She pulled her still-wet bathing-suit bottom out of the bag, tossed it into the shower, and rinsed out the sand in the hot water. Then, as the bathroom filled with steam, she undressed, looking at herself in the fogged mirror. The naked body she saw, its beauty obscured by the moisture on the glass, could have been anybody’s. She was anonymous.

After she got out of the shower, she pulled a small makeup compact from the backpack. She tapped it twice on the counter and the cover popped up. She licked her index finger on her right hand and rubbed it around the rim of the compact. There.

She held up her hand to the light and saw the hair. She pulled her fiancé’s black plastic brush from the jewelry box on the counter. She blew gently on her finger, and the hair fell onto the brush. Carefully, she put the brush back in the box.

Carrie sat down on the toilet and closed her eyes. Now she saw them again. Then she saw her fiancé, and, finally, she saw her father.

The inch-long cuts she made on her left thigh wiped the images of the men away. Eyes still shut, she didn’t see the blood dripping onto the blue tile at her feet. The clatter of the scissors on the floor jarred her back from the moment. She stifled a cry of pain and began to wipe the blood away with her palms. She moved to the sink for a towel and then stopped. The fog on the mirror receded just enough for Carrie to look herself in the eyes. I am not anonymous, she told herself. I am death.

In many ways it was like watching an old Xerox copy machine in action. A thin layer of graphene chips was sprayed down by a roller that moved from one side of the table to the other. Essentially carbon atoms laid out in the same hexagonal structure of chicken wire, graphene was light and strong, and it was a great conductor. But more important, it was made from the same carbon atoms that formed everything from graphite to charcoal, so it could be sourced easily. Indeed, the graphene in this run of the machine had been pulled from the smoke of a coal-fired power plant.

There was a burning smell as a laser fired, igniting a tiny flame where the light beam came into contact with the graphene dust, melting and fusing the particles together. Then the roller swept back in the other direction, laying down another thin layer, the laser firing again, back and forth, back and forth.

In each microscopic layer, the laser carved out new shapes in the powder. Slowly, a form began to rise, akin to pieces of paper stacking up. As the laser fused it all together, the form grew into an intricate latticework, almost like a honeycomb. The roller paused as a robotic hand reached over, turned the object thirty degrees, and inserted a feed of electrical wire, and then the layering began again. In ten minutes, the form was complete. The robotic hand reached back in and lifted it up, and a spray of air blew off the remaining dust that clung to the object. The arm then moved the object outside the machine and put it in a cardboard box. After sixty forms had been placed in the box, an alarm rang.

A human worker scurried over, quickly closed the box, and ran a line of packing tape over it, sealing it shut. He slapped a barcode sticker on it, and another worker loaded the box onto a robotic pallet mover that drove itself down the aisles. Where once garden gnomes and children’s bicycles had been stacked and stored, ready for distribution across the retail network, there now stood boxes of reverse-engineered spare parts, from machine-gun belts to wheel brackets to, in this case, a power coupling needed at Mare Island. Outside the warehouse, an eighteen-wheeler truck waited with a manifest for the various items that would be distributed and delivered by the next day.

Back inside, the direct-digital manufacturing machine, also known as a 3-D printer, continued its work. A new software package had been downloaded, and now the device began to build an entirely different object. The process had the efficiency of an assembly line but the flexibility to shift on demand and build any design that could be modeled with computer software.

And, even better, it could reproduce itself. The protocol, as voted on by Lee-Ann’s shareholders, dictated that every tenth run would produce parts for additional 3-D printers. These would then be sold at a discount to the firms that had originally been in Wal-Mart’s supply chain. The seeds of both a manufacturing revolution and a new kind of defense industrial complex were being sown within the world’s largest retail chain.

Ritual could be deadly. But ritual also offered its own protection. If you followed the same patterns day after day after day, those watching knew that you had nothing to hide.

So Russian air force major general Sergei Sechin had been going to the Lotus Flower Club now for three years. The same girl. He never asked her name. He knew her only by her number: Twenty-Three.

Twenty-Three wore her jet-black hair short, cropped in a spiky mess that looked sultry, not sloppy. She might have been from Tibet; he wasn’t sure. He never asked, never bothered her with fake conversation. Maybe that was why her dark eyes seemed to light up just a slight bit whenever she saw Sechin, which was once every two weeks. That was enough. He was no longer a young man.

She was chipped, of course. His Chinese counterparts could have all the biofeedback they wanted of an old man’s best effort at screwing his way toward a fleeting moment of escape from age and decay. But at the Lotus Flower Club, that also meant she was wired into the room’s screens on all four walls and the ceiling. The screens pulsed colors depending on her level of arousal. Whatever pills she took worked, because the explosions of light that finished off each session were unlike anything Sechin had ever seen. It was like an aurora borealis in the bedroom.

The concierge guided Sechin to his usual room and left him. Sechin knocked once, then entered.

But she was not the usual Twenty-Three.

The girl under the purple sheets had blue hair and sharp Nordic features.

Shit. Moscow must have sent her. If this was an attempt to kill him, it was not the way he’d thought it would happen. He turned to leave. Let them shoot me in the back, the cowards.

“Be’ ’IH mej ’Iv?” she said.

He froze.

Klingon. She had just spoken Klingon.

“What did you say?” he asked.

“Be’ ’IH mej ’Iv?” she repeated.

Now he was intrigued. This was too artful for the Directorate or his own intelligence service.

“Who leaves a beautiful woman” indeed?

He sat on the bed and placed one hand on her leg.

“So, we have a language in common — what shall we talk about?” he replied in Klingon.

“Come here,” she said. “I’m cold. I need you to warm me.”

“If you’re not careful, such clumsy talk may make an old man lose his will,” he said.

“Perhaps I can help.” Then she lowered the sheet, revealing her breasts. “I can make them bigger if you like,” she said. “Or smaller. Whatever you wish.” She put a device the size of a matchbox on the nightstand.

Biomorphic breast augmentation was increasingly common, and inexpensive, in China. In Russia, it was taboo and therefore a rarity. Whoever had performed the surgery was very talented.

“There’s no need,” said Sechin under his breath. “They’re perfect as they are. Really.”

He undressed quickly, leaving his clothes in a pile at the foot of the bed.

“Your socks,” she said with a giggle.

“What about them?” he said as he climbed in.

“You can take them off,” she said.

“Never. So I can make a quick getaway,” he said with a wink.

“Not too quick, please,” she said. She pulled the sheets over them. Then she pulled another blanket made of thin metallic fabric over the sheets.