She expected some reaction to this dig, but the soldier’s face didn’t change. He didn’t say a word. But a moment later, the other soldier stepped forward and stood abreast of his comrade. “We’re concerned about the security of Supreme Harmony. That’s why we brought you here. The Guoanbu agents in Panama had been assigned to eliminate you, but we changed their orders when we took control of the ministry’s communications.”
Layla did a double take. The second soldier’s English was also perfect and eerily similar to the first soldier’s. The timbre of his voice was different, but his diction and phrasing were exactly the same, as if he was trying to mimic the first soldier.
“We suspect there may be anomalies in the network’s software,” the second soldier continued. “Worms or viruses may have been deliberately embedded in the code by the developers of the system. This malware may be hidden so deeply that our diagnostic programs are unable to detect it. But your expertise in cybersecurity will help us develop better diagnostic tools. With your assistance we will eliminate the malware before our enemies can activate it.”
Layla felt cold. She was frightened, but she didn’t want the soldiers to see it. She clenched her hands and scowled. “Fuck you,” she said firmly. “Fuck you and your Supreme Harmony. And fuck the asshole who taught you English. You sound like Tweedledum and Tweedledee.”
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.”