by Mark Alpert
Layla held her breath. This was the trickiest part of their plan, the riskiest moment. Wen scowled at Zhang, then picked up the younger of the two schoolboys, the doll-like nine-year-old. Holding the screaming child by the waist, Wen strode toward Zhang and thrust the boy at him, as if to say, “Here, you try talking to him.” Zhang jerked backward, lowering his gun. At the same moment, Wen threw the child at Zhang’s chest and grabbed the hand that held the pistol.
Wen moved so swiftly that Layla’s eyes could barely follow him. Wrapping both his hands around Zhang’s, he slipped his index finger between the gun’s trigger guard and the Module’s finger. In one fluid motion he yanked Zhang’s arm to the left and fired the pistol at one of the soldier Modules. Then, without pausing, he swung Zhang’s arm toward the second soldier and pulled the trigger again.
Both Modules tumbled backward, blood pumping from their heads. Zhang went rigid and let out a scream of shock and pain.
Wen tried to wrest the gun from the Module’s hand, but Zhang’s fingers locked tightly around the handle. They struggled for the pistol, and one of them pulled the trigger again. The bullet ripped into the concrete wall near the schoolboys. Both of the boys cowered on the floor with their hands over their ears, paralyzed with terror. Layla shouted, “Get out of the way!” and pointed at the far corner of the room, but neither boy seemed to hear her. Then she raced barefoot across the room to the pair of soldier Modules, who’d collapsed within a few feet of each other.
Averting her eyes from the spreading pools of blood, she bent over the nearest soldier and removed the pistol from his belt holster. She cocked the gun, chambering the bullet just as Wen had instructed. Then she ran back to where Wen and Zhang were grappling. Although the Module was at least ten years older than Wen, he was in good shape. Keeping his grip on the gun with one hand, Zhang bent his other arm and drove his elbow toward Wen’s jaw. Wen managed to deflect the blow and hold on to Zhang’s gun hand, but then the Module slammed his knee into Wen’s stomach. Shit, Layla thought, the bastard knows how to fight. But she shouldn’t have been surprised. The goddamn network could access the skills of all the soldiers and agents it had incorporated.
She raised the pistol and tried to aim at Zhang’s head, but he and Wen were close together and in constant motion, furiously trading blows. She couldn’t get a clear shot. When she tried to move closer, Zhang twisted away, putting Wen’s body between himself and the pistol. Wen’s head drooped as he wrestled with the Module. He was losing strength. He wouldn’t last much longer.
And then, all at once, Layla realized her mistake. She turned away from the grappling men and fired at the surveillance cameras, first obliterating the one behind her and then the one hanging from the opposite corner of the ceiling. Then she ducked behind Wen so Zhang couldn’t see her. Now the network didn’t know where she was and couldn’t predict her next move. Charging forward, she remembered what Supreme Harmony had told her: Dr. Zhang Jintao no longer exists. His emotions no longer exist. So she didn’t hesitate after she popped up beside the Module and pressed the muzzle of her gun to his forehead. She just pulled the trigger.
But afterward—after the gun went off and Zhang’s head jerked to the side and his blood and brains sprayed across the floor—Layla felt sick. He still looks human, she thought as the Module dropped to the floor. He still looks human.
Her ears rang from the gunshot. Wen was calling her name, but she could barely hear him. Finally, he stepped in front of her and looked her in the eye. “Layla!” he shouted. “We have to go. To the computer room. Remember?”
The boys from Lijiang stood beside him, their fingers gripping his belt. They swayed on the balls of their feet, dazed. Layla looked at them for a moment, then nodded. Then Wen took her arm and pulled her toward the door.
FIFTY-THREE
Kirsten was immersed in a half-dream, shallow and vaporous. Boulders rolled inside her skull, following the contours of her cranium. One of them rolled behind her eyes and she felt a sharp, familiar pain. She’d felt it once before, in the embassy in Nairobi, in the moments after the bomb exploded. And now, after fifteen years, she felt it again. She clutched the memory as if it were a lifeline. Although the pain was almost unbearable, it pulled her out of the half-dream and into the clear air of consciousness.
But when she opened her eyes she saw only darkness. She was blind again. They’d taken her glasses! Panicking, she thought of the image she’d seen on Arvin’s flash drive, the room full of lobotomized men lying faceup on their gurneys. Now she was also in that room, she was sure of it. She was lying beside the others, another twitching body ready to be connected to Supreme Harmony. Terrified and enraged, she yelled, “No!” into the darkness and bolted upright, kicking and thrashing. But a moment later she heard Jim say, “Whoa! Settle down!” and felt the unmistakable weight of his prosthetic hand on her shoulder.
“What the hell?” Kirsten sputtered. “Where are we? Where are my glasses?”
“Hold your horses!” To her surprise, Jim sounded cheerful, almost jaunty. “I’ll get the glasses for you. I turned off the cameras to save the battery charge.”
While Kirsten waited, she heard the rumble of an engine. She was in a moving vehicle. Her seat was hard, and it jolted up and down with every bump in the road. No wonder she’d dreamed about boulders.
“Here you go,” Jim said, handing her the glasses.
She turned on the cameras and sat through the usual recalibration process, which took six and a half seconds. When she finally got her sight back, she saw Jim in the driver’s seat of a small three-wheeled truck. It was a relic of the old China, built decades ago, ramshackle and rusty but still chugging along on its noisy two-stroke engine. The truck’s cab was only four feet wide, barely big enough for two people. It was propped on a single, undersized tire, and behind the cab was a wooden truck bed resting on the two rear wheels. Inside the truck bed was a bale of hay, which wobbled and bounced as they drove down a poorly paved country lane.
Jim wore an olive-green Mao cap and wraparound sunglasses. They covered up his Caucasian features, but they also made him look ridiculous. “Oh shit.” She laughed. “Nice disguise, Pierce.”
He smiled back at her, amused. “Yeah, I thought so, too. I got the hat and sunglasses from the same guy who sold me the truck. He threw them in for free, actually.”
“I should hope so. So when and where did you make this purchase?”
“It was about an hour after you got your bug bite. How does it feel, by the way?”
He pointed to the underside of her chin. Kirsten raised her hand and touched a piece of cloth taped to the soft skin there. Oddly, she didn’t feel any pain when she touched it. “Doesn’t hurt,” she said. “Just tingles a bit.”
“There might be some nerve damage. The drone’s paralyzing agent is a nerve toxin. Similar to cobra venom.”
Kirsten remembered the last moments before she lost consciousness. “So one of the flies got me after I climbed out of the crawl space?”
Jim nodded. “I had to cut out the drone’s dart before it delivered more toxin to your body. Luckily, I had some antibiotic to clean off my knife. But it made a mess.”
Kirsten looked down at her shirt, the wrinkled blouse she’d worn to look like a frumpy Beijinger. There was a large red stain below the collar. For a moment she pictured Jim kneeling beside her on the ground floor of that open-air pagoda. Her throat tightened. Once again he’d saved her.
She waited a moment to get her emotions under control. “So what happened next? You carried me to the nearest truck dealership?”
“Well, the pagoda was in a rural part of the Fangshan District, so there weren’t any retail outlets nearby. But after lugging you through the forest for a while, I saw a farmhouse with a truck parked outside. And the farmer, as it turned out, was willing to make a deal.”
“How much did it cost you?”
“He wanted dollars, not yuan. I gave him five thousand.”
Kirsten looked ag
ain at the truck’s battered chassis. She could actually see the road through the holes in the floorboard. “It’s a good thing you’re a defense contractor, Jim. In the world of real commerce, you wouldn’t last a minute.”
“Hey, this old jalopy still has some life in her.” He gave the steering wheel an affectionate pat. “We were making pretty good time until a couple of hours ago. Around midnight I found a provincial road that ran straight south. Believe it or not, we were doing a hundred and ten kilometers per hour. Going downhill, anyway.”
She looked out the truck’s window. The countryside was rugged, with tree-covered hills all around and small farms tucked into every corner. The slopes were terraced and planted with sunflowers and corn. The farmhouses and barns were simple and old, and on some of the barns Kirsten could see traces of Revolutionary symbols, painted stars and hammer-and-sickles that had faded from red to gray. They passed an elderly woman in a shabby black tunic, walking along the road with a basketful of kindling on her back. Then they passed a shoeless boy throwing cornmeal to a flock of ducks. It was a completely different country from the China of Beijing, Kirsten thought. There were no women in designer clothes here and no BMWs on the roads. This was still a country of bicycles and wheelbarrows and farm trucks, and Jim’s three-wheeler fit right in.
“So where are we, exactly?” Kirsten asked.
“The number of this road is S223. But I haven’t seen any signs for a while.” Jim pursed his lips and thought for a moment. “We passed Nanyang a couple of hours ago, so I guess we’re in Hubei Province. The next big challenge will be crossing the Yangtze. There aren’t that many bridges over the river. I’m hoping the police haven’t set up any checkpoints yet.”
“You really think Supreme Harmony is giving orders to the police here? We’re hundreds of miles from Beijing.”
“The Modules are probably all over the country by now. The network knows how to add new ones, so the only limitation on its growth is the availability of the neural implants. And I bet Supreme Harmony has taken over the factory that makes the implants and done everything possible to ramp up the assembly line.” He shook his head. “That’s why we have to go to Yunnan. We have to get to the Operations Center before the network spreads so far and wide it’ll be impossible to shut it down.”
Kirsten held her tongue and just stared at him. He was gripping the steering wheel so tightly that his mechanical fingers had crimped the metal. One of the things she’d always admired about Jim, going back to the days when he was her boss at the NSA, was his intensity, his single-minded determination. Now, though, she saw some of the drawbacks of this trait. He’d convinced himself that Layla was at Supreme Harmony’s headquarters in Yunnan Province and that he could defeat the network and save his daughter’s life by waving around a picture of an ancient Greek monster. He had no real evidence to support these conclusions, but he acted as if they were certainties.
Kirsten knew from her long career in the intelligence field that this was the worst kind of error an agent could make. If it was up to her, they’d head straight for the nearest border and try like hell to get back to the States. Unlike Jim, she recognized the limits of their abilities. She knew when it was time to call in the marines.
And yet she wasn’t going to say any of this. She wasn’t going to tell Jim that Layla might be somewhere else in China besides the Yunnan Operations Center. And she wasn’t going to mention the possibility that his daughter might be dead already, or worse, incorporated into Supreme Harmony. No, she wouldn’t do it. She was going to trust him and fight by his side. She owed him that much.
Leaning toward him, she rested her hand on his right shoulder, just above where the prosthesis was attached to his body. “I’m with you, Jim. Till the very end. You know that, right?”
She felt the tension in his muscles. He kept his eyes on the road and his expression didn’t change, but his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down in his throat. “I’m sorry, Kir,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. His mouth stayed open, as if he was going to say something else, but no words came out.
She gave his shoulder a squeeze. “Come on. You don’t have to apologize. I knew what I was getting into when I decided to come with you.”
“No, I didn’t mean that.” He shook his head. “I’m not sorry that you’re here. I’m grateful. I couldn’t do this without you.” His Adam’s apple bobbed again. “I’m sorry about everything that happened before.”
Kirsten was confused. “What? You mean Nairobi? Jim, that wasn’t your fault.”
“I know, I know. Believe me, I know it.”
“Layla tried to make you feel responsible, but she was wrong. We were doing our jobs.”
Jim didn’t say anything at first. Kirsten thought that maybe she shouldn’t have mentioned Layla. It was a sore subject, his estrangement from his daughter. But after a few seconds he nodded. “You know, I realized something about Layla. She was angry at me, but not because of what happened in Nairobi. She was angry because of the way I acted after Nairobi. How I tried to forget them. How I tried to push them out of my mind.”
Kirsten felt an ache in her chest. She knew who he meant by “them.” His wife Julia and his son Robert. Kirsten hadn’t heard Jim say their names in fifteen years.
“I made a mistake, Kir. I thought the only way to move forward was to focus on the present. So I went to California and put all my energy into raising Layla and studying with Arvin. And I shut out everything else.” He turned to her, keeping one eye on the road. “Including you. That’s what I’m most sorry about.”
The ache in her chest sharpened. “No, that’s not true,” she said. “You didn’t shut me out.” She tapped the frames of her camera-glasses. “You built these for me. You gave me back my sight.”
“I should’ve done more. I wanted to do more for you.” He took his prosthesis off the steering wheel and grasped her hand. The touch of his mechanical fingers was surprisingly gentle. “And I still want to.”
Kirsten was shocked. She couldn’t believe this was happening. Jim was holding her hand while driving a three-wheeled truck through the farm country of central China. And along with her shock and amusement, she felt a swooping elation. This was one of the most absurd and wonderful things that had ever happened to her.
For half a minute they just sat there, neither saying a word, while the truck jounced and rumbled down the road. Then Jim said, “There,” and let go of her hand. “I hope that didn’t sound too crazy.”
She smiled. “No, it was nice. But it’s a little difficult to take you seriously when you’re wearing that Mao cap.”
“Hey, when in Rome.” He smiled back at her, then let out a long, tired breath.
Kirsten realized all at once that Jim hadn’t slept in more than twenty-four hours. “You should let me drive for a while. You need to rest.”
“You sure you feel up to it?”
In truth, Kirsten still felt a little woozy. Also, her throat was parched and her stomach was empty. “Maybe I should eat something first. You have anything on you? A candy bar, maybe?”
“Oh, I got something better.” He reached behind Kirsten’s seat and pulled out a cloth sack. “Before I settled the deal with the farmer, I asked him to throw in a few provisions. He gave me a jug of water, a dozen oranges, and a roast chicken. Not bad, huh?”
Jim handed her the sack. Kirsten opened it, unscrewed the cap from the water jug, and took a long drink. Then she ripped a drumstick off the chicken. “I take back everything I said, Pierce. I’ll never criticize your bargaining skills again.”
Happily, she bit into the drumstick and passed him the chicken breast. It was a messy, noisy breakfast, but because Kirsten was so hungry it tasted delicious. She looked out the window again while she ate, viewing the barns and farmhouses and terraced fields. After a few minutes she saw some signs of civilization—a billboard, a schoolhouse, a row of shops, a parking lot. The road became wider and better paved, and now there were more cars traveling in the opposite
direction. They were obviously approaching a town or city. After another ten minutes she pointed to a road sign.
“Look at that,” she said, wiping her greasy fingers on her pants. “We’re just ten kilometers from Yichang.”
Jim thought for a moment, biting his lip. “I know that city. It’s on the Yangtze, right?”
She nodded. “It’s a pretty big place, too. I mean, by Chinese standards, it’s only medium size, but more than four million people live in the area.”
“Big might be good for us. Easier to blend in with the traffic while we’re crossing the river. I have to see if—”
Jim stopped in midsentence, staring straight ahead. Kirsten faced forward and saw a long line of cars and trucks clogging the road. And at the front of the line, about a hundred yards away, half a dozen officers from the Yichang Public Security Bureau were inspecting the vehicles and interrogating the drivers.
FIFTY-FOUR
Layla ran barefoot down one of the long corridors of the Yunnan Operations Center, following Wen Hao and the boys from Lijiang. She still held the gun she’d taken from the soldier Module’s holster, but she kept it pointed at the floor. Wen, who’d taken the pistols from the other two Modules, carried one in his right hand; the other gun was tucked in his pants. It was amazing how fast Wen moved. As he dashed down the corridor his head swiveled back and forth, constantly on the lookout. The schoolboys rushed to keep up with him, somehow sensing they’d be safe as long as they stayed near the man.
As they approached an intersection with another corridor, Wen raised his pistol and fired at a surveillance camera mounted on the ceiling. They had to assume Supreme Harmony was connected to every camera in the Operations Center. At first Layla was surprised that no alarm sounded after they escaped from the room that had been their prison, but now the reason seemed clear. The Modules didn’t need an alarm. The network had undoubtedly alerted them already, and now dozens of lobotomized soldiers and scientists were rushing toward them from every floor of the underground complex.
