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comprised the New Technologies Development Site #18—became extensions of the blast.
    The force punched like a fist down into the heart of the bedrock, smashing along the twenty-five-mile Tangshan Fault, causing the Okhotsk Plate to grate against the great Eurasian Plate. The whole earth recoiled from that blow, shuddering from the impact. Waves of trembling power shot through the entire region.
    Some seismographs metered it as 7.8 on the Richter magnitude scale; on other machines it was measured at 8.2. The unbridled ferocity of it shot upward through the earth, tearing apart thousands of buildings. There were no foreshocks to warn people. There was no hint at all that this was coming. It was incredibly fast and without mercy. Virtually none of the structures in this part of China had been designed to withstand such fury. Hundreds of thousands of buildings were destroyed. Tremors were felt as far away as Xi’an, nearly five hundred miles from the blast. Closer cities—Qinhuangdao and Tianjin, and even Beijing—shivered as the shock waves hit, shattering glass, cracking walls, tearing up the streets.
    So many people were asleep when it happened. Nestled in bed, unaware that hell had come to their part of the world. Houses and buildings crumbled to become tombs for more than half a million.
    The New Technologies lab had been built there because Tangshan was a region with a relatively low risk of earthquakes.
    And yet this was the worst earthquake of the twentieth century, and the third deadliest in all recorded history.
    Nearly seven hundred thousand people died.
    Within a month teams of diggers had burrowed beneath the rubble of houses and the bones of the dead and were inching their way down into the troubled earth. Not in hopes of finding survivors. Not in hopes of recovering General Lo or Scientist Zhao.
    However, if there was a chance—a single chance—to recover even a piece of the Dragon Engine, then nothing could be allowed to interfere.
    That excavation continues to this day.

 
    Part Two
    Taken
    Stars, hide your fires; Let not light see my black and deep desires.
    —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Macbeth
    Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness.
    —ANNE FRANK

 
    Chapter Eight
    Secret Service Ops Center
The White House
Sunday, October 20, 3:22 a.m.
    Nothing was happening. That’s how Duty Officer Lyle Ames liked it. The ideal day for the Secret Service Presidential Detail was one in which the president did nothing, shook no hands, saw none of the public, and basically stayed indoors, out of sight, and safe.
    The press hated days like this.
    Ames loved them.
    According to the duty log on his desk, nothing much had happened all day. It was slow. Boring.
    Perfect.
    He sipped coffee from a ceramic mug with the presidential seal on it and flipped the duty log over to the last page. Nothing there, either. Nice.
    The office was nearly empty. His agents were at their posts, and Ames’s only company was Regina Smallwood at the ops desk. Smallwood sat in front of a row of computer monitors that displayed real-time feeds of security cameras. Each monitor screen was divided into many smaller windows that displayed telemetric feeds, coded to correspond with the heartbeat of an individual. Green lights pulsed for the president, the first lady, their family, the vice president, and the key members of government who formed the line of succession—the speaker of the House, the president pro tempore of the Senate, secretary of the Senate, all the way down to the secretary of Homeland Security. Most of the green lights pulsed with the slow, rhythmic beating of sleeping hearts. A few were more rapid, indicating that these people were night owls or in different time zones.
    The signals were sent by RFID chips—radio frequency identification chips the size of rice grains. Each VIP had one surgically implanted in the fatty tissue under their triceps. Unlike the passive chips used to store medical information,