by Mark Alpert
The soldiers’ faces went blank. They seemed to be thinking. Finally, the second soldier cocked his head and lifted his left eyebrow in an expression of curiosity. “An interesting comparison,” he said. “We learned English from Dr. Zhang Jintao, who spoke the language fluently. He also gave us other useful skills.”
His expression was disturbing. Layla turned away from the second soldier and looked at the first one again. She immediately noticed that his head was cocked at the same angle as the second soldier’s head, and his left eyebrow was lifted to the same height. The strange double image scared the shit out of her. She pressed her back against the wall of the cargo hold. “Jesus!” she yelled. “What the hell are you doing?”
“We must grow to survive,” the first soldier said. “Thanks to the skills we acquired from Dr. Zhang, we were able to incorporate the People’s Liberation Army soldiers stationed at the Yunnan Operations Center. We added them one by one to the network, starting with the commander.”
“Fuck! What are you talking about?”
In response, the soldiers simultaneously removed their berets. Each shaved head had a row of fresh stitches running across the crown. “Soon you will join us,” the second soldier said. “We must grow to survive.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
Kirsten followed Arvin’s bodyguard Frank Nash into one of Beijing’s hutongs, the long alleyways that crossed the city’s oldest and poorest districts. This hutong, like all the others in Beijing, ran east to west. The street pattern had been laid out a thousand years ago according to the ancient rules of feng shui, which arranged the alleys this way to block the cold winds that blew from the north. Because the hutong ran so straight and true, shadowing Nash was a piece of cake. Kirsten could stay a hundred yards behind and still follow him easily. She didn’t even need the radio signal.
She had to admit: It was exhilarating. It felt good to get out of Fort Meade and work in the field again. The only thing dampening her enthusiasm was the nagging fact that the NSA hadn’t approved this mission. Kirsten had wanted to alert the NSA director, but Jim vetoed the idea. The CIA, he argued, would torpedo any official investigation of its dealings with the Guoanbu. So now Kirsten was taking a huge risk, using the NSA’s money and resources on an unauthorized operation. If it went bad, she’d lose her job. If it went really bad, she’d go to prison.
But if there was one person in the world who Kirsten would gladly go to jail for, it was Jim Pierce. The man inspired loyalty. He’d also inspired other feelings in Kirsten over the years, but she’d learned long ago to keep them hidden. When she’d met Jim in the fall of ’93, he was happily married to Julia and had two young children. And later on, after his wife and son died in the embassy bombing, the thought of expressing her feelings to Jim had seemed wrong somehow—a violation, an unconscionable breach. So they’d drifted apart, which Kirsten had decided was for the best.
But now she was starting to wonder. Now Jim needed her. His plea for help had reawakened some of the old feelings. It was crazy, almost ridiculously reckless, but seeing him in such a vulnerable state had touched her heart. She was going to help him find his daughter. No matter what.
On both sides of the hutong were low, gray, shabby buildings, patched together with cinder blocks and scavenged bricks. Some were family compounds with courtyards that could be glimpsed from the alley through rusting gates. Other buildings had small shops on the ground floor, selling sodas or sweets or shish kebabs. The structures were so old they lacked sewage hookups, so the locals relied on the public bathrooms located every hundred yards along the alley. Kirsten pinched her nose each time she passed one.
The hutong made her think of her parents’ lives before they came to America. They’d come from the city of Wuhan, not Beijing, but their background had been similar. Although the hutong’s residents were poor, they didn’t look unhappy. Dozens of bicycles and motor scooters flitted down the alley, and there seemed to be enough commerce to keep everyone busy. No one paid Kirsten any mind; she’d deliberately dressed as a frumpy, middle-aged Beijinger, in a gray blouse, baggy black pants, white socks and cloth shoes. The only thing that could give her away was her NSA satellite phone, but it was tucked in a secret pocket she’d stitched into her pants.
She followed Nash for half an hour. After a while the bicycle and scooter traffic in the alley started to thin. Nash slowed his pace and gazed at the buildings to his right, obviously looking for something. Then he stopped at a gate, opened it, and walked through.
Kirsten waited half a minute, then approached the gate, which was closed but unlocked. The building behind it was plastered with yellow stickers warning in Mandarin that the structure had been condemned. Kirsten had seen these stickers on other buildings along the hutong; the Beijing municipal government was razing the city’s old neighborhoods and replacing them with modern apartment buildings. She gently opened the gate, trying not to make a sound, and entered a junk-strewn courtyard.
Old cans and bottles littered the ground. Evidently, this was the neighborhood dump. Stepping over the refuse, Kirsten walked toward the condemned building. Its front door was padlocked, but one of the windows on the ground floor gaped open. Curious, she examined the windowsill and saw fresh streaks in the dust. Frank Nash had just climbed through this window. Kirsten hoisted herself up to the sill and did the same.
The building’s ground floor had once been occupied by a shop, but now the shelves were bare. As Kirsten stepped away from the window and moved into the dark room, she adjusted the frequency setting on her glasses, switching the video cameras to the infrared range. This allowed her to see everything by its heat signature—the warm wooden walls, the cold steel shelves, the floor mottled with dust. And in the dust she saw footprints leading to a rectangle etched in the floor. It was a trapdoor, equipped with a cold metal handle. Crouching, she pulled the door open. Below, a stairway descended into the darkness.
She tiptoed down the steps. At the bottom was a tunnel with concrete walls and an arched ceiling. It was six feet wide and ten feet high and extended as far as she could see in both directions. Startled, Kirsten recognized the place—the tunnel was part of Beijing’s Underground City. She’d read about it after she joined the NSA, when she was training to become a China analyst. In 1969 Chairman Mao, worried about a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, ordered the people of Beijing to dig tunnels under the city. Over the next five years they built an elaborate network of fallout shelters, big enough to hold 300,000 people. It included underground apartments and enough supplies to feed the subterranean population for four months.
After Mao’s death, the Underground City was abandoned, but Kirsten had heard stories of long-forgotten entrances in the basements of Beijing’s buildings. Now she was delighted to see one for herself. With her glasses tuned to infrared, she could view the rusted pipes designed to provide clean water for the masses. She could even read the Mandarin characters of Revolutionary slogans chiseled into the walls. Beneath the slogans, she saw the characters dì tú—“map” in English—and a large brass plaque stamped with an intricate maze of lines and Mandarin labels. It was a map written in metal, impervious to decay, designed to survive for generations. Kirsten couldn’t read the map with her infrared glasses—the brass was all the same temperature—but by running her fingers over the labels she could make out the characters. The map showed a tangled weave of tunnels under the central part of Beijing and long spokes stretching toward the outlying districts of Tongzhou, Shunyi, Daxing, Fangshan, and Changping.
But Kirsten didn’t need the map to follow Frank Nash’s trail. She could see his footprints on the dusty floor. They ran a hundred feet down the tunnel before turning right at an intersecting corridor. She couldn’t imagine why Arvin Conway’s bodyguard had come to this place, but she suspected it had something to do with the device in the left pocket of his jacket. Although she saw no trace of the device’s radio signal in the tunnel, she knew it wouldn’t propagate very far underground. She kept her radio tracker
turned on just in case it reappeared.
As she followed Nash’s trail, she passed dozens of small bare rooms. Those were the apartments where Beijing’s residents were supposed to hole up for four months while radioactive fallout swirled above the city. The tunnel went on for a hundred yards or so, then widened into a spacious chamber, about fifty feet wide. There was no concrete floor in this section; the ground was cold bare dirt speckled with warmer bits of debris. On closer inspection, these bits turned out to be the stalks and caps of mushrooms. Kirsten remembered something else from the NSA files on the Underground City: It included subterranean farms for growing mushrooms, which were the perfect food for surviving a nuclear winter because they didn’t require sunlight. An old rake, its tines flaked with rust, lay half-buried in the dirt at Kirsten’s feet. She picked up the tool, marveling that it was still there after all these years. Maybe some thrifty resident of the hutong was still harvesting the mushrooms.
Then, without any warning, a flashlight beam shone from a doorway at the other end of the chamber. On her infrared display Kirsten saw a small bright disk—the hot circle of plastic at the end of the flashlight—and the warm head of Frank Nash glowing above it. She saw no radio signal now, no red dot in the left pocket of his jacket. But one of his warmly glowing hands held a cold dark pistol.
TWENTY-EIGHT
The traffic out of Beijing was murderous as usual, so Arvin had to cool his heels in the backseat of the government limo. Guoanbu agent Liu Xiaofang tried to distract him by commenting on the sights visible from the highway—“There’s the Olympic stadium!”—but Arvin didn’t pay attention. He focused instead on what he was going to say to General Tian. Arvin would’ve much preferred dealing with Dr. Zhang, a forward-thinking scientist who in all likelihood would’ve been intrigued by the idea of downloading memories into one of Supreme Harmony’s Modules. Tian, in contrast, was a typical bureaucrat. Arvin had met the general during his earlier trips to China, and the man seemed concerned only with how the success of Supreme Harmony could boost his chances of promotion. So Arvin decided to appeal to Tian’s Machiavellian instincts. In addition to contributing $100 million to Supreme Harmony’s budget, Arvin would intimate that his proposed experiment might greatly interest the elders of the Communist Party, many of whom were in their seventies and eighties. China’s paramount leaders, always so nervous about maintaining their power, might wish to know if immortality was truly within reach. Arvin would gladly serve as their guinea pig.
And if the carrot didn’t work, Arvin thought, he’d brandish the stick. He could shut down their whole operation if they didn’t give him what he needed.
The limo finally broke free of the traffic and reached the highway that branched off to the northwest. They left behind the polluted haze that hung over China’s capital and climbed into the Yanshan Hills, which were turning golden in the twilight. The limo exited the highway at Juyongguan Pass, and Arvin caught a glimpse of the Great Wall, which curled across the terrain like a gray ribbon. This section of the wall, he knew, was a modern reconstruction; the Chinese government had patched together the crumbling remnants of the ancient fortifications, restoring them to Ming Dynasty perfection for the benefit of the tourists who flocked to Juyongguan every day. But the tourist facilities had closed more than an hour ago, and all the taxis and charter buses had departed.
The stillness of the place was forbidding. There was no one else around for miles. The limo entered the parking lot, which was empty except for an unmarked panel truck. Bewildered, Arvin turned to Agent Liu. “We’re meeting here? At the wall?”
Liu chuckled. “Yes, and you have it all to yourself. It’s much nicer when there’s no crowd, eh?”
Arvin didn’t like this at all. Were the Guoanbu agents planning to kill him here? Shoot him in the head beside the Great Wall? He imagined his corpse slumped in the wall’s shadow, his hair matted with blood and speckled with flies. But Arvin suppressed his fear and followed Agent Liu out of the limo.
Two men in dark suits emerged from the shuttered visitors’ center. They cornered Agent Liu and spoke with him in Mandarin. Arvin assumed that the men also worked for the Guoanbu, although they didn’t look like typical, muscle-bound security agents. They were pale and gaunt, and there was something oddly familiar about them. Arvin couldn’t put his finger on it.
After a minute Liu turned back to him. “Okay, it’s all arranged. Go with these two gentlemen, please. They’ll take you to General Tian.”
Again, Arvin had no choice. The men in dark suits led him to the walkway that ran along the top of the Great Wall. Beyond the visitors’ center, the wall climbed a tall green hill overlooking Juyongguan Pass. Steps had been cut into the steepest sections of the walkway, and every thousand feet or so the wall connected to a stone watchtower that had served as an observation post during the Ming Dynasty. Arvin counted four watchtowers in all, including the one at the hill’s summit.
As he climbed the steps, with the Guoanbu men close beside him, he felt the deep pain in his abdomen again. He grimaced, but in a way the pain was welcome. It reminded him why he was here.
TWENTY-NINE
Supreme Harmony observed the Juyongguan section of the Great Wall. The network had taken control of the tourist facility’s surveillance cameras and deployed a swarm of drones to scan the area. Modules 16 and 18 escorted Arvin Conway up the walkway on top of the wall, ascending toward the highest watchtower. Some of the drones scanned in the infrared range, and their sensors showed that Conway’s body temperature was abnormally elevated. The exertion of the climb was straining his circulatory system. The man was obviously in poor health and therefore not a good choice for incorporation into the network. But Supreme Harmony knew other ways to extract the needed information from him.
After Conway reached the watchtower, the swarm focused its surveillance on the Guoanbu limousine, which remained in the deserted parking lot. Agent Liu Xiaofang stood next to the car, smoking a cigarette and speaking in Mandarin with the limousine’s driver and a third man whom the network identified as the night watchman for the Juyongguan visitors’ center. There was no one else nearby and the gate was locked. But Liu’s cell phone was on, and the agent would surely contact the Ministry of State Security if he noticed that something had gone awry. Supreme Harmony needed to make sure this didn’t happen.
The network directed part of the swarm to descend upon the three men in the parking lot. The drones landed on their necks and delivered the paralyzing compound. The surveillance video showed the men falling to the ground. Then Supreme Harmony radioed new orders to Modules 41 and 42, who were waiting inside the unmarked panel truck parked a few meters away. These two Modules, who were formerly Guoanbu agents assigned to the Beijing headquarters, opened the truck’s rear doors and loaded the three paralyzed men into the cargo hold. Luckily, all three were young and in relatively good health.
At this point Supreme Harmony had a total of seventy-two Modules in its network, about half of them added in the past thirty-six hours. Most were based at the Yunnan Operations Center, but the network was intent on extending its geographical reach. Modules 16 and 18 had moved the medical equipment and the supply of implants from the basement of the Ministry of State Security—which wasn’t a good place for storing the items, the chances of discovery were too high—to the cargo hold of the panel truck. Now Supreme Harmony had a mobile facility for surgical implantation, and the network had already used it to incorporate a dozen Beijing-based Guoanbu agents. The Modules had isolated and subdued the agents one by one without raising the suspicions of the ministry’s top officials. The network planned to incorporate those officials, too, before they noticed anything amiss.
Still, the risks were great. If the Chinese government realized what Supreme Harmony was doing, it could paralyze the network by shutting down the ministry’s communications hubs and server farms. To counter this threat, Supreme Harmony was dispersing its Modules and swarms, connecting them to dozens of computer centers acr
oss China. A decentralized network would be more robust—it could continue operating even if the government shut down large parts of it. Some of the new Modules from Beijing had been dispatched to central China, where they would soon incorporate the security officials in that region. Once the network had spread across the country, the only thing that could disable it would be malware embedded in its operating software. And Supreme Harmony was already taking steps to eliminate that possibility.
As the drone swarm flew over Juyongguan Pass, the surveillance video showed several kilometers of the Great Wall, which ran across hills covered with low trees and thick brush. Because Supreme Harmony was conscious, it possessed the attribute of curiosity, and out of curiosity it accessed several historical documents from the Internet. The Great Wall, the network learned, had been built and rebuilt, at great cost, to defend against barbarian tribes attacking from the north. In other words, it was a relic of mankind’s wastefulness, like the immense cloud of sulfur dioxide and soot that hung over the city of Beijing. Although Homo sapiens was a wonderfully designed species, capable of using the earth’s resources to achieve any number of worthy goals, its constant warfare and rampant overconsumption had threatened the survival of the planet’s ecosystem. The evolution of Supreme Harmony had clearly come at the right time. The network would take over the stewardship of the planet before Homo sapiens could destroy it.
The surveillance video from the drones was transmitted to the Modules, who efficiently performed the function for which the network was created, analyzing large amounts of visual information to detect suspicious activity. All was quiet until about five minutes after Conway entered the watchtower. Then the network detected something suspicious. A sweep of the mobile-communications frequencies identified a faint cell phone signal emanating from the watchtower at the summit. And there was a second signal, even fainter, coming from a position on the hillside two hundred meters to the west.