Mark Alpert - Extinction

Jim tossed the prosthetic arm aside but immediately started looking for another weapon. He saw a ball-peen hammer on the workbench, about four feet to the right of where Yin stood. It was a smallish hammer, a one-pound tool that Jim used to test the sturdiness of the electrical connections in his prostheses, but it was better than nothing. As he stepped toward the bench, he tensed his left arm, getting ready to dive for the tool. But before he could make his move, Yin leaped forward. The guy was fast. He grabbed the hammer and swung it at the right side of Jim’s head. Off balance, Jim couldn’t raise his left arm in time to block the blow. The hardened steel slammed against his skull. He fell to his knees and blacked out.

When he came to, he was lying full-length on the workbench, parallel to the wall. He lifted his head, which hurt like hell, and saw Yin binding his legs to the bench with copper wire. Jim tried to get up, but he couldn’t move. His left arm was clamped in the vise at the bench’s edge.

After Yin secured his legs, he stepped toward the vise and grasped the long handle of its screw. “Now let’s try again,” he said. “Where is your daughter?”

“Fuck, I was telling the truth! I don’t know where she is!”

“Please don’t waste my time. I know about your work with Arvin Conway. So don’t try telling me that you’re not involved.” Yin shook his head, then turned the screw. The steel jaws of the vise squeezed Jim’s forearm.

The pain was horrendous. It took all of Jim’s will to stop himself from screaming. “Christ! Why do you want Layla? What’s she done to you?”

“Your daughter stole some documents from us. I suppose she got tired of breaking into the Pentagon’s networks and decided to try ours for a change. That was a mistake on her part.” He turned the screw again.

Jim groaned and his eyes watered. Yin let go of the screw and leaned over the bench, propping his elbow on Jim’s chest. “We’re very serious about the security of our networks. Especially the one your daughter tampered with.”

Jim turned away from the bastard. Gritting his teeth, he looked past Yin’s face and concentrated on fighting the pain. But as he did so, he noticed something unusual. When he looked down the length of the bench, past Yin and past his own shoes, he saw something moving. It was the hand of the prototype arm he’d built for Steve Dugan. The prosthesis lay on the other end of the bench, ten feet behind Yin, but its hand was opening and closing as Jim writhed in agony.

Holy shit . He was connected to the prototype. He was wirelessly sending it commands. When the gunshot blasted the electronics in Jim’s Terminator arm, the neural control unit on his shoulder had automatically searched for another prosthesis it could link to. Jim should’ve realized this would happen. He’d designed it that way.

He started yelling as loudly as he could. Yin smiled, obviously enjoying himself, but Jim wasn’t yelling from the pain. He was trying to drown out the noise of the prototype arm, which he was maneuvering behind Yin’s back. He sent a command that turned the wrist joint and pressed the adhesive fingertips to the bench’s surface. Then he bent the elbow, which dragged the upper part of the arm across the wood. Next, he lifted the hand and stretched it toward his supine body, moving it to within five feet of his shoes. Then he pressed the fingers to the bench again and dragged the prosthesis a little closer.

Meanwhile, Yin reached for the tool rack on the wall behind the bench and took down one of the high-speed drills. “It’s time to get serious, Colonel Pierce. If you don’t cooperate now, I’ll start drilling holes in your remaining arm. Three holes for every question you don’t answer. Does that sound fair?”

“Okay, okay! I’ll tell you what you want.”

“Good, let’s make this quick.” Yin selected a quarter-inch bit and inserted it into the drill. “How did your daughter infiltrate Supreme Harmony? Who helped her download those documents from the network?”

“She didn’t need any help. She’s a hacker. She can break into anything.”

Yin looked at him for a few seconds, frowning. Then he sighed. “I warned you. This is going to hurt.” He flicked the drill’s power switch.

Turning to the vise, he looked down at Jim’s left arm. At the same instant Jim maneuvered his prosthetic hand next to his own feet and grabbed the toe of his right shoe. He stretched the arm once more, and the mechanical fingers scrabbled up his right leg, dragging the rest of the prosthesis along. Fortunately, the whirring of the drill was loud enough to cover the noise. As Yin selected a spot on Jim’s forearm and lowered the drill, the fingers reached Jim’s right hip. He grasped it firmly and swung the upper part of the arm toward his shoulder.

At the last moment Yin saw something out of the corner of his eye. He swiveled his head and stared in bewilderment as the prosthesis locked onto Jim’s shoulder. Then Jim pivoted his torso and punched Yin’s chest, extending the knife from his hand at the same time. He aimed for the heart, just as they’d taught him in Ranger school. The blade sank home and Jim gave it a twist.

Yin dropped the drill and clasped both his hands around the prosthesis, but his skewered heart had already stopped pumping. He died before he could comprehend what had happened to him. Jim retracted the blade and the man fell to the floor with the look of bewilderment still on his face.

Breathing hard, Jim used the prosthesis to release his left arm from the vise. Then he untied the wires binding his legs and took out his cell phone to call the police. But before dialing 911 he sat on the edge of the workbench for several seconds, rubbing his left arm and staring at the corpse. Judging from Yin’s accent and skills, Jim could guess who the man worked for. He was an agent for the Guoanbu, China’s Ministry of State Security. Back when Jim worked for the NSA, the Guoanbu was one of his chief adversaries, a ruthlessly efficient intelligence agency that divided its time between spying on the United States and terrorizing dissidents in China. And now it was pursuing his daughter.

Layla Pierce was dancing at an outdoor concert in the SummerStage amphitheater in Central Park. It was a steamy July evening in New York City and the place was packed. The band was apparently quite popular, although Layla had never heard of them before. Someone had told her the band’s name a few minutes ago, but she’d forgotten it already. She was stoned, so she was having a little trouble with her short-term memory.

Whatever the name, she liked their music. A pair of guitar lines tangoed with each other, repeating the same steps with growing volume and fury. Layla danced with the guitars, trying to match their undulations within her cramped niche in the crowd. Luckily, she was small—five foot even, a hundred and two pounds—so she didn’t need a lot of space. She wore her usual clothes, black pants and a black T-shirt. Her hair was black, too, dyed black and cut short. Her body was boyish—skinny and flat-chested—making her look more like a teenager than a woman of twenty-two. All in all, she was no Miss America, and yet several men and a few women in the crowd tried to dance with her. They smiled and sidled closer and mirrored her movements, but Layla just closed her eyes and turned away. She wasn’t interested in either boys or girls tonight. She was dancing with the guitars.

She knew no one there. Although she’d lived in New York for the past six months, she hadn’t made many friends. The problem was, she didn’t have a real job, or a real home either. Every month or so she moved from one apartment to another, taking nothing with her but a change of clothes and her MacBook Pro. She was one of the most experienced hackers working for InfoLeaks, but the Web site couldn’t afford to pay her, so she lived off the charity of the volunteers who supported the site. They let her sleep on their couches and share their organic food, at least until the novelty wore off. Most of them wanted to talk politics and get her involved in their boycotts and petition drives, but Layla had no interest in that stuff. Her only interest was hacking. She had a weird obsessive hatred of secrecy, and she got an equally weird thrill from breaking into networks and learning things she wasn’t supposed to know.