The Ascendant: A Thriller Read online

  She had helped write it.

  She sipped her coffee and fantasized about how she would rip the malware to pieces, imagining it as a burglar in the night, breaking into her house, who she would personally blow to bits with her own 12-gauge digital shotgun. She laughed at the metaphor, but then came up short. Another container was registering the malware. What the hell? That made three separate sections of the server farm that were infected. This was highly unusual. It occurred to Lillian that the malware might have self-replicated long ago, well before detection by her security software. If that was the case, then there might be many, many more computers infected. In fact, she thought, as a horrifying chill ran down her spine, the malware might have infected the entire . . .

  But Lillian Pradesh did not even have time to finish the thought. At that very moment, her computer screen began to register a massive shutdown of server CPUs across the server farm. One, then two, then twenty, two hundred, a thousand, ten thousand, then . . .

  . . . All of them.

  Every single server in the two buildings, all 150,000 of them, all at once, turned off, the digital equivalent of going from the speed of light to zero in an instant. Lillian stared, openmouthed. Her computer screen showed her the completely unimaginable: they had been breached, compromised, and basically destroyed. Her entire server farm was offline. The attack had been swift and unrelenting. She was too stunned to even move. The only sound she heard was the blowing of the massive cooling fans on the floor of the cavernous server farm. They whirred and whirred, relentless, as the very thing the fans were meant to cool died.

  Then her computer shut itself down as well. The entire building was dead.

  27

  CAMP PENDLETON, APRIL 4, 8:17 PM

  Garrett dipped his feet in the cold Pacific Ocean. He had tossed his shoes into the sand behind him, rolled up his jeans, then waded up to his knees in the frigid water. He didn’t mind the cold—it felt good on his skin. He needed to clear his head. It had been more than four days of uninterrupted work and his brain was fried. Behind him, he could make out a Marine sentry standing thirty yards back from the water, night-vision goggles flipped down, silhouette lit up by the full moon that hung low over the black horizon.

  “Nice night, huh?”

  Garrett turned. Alexis walked out of the darkness and stood at the edge of the water. Her face was bathed in silver luminescence, her body outlined by the white sand. She had changed out of her Army dress slacks and into jeans and an old Adidas T-shirt.

  “Good night to be back in California,” she said.

  “I always missed the beach in New York.” He stepped out of the waves and back onto the beach. “I missed swimming in it. Surfing in it. The Atlantic just doesn’t cut it.”

  “Take a walk for a few minutes?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  She turned, and they walked side by side on the beach, right along the invisible line where the waves broke and the water dissolved into the sand.

  “Tell me about yourself,” she said. “About your life.”

  “Nothing to tell.”

  “Did you like your job at Jenkins & Altshuler?”

  “I liked the money. And bond trading was easy. For me at least.” A wave rolled up to his feet.

  “But?”

  “But nothing. I didn’t give it too much thought. I just did it.” He looked at her, half her face in darkness, the other half illuminated by the rising moon. She was beautiful, her smooth olive skin glimmering in the dim light. “Now you tell me something. You like your job?”

  “Love it,” she said, without hesitation.

  “You ever had another job? Before the military?”

  “Waitressing. In college. Which I hated. But I guess everyone should wait tables once in their lives.”

  “You saw combat?”

  “Waiting tables? Constantly.”

  He laughed. She smiled briefly, then shook her head no. “Two tours of duty in Iraq. But logistics mostly. I never fired my gun.”

  “Not once?”

  “Nope.”

  “You sad about that? Not shooting anyone?”

  “Hardly. I didn’t join the Army to kill people. I would have, if I’d had to. But the occasion never presented itself.”

  “So why did you join? I mean, if you weren’t looking to kill anyone?”

  “To serve my country. To give back. To find purpose in my life.”

  “Whoa. That’s a lot of sincerity. I was looking for something more cynical.”

  Alexis smiled and shrugged. “I don’t do cynical well.”

  “I’ve noticed.”

  They walked for a moment in silence. The waves thudded against the shore, broke, and bubbled onto the sand. A thin line of foam zigzagged ahead of them into the night. Garrett looked at her. “So? Have you? Found purpose?”

  “Absolutely. I’m the front line of defense. Keeping my country safe. Every morning I get up knowing exactly what I am doing and why I’m doing it. I love that feeling. To me, that’s purpose.”

  Garrett tried to think of something cutting to say, but nothing came to mind. He let out a long breath instead. At his side, Alexis stopped walking, and her feet sunk into the sand. Her shoulder accidentally rubbed up against his. “I’ve been meaning to ask you this question,” she said, “and I don’t want you to take it the wrong way. But if you’re so cynical, why’d you agree to help out? I thought you hated the military?”

  “I hate what the military does.”

  “What do we do?”

  “Destroy lives. Lots of lives. Lives of enemies. The lives of its own soldiers.”

  “Your brother’s life.”

  “My brother’s life for sure.”

  “And yet you’re here?”

  “Yeah. I am here.” Garrett looked out at the black sea. He had been asking himself the same question, but found the answer to be elusive. Why the hell was he here, on a Marine base, aiding and abetting the one organization in the world that he absolutely detested, hands down, above any other?

  “I can’t explain that one . . .” His voice drifted off. He watched the rhythmic waves rolling onto the sand. “I look for patterns. But my own life, it wasn’t falling into a pattern. It was just . . . random. Making some money. Losing some money. Drinking. Partying. Sleeping with a girl, not seeing her again. Back at work. Not that it was bad. It just wasn’t . . . anything. I can’t accept that. There are always answers.”

  “You can’t live without patterns.” She seemed to say this more as a statement than a question, and Garrett nodded in the affirmative. It was a truth about him that he had known for a long time—since childhood, really—but it wasn’t a truth he volunteered readily. Alexis had sensed it intuitively. Garrett suspected she understood him a lot better than she let on.

  “I try not to,” he said. “Without patterns, the world is too . . . chaotic. Truth is, chaos scares the shit out of me.”

  “Chaos scares everyone.”

  “Does it?” He smiled. “I guess I’m glad to hear that. What I mean is—nice to have company.”

  Alexis watched his face carefully. “Are you happy with the decision? To join us?”

  Garrett laughed. “Happy? Let’s not go overboard. I’m here, doing the job. That’s about as far as I’m willing to go.”

  Alexis smiled at him. “Well, I’m happy with your decision. Very happy.”

  Garrett cocked his head sideways. What had he just heard in her voice? A softness, a quiet affection? It gave him chills. He turned to her—she had never looked quite so pretty as she did now. He thought about stepping forward to kiss her—it seemed like the right thing to do, even with Marine sentries staring at them through their night-vision goggles—when a voice rang out.

  “Guys! We have a problem!” Lefebvre was sprinting down the beach. “Google is crashing!”

  28

  NEW YORK CITY, APRIL 4, 11:23 PM

  Avery Bernstein ducked into the White Horse Tavern on the corner of Eleventh and Hu
dson. The day had been slow, unproductive for most of the team, and tediously long for himself. The truth was, no one at Jenkins & Altshuler had recovered fully from the bombing. None of them had been hurt in the blast, but everyone had heard it, had their desks rattled by it, had seen the debris scattered across the pockmarked lobby and the shattered street. And rumors about Garrett Reilly had been flying around the office for days now.

  At first all the other brokers had bought the story Avery had been told to spread—Garrett had been hurt, but was recovering, and had decided to take some time off by visiting his family in California. But coworkers who knew Garrett had trouble believing he would go anywhere near his family, especially if rest and relaxation were what was called for.

  Now, ten days later, new stories were surfacing: Garrett had been the target of the bomb. He had happened onto some kind of top-secret financial scandal. He had been abducted by a foreign government and was being held for ransom. Avery tried to beat back the rumors, but that only stoked more speculation. This morning he had found an online bulletin board on the company servers dedicated to half-cocked theories as to who had detonated the bomb—Armenian extremists, irate Goldman Sachs directors—and where Garrett Reilly really was—in jail, a mental institution, two floors below the Jenkins & Altshuler offices, trading highly speculative derivatives. Avery shut the bulletin board down, but not before reading that he himself was suspected in Garrett’s disappearance. “AB is complicit and not to be trusted,” read one post. “Watch your back around him.”

  Well, they’re sort of right, Avery thought as he ordered a shot of Basil Hayden’s bourbon with one ice cube. He was complicit. But complicit was different from responsible. He was not responsible for what had happened, he had merely been a conduit for information. And still, he sighed as the bourbon’s hint of sweetness trickled down his throat; he worried about Garrett and what would happen to him. The government was a soulless machine. Its bureaucrats did not care a whit for who was ground up in its cogs. And as big a pain in the ass as Garrett was, Avery loved him. As corny as it sounded, Garrett really was the son he had never had. Avery would be devastated if anything happened to Garrett—utterly devastated.

  “But what can I do now?” he muttered as he downed his drink, disgusted at the catty workers in his office, disgusted at the gossips in other financial firms across lower Manhattan, and disgusted mostly at himself for allowing the military to cajole and bully him. Why did he play along with their games, their secrets? He knew the answer—he played along because he was scared of them. He was scared of their power, their ability to ferret out nasty intelligence about his business, about his personal life, and he was even slightly afraid for his personal safety. He wasn’t one of those people who believed the United States government went around killing its internal enemies, but he wasn’t ready to put that theory to the test, either.

  The truth about Avery was that he was a coward. He’d been picked on as a child, beaten up more times than he could remember for being short, geeky, and then, when he was a little older, for being gay. Avery had been out of the closet for years now, but he still recoiled at the memory of the savage pounding he’d gotten in high school when he’d dared to kiss another boy. The boy had panicked, desperate to hide who he really was, and told everyone at the school what had happened, and then Avery knew it would only be a matter of time before the starting nine of the baseball team trapped him in the men’s bathroom, which they did, and punched him and kicked him until he blacked out. Which they also did.

  The incident didn’t make him tough. Or brave. It made him cautious. He didn’t kiss a boy again until he was twenty-seven, and even then he was sure his world would come crashing down around him. But it didn’t, and slowly Avery gained his dignity as a scholar, later a businessman, and eventually a gay scholar and businessman. But he still stayed away from gay bars, and kept his sexual identity mostly to himself.

  He dropped a twenty-dollar bill on the bar and hurried out into the cold. Lower Manhattan was dark and quiet, for a change. The tourists were gone for the day; it was too cold and wet for anyone to stay outside for very long. Avery pulled his coat collar tight around his neck and put his head down against the relentless wind blowing off the Hudson River. His brownstone was three blocks away, due west, and Avery needed to get home. He needed to curl up in bed with a good book—he was a voracious reader of historical fiction—and wait for the sunrise and promise of a new day.

  He was dreaming of falling into the intricate plot of the thriller of Imperial Rome he’d been reading when he noticed a short, thick-set man in a down jacket appear out of the shadows and walk directly toward him. Avery was crossing Washington Street, a block from home, and he got the distinct sense that this man was heading for him—that he was aiming to intercept him.

  Avery’s shoulders tightened and he quickened his pace. The short man did the same. Avery looked up and down the street, and now he cursed the street’s emptiness, which only seconds ago he’d enjoyed. Where were the packs of Irish tourists when you needed them? He was on the verge of breaking into a run when the man caught up with him and asked quietly: “Avery Bernstein?”

  Avery kept walking—he was in the middle of the street—and decided not to slow down. If this man knew him, or had business with him, he could do it as they walked.

  “Who are you?” Avery said.

  “My name is Hans,” the short man said as he jogged to catch up with Avery. “Hans Metternich.” He had a thick accent that Avery pegged as Dutch probably, or maybe Danish. His face was square and clean-shaven, and he was noticeably good-looking. But Avery was still not going to slow down.

  “I don’t know you,” Avery said.

  “No reason you should,” the man said, falling into a quick walk alongside Avery. “But I know you. At least I know about you.”

  Avery gave him a worried look. And now that he heard the man speak more, Avery thought his accent wasn’t Dutch or Danish, but actually a put-on. What kind of name was Hans Metternich? The guy could have been from Bensonhurst for all Avery knew.

  “I need to have a word with you,” Metternich said.

  “Well, it’s late, and I don’t talk to strangers on the street, so why don’t you call me tomorrow at the office?” Avery walked a little faster. Only half a block until his home. He clutched at his cell phone in his pocket. He would call the police in a heartbeat if this man came at him.

  “I would call you at your office, yes, for sure, but, I don’t know if you are aware of this—people are listening to your phone calls.”

  Avery pulled up short. He stared at the man in the down coat, trying hard to memorize the particulars of his face. “Who are you?”

  “I am an investigative journalist.”

  “Journalists call on the phone,” Avery said.

  “As I said . . .”

  “People are listening to my calls. Who?”

  “Hard to say. Government. Police maybe. There are a host of suspects.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “I have investigated,” Metternich said brightly, amused by what he seemed to consider a joke. “That’s why I use investigative in front of the journalist part.”

  Avery shivered in the cold April wind. The two of them had stopped walking. Avery’s brownstone was in sight now, just a quick sprint from where they stood. “Bullshit. You’re a journalist like I’m a UPS driver. What do you want?”

  “I need to get in touch with Garrett Reilly.”

  Avery thought he felt his heart skipping a beat. Shit, he thought. What the hell is going on?

  “I know all about his discovery of the Treasuries sell-off by the Chinese,” Metternich continued. “And that the government took him away.”

  Avery took a moment to collect his thoughts. “Why do you need to get in touch with him?”

  “I have things to tell him.”

  “Such as?”

  “Who set off the bomb in front of your offices. And why they did it. It was not terro
rists, as the police and media have suggested.”

  Avery stared at this man. Was he a lunatic? A crank come to discuss crank theories, like so many other people who seemed to have sprung up lately around the Jenkins & Altshuler offices? “I don’t know where Garrett is.”

  “I know you don’t. He has been taken off the grid. But I have reason to believe he is being kept at a Marine base in California.”

  “If you know so much about him, then why are you talking to me?”

  “Because at some point in the next few days, or weeks, he will call you. Or the people who are keeping him will call you. They will put you in touch. Maybe ask you to see him? Or talk to him? I don’t know for sure. But I believe this will happen. And when you do see him, I would like you to pass him my name. Hans.”

  “That’s it? Just your name?”

  “No, no,” Metternich said, eyes twinkling with amusement and, Avery thought, mischief. “Tell him to make himself known to me. So that I can make contact with him. But tell him to be clever about it. Very clever.”

  The man named Hans Metternich reached into his pocket and Avery flinched, afraid of what was about to happen. Metternich smiled. “Don’t worry, Mr. Bernstein. Just a piece of paper. On it I have written my e-mail address. If you could give it to Garrett when you see him?”

  The man handed the paper to Avery, and Avery, out of habit—and he immediately wished he hadn’t—took it. Metternich bowed slightly, then backed away from Avery, lips still curled into a smile. “Sorry to have startled you, Mr. Bernstein. And I am most sorry for the odd circumstances surrounding our meeting.” With that, he turned and hurried down the street.

  Avery watched him go a moment, then shouted after him. “Hey! You! Hans!”

  Metternich pirouetted in a pool of orange lamplight. Leaves and plastic bags swirled at his feet. “Yes?” he said.

  “Why do you need to tell Garrett anything? What fucking business is it of yours?”