The Ascendant: A Thriller Page 21

  When that happened, the movement would fall apart.

  She needed to strike an overwhelming blow. But how? She didn’t know. And the people in the truck, her closest advisors, could not help her. It wasn’t that they weren’t smart or committed. It wasn’t that they wouldn’t lay down their lives for Hu Mei—she suspected they all would do so if asked. No, it was that they were followers, marching behind her as she led the way, and what she needed most right now was an equal, a confidant who would walk at her side. Someone who could match her, idea for idea; someone she could open up to, plan with, dream with. In her mind’s eye he was a handsome young man, daring and heroic, and maybe she could even love him, although she expected never to love again.

  Together they would start a true reformation in China. Doing it herself—exhausted, wounded, bouncing in the back of a garlic truck—was proving to be too hard. Too complicated. There were too many details that, if overlooked, could lead to disaster, too many life-or-death decisions where her instincts had started to fail her.

  But where would she find such a person? It seemed impossible. China was huge and crowded, but not huge and crowded enough. Trust—the real trust of a soul mate—was, to Hu Mei’s mind, a rare commodity. Rarer than silver or gold. Rarer than love. And more valuable. But she felt that without it she would make another mistake. Then another.

  And eventually one of those mistakes would kill her.

  48

  ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA, APRIL 11, 6:45 AM

  Garrett woke to the sound of his cell phone ringing insistently on the bedside table. It was General Kline.

  “A pair of MPs will knock on your door in ten minutes. They’ll be escorting you to the Pentagon.”

  Garrett rubbed his eyes, scanning Alexis’s condo. “I’m not at the base.”

  “I know,” Kline said. “The MPs will have a service uniform for you. Ten minutes.” He hung up.

  Garrett looked for Alexis, but she wasn’t in bed.

  “Alexis?”

  She didn’t answer. Garrett pulled on his pants and searched the small apartment, but she wasn’t there. He looked for a note, or any sign of communication, but there was none. He showered quickly and was drying off when Kline’s military policemen arrived. The pair of them were young and stood ramrod straight in the doorway of the apartment. The younger of the two laid a plastic-wrapped Army uniform over the back of a La-Z-Boy.

  “Sir,” he said. “Your uniform, sir.”

  Garrett pulled the plastic off the blue Army service uniform and held the jacket up to the light. There was a seven-pointed gold-colored oak leaf pinned to the shoulder.

  “I’m a major?” Garrett asked.

  The MPs glanced at each other. “Sir, did we bring you the wrong uniform?”

  Garrett took several minutes before he decided he would actually put the uniform on. He seemed to remember telling Alexis—it felt like months ago, but in reality was only a week and a half—that there was no way he would wear a uniform, Army, Navy, Marines, or sanitation worker. And yet here he was, standing in her bathroom, looking at this highly starched piece of blue fabric and contemplating getting into it. He decided to give it a try, and when it was on, he stared at himself in the mirror. It was beyond strange. Brandon had been the one to wear a uniform, not Garrett. He remembered how heroic his brother had looked when he walked in the door in his Marine jacket, broad smile plastered across his face; how his mother had cooed over him, and how secretly jealous Garrett had felt.

  It didn’t just feel wrong for Garrett to be dressed as a soldier, it felt almost illegal. And yet, he sort of liked it. It fit well, and he had to admit that it made him feel powerful. There was an aura to it.

  “Gonna have to watch that,” he muttered to himself. “Could be dangerous.”

  He spent another five minutes inspecting the buttons and insignia on the suit, then headed downstairs with the MPs. They drove him in a military police car north through Alexandria to the Pentagon. The gargantuan building rose up out of nowhere, a bland, modern-day fortress. They parked in one of the building’s vast outdoor parking lots, and then ran him through a security checkpoint. Garrett took all this in wordlessly, figuring that these two MPs would be able to answer a sum total of zero of his questions.

  The Pentagon building looked immeasurably large and imposing from the outside, but from the inside it seemed to Garrett to resemble an endless, sprawling series of hospital corridors, only these hallways were filled with soldiers, not doctors. None of the soldiers so much as gave Garrett a second look, even though he felt like his major’s uniform screamed: “I’m an imposter! Arrest me now!” In the elevator down to the subbasement a young Hispanic lieutenant saluted Garrett. Garrett grunted wordlessly, unsure of how to respond.

  Once in the basement, the MPs led him through another series of smaller, institutional hallways—painted green with flickering fluorescent lights—to a large steel door guarded by a pair of Marines with M16s slung over their shoulders. The sign over the door read: “National Military Command Center Complex.” The Marines checked his ID, ran his name through a computer, and waved him in. More hallways, till finally Garrett was led into a large, high-ceilinged war room.

  It looked, to Garrett, almost exactly how he had imagined a Pentagon war room would look. The room was dark and quiet. On the front wall hung large—ten-foot-by-twenty, at least—digital maps, each screen showing a different continent. The maps were dotted with ship, plane, and soldier icons, each with a unit name and number attached to it. They blinked and moved slowly, as if in conjunction with a satellite image, to which, Garrett guessed, they were linked. Facing the screens were two lines of desks, each desk topped by multiple computer screens, headsets, and keyboards. Behind the desks were amphitheater seats, with a phone and bank of controls on the armrests, arrayed so that an audience could watch the proceedings on the digital screens as well as the people who monitored those screens. Everything was new and state-of-the-art. Garrett smiled: finally, here was the military technology he had been waiting for.

  A smattering of Air Force officers sat at the computers, a half dozen in all. A knot of what Garrett guessed were higher-ranking officers sat in the back seats of the amphitheater, but they were shrouded in darkness and Garrett couldn’t make out their faces. Then General Kline rose from a seat in front and walked up to Garrett. He looked Garrett up and down. “The uniform fits?”

  “You made me a major? Is that legal?”

  “The president can make you anything he wants,” Kline said. “Of course I could demote you if you’d like.”

  The Air Force officers at the computer terminals were all watching him now. Garrett felt the starched collar of the uniform: “Does being a major come with perks?”

  “It does. This is your war room. It belongs to you. You’ve got six analysts from the Defense Intelligence Agency working for you on those terminals there. The ones on the left monitor all military location and readiness information in real time. Ours, NATO’s, Russia’s, China’s. Everybody’s. You want to know where a battalion of soldiers is, anywhere in the world, they can tell you. Those screens are live Global Hawk and Predator aerial intelligence feeds. The two people on the right side are civvies—GS-13s—and they track intelligence from the CIA and NSA: political news, State Department briefings, diplomatic cables. Consider them CNN on steroids.”

  The officers—two women and four men—nodded from their positions at the computer terminals. Garrett nodded back into the darkness.

  “Liaisons from the Navy, Army, and Marines are sitting back there, in the stadium seating. You give them orders and they will relay them to their respective high command. We also have someone from the Treasury Department, as well as from the CIA. Anything you tell them will go right to the top. You’ll get answers in five minutes, tops.”

  “Answers?” Garrett said, trying to make out the faces of the men and women sitting in the back of the amphitheater. “Answers to what?”

  “Answers to your orders.�
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  “My orders,” Garrett laughed, still not sure what Kline was saying. “What the fuck am I going to order them to do?”

  “Whatever you want,” Kline said. “Within reason.”

  “You mean, like, I want us to invade”—Garrett glanced at the digital maps—“Canada? I can have us do that? Take all their women. And beer.”

  “As I said—within reason,” Kline said, without moving—or smiling.

  “I thought you brought me here to be unreasonable?”

  “We brought you here to win.”

  “Win? Against the Chinese? So we’re at war, officially?”

  “Officially none of this exists. You’re a bond trader on leave, and I’m more concerned with jihadists crawling on their bellies out of the Sudan. Officially, China and the United States are friends. Allies, even. But two days ago a computer worm shut down power plants in seven midwestern states. Detroit went up in flames, and you and I both know that was just the tip of the iceberg. This morning, a hundred thousand People’s Liberation Army regulars staged amphibious assault exercises off the coast of Taiwan. It’s chaos out there, Garrett. And it’s getting worse by the minute.”

  Garrett looked around the dark, cavernous war room, eyed the maps on the wall, the pinpoints of U.S. fleet positions and the arrows of bomber squadrons. “So what next?” he asked.

  “You tell me,” Kline said.

  Garrett thought for a moment: “I do like the president said—fight them without fighting them.”

  “Sounds like a plan.” Kline nodded, turned on his heels, and headed off. Over his shoulder he barked: “Everyone here has my phone number. Call if you need me.” He had got to the door when Garrett yelled after him.

  “General, wait.” Garrett jogged to the door. He spoke quietly so no one else in the room could hear him: “Where’s Alexis?”

  “Captain Truffant is busy.”

  “Busy? Meaning . . . ?”

  “She’s been reassigned.”

  “What? Why?”

  “She did her job.”

  “Her job? What was her job?”

  “I thought that had been made clear. Training you.” Kline swept his hand toward the rest of the war room. “For this.”

  Garrett took in that information with growing tension in his back and shoulders, an ember of rage igniting in his core. “I want her here,” he said. “I need her expertise.”

  “You have experts. The best in the business.”

  “They don’t know what she knows.”

  “Don’t be an ass. They know twice as much.”

  “I want her!” Garrett yelled. There was silence as his words echoed through the room.

  “Well,” Kline said slowly, quietly, “you can’t have her. She’s on leave. With her husband.”

  Garrett cocked his head slowly to one side. He started to say something, stopped, reconsidered, then started again, only to have words fail him once more.

  Kline put his face up next to Garrett’s. “I know, I know. You slept with her. It was earthshaking. She’s the woman of your dreams, your soul mate, and so on and so on. But maybe she reconsidered? Maybe she felt like she made a mistake with you? Maybe you’re not the love of her life after all? I don’t know, and I don’t care. She’s gone now. Unavailable until further notice.”

  Garrett grimaced. Kline watched him. “Are you going to go out and get drunk? Get into another bar brawl? Get the living crap kicked out of you? Let me know, because if you are, I’ll send all these people home. Give them the day off and try to figure out some other way to save our country.”

  Garrett thought about hitting Kline square in the face. He thought, just for a brief moment, about stomping the arrogant bastard, laughing gleefully, and watching as the blood flowed from his nose and mouth. But he didn’t. Instead, he clenched his teeth, clenched them hard and tight, until the bones in his jaw ached, and the desire to inflict pain drained from his body.

  Major General Kline studied Garrett’s face, then said, “We are staring down the barrel of a gun. War between the world’s only remaining superpowers is a distinct possibility. This is the big time. What you do now matters. To our entire nation. To the world. What I need—no, what we all need—is a visionary to run things. To be in charge and to lead. Lead us all. I’m hoping you’re that visionary.”

  The general turned and marched out of the war room. Garrett watched him go, and then said, to no one in particular, “Fuck me.”

  49

  THE PENTAGON, APRIL 11, 9:07 AM

  Garrett sat by himself in the dark of the war room, considering the task ahead of him. His problem was twofold.

  First off, he hadn’t the slightest idea how to prosecute an unseen war against the Chinese. He was a half-Mexican surfer from Long Beach, two weeks out of a Wall Street job at which he’d spent most of his time trying to squeeze a profit out of government bond issues. He had barely finished college, had never fired a gun in his life, hated the military, and wasn’t particularly crazy about his own country. But the president—the motherfucking president of the United States—had asked Garrett personally to strike out at America’s enemies without their seeing it coming, or anybody else noticing that it was happening. To Garrett, that was lunacy.

  The second part of his problem was more complicated still: he was in love with Alexis Truffant.

  He had never been in love before, so he had no particular frame of reference for the feelings involved, but the evidence was stacking up. He had suspected it as early as when he had tried to kiss Alexis that night in Camp Pendleton, but he had forced the idea from his mind. It resurfaced again in Detroit, as he lay with his head in her lap, while around them the Midwest burned. A national catastrophe was unfolding, and he was happier than he’d ever been in his life. That was a pretty strong clue. And then there was yesterday, at Arlington, in the car, kissing, then making love in her bedroom, holding her all night long. And even though she had left this morning without a word, and was, right at this moment—at least according to General Kline—with her husband, trying to work things out, Garrett didn’t care.

  He didn’t care and he forgave her everything.

  That pretty much sealed it for him, because Garrett rarely forgave anyone anything—ever. Sitting there in the dark, cavernous, subterranean Pentagon war room, he forgave Alexis for not telling him that she wanted him for the Ascendant project. He forgave her for not telling him that there even was a project in the first place. He forgave her for leading him on, for not wearing her wedding ring, for flirting with him on the beach at night, for digging into his past, for figuring out that a pretty woman turned him into a sputtering idiot and then using that character flaw against him.

  Garrett didn’t care. He loved her face, her voice, her hair—the fact that she had stood up to the secretary of defense on his behalf. And he was clinging to the belief that she loved him as well—she would come back from the time spent with her husband and choose Garrett. If she really was with her husband. Garrett might have been in love, but he was not so naïve as to take anything General Kline—or anyone else in Washington, D.C.—told him at face value. She could have been ordered back to California, or Timbuktu, to get out of Garrett’s sight and wait out world events. Either way, Garrett felt pretty certain that she would eventually come back. To him.

  If that made him a hopeless romantic, caught in the grip of a delusion, so be it. That, he decided, must be what love was all about.

  Not that any of these revelations made him feel like a better person. He didn’t feel more virtuous or more compassionate. He certainly didn’t feel like talking to all the DIA analysts and service liaisons whispering to each other or staring at their computer screens. In love or not, he didn’t give a shit about any of them. Were they really waiting for him to give them orders? To lead them into battle?

  That might take a while. A long while.

  CNN played on one of the screens that hung at the front of the war room. It had been playing all morning, cutting back
and forth to reporters scattered across the Midwest—Detroit, Toledo, Cleveland, Chicago—as they tried to make sense of the blackouts and rioting. Most of it was sensationalistic pap: condemnations of the amoral looters, praise for the steadfast police, a search for who screwed the pooch at the downed power plants. Nowhere and at no time did anyone mention a virus, an Internet worm, or the Chinese. For the time being, the truth was not going to see the light of day.

  But it might soon, and then the public would demand an explanation. And action. They would want a plan. Garrett’s plan. And with that thought, he finally returned to his first problem: he didn’t have a plan. Not even the beginnings of one.

  It was one thing for him to seek out patterns in raw financial data, or to learn about the habits of the Chinese Communist leadership, but it was another thing altogether to launch one’s own country into a covert war. He might have successfully led a battalion of Marines against some of their comrades in a combat simulation, but it was just that—a simulation. No one was going to get hurt. The only pain was going to be felt by that dickwad secretary of defense, Duke Frye. It was just play.

  And that thought made Garrett pop out of his chair. He had been playing. He had not taken the military seriously. He had not taken their leaders seriously, or their soldiers. They were warriors, and he, at heart, was a gamer. Money games. Video games. He lived online. He played virtually. And that’s exactly what he would do now.

  • • •

  “I want you to drive to the nearest GameStop and buy as many game consoles, controllers, and game discs as you can get your hands on,” Garrett told a young Army captain sitting in the front row of the war room.

  When the captain—Hodgkin, according to his nametag—looked confused, Garrett threw his hands in the air in astonishment: “You know, Xbox? PlayStation? You never gamed before?”