Mark Alpert - Extinction

Layla had started hacking in high school, but it was just a hobby until two years ago. During her sophomore year at MIT she helped InfoLeaks unscramble an encrypted video that showed an American helicopter strafing a crowd of Afghans. She found this assignment more interesting than any of her computer-science courses, so she dropped out of college and joined the InfoLeaks underground. Since then she’d hacked into dozens of networks and downloaded thousands of classified files. She’d targeted the Pentagon, the State Department, the Saudi monarchy, and the Russian Federal Security Service. Her latest job was breaking into a Chinese government network rumored to hold files about the mistreatment of political dissidents. An anonymous source, code-named Dragon Fire, had opened a digital backdoor that gave her access to the network, allowing her to download a batch of encrypted documents. She’d started decrypting them several days ago and finally finished this afternoon, but because the documents were in Mandarin she still didn’t know what they said. So she’d forwarded the files to InfoLeaks, which would find Mandarin-speaking volunteers to translate them.

And now, to celebrate the job’s completion, she was pretending for a few hours that she was a real New Yorker, a young hip woman enjoying an outdoor concert with her young hip friends. She surreptitiously relit her joint and concentrated on the music. The duet of the guitarists turned cacophonous, with loud random notes spilling from the amplifiers. But there was a pattern in the randomness. There was always a pattern. Layla saw the music as a stream of binary code, a long line of zeroes and ones floating over the crowd. It was like an encrypted file, a scrambled mess of data, and it was Layla’s job to decipher it, to make sense of the noise. So she did the same thing she always did when decrypting a document: She hunted for the encryption key, the special sequence that would unscramble the data. And after a few seconds she saw it: a string of exactly 128 ones and zeroes, floating in the air right beside the music. The key specified the algorithm that would unlock the code, converting the hideous nonsense into beautiful, readable information. She reached into the air and grabbed the key. The zeroes and ones glowed in her hand.

Then the song ended and the key disappeared. The band played another song, but it wasn’t as good. The joint was no longer in Layla’s hand; she must’ve dropped it while reaching for the key. She tried to keep dancing, to recapture that ecstatic moment, but her buzz had already worn off. She drifted away from the crowd, all those happy young people, and left the amphitheater. She couldn’t pretend anymore. She was different from the others. She’d always been different.

It was ten o’clock. Layla went to the dark, wooded area behind the stage and fished in her pockets for another joint, but all she found was an inch-long stub. She lit it anyway and listened to the distant music, which sounded trite and pointless now. Then the band finished its set and the crowd filed out of the amphitheater, heading for the lights of Fifth Avenue. But Layla walked in the opposite direction, going deeper into the park.

She finished her joint while strolling down an asphalt pathway that meandered under the trees. Then she heard a voice behind her: “Hey, baby, want another? I got smoke.”

She looked over her shoulder and saw the guy’s silhouette, bulky and tall. She called out, “No thanks,” and walked a little faster.

The guy matched her pace. His shoes slapped the pathway. “Hey, slow down! Where you going?”

Layla started to run. Her father had once told her: If you can’t win a fight, there’s no shame in running away. She saw a lighted area ahead, a large rectangle of asphalt, and at its center was a lone man on inline skates. He was practicing his roller-dancing moves while listening to his iPod. The guy wore gym shorts and a basketball jersey, and luckily he was just as big as the guy who was chasing her. Layla sprinted toward the roller-dancer, waving her arms and yelling, “ Hey! Hey! ” to get his attention. The guy stopped dancing and removed one of his earphones.

“Yeah, what’s up?”

Then she heard a metallic click. The roller-dancer’s head jerked backward and he crumpled to the asphalt. Blood fountained from his scalp. In horror, Layla turned around and saw her pursuer approaching. He was Asian and dressed in a black suit, and he held a gun equipped with a silencer.

She ran in earnest now, charging down the gravel path next to Sheep Meadow. She was fast, a former star of her high-school track team, but the gunman was faster. He gained on her as she raced toward the Central Park Loop. The road had been closed to traffic hours ago, and no cyclists or dog-walkers or strolling couples were in sight. But another guy on inline skates was speeding down the Loop, a daredevil in spandex pants and a motorcycle helmet. Layla opened her mouth to call to him, but then she thought of what had happened to the guy in the basketball jersey. She was still agonizing over what to do when the skater went into a crouch and made a sudden turn. He barreled past her and smacked into the gunman. The tall Asian man tumbled backward and his gun went flying. Layla ran to the fallen man and kicked him in the head for good measure. He lay on his back, unconscious.

Meanwhile, the skater took off his helmet. He was also Asian. He wore a windbreaker over his spandex outfit and carried a backpack. “Layla Pierce?” His accent was thick. “I’m Wen Sheng.”

“Wen Sheng? I don’t know—”

“Yes, you know me. My code name is Dragon Fire.”

Oh shit, she thought. Her anonymous source. “I thought you were in China.”

He nodded. “I was. But the Guoanbu discovered what I did.” He pointed at the unconscious man on the ground. “They came after me. And they’re after you, too. They sent a team of agents to New York to find you. I’ve been shadowing them.”

Layla’s throat tightened. “They know about the backdoor?”

“Yes, and they know you downloaded the files. The documents about Tài Hé . Have you decrypted them yet?”

“Yeah, I just forwarded them to InfoLeaks for translation.”

He nodded again. “Good. Now I have two new files for you. I downloaded them before I left the Operations Center.” He took off his backpack, unzipped it and reached inside. “The documents are on the flash drive. And I have something else for you, a specimen.”

He pulled a small zippered pouch out of the backpack and handed it to her. Layla started to open it, but Dragon Fire stopped her. “No, not here. We have to leave.” Putting his hand on her back, he led her down the path, heading toward the park entrance on West Seventy-second Street. “I saw two other Guoanbu agents in the park. They’re not far.”

Layla reached for her phone. “I’ll call the police.”

“No!” Wen grabbed her cell phone and tossed it into the grass. “The American intelligence agencies are also looking for you. They’re scanning the communications bands.”

“But once we tell them—”

“Listen to me. The CIA and the Guoanbu are working together. You can’t trust any of the American authorities.”

“Wait, how do you know that?”

“I was also an agent with the Guoanbu. But no more. What they’re doing is wrong. You have to give the new files and the specimen to InfoLeaks, so the whole world can see them. Make sure—”

He stopped talking and stood absolutely still. Layla heard rapid footsteps. Two more men in black suits stepped onto the pathway behind them.

Dragon Fire pushed her toward West Seventy-second Street. “Go,” he whispered. “I’ll take care of them.”

“Hold on, what are you—”