Eleven years earlier
He dropped the first two tangos easily, one running low to his right, the other peeking around the corner of a gray shrapnel-pocked building. A quick dash to the right put him in cover behind a scorched armored personnel carrier. He switched mags expertly, knowing he had but one round remaining in his AN-94 assault rifle. Through all the years, through so many battles, the count in the back of his head had never failed.
He checked the positions of the two remaining members of his team. One man was in solid cover on his right flank. The other, to the left, was running over open ground like a startled deer. “Idiot,” he muttered to himself.
Realizing the man on the left was about to die, and not wanting to waste the opportunity, he readied a grenade and scanned ahead. Explosions lit the battlefield, a panorama of the apocalypse. Burning cars and bomb craters, bodies all around. The noise reached a crescendo, blasts overriding the staccato rattle of full automatic fire. He heard indistinct shouting and wails of pain. The most efficient killer on earth tuned it out as he always did.
The chance came precisely as expected, a muzzle flash slightly to the left. His teammate, still in the open, took a hit. Monkh’s response was lightning-like. Before his teammate had hit the ground, the grenade was in the air. He scored a direct hit, removing, as it turned out, the last two members of the opposing force.
“Game over, bastards!” said Nikolai, who’d been watching over his shoulder.
And so it was.
Monkh removed his headset and pushed back from the gaming console.
“You are the best ever!” said Nikolai, who at fifteen was two years younger than the friend he idolized. “How many did you kill?”
“One fewer than I will next time.”
“What about the prize? How much did you win?”
Shaman44—that was his nom de game—only shrugged. “Not much. Maybe five hundred dollars. This was a small tournament. After I divide it with my worthless teammates, barely enough to buy a keyboard with better backlighting.”
“But there are bigger tournaments.”
“Yes, far bigger ones. But the problem is always the same. The big-money tournaments draw the best players, and without a strong team it doesn’t matter how good I am. And I can never get on a decent team because our internet is throttled down by the government—it’s like trying to win an F1 race on two cylinders.”
“When you get the money, let’s get drunk. The kid who runs my uncle’s store at night sells to anybody—you only have to slip him a few yuan.”
“I don’t like drinking. It dulls my reflexes.” Monkh pushed up from his custom three-axis chair and stretched. “You would be a better player if you stayed sober, Nikolai.”
“I could never be as good as you. Your speed of play—you have the best kill-death ratio of anyone in the E-Sports rankings.”
“It’s all about preparation. You have to be a student. Know the scenarios and your opponents.” He kicked an empty box across the room, the one that had held his new backup controller. “But rankings mean nothing when you live on a pig farm on the steppe. Without being on a top team there is no way to make a living. And even if I did have a better connection, the best players don’t like me. They know I am a threat, so they freeze me out.”
A familiar knock on the door behind them. Tentative, but determined.
His grandmother.
Monkh had lived with her since he was four, when his mother had died of cancer. His father had disappeared two years before that, or so he’d been told. By now he had surely drunk himself to death.
Monkh went to the door, expecting the usual admonitions about getting out of the house or tending to the pigs—the farm was down to its last five. He had recently quit school, so at least that battle was behind them.
Monkh opened the door, and what he saw surprised him. It was indeed his grandmother, yet her round, wrinkled face, framed by a colorless scarf, showed none of its usual sternness. His nai nai looked … befuddled.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Men have come to see you.” Her voice was thread-thin.
“Men? What men?”
Her face collapsed into a visage that was nothing short of despair. This from a widow to whom life had dealt nothing beyond drought, pestilence, and an abusive husband.
Monkh walked to the front room cautiously—not as Shaman44, gaming wunderkind, but as a gangly, seventeen-year-old son of the Manchurian steppe. There were indeed two men waiting.
The one on the right was easy to assess. His face gave nothing away, but what he wore spoke volumes. Monkh recognized the rank and insignia of a major in the People’s Liberation Army.
The second man, wearing an overcoat and fur hat, was something else entirely. Of the two, he was the far more frightening.
Present day
Through the tinted visor of his motorcycle helmet, Monkh watched a blond woman at the adjacent gas pump try to fill her Mercedes convertible. In a tight skirt and ridiculous shoes, she fumbled with the hose, which was twisted near the attach point. An old man, at least seventy, came to her rescue from the opposite side of the pump island. She batted her eyes and smiled as he straightened things out. When he was done, she immediately turned her back on him. The old guy walked away pitifully toward the convenience store, a dog who’d been kicked out of the house.
Monkh had long ago concluded that women were the same everywhere. The schoolgirls in his village outside Hailar had been cliquish and patronizing, uninterested in a boy whose only future involved a failing pig farm. He thought that might change when he left the backwater of Manchuria. For years now, clandestine operations had taken him to cities across the world, expanding the field of play exponentially. Still, the social awkwardness that had always dogged him, combined with the way he immersed himself in his work, unfailingly got in the way. He found American women particularly vexing. In the month since arriving here, Monkh had regularly tried to strike up conversations with girls in campgrounds, grocery stores, and diners. He’d been rejected every time.
The blond locked the doors on the Mercedes—even though the top was down—and ignored Monkh completely as she walked past him toward the little store, her boobs bouncing and hips swaying.
He didn’t like this country. Didn’t like Americans for their ignorance and self-absorption. Most people here had no idea how the rest of the world lived. They drank their Starbucks, drove gas-guzzling cars, not knowing or caring where any of it came from. Monkh had been raised differently, imbued in self-reliance. Whether it was keeping a farm running or assassinating government officials, he never counted on outside help.
The pump clicked off, interrupting his musings. He had used a prepaid debit card, of which he kept a pocketful—credit cards required an identity, and paying cash necessitated going inside where there were cameras. He’d acquired the cards from dozens of different sources, and used each of them only once. It was probably overkill, but he wanted no chance of the FBI building a pattern with its digital analytics.
He cradled the pump handle and twisted on the motorcycle’s gas cap. The bike was a big Kawasaki touring model, 1200ccs of smooth power. He was presently a few miles outside Boone, North Carolina, having spent the predawn hours working his way toward the Blue Ridge Parkway. It wasn’t because he enjoyed scenic vistas, nor was it the shortest route to his destination. It was simply the perfect place to blend in. On a clear Sunday afternoon, he knew the Parkway would be thick with cruising motorcycles. For the last two hours he had fallen in loosely with groups of other bikers and waved cordially to those passing in the opposite lane. Gangs of dentists and accountants, he imagined, all wearing jeans and bandanas, and sporting week-old soul patches.
What could be more American?
His plan was to ditch the bike in a prepaid storage shed in Asheville, and from there make his way to the airport. Assuming he was not the subject of an intense manhunt—and he would have plenty of forewarning if that was the case—he would board a flight to Atlanta, and from there leave the country. Connecting to international flights from regional airports was always his preferred technique, avoiding the more intense security screening at big hubs. If all went well, within twenty-four hours of last night’s strike, Monkh would be safely en route to the second, less demanding part of his contract.
Not wanting to enter the store, he decided to stop for a piss somewhere outside town. He remounted the bike, adjusted his helmet, and cranked it to life. Monkh idled toward a nearby curb and then stopped to check his phone. He powered up the satellite device and waited. It was supposedly secure, but Monkh never relied on such promises when it came to electronics.
At last, a notification appeared on the encrypted messaging app: Call immediately.
He wondered what his employer wanted. Monkh had not seen any news since last night, when he’d checked the phone from the back seat of the Cessna. He knew Elayne Cleveland had survived the crash. But what’s happened since then?
He looked around the busy parking lot, saw cars coming and going. Next to the convenience store groups of people were loitering under shade awnings. Drinking coffee and eating donuts.
Monkh suddenly felt exposed.
“Whatever it is, it can wait,” he muttered under his breath.
He turned off the phone and slid it into his riding jacket. With one turn of the throttle, the bike jumped ahead into the cool mountain air.