Mark Alpert - Extinction

“No, that’s not right. It’s like I said, I need you to contact the—”

“Don’t do this. Please.” She turned to him and clutched his arm. His left arm, his flesh-and-blood arm. “Let’s both go to Burma. Getting yourself killed isn’t going to help Layla.”

Now it was Jim’s turn to face forward and look at the mountains on the horizon. He knew he couldn’t leave this place. He couldn’t drive past those mountains without searching for his daughter. It would be like ripping his heart right out of his chest. And Kirsten had to know this, too, he thought. If she knew him at all, after all these years, she had to know he couldn’t do such a thing. So he didn’t say a word. He just stared at the white peaks of Yulong Xueshan.

For almost a minute they sat there, silent and motionless, like two mannequins propped in the front of the sedan. Then Kirsten let go of Jim’s arm. She shifted the car out of PARK and stepped on the accelerator. “All right,” she said. “I’ll drive you to your funeral. Just tell me when you want to get out.”

She resumed driving down the dirt road, moving at the same speed as before, but now her eyes were wet behind her camera-glasses.

Jim took another deep breath. He forced himself to turn away from Kirsten, to dispel the image of her stricken face. He had things to do before he could start hiking toward the tower.

First he checked his Glock. The gun was in good shape, clean and well oiled, but there were only twelve bullets left in the clip and he had no extra magazines. He’d have to make every shot count. Next, he reached for his satellite phone and deleted all the files he’d copied from Arvin’s flash drive. Jim had already memorized all the useful facts, and during his years in the NSA he’d learned to avoid carrying sensitive information if he didn’t need it. After deleting the files he pressed a special button on the NSA phone that demagnetized its hard drive, removing all traces of the erased data. Then he did the same thing to the Dream-catcher, the disk that Arvin had cut out of his scalp just before he died at the Great Wall. Jim had already copied all the files on the disk to Arvin’s flash drive, which he intended to leave with Kirsten. If he was strictly following NSA procedures, he’d delete everything on the flash drive as well, but he decided to leave it alone. Arvin had begged him to protect the digital hoard of memories, and although Jim was furious at his old friend for unleashing this catastrophe, he was going to honor the man’s last request.

Then there was just one more task. Jim picked up Arvin’s flash drive and retrieved a file holding an unusually complex image. Labeled with the innocuous name CIRCUIT, the file showed the location of the Trojan horse amid the billions of circuits in the retinal implants’ microprocessor. This was the information Arvin had hoped to trade to Supreme Harmony in exchange for the use of one of the Modules. If the network acquired the file and discovered the Trojan’s location, it could adjust its programming to create a detour around the altered circuit. Then the shutdown code would have no effect on the chip and the network would no longer be vulnerable.

Jim had no desire to bargain with Supreme Harmony, but he sensed that this information might still be useful. The file contained fifty megabytes of data, so it was much too big to be memorized. Instead, he downloaded the file to his sat phone and encrypted the data, using an NSA cipher to turn the diagram into a nonsensical hash of ones and zeroes, unreadable to anyone who didn’t possess the encryption key. He transferred this encrypted file to the Dream-catcher disk, which he slipped into one of his socks. Then he deleted the original file from his sat phone and demagnetized its hard drive again. Finally, he downloaded the image of Medusa from Arvin’s flash drive to the phone.

By the time he was done, Kirsten had driven closer to Yulong Xueshan. The base of the highest mountain was less than five miles to the west. The dirt road curved south here, heading toward the city of Lijiang, but to the right Jim spotted a footpath zigzagging up the tree-covered slopes. Assuming the path was in good shape, he could reach the summit by nightfall.

“All right, stop here,” he said. “It looks like this is as close as the road gets.”

Kirsten slowed the car gently this time and parked on the side of the road. She turned to Jim, but her face was blank again. Her tears had dried and her mouth was firmly closed. She gave him an impersonal look, like a taxi driver impatient to get rid of her passenger.

He handed her the flash drive. “Keep this safe, okay? I already downloaded everything I need.”

She took the device, stared at it for a moment, then tossed it over her shoulder. It landed on the backseat.

Jim bit his lip. It was difficult to see Kirsten this way, so hurt and angry. He pointed at the road ahead. “Once you get to Lijiang, go west on Provincial Road S308. You should be able to cross into Burma near the town of Pianma.”

She frowned, apparently irritated by his directions. Jim saw this as a sign of progress. He leaned closer and looked directly at the camera lenses in her glasses. “Before I go, I want you to answer one question. In the twenty years you’ve known me, have I ever failed to do something that I set my mind on doing?”

Her frown deepened. “No, you haven’t. You’re the most stubborn son of a bitch I’ve ever met.”

“That’s right, I’m stubborn. And now there’s two things this stubborn S.O.B. is going to do.” He raised his prosthetic hand and pointed its index finger straight up. “One, I’m going to find my daughter. I’m going to bring Layla home and lock her in her room and take away all her goddamn computers.” His voice was loud, booming inside the car. He lowered it as he uncurled his middle finger. “And two, as soon as we get back to the States, I’m going to take you out to dinner. I know a great French restaurant in Georgetown. We’ll order champagne, the whole works. What do you say?”

She still frowned, but there was a slight change in her expression. She blinked rapidly behind her glasses, as if there was a bit of dirt in her eye. “You’re making a big assumption, Pierce. How do you know I’ll want to have anything to do with you after this?”

He lowered his prosthesis and folded his arms across his chest. “I’ll turn on the charm. I’ll recite love poems. Whatever it takes.”

The frown stayed on her face for another three seconds. Then, without a word, she lunged toward him, practically jumping into the passenger seat. Jim unfolded his arms and wrapped them around her. She buried her face in his chest and started to sob. Her whole body trembled.

“Promise,” she murmured against his shirt. “Promise you’ll come back.”

“I promise. With all my heart.”

The cave that Layla found on their first night in the mountains was cold and dank, but she and the boys were so exhausted they slept on its stone floor until noon the next day. Layla woke up first, shivering. Because she wore nothing under her down coat except the thin hospital gown, her legs were freezing. She found a place to pee at the back of the cave, then spent a few minutes watching the children sleep. They lay on their sides, snuggled against each other for warmth. Their snores echoed against the rocky walls.

She’d learned their names the day before during their long walk along the mountain trail. The older boy was Wu Dan, and the younger one was Li Tung. When she tried to teach the boys her name, they both said “Lei-lei” instead of Layla, but that was close enough. She also learned three important Mandarin expressions: wŏ kě le (I’m thirsty), wŏ lèi le (I’m tired), and wŏ è le (I’m hungry). Her response to the first complaint was straightforward—she led the boys to one of the rivulets streaming down from the glacier on the mountaintop—and she solved the second problem when she found the cave. But addressing the third complaint was more difficult. The mountainside was almost bereft of life. Nothing grew on its steep slopes except moss and yellow grass and small purple flowers. Layla thought of the hikes she used to take with her father and tried to remember what he’d told her about edible plants, but it was hopeless. She’d been too busy playing in the woods to pay attention to him. And the plants on this mountain didn’t look familiar anyway.