The Ascendant: A Thriller Page 10

  Then Garrett, jonesing to get high, asked Bingo if he knew where Garrett could score some weed. Bingo fell silent for almost a minute, and then said, flatly, “You should not smoke pot. It’s bad for you.”

  That was the sum total of the conversation.

  It was clear to Garrett that Bingo was a seriously odd bird, but in a way that he kind of liked. He seemed incapable of harming a living thing—he scooped up stray spiders in coffee cups and released them in the brush outside—but when Garrett caught him playing Call of Duty on a laptop late that night, he saw the burning intensity of a killer in Bingo’s eyes. Bingo was slaughtering Soviet agents with abandon, grunting in pleasure whenever a soldier bit the dust. That was when Garrett decided that the two of them were connected, however tangentially. Like Garrett, Bingo was a hard-core geek. Like Garrett, he had rage issues. He even had crappy social skills, a problem with which Garrett could sympathize.

  By three in the morning Garrett was wrung out and asked to go to sleep. He sacked out in a small bunk room with a thin mattress and a window that was painted shut. An American flag hung on one wall, along with a Marine Corps recruiting poster. A square-jawed Marine in a white dress cap held a gleaming silver sword in front of his face. Brandon had brought home a poster just like it after he had signed up for the Corps. The few, the proud, the Marines, he had said over and over again, half taunt for his little brother and half catechism for himself.

  Garrett ripped the poster off the wall and stuffed it into a garbage can, then curled up and passed out without taking off his clothes.

  • • •

  Day two had started at 6:00 a.m., with Alexis pounding on his door.

  “Get up,” she said. “We’re going for a run.”

  “We’re not doing anything,” Garrett said, a pillow over his head. “You go for a fucking run.”

  Alexis opened the door anyway and shook Garrett roughly. “You need exercise. Good for the brain.”

  “My brain is fine,” he said. “Fuck off and die.”

  She put a portable radio next to the bed and turned it on. Kesha screeched through the tinny speaker. She turned on the lights and pulled back the curtain on the window, flooding the room with sunlight.

  “Ah, shit,” Garrett said. “Have a fucking heart.”

  Garrett staggered out of bed and pulled on a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt that she had left on a chair for him. He stumbled out of the barracks into the early-morning light and blearily put one foot in front of the other, following Alexis down a dirt path, working his way up to a reluctant, if steady, shuffle.

  It was awful: the dust, the rocks, the dry wind, the sweat, the thirst, the pain in his muscles. He had never liked exercise of any kind, always thought it a waste of his time—after all, he was in perfectly good shape, and could push an elevator button as well as the next guy—and running seemed the ultimate in pointlessness. The fact that Alexis was able to lope effortlessly up and down hills like some kind of African springbok only furthered his humiliation. When she waited for him to catch up every quarter mile he had to restrain himself from smashing in her kneecaps with a rock.

  After twenty minutes he dropped to his knees and began to dry-heave. Alexis relented, and walked him back to the barracks for the next set of sessions.

  The rest of day two was more of the same: politics with Lefebvre, Chinese culture with Celeste, military briefings with Bingo. Four hours, then food, four hours, then food, and on and on into the night.

  Alexis oversaw every session, sitting nearby, taking notes and asking questions. She didn’t seem to tire, ever, or get distracted when her cell rang, which it did regularly. As far as Garrett could tell it was mostly General Kline badgering her for progress reports. If she was standing close enough he could hear the general barking at her about schedules and funding, and sometimes about the military, and once even about the president. Alexis would answer in flat, even tones—yes sir, no sir—never letting Kline’s hyperbolic emotions ruffle her. That impressed Garrett, because keeping his cool was one of the things he was truly terrible at.

  The other thing that impressed him was her flexibility. She was clearly running the show, but Garrett had to admit that she did it without ever throwing her weight around or restricting the conversation to subjects deemed “on topic.” That surprised Garrett. His first impression of her had been that she was a rigid thinker, and he despised rigid thinking. Fluidity and change were the intellectual seas in which he swam. But Alexis was not so easy to pin down. She let the flow of information swing from place to place, arena to arena, and she showed no irritation when Garrett wanted to explore with Celeste—conversationally, of course—the differences between male and female masturbation, or when, exhausted and cranky, he finally told Lefebvre that diplomacy was a waste of time, and that the U.S. should just nuke China off the face of the earth.

  At the end of day two, Garrett stopped studying Alexis’s behavior and just thought of her as another member of the team. Well, almost. He had to admit that he still found her extremely attractive. He even found, in moments of distraction, that he had begun to have feelings for her, beyond just wanting to bed her. He wasn’t exactly sure what those feelings were, but he did know that was new territory for him. Very new.

  • • •

  On the morning of day three Garrett and Alexis had run again, predawn. It still hurt, but Garrett only gagged twice and managed to make it a full three miles down the dirt jogging path, albeit very slowly. Alexis didn’t break a sweat. That just killed him.

  When they returned to the barracks, ten file-folder boxes full of intelligence briefings—with the providing agencies’ names and officers redacted—had been delivered along with breakfast. The team—and Alexis had started calling them that somewhere in the middle of day two—broke from instruction sessions and instead dug through the briefings, each of them taking two boxes. It was a fascinating trove of global information that was often prosaic (the Brazilian wheat harvest was up seven percent for the first quarter, leading to an increase of 20,000 hectares of the grain being planted for the coming year), sometimes titillating (the prime minister of Cameroon was having an affair with a young Thai prostitute, which wasn’t that unusual, but the prostitute was thought to have had a sex change, and that could prove embarrassing), and occasionally fraught with peril (Ukraine was believed to be shipping two hundred North Korean antiaircraft missiles to Iran, and the Israelis were contemplating intercepting the freighter, which American officials feared might set off a new Middle Eastern conflagration).

  Halfway through his first briefing box, still covered in a fine layer of dirt from his run, eye sockets still sore from lack of sleep, Garrett had another revelation. He realized that he liked it. He had always loved learning esoteric things, especially if they had to do with numbers and economics, but he could not have guessed that amassing all this information at once would be so—he had hunted for the word while sipping a coffee and studying a map of the Sea of Japan—thrilling. It filled him with excitement. It was like being back at Yale, when Avery would push him not just to find the answer to a problem, but to figure out why the problem existed in the first place. But it was more than that now. He felt, for the first time, like he was doing something worthwhile. And useful. And those two concepts were strange bedfellows for Garrett Reilly.

  It was as if all that privileged information was being funneled only to him, because someone out there believed that he could make sense of it all. He could sort the information, recognize the latent patterns, see through the random nature of the Chinese actions and bring coherency to them.

  He was embarrassed to admit it, but he loved the feeling of being needed. He knew, consciously, that Alexis and her cronies at the DIA had planned it this way—that he was supposed to well up with a sense of purpose, and that in fact this was information that had already been vetted by some junior analyst in Washington. He knew that he wasn’t that special. And yet, it worked. He felt a juvenile inner glow, no matter how much
he hated himself for feeling it.

  What he decided he really felt—head swimming, exhausted, waiting half-starved at the end of day three for more inedible mess-hall food to arrive at the barracks—was, well . . . proud.

  23

  QUEENS, NEW YORK, APRIL 4, 1:42 AM

  Mitty Rodriguez was glad no one could hear her. She’d laughed so hard that Mountain Dew had come spraying out of her nose. And if anyone had seen that, well—major humiliation. But it was almost two in the morning and she was in an alley behind Thirty-fifth Avenue in Astoria, Queens, hunting through a Dumpster that belonged to an auto parts store, so no one was listening, and absolutely no one was watching.

  She was looking for servomotors. Big ones, not the little pieces of shit that you bought at hobby stores. She needed them to control a pair of forward-reaching arms on the battle robot she was entering into the Destroy All Robots competition in Yonkers next week. Her plan was to attach a thin section of sharpened aluminum tubing to the right arm, and a circular Plexiglas shield to the left, which would make Morloc—that was her name for the as yet unfinished, two-foot-tall mechanical man—a seriously gangsta piece of machinery. Morloc was going to drive that aluminum spear right into the motherboard of all her challengers, frying out their circuits and rendering them electronically brain-dead.

  In her mind’s eye, Mitty could see the jig she would dance when Morloc won, and how she would pour beer on the heads of those semi-Asperger’s Orenstein twins who beat her last year. But this was in the future. First she needed to find those servomotors, but it was dark, and she was having no luck.

  The Dumpster was full of plastic bubble wrap and half-empty 10W-40 oil cans, which was making it stink like an old car engine. Also, Garrett kept calling, which was why she was laughing in the first place. He was talking some hilariously crazy shit. She would listen briefly, phone tucked to her ear, flashlight in her left hand, right hand digging through the crap, then hang up on him when his story started sounding too much like he was blowing crank up his nose.

  Garrett was telling her that he was on a military base on the other side of the country. That he was working on some top-secret Defense Department shit—he couldn’t tell her what because that would be illegal and they were probably listening in on this phone call—and that they had recruited him after the bombing at his office.

  That’s when Mitty started laughing.

  “You’re a lying sack of shit,” she had said, and hung up.

  He called back thirty seconds later and continued his tale. He was reading top-secret intelligence briefings and being tutored on all this classified junk by experts.

  Doubt it. Laugh in face. End call.

  Okay, maybe he wasn’t a hundred percent trippin’. Yes, she had gotten his voice mail a couple of days ago: there had been that bombing downtown, he had been close to it, but he was fine, and he was leaving the city. She hadn’t known anything about the bombing when she heard his message—she had been fighting with the Horde to conquer Azeroth in the Mists of Pandaria and had missed out on a couple of days’ news—so she wasn’t that relieved when she found out he was okay. That didn’t make her insensitive—it was like someone telling you they had survived a car crash when you didn’t even know they’d been in a car. Okay, maybe she was a little oblivious. Whatever. She had her priorities. Garrett understood that. That’s why they were friends.

  It did seem a little weird, though, that Garrett had left town and not told her why. And when she had listened to the voice mail again, she could hear strain in his voice. But Garrett was always getting into situations that put strain in his voice—buying stocks on loan or selling stocks on loan or trading contracts on loans. She didn’t understand half of what he did, and didn’t care.

  But she did understand one thing: there was no way in the world Garrett Reilly was working for the U.S. military. For a lot of reasons.

  First off, he hated the military. Those assholes had killed his brother. And then they had lied about it. Hell, she’d been with Garrett the night he took a drunken swing at the Marine sergeant at the recruiting center in Times Square, which had been hella funny, btw.

  Second, what military in the world would want Garrett Reilly on their team? He had an unfixable attitude problem. She loved him and all, and he was her best friend, but you have to call a spade a spade—Garrett Reilly was just as likely to punch a coworker in the face as he was to scrap with our country’s enemies. The dude was a 24/7 liability.

  Mitty banged down a gulp of Mountain Dew (she brought a can with her everywhere she went) as her phone rang again. It was Garrett.

  “You gotta cut it out,” she said. “I’m a busy woman. If you’re on the inside, prove it. Muéstrame.”

  She hung up again. It was time to give up on the AutoZone Dumpsters. There were no servos down there, which was disappointing, but not surprising. It was hard to build a killer robot on the cheap, but it was a labor of love, and Mitty would not be denied. She climbed out of the Dumpster and walked the ten blocks back to her building on Thirty-first Avenue, trying to brush the dirt and grease off her pants as she went, then slogged up the three flights of stairs to her apartment and sat on her couch, gazing mournfully at the pieces of Morloc spread out on her living room floor. She had had such big plans for him . . .

  Her phone chimed. It was a text. From Garrett. It read: Preguntas. Questions. That was their code. It meant that he had something to share with her, but that it was a secret, and he was sending it on their own virtual private network. They used the VPN mostly for passing game cheats and ripped movies.

  She sighed, tired of the charade with Garrett, but booted up one of her laptops anyway. It was the computer she kept offline ninety-nine percent of the time, and only connected to the Web on an isolated dial-up that she had hacked from the phone company. No one was going to be snooping on that line. There was one unread e-mail on the account, and it was from Garrett, and of course it was encrypted, but she had the encryption key. Hell, she had written it.

  She opened it. There was a link. And a password. She clicked it and waited, tired and stinking of motor oil and ready for bed, but then what loaded on-screen made her heart race . . . and forget all about Morloc’s pitiful, lifeless arms.

  Destroy All Robots could wait, she thought, gazing at the scroll of military enlistment records, because her homeboy Garrett had just struck the mother lode.

  24

  CAMP PENDLETON, APRIL 4, 12:39 AM

  Garrett lay in his slatted bunk bed and smiled. He smiled because he knew that across the country, Mitty Rodriguez was staring at his e-mail and hyperventilating.

  He hadn’t sent her anything important—just a backdoor portal into a Camp Pendleton HR account. He’d hacked it himself, after Alexis had broken them off for the evening and he had a few minutes to lurk in the base’s secured intranet. Of course it was secured from outside of Pendleton, but not from sniffers inside the military’s firewall. He hadn’t done any real damage; the HR server was a dead end, and Mitty would find that out pretty soon. But it proved where he was, and that he wasn’t just bullshitting her.

  It also allowed Garrett to see Jimmy Lefebvre’s Army records, and reading them had been an eye-opener. Lefebvre had graduated with top honors from Officer Candidate School, and had been about to ship out to Iraq when doctors discovered he had a heart arrhythmia. Those were grounds for an immediate medical discharge, but someone, somewhere, had pulled strings and Lefebvre was offered a desk job instead—poli-sci research at the War College. It saved his career, but Garrett guessed that not seeing combat must have been crushing to a proud southern aristocrat like Lefebvre. It helped explain his attitude: Lefebvre probably saw Garrett as an able-bodied freeloader. That must eat him up.

  Garrett decided to cut him some slack.

  He eyed the stack of books Lefebvre had given him. They were beginning to pile up all around his tiny bunk room. Maybe the first part of cutting the lieutenant slack was actually doing what he asked.

&nb
sp; Garrett leafed through them. They were all about China: biographies of its leaders, histories of its culture, the revolution, its wars, essays on Chinese painting, poetry, literature. Name an aspect of modern Chinese life and Garrett was pretty sure that in the last five years there had been a book published about it. Probably two. Or a dozen.

  Some were more interesting than others, but Garrett didn’t mind that. He had come to terms with his role on the team, that of human database. By definition, a database needed as much information as it could hold. And Garrett could hold a lot.

  One book caught his attention: a biography of Mao Zedong. The son of a peasant who had grown rich selling grain, Mao had grown up not poor—as Garrett had assumed—but in fact relatively well off. He had been well educated, going to secondary school—a rarity in that age in China—and eventually attending Peking University, where he met and married the daughter of a college professor. It was there, at university, that he had discovered Marxism and promptly joined the Chinese Communist Party. And it was in the party that Mao discovered his true calling.

  What struck Garrett most about Mao was his intellect. He was brilliant. He was also a futurist of the highest order. He understood the logistics of political organizing, and he implemented those logistics by placing loyal commissars in all local party cells. He also understood the future of warfare in a way that no one else at the time did; he knew that the modern armies facing his ragtag revolutionaries could only be beaten by what would now be termed asymmetric warfare—sporadic, surprise guerrilla attacks meant to disrupt and demoralize. And so that was exactly the military strategy he employed. He knew, instinctively, that he had to win the hearts and minds of the local peasantry in order to change a country as vast and populous as China, and that once those hearts and minds were won, they had to be kept in line through iron-fisted control.