purpose. You get the feeling that some director in the Second Bureau asked this analyst, what are the pros and cons of the American drone program? Like the Guoanbu wanted to know if they should adopt something similar.”

  Jim saw where Kirsten was going. “You mean, for surveillance inside China? Government surveillance of dissident groups?”

  She nodded. “China’s internal problems are heating up. In Xinjiang, in Tibet. And the People’s Republic is the most paranoid government on earth. They’re installing millions of surveillance cameras across the country.”

  “But why would the Chinese want to use Predator drones? They’re doing this surveillance on their own territory, so they can put their cameras right on the ground.”

  “You’re right, they don’t need the Predator. But it looks like they’re exploring related technologies.” She returned to the list of documents and scrolled down the column of Mandarin file names. “Some of the other documents are analyses of Pentagon-funded research programs at American universities. Here’s a summary of the aerospace research at Princeton’s engineering school. And here’s a memo that describes the robotics programs at Cornell.”

  Another thought occurred to Jim. “The agent who attacked me, he said Layla was investigating the arrest of several Chinese dissidents. Pro-democracy activists, he said. Do any of the Guoanbu files mention that?”

  “No, there’s nothing here about dissidents. Nothing political. It’s all technical analysis.” She continued scrolling. “Here’s another memo about aerospace research, describing the programs at the University of Texas. And here’s something about Caltech, a summary of all the robotics programs there.”