The Ascendant: A Thriller Read online

  President Cross shook his head, going quiet for a moment, then stood and started pacing the room. As he spoke, he turned his head repeatedly to Garrett. “Mr. Reilly, I would unleash the full might of the U.S. military on the Chinese—I would rain down hell on them—if I thought it was the best thing for the country. But the Chinese are just as capable in a nuclear sense as the Russians. Maybe more so.”

  President Cross took a breath, paced a moment longer, then waved his hands in the air. “I would be dishonest if I said that there aren’t some in my administration who are pushing hard for a traditional military response to what’s been happening. But I’m not certain we can risk that. I’m not saying we couldn’t win, but good God almighty . . . what a thing it would be.”

  The president stopped, rubbed his chin, shook his head. “The long and the short of it is, Mr. Reilly, we cannot go the tried-and-tested route. We need to be clever. We need to be mysterious. We need to think one, two, maybe three or four steps ahead of our enemy. We need modern, outside-the-box leadership.”

  The president stopped his pacing right in front of Garrett’s seat on the couch. He pointed a long, slender finger at the young man. “What we need is you.”

  Lines formed at the edges of Garrett’s mouth. Kline thought he saw the young man pale slightly. “Excuse me?” Garrett said.

  “I want you to prosecute a stealth war against the Chinese. You will have whatever resources you need. Money, men, technology. You name it, it will be at your fingertips. You will marshal all the power of that spectacular brain of yours and bring it down hard, like a hammer, on our enemies. I want you to smash the daylights out of them. And I want you to do it in ways that they do not see coming. And, just as important, I want you to do it without anybody noticing. No bullets, no missiles. We cannot let the public know that we are fighting a war with China. Absolutely not. Nobody outside of a few people we deem necessary can have any knowledge of this. The consequences of the public finding out would be vast and potentially disastrous. To our economy. To the world. You’re going to attack our enemies, defeat them soundly, and nobody can ever be the wiser. It will be as if it all never happened.”

  There was silence in the room. All eyes turned to Garrett, whose jaw hung ever so slightly slack from his face. Kline shivered involuntarily as he waited for Garrett’s response. It was sink or swim. For Kline. For the country.

  “I thought I was being trained to spot attacks, not plan them,” Garrett finally said, eyes blinking.

  “You thought wrong,” President Cross answered.

  “I’m not sure . . . I’m not sure I know how to do that.”

  “You took out three companies of the best Marines money can buy. And you never had any of your boys fire a shot. You humiliated them. From what I’ve been told it was masterful.” The president turned to Major General Kline. “Were those not your words, Major General?”

  Kline nodded slowly but confidently. “Those were my words, Mr. President.”

  “We have very little time to waste, Mr. Reilly,” President Cross said. “But if you need the rest of the day to think on it, take it. I’d like you to report for work tomorrow morning, oh-seven hundred.”

  Kline watched as Garrett gulped, and then repeated the president’s words, as if to reassure himself that what he’d just heard was real. “You want me to lead an underground war against the Chinese?”

  “Not lead it, son,” the president said. “Win it.”

  46

  ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA, APRIL 10, 2:10 PM

  “You’re mad that I didn’t tell you?” Alexis asked from the driver’s seat of the black SUV. “About the plan?” They were crossing the low, broad expanse of the Arlington National Bridge, the black Potomac River eddying lazily below them. Garrett turned away from the window. They were the only ones in the car; their previous driver had gone back to Bolling with General Kline.

  “You knew the whole time,” he said, not a question but a statement.

  “I did.”

  “Bring me in, educate me, then put me in charge. A setup from the beginning.”

  “Not a setup, Garrett. A recruitment. We’d been looking for someone like you for more than a year. Someone young, brilliant, brave, and outside of the military.”

  “We?”

  “It was General Kline’s idea originally. But he and I put the program together. It took two years. A lot of hard work and not a lot of money.”

  “So I’m part of a program?”

  “We’re all part of a program. Every one of us. You used to be part of the Wall Street program, now you’re part of the U.S. military program.”

  “Convenient logic.”

  “You saying it’s not true?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore.” He looked at Alexis. “What’s the program called?”

  “It has a code name.”

  “Which is?”

  “Ascendant.”

  “Ascendant?” Garrett said. “Like, China is ascendant?”

  “Or, like, you are. Or, like, the program is. We developed Ascendant because the world is changing. Fast. Faster than a large, bureaucratic organization like the military—or the government—can keep up with. We saw threats out there, and we thought the only way this country could handle them was through a project like this. Nobody outside of the DIA believed Ascendant was viable. Until you came along.”

  It sounded to Garrett like there was a hint of pride in her voice. He shivered involuntarily. Suddenly the whole world seemed to have expectations of him. Everyone was making plans for Garrett Reilly.

  “How did you get involved?”

  “General Kline recruited me. Specifically for Ascendant. It was a long shot,” she said, smiling over at Garrett. “But I’ve always had a weakness for long shots.”

  “Have there been other recruits? Before me?”

  “None that fit as perfectly.” Alexis hesitated. “Or made it this far . . .”

  Garrett considered this: there had been others before him. Maybe a whole host of them. Brilliant young recruits. Or misfits. Or suckers. It made his head ache again. They rode in silence for a few minutes.

  “Where are you taking me?” Garrett asked.

  “The place I go every time I return to D.C. I thought you’d like to see it.”

  He stared at her, studying her face for clues, but she turned away to focus on the traffic. The SUV traveled straight from the bridge onto Arlington Memorial Drive, then onto the quiet roads of Arlington National Cemetery. The headstones of the soldiers were endless, row upon row of them: plain white, some faded to gray, etched with names, dates, and details of rank, flowers and wreaths laid on the occasional marker. Garrett stared at the immensity of the place, and the multitude of the dead. Alexis parked in the northwest corner of the burial ground, section 20. She got out of the vehicle, and Garrett followed her, slowly, warily.

  She waited for him at the edge of a field full of headstones. “There are sixteen Truffants buried in Arlington. All related to me. First one died in the War of 1812. We’ve had a casualty in every American conflict since.”

  “Is that supposed to make me feel patriotic?”

  “Being a citizen of a democracy requires sacrifice.”

  “Plenty of people don’t sacrifice anything.”

  “That doesn’t make it right.”

  “That doesn’t make it wrong, either. Okay, so the Truffants have spilled a lot of blood. Maybe you guys should call it a day, become dentists. A hell of a lot safer.”

  Alexis gave a short laugh, then pointed toward a distant row of grave markers. “I didn’t bring you here to see my family.”

  And suddenly Garrett knew exactly why she had taken him here—he couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen it earlier—and a sadness welled up in him that seemed infinite, a wave of despair that threatened to engulf his entire body. An empty place had opened up in the pit of his stomach and reached out to the tips of his fingers and toes. He felt hollow.

  “Third ro
w, seventeenth marker,” Alexis said. “I’ll wait here.” She walked quickly back to the car.

  Garrett just stood there for a moment, unable to move, either toward the grave site or away from it. Finally, after what seemed like an hour of indecision, he trudged, feet leaden, to the third row, and then to the seventeenth marker. All the soldiers in the neighboring plots had been killed in the last five years, either in Iraq or Afghanistan. Garrett stopped at the seventeenth marker and read the headstone:

  BRANDON PABLO REILLY

  LANCE CORPORAL

  US MARINES

  PURPLE HEART

  AFGHANISTAN

  MAY 14, 1982–JUNE 2, 2008

  There were no flowers on Brandon’s grave, no wreaths or teddy bears, no boxes of cookies or framed snapshots. It looked, to Garrett’s eye, like no one had ever touched his brother’s headstone. Maybe no one had ever visited it. He stood there, looking down at it for a full five minutes, not really thinking of anything in particular, not remembering Brandon, or fuming about the way he had died. His mind was oddly blank. It had never occurred to him to wonder where his brother was buried; he dimly remembered a letter from the Marines, but he’d torn it up without reading it carefully. He had been angry and bitter and oblivious of the details. And probably stoned as well.

  He bent low and ran his fingers along his brother’s first name, the letters sharply etched into stone. He did it in order to say that he had done it, that someone had purposely visited Brandon’s grave, and not as some sentimental gesture. That done, he walked back to the SUV and climbed in. Alexis was already sitting behind the wheel.

  “Was bringing me here part of the program as well?”

  She shook her head no. “From here on in, the program is whatever you make it. You are the program.”

  Garrett laughed briefly, bitterly, then looked away. Instantly, the laughter was replaced with pain. He winced as the darkness welled up in him again. He could feel tears building, sadness taking physical form, distorting the corners of his mouth and the muscles around his eyes. He tried desperately to get a hold of himself.

  “I miss him,” Garrett said. “I miss him so much.”

  Alexis reached out and touched his face, and Garrett could no longer control himself.

  He began to weep.

  He was humiliated, but there it was, the plain, naked truth—he was bawling his eyes out in front of an Army officer, a woman no less, and one whom he was deeply attracted to. He felt like a fool, but he also felt free, cleansed, strangely lighter. He cried hard, like he had meant to cry—had wanted to cry—for years. All those years of missing his brother; all those years of bitterness and rage; all those years of loneliness. When Brandon died he had left Garrett all alone in the world. The one person he could count on had abandoned him, and that had ripped a hole in Garrett’s world too large to ever be repaired. It had rent the fabric of his life, distorting, in some way, every feeling he’d had since the day he learned of the killing.

  And then suddenly the weeping turned into laughter, and Garrett was laughing through the tears streaming down his face, and he said to Alexis, “What the fuck is this all about?”

  He really had no idea—it was all new to him, this emotional catharsis. Every day seemed to bring another revelation. It was wearing him out. He continued to laugh, if only because that seemed to be the path he was now on, and he didn’t have the strength to do something else.

  Alexis laughed as well, and Garrett wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his suit jacket. And then, before Garrett could register how it had happened, he was kissing Alexis, holding her head in his hands and kissing her, his tongue in her mouth, and her hands groping the back of his neck. She was breathing hard, and holding him tightly, and he could taste the salt of his own tears, and he wondered if she could taste them as well. They moved their bodies closer to one another, and he could feel the warmth of her chest against his, through his suit and her uniform.

  She pulled away from him abruptly, shoved the key in the ignition, and started the car. They drove hurriedly out of Arlington, without saying a word, and then south, out of the cemetery and into Alexandria. She parked in front of a riverfront brick building and led Garrett inside. In the elevator Garrett clawed at her uniform and she yanked off his tie, and by the time they made it to her condo half their clothes were pulled off. She slammed the door shut and they dove into bed.

  Garrett loved the feel of her body—a mixture of soft and firm, muscled and yet distinctly female. She was in spectacular shape. They felt each other’s bodies, exploring, teasing, before he plunged into her and she groaned in pleasure. They writhed rhythmically, on top of each other, arms and legs intertwined. Garrett wanted to stay inside of her forever, just live there, attached to each other at their cores. She came loudly, intensely, her eyes locked on to his, and he followed her shortly after, happily, contented and, for the first time in a long time, at peace.

  By then night had fallen, and the two of them fell asleep in each other’s arms. He was not lonely. He felt whole.

  47

  CHENGDU, CHINA, APRIL 11, 12:33 PM

  She should have seen it coming.

  Riding in the back of a truck half-stacked with wooden crates of garlic, her most trusted assistants and lieutenants at her side, Hu Mei could see how obvious it had been: one minute the plaza outside the apartment building had been filled with passersby and street vendors, and the next it was empty. How could she not have understood that this meant the police had sealed off the area and were about to move in? And how had they known? Who had tipped them off to the meeting?

  She gazed at the faces of the other men and women swaying back and forth as the truck thudded over a potholed street. There was Chen Fei, the onetime party township director who was now her head of security. He had cuts and scratches along his face from where he had battled a police officer. But he could not have betrayed her now.

  Why? Because he could have done it a month ago, with far less trouble.

  There was Li Wei, a nurse from the south, who was dabbing at Chen Fei’s cuts and trying to hide her tears. Could she have been the traitor? Hu Mei doubted it. Li Wei had little else in her life: no husband, no children, no parents. Without the movement, she would have nothing. That made her loyal.

  Lin Chao, a political science student at Peking University, sat to Hu Mei’s right. He had been shot in the raid—his arm was bandaged, and a dark red patch of blood had soaked through the white linen of his shirt. He would live, thanks to the incompetence of the police, and Li Wei’s careful ministrations, and he did not seem overly worried about the wound. On the contrary, he seemed pleased. Lin Chao was a true believer. His only dream in life was to die on the barricades, a protest banner in his hands, a slogan on his lips. A wound only made him purer. There was no way Lin Chao had tipped off the authorities. He would rather die—literally.

  Mei grimaced as the truck turned a corner, and a box of garlic pressed against her shoulder. A policeman, trying to arrest her, had swung a baton at her, connecting with her arm, just above her elbow. Chen Fei struck the policeman down a moment later, but the damage had been done. Her arm radiated pain. She could barely move it.

  It was a miracle so many of them had escaped. Two of her inner circle had been shot dead as the first policemen stormed the building. Four were captured soon after that. Seven had escaped onto this truck with Mei. Eleven others had managed to scatter into the crowd of onlookers that had gathered. They would melt into the backstreets of Chengdu, and survive to fight another day.

  But just barely.

  This had been their fourth close call in as many weeks. The police were getting smarter, more determined. Stealthier. And there was the real possibility of a mole within the movement’s leadership. She scanned the faces of the three other people riding in the truck: Huang Jie, her strategist; Gao Gang, a computer expert; Wan Chen, who wrote her pamphlets. All shell-shocked, all trying to hide their fear. Had one of them betrayed her?

  No, Hu Mei tho
ught as the sickening smell of diesel wafted up through the cracked floorboards, this had happened because the movement had grown so large. There were so many people, in so many places, working with her—working with the organization—that some of them had to be informers, or plants, or spies. And none of them needed to be within her inner circle—there were endless opportunities to overhear a meeting time or location, and then to tell state security. It seemed to be the nature of growth—the more people you brought in to help you, the fewer you could actually trust.

  “How did this happen?” Lin Chao barked over the roar of the truck engine. He pointed an accusatory finger at Chen Fei. “You let it happen.”

  Chen Fei growled and shook his head. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Go back to school.”

  “School? The students will save China,” Lin Chao roared.

  “Like they did at Tiananmen?” Chen Fei snarled, lips curled in a cruel smile.

  “You and your party are killing the soul of the country!”

  “Enough!” Mei said. Her head hurt, her arm hurt, her stomach was turning with the combined stench of garlic and diesel exhaust. “If there is blame to be assigned, I will take it. I should have seen the police coming. I should have examined the surrounding area more closely. It is my fault.”

  That silenced them. It always did. Take responsibility for failure; share credit for success. It was what came naturally to Hu Mei. It was what made her a leader of men. And women. But she knew, sitting in the back of that truck, roaring away from their most disastrous mistake yet, that she was actually failing, not leading.

  She could not go on like this forever, running and hiding, striking glancing blows at the party behemoth. No, that was a losing game. They were mere flies buzzing around a horse. A nuisance. Soon enough they would find her, catch her, grind her to dust. They would execute her, alone, no witnesses, as they did all people they branded as traitors to the state—and they had branded her as that months ago.