“When we downloaded the data from the device,” the Module continued, “we discovered that all but one file had been deleted. The remaining file, which is labeled Circuit, has been encrypted, most likely with an Advanced Encryption Standard key, but we can make a guess about its contents. Before Arvin died, he told us he’d hidden a fifty-megabyte file holding the information needed to disable the shutdown switch in our implants.” The Module lowered the disk until it was a couple of inches above Jim’s nose. “Although we can’t read the encrypted file, we see that it contains approximately fifty megabytes of data.”
Jim closed his eyes. He didn’t want to reveal anything else. Supreme Harmony was very good at making guesses.
The Module lifted his hand from Jim’s mouth and pressed a finger to his right eye again, pulling up the lid. Then he raised his penlight and pointed the beam at Jim’s pupil. “Now that we have the file, we need to decipher its data. So here is our question for you, James T. Pierce: Do you know where we can find the encryption key?”
Jim tried to look away from the light, but the beam followed his pupil. “Shit,” he said. “Why don’t you just go into my head to find out?”
“Yes, we intend to do that. We’ll insert the retinal implants to send commands to your brain and the pulvinar implant to extract your memories. We’ll have to change the implantation procedure, though. Ordinarily, we lobotomize the patient first, then insert the implants. But because the lobotomy disrupts the neural circuits, we can’t access the long-term memories until the connections are reestablished approximately six hours later.” The Module closed Jim’s right eye and moved on to his left, performing the same inspection with his penlight. “On the other hand, we can retrieve the memories immediately if we put in the implants first. Once we have the information we need, we can proceed with the lobotomy.”
Again, Jim tried to look away from the light. He found it difficult to think with the beam shining in his eye, but he saw one thing clearly: Supreme Harmony was worried. The network was accelerating the implantation procedure because it feared that someone was coming to shut it down.
Jim’s heart knocked against his sternum. He knew who was coming. “Kirsten,” he said. “She did it. She called for backup.”
The Module didn’t respond. He continued examining Jim’s left eye for several seconds, then switched off the penlight. “We have the answer to our question. From analyzing the changes in your heart rate and body temperature, we’ve determined that our guesses are correct. The encrypted file does indeed contain the information for disabling the shutdown switch. And you can tell us where to find the key for deciphering it.” He turned away from Jim and bent over a medical cart between the two operating tables. “Now we can begin the procedure.”
“You’re fucked, you know that?” Jim curved his numb lips into a defiant grin. “My people are coming. They’re gonna pull the fucking plug on you.”
The Module stayed bent over the cart. “The Operations Center is well defended. We have a garrison of Modules armed with surface-to-air missiles and rocket-propelled grenades. The American helicopters are outmatched.”
Jim’s heart beat faster. “So they’re coming in helicopters? That’s even better than I thought.”
When the Module finally turned around, he was holding a syringe. He leaned over Jim and stabbed the needle into his left shoulder. “You won’t be fully conscious during the procedure. It’ll be more like a vivid dream. But it’s a dream we’re going to share. Once the neural implants are inserted, we’ll be able to communicate directly with your brain.” The Module pushed the plunger all the way down, then pulled out the needle. “It may get a little uncomfortable. It’ll be less painful if you don’t resist. You can’t stop us from extracting the memories.”
Jim had no idea what drug they’d just given him, but it acted fast. He couldn’t keep his eyes open. “Just … try me. I’m a stubborn … son of a…”
“Yes, you are. But you won’t be the only one in pain. Your daughter will be in the dream, too.”
SEVENTY-FIVE
Supreme Harmony observed the pair of UH-60 Black Hawks as they skimmed over the mountains southwest of Yulong Xueshan. The helicopters flew too low to appear on radar, but the network could track them by following the signals they exchanged with the U.S. Air Force AWACS plane cruising over southwestern China. The plane, an E-3 Sentry, was monitoring all the American aircraft in this section of Chinese airspace by continuously broadcasting friend-or-foe queries to the bombers, fighters, and helicopters in the area. Because Supreme Harmony had access to all American military communications, it could detect the coded signals sent in response by the Black Hawks’ transponders. The helicopters were currently near the village of Shiguzhen, less than thirty kilometers from the Yunnan Operations Center.
The network issued new orders to the Modules stationed in the fortifications at the center’s entrance. The flight path of the Black Hawks hugged the western face of Yulong Xueshan. Under ordinary circumstances, this approach would prevent the Modules from firing their surface-to-air missiles at the helicopters until they came within a few hundred meters of the Operations Center. But Supreme Harmony had modified the missiles so that they could be guided by the transponder signals emitted by the Black Hawks. The Modules would be able to fire at the aircraft as soon as they came within six kilometers, which would happen in approximately five minutes.
Meanwhile, on the lowest level of the Operations Center—about two hundred meters inside the mountain—Modules 32 and 67 removed the bone drill from James T. Pierce’s skull and prepared to insert the pulvinar implant. It was a superb piece of microelectronics, smaller than an apple seed, so tiny that that the Modules could attach it to the tip of a surgical probe and slip the device through the brain’s lobes without damaging the tissue. Using a CAT scan of Pierce’s brain to guide them, the Modules maneuvered the implant to the very center of his skull, where the walnut-size thalamus relayed and coordinated the billions of neural signals that generated the man’s consciousness. Then they embedded the device in the pulvinar nucleus, the part of the thalamus where the brain’s visual perceptions were collected. Within seconds the implant’s minuscule radio transmitter started to send those neural signals to Supreme Harmony.
The radio receiver had already been embedded in Pierce’s scalp and the retinal implants inserted into his eyes, so the network was now fully linked to his brain. But the first signals that Supreme Harmony picked up from Pierce were very different from what it usually received from its Modules. After the six-hour waiting period that followed implantation, the mind of a lobotomized Module was like a pool of clear water, perfectly transparent. The network could easily retrieve the Module’s long-term memories and put its logic centers to work. But because Pierce hadn’t been lobotomized yet, his mind was more like a roiling ocean. In his semiconscious state, his visual perceptions were a maelstrom of remembered images and absurd fantasies. Supreme Harmony had to dive into these swirling waters to find the encryption key. Nevertheless, the network was confident of success.
Modules 32 and 67 attached a new bag of fluid to James T. Pierce’s intravenous line. Then they turned to the other operating table and pointed their bone drill at the crosshairs drawn on Layla A. Pierce’s skull.
* * *
At the same moment, Supreme Harmony observed the remaining members of the Politburo Standing Committee, who’d gathered in a conference room inside their bomb shelter near Beijing. The emergency meeting began with a minute of silence to honor the memory of the general secretary. Then Module 152 rose to his feet and gave his account of the assassination. Supreme Harmony made the Module’s eyes water as he described the shooting. He told the committee that he and Minister Deng would’ve been killed, too, if they hadn’t immediately fired on the treacherous bodyguards, who had obviously been recruited by the CIA to murder China’s leaders. During the Module’s speech, the network focused on the faces of the other committee members and observed that a few showed signs of skepticism. But no one dared to voice his doubts. After the vice president sat down, the committee unanimously decided to make him their new paramount leader. Module 152 was now the general secretary of the Communist Party and the president of the People’s Republic of China.
The committee members applauded vigorously as the Module stood up again. Then he held out his hands, and the room fell silent. Supreme Harmony put a solemn expression on the Module’s face.
“I think we all know what needs to be done,” he said. “We must show the world that we’re not defeated. We must punish the Americans.”
SEVENTY-SIX
Kirsten sat in one of the jump seats inside the Black Hawk’s crowded cabin. She was only an arm’s length from Sergeant Briscoe, who pointed the barrel of an M240 machine gun through the helicopter’s open door. They were flying low, less than ten feet above the fir trees that covered the terrain. The countryside was still shrouded in darkness, but when Kirsten switched her glasses to infrared she saw a curving river that flowed into a narrow gorge about ten miles ahead. On the eastern side of the gorge was Yulong Xueshan, which she recognized instantly. It was the same jagged row of peaks she’d seen yesterday when she said goodbye to Jim.
Because the Black Hawk’s cabin was so noisy, all the passengers wore helmets equipped with radio headsets. Another door gunner manned the M240 on the other side of the helicopter, and eight more Special Ops soldiers filled the back of the cabin. Hammer sat in the jump seat to Kirsten’s right and Agent Morrison sat to her left. A hundred yards behind them was the second Black Hawk, which was also packed with soldiers and agents and guns.
To calm her nerves, Kirsten reached for her satellite phone and pressed a key that retrieved an audio file stored in the phone’s memory. Just before she’d left the Kachin camp, the NSA director had sent her this file, which held a recording of a radio transmission picked up by one of the agency’s satellites. It had been sent from Jim’s sat phone yesterday at 5:19
P.M.
It was a brief recording, less than ten seconds long: “Kirsten! They got me cornered! Come help!” Although she’d been terrified when she heard the message for the first time, she soon realized that Jim had been faking the call for help. The tip-off was the fact that he’d said “Kirsten.” Jim always called her “Kir,” never “Kirsten.” He must’ve been playing some kind of trick on Supreme Harmony, trying to fool the network somehow. So the message gave her hope. She slipped the phone into her helmet and pressed the speaker against her ear so she could listen to it again: “Kirsten! They got me cornered! Come help!”
She was listening to it for a third time when a louder voice, the voice of the Black Hawk’s pilot, came over the earphones in her headset:
“Shit! We got incoming!”
The Black Hawk lurched to the right, rolling into a sharp turn. The evasive maneuver threw Kirsten to the left and her helmet smacked into Morrison’s. She saw the helicopter eject its flares and spew a cloud of chaff to confuse the guidance system of the incoming surface-to-air missile, but she didn’t see the missile itself until it streaked past. The trail of its exhaust, clearly visible in infrared, passed just a few yards from the helicopter’s rotor blades.
“Watch out, here’s another!”
This time the pilot veered to the left. The Black Hawk’s engines whined as the helicopter raced down the mountainside, its skids almost touching the tallest trees. Kirsten smacked into Hammer, who shouted something into his headset that she couldn’t make out. The second missile came within a few feet of the helicopter’s tail and then exploded on the slope below.
Kirsten heard the pilot’s voice again:
“I don’t see any radar. How the hell are they tracking us?”
Then Hammer: “Just fire the package! We’re close enough to the target!”
“Negative, we can’t pop up to firing position. We gotta get the fuck outta here.”
Although the helicopter was rocking violently, Kirsten managed to switch the frequency of her glasses from infrared to the radio wave band. Then she peered through the Black Hawk’s open door, looking for a signal that might be coming from a radar station. It was hard to see anything through all the electromagnetic noise bouncing around the cabin, but after a couple of seconds Kirsten detected a signal reflecting off the helicopter’s metal skin, a powerful, rapidly pulsing transmission at 1320 megahertz. But it wasn’t a radar signal. It was coming from the helicopter itself, from the antenna just behind the rotor mast.
She turned to Hammer and grabbed his forearm. “The transponder! They’re tracking the friend-or-foe signals we’re sending to the AWACS!”
“What?” Hammer looked confused. “That’s impossible! How could they—”
“Trust me on this! Tell the crew to disable the transponder! Then they can return fire!”
Hammer hesitated a moment, then gave the orders. Kirsten heard a flurry of communications in her headset. Then the Black Hawk’s pilot throttled up the engines, and the helicopter swiftly rose a hundred feet above the slope. Kirsten switched her glasses back to infrared and saw a fissure in the mountainside. Inside the gap was a rectangular structure, a bit warmer than the surrounding rock. This, she realized, was the concrete entrance to the Yunnan Operations Center.
A loud bang went off to her right, and for a second she thought they’d been hit. But when she looked in that direction, she saw the hot exhaust of a missile streaking
away
from them. The Black Hawk had just fired it at the Operations Center. The pilot immediately returned to the relative safety of the lower elevations, but as the helicopter leveled out above the mountainside, Kirsten saw the exhaust trails of three more surface-to-air missiles. They rushed past, converging on the Black Hawk a hundred yards behind them.
“Watch it! You got incoming!”
the pilot shouted over the radio.
“They’re—”
Then she heard the explosion.