Mark Alpert - Extinction

Jim lowered his arm and disengaged the targeting system. He looked with revulsion at the prosthesis, which gave off waves of heat. Of all his inventions, he liked this one the least.

Turning around, he saw Hammer come toward him. The bastard had a big smile on his face. But before Hammer could say anything, Jim heard a ululating scream from above. A lone Afghan fighter, left behind by his comrades, jumped down from the top of the wall and knocked Hammer to the ground. Kneeling on the agent’s chest, the Afghan pulled a knife from his belt and raised it high. But before the jihadi could slit Hammer’s throat, Jim whacked him in the head with the heavy prosthesis, knocking him out.

Hammer seemed shaken. Eyes wide, he jumped to his feet and backed away from the unconscious Afghan. After a few seconds, though, he regained his composure. He turned back to Jim and pointed at his prosthesis. “That’s a nice piece of equipment.”

Jim knew this was as close as the agent would ever get to saying thank-you. “You’re welcome,” he replied.

Hammer stood there awkwardly for a moment. Then he brushed the dirt off his pants. “You know, as defense contractors go, you’re not so bad. Ever consider doing some work for our Science and Technology division? The pay’s decent.”

Jim frowned. “No thanks. I talked to Arvin Conway, remember? So I know how your agency treats its contractors.”

“What are you talking about? Arvin’s happy as a pig in shit. We gave him the export exemption he wanted. Now he can make billions off the Chinese.”

“He didn’t want to do the deal. You forced him into it.”

“Is that what the geezer told you?”

“He said you threatened to shut down his company if he didn’t go along.”

The CIA agent chuckled. “He was blowing smoke. The technology swap was Arvin’s idea from the beginning.”

Kirsten came toward them, grinning with relief, but Jim focused on Hammer. “It was Arvin’s idea?”

“He told us the Chinese had developed the cyborg insects, and we could get our hands on the surveillance system if we agreed to allow the export of his retinal and pulvinar implants.”

Jim was confused. He looked carefully at Hammer, trying to figure out if the agent was telling the truth. “I don’t believe you.”

“If you want, I’ll show you the paperwork. Arvin’s lawyers drew up the contract a year ago and we just renewed it. That’s why I had to go to California this week. I had to sit in Arvin’s big, empty lab for three hours while he gave me a fucking lecture on artificial intelligence.”

That sounded like Arvin. The old man loved the sound of his own voice. “Arvin told me that you never came to his lab. That you always met elsewhere.”

“You want me to describe his desk? It’s got a piece of paper with lots of zeroes and ones on it. That’s what I stared at the whole time while he lectured me.”

Jim frowned. He didn’t understand it. “Why would Arvin lie to me?”

“Beats me.” Hammer shrugged. “Why don’t you ask him?”

Yes, Jim thought. That’s exactly what I’ll do.

Layla was drowning. The surface of the water was three feet over her head and rising faster than she could climb the ladder. Frantic, she let go of the rungs and swept her hands downward, trying to propel herself to the surface. She caromed painfully against the hull of the freighter and then against the concrete wall of the lock. Her vision started to darken. She felt an overwhelming urge to open her mouth and let the water rush in

But then a pair of strong hands grabbed her by the armpits and pulled her up. Her head popped above the surface and she took an excruciating breath. The man with the strong hands lifted her as if she were a rag doll and passed her to another man standing at the lip of the concrete bathtub. She collapsed beside him, gasping and heaving. It took her a few seconds to realize that the men standing around her were Asian. And they were carrying assault rifles.

“Jesus,” she gasped. Her bewilderment was so complete, she felt like laughing. “I thought… you wanted to kill me.”

“We did,” one of the men replied. “But we just got new orders.”

Then the man hit her in the head with the butt of his rifle, and Layla blacked out.

From the courtyard of Camp Whiplash, Jim used his satellite phone to make a call to Pasadena. It was 8:00 P.M. in California, but he managed to speak to a receptionist working late at Singularity, Inc. She said Arvin Conway was traveling and couldn’t be reached.

Jim felt a knot of suspicion in his gut. He remembered how uneasy Arvin had been during their conversation in his laboratory, especially when they were examining the visual memories picked up by his pulvinar implant. When Jim had told him to concentrate on thinking about the CIA agent, Arvin’s mind had wandered all over the map, almost as if he was trying to thwart the search by thinking of anything but the agent’s face. Arvin hadn’t wanted Jim to find Hammer. And now Jim wanted to know why.

Meanwhile, Kirsten used her own satellite phone to call Fort Meade. She ordered the NSA analysts on her staff to track down Conway. In less than five minutes, they had some information for her.

“Arvin left the country,” Kirsten told Jim. “He also wire-transferred a hundred million dollars from the corporate account of Singularity, Inc., to his private bank account in Switzerland. Basically, he drained the company dry. He took every cent that Singularity got from its investment bankers.”

“Where did he go?”

“China. His Learjet arrived in Beijing four hours ago.”

Supreme Harmony observed a conference room inside the Guoanbu’s headquarters in Beijing. General Tian had traveled here to give an update on the surveillance project to the top officials in the Ministry of State Security. He’d brought along Modules 16 and 18 to provide concrete evidence of the project’s success.

During the journey from the Yunnan Operations Center to Beijing, Modules 16 and 18 had to be disconnected from the twenty-eight other Modules in the network. Without the radio link, the two Modules went into a paralyzed, comalike state, unable to send or receive data, so Tian had to put them on stretchers for the three-hour flight to the capital. The loss of their input was disconcerting to Supreme Harmony. The sensation was similar to what a human being felt when his arm or leg went numb. But after arriving at the ministry headquarters Tian restored the radio link, connecting the two Modules to a wireless router that transmitted their signals to the rest of the network. Now the ocular cameras implanted in the Modules’ eyes were relaying images of the ministry’s main conference room, where General Tian was delivering his report to six Guoanbu officials.

The bureaucrats sat in wingback chairs arranged in a semicircle, and General Tian sat in a seventh chair facing them. Modules 16 and 18 stood on either side of the general’s chair and trained their cameras on the officials, whom Supreme Harmony recognized from photographs stored on the government’s servers. The highest-ranking one was Deng Guoming, the minister of State Security, who sat with his hands clasped over his stomach and his head cocked to the right. The network carefully observed his posture and facial expressions. To protect itself from the threat of a shutdown, Supreme Harmony would have to take control of the Chinese government, so it was keenly interested in learning more about the behavior of its leaders.

The network also received the auditory feed picked up by the ears of Modules 16 and 18, but this was less interesting than the video. General Tian was reading from his progress report, and Supreme Harmony was already familiar with this document. It contained statistics on the surveillance swarms operating in the restive provinces of western China.