“I’ll see you later,” he said.

Huang ended the call without another word. Wei sat thinking hard and soon felt gravity and centrifugal force nudge his stomach. Then he heard the knock of the landing gear being deployed and buckled his seat belt. The pilot had begun his rattling descent over Beijing.

New York

Grigor Malkira landed at JFK a few minutes past noon, clearing the facial-recognition scanner at the gate without any problems. On the Crimean Peninsula, it would be seven o’clock at night. The sixteen-hour flight and the time difference had left him mildly disjointed, but he did not feel any jet lag. His body’s internal clock adjusted easily.

In his new identity, Grigor was Wendell Balen, an importer, exporter and distributor of artisanal foods from North Carolina. He was thirty-six and divorced, with no children. Balen, who had flown directly into town after a business trip to Ukraine, was here to arrange for distribution deals between a bee honey producer in Simferopol and several high-end US retailers in New York and Hawaii. Crimean mountain honey was a centuries-old delicacy, set apart by the local subspecies of bees, their unique diet of high forest nectars and regional beekeeping techniques. Grigor had thoroughly versed himself in the subject during his flight.

Outside the terminal now, he hailed a yellow cab from the queue and set his single travel bag on the seat beside him.

The driver half turned. He was a young Black man with a small red lightning bolt tattoo on his neck.

“How are you today, sir?” His accent was West African. Senegalese French.

Grigor studied the neck tattoo. It closely resembled the Russian body marker worn by Krovavaya Molniya, or Blood Lightning, a Russian strike force made up of three elite military units with neural implants. Though recently the brainport computers had become popular throughout Eastern Europe, where cheap implant clinics were everywhere.

There hadn’t been any in the States when he left five months ago.

“I’m fine, thank you,” Grigor said, then gave the driver his Manhattan destination in Balen’s Virginia Tidewater accent. The Westin-Marriott Grand Central, but first a stop in Greenwich Village. He provided the address. “You’ll wait? I won’t be five minutes.”

“No problem, sir.”

The route to the downtown location appeared on the taxi’s GPS screen. Then its meter reset.

Grigor noticed that the driver never lifted his hands off the wheel.

A Bluetooth neurolink.

He sat back as the taxi pulled from the curb and slid into the thick crawl of vehicles leaving the airport. Neurolink vogue in America, he thought. Change swept the mighty. And it was nothing compared to what else was coming in with the tide.