The Ascendant: A Thriller Read online

  And then there was Hans Metternich, whoever the fuck he was. Anyone who could just show up on a Metro train and then disappear again without a trace was worth worrying about. And being afraid of. Maybe it was Metternich who had tried to blow him up in New York. Maybe Metternich, despite his protestations, actually did want Garrett dead.

  To Garrett, the world had become very hostile. And very dangerous.

  Plus, he had Celeste Chen’s fate to consider. She was in China on his orders. If he cut and ran she would be on her own, with no one in the States to watch over her or provide help if she got into trouble. It wasn’t like he’d suddenly become a den mother, but abandoning Celeste now was a little too selfish. Even for Garrett.

  So that left staying. And cooperating with Kline and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Again, he’d be in their system. Unless, of course, he was running that system, and wasn’t that what Kline had dangled in front of him? Continue running the Ascendant program? Did Garrett believe him? Or trust him? Absolutely not.

  But perhaps he could use him; use Kline, and Ascendant, to give himself some time and some leverage. If he was actively working for the DIA—and whatever other government agencies were supporting him at the time—then they would be invested in keeping him safe. And breathing. At least for a while.

  And Ascendant did offer up the other benefit of being in opposition to the president, Secretary Frye, and the U.S. military. If he succeeded, then those people and organizations would be furious; and there was nothing Garrett wanted more than to piss those fucking bastards off.

  Still, Garrett wasn’t crazy about those two options. There didn’t seem to be a viable long-term solution in either of them. But he was in too much pain and too hungry to come up with any others. He brushed the dirt and leaves off the raincoat he’d wrapped himself in for warmth, hid the cereal and juice under a bush in case he needed to come back for them, then walked to an empty parking lot on the edge of the park, and slotted the battery into the back of the stolen cell phone.

  Garrett Reilly dialed a number . . . and hoped he was making the right choice.

  65

  ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA, APRIL 17, 11:01 AM

  The military policemen who had driven Bingo and Lefebvre back to their hotel—a Ramada Inn just west of downtown Alexandria—told them to pack their bags and await further orders. Bingo tried to explain that he wasn’t in the military and that they couldn’t order him to do anything, but the MPs seemed unimpressed. They said he should not leave the hotel, call no one, and that additional security agents would stop by every few hours to check on them.

  Bingo packed his bag in ten minutes and spent the next twenty-four hours watching the History Channel in a cold sweat. The hotel phone rang every few hours; he always answered on the first ring, and could hear someone on the other end of the line, but they never said anything, just listened as Bingo said “Hello?” and then hung up. His heart skipped a beat every time this happened.

  Lefebvre knocked on his door the next morning and said they should go get a latte at a coffee shop a few blocks away. When Bingo asked how come, Lefebvre said casually, “Stretch our legs. Get the blood flowing. Just ten minutes.”

  Bingo went, against his better judgment, and knew he’d made a mistake the moment he entered the coffee shop: Alexis Truffant, dressed in civilian clothes, was sitting in a corner, waiting for them. Bingo hadn’t seen her in a week and a half, and she looked tense.

  “We don’t have a lot of time,” Alexis said as Lefebvre took a seat next to her. The place was mostly empty, but Bingo noticed that Alexis’s eyes were constantly scanning the front door.

  “I don’t think we should be here,” Bingo said.

  “You’re probably right,” she said. “But we are here, so let’s make the most of it.”

  “Where’s Garrett?” Lefebvre asked.

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “And I don’t want to know.”

  Alexis leaned close to Lefebvre and whispered in his ear. Bingo couldn’t hear what she said, but when she was finished the lieutenant was silent for a full minute. He seemed troubled to Bingo, as if at a moral crossroads. Then he said, “It’s a big decision. I need some time.”

  Alexis said he had until midnight, but no longer. Lefebvre stood, nodded curtly, and left the coffee shop.

  Alexis turned her attention next to Bingo: “Do not go back to your hotel room. Do not pick up your clothes or any other personal belongings. I’m going to give you a prepaid wireless phone. You’ll go to the library, use one of their public computers to log on to the Internet. Find a commercial space that’s for lease for the next month. It needs to be medium-sized, at least two thousand square feet, out of the way—preferably in a bad neighborhood—and have close access to an Internet backbone line. It would be best if the space had gone unoccupied for a long time, ideally a year or longer. The owners need to be willing to take cash up front and ask no questions. Alternatively, you need to be able to break in and secure the space without arousing suspicion or tipping off the landlord.”

  “Break in? You mean illegally?” Bingo asked, his voice rising an octave.

  “I mean that exactly,” Alexis said. “Do all of this ASAP, and make sure you’re not being followed. Secure the space and wait for further instructions. After you get those instructions, ditch the prepaid cell phone.”

  “Uh-uh, no way,” Bingo said. “They told me. Homeland Security said. The war room is shut down. They said I should wait in the hotel until further orders.”

  “These are your further orders.”

  Bingo tried to laugh, but it came out as more of a snort. “No they’re not,” Bingo said. He might not have much in the way of courage, but he was no fool, and what Alexis wanted him to do seemed of dubious legality at best, and full-out treasonous at worst.

  Alexis took a deep breath, then she smiled warmly at Bingo, and for a moment he thought it was all going to turn out just fine—she’d say that he should just go on home, forget about all this craziness and get on with his life.

  Instead she said, “You’re right, they’re not. But you’re in a bit of a tricky position. If you go back to your hotel now, Homeland Security will come around. They’ll see that Lefebvre is gone, and they’ll ask you what you know. And you’ll have to tell them you met with me, and that we discussed plans. That will make you at the very least a suspect in their eyes, and at most an accomplice. You will be detained. Indefinitely. Maybe brought up on conspiracy charges. Obstruction of justice. It will not be fun. However, if you do what I’m asking, yes, it will be risky, but at least you stand a chance of living the remainder of your life as a free man.”

  She stood up, still smiling, pulled a cell phone out of her purse and handed it to him. “Your choice,” she said, and walked out of the coffee shop.

  Bingo stared at the cell phone. He was pretty sure most of what Alexis had just said about indefinite detention and obstruction of justice was a load of crap, but given the events of the past month—and the deep-down paranoia his mother had raised him with—he couldn’t be one hundred percent positive, and even a small chance of jail time was enough to make him sick to his stomach.

  He dropped the phone into his pocket and slunk onto the sidewalk, hands jammed miserably into his pockets, eyes looking for anyone who might be watching him in turn, and as he did this he had one overriding thought, and that was: if he survived this lunacy, he was going back to his bedroom, locking the door, and never coming out again. Ever.

  66

  SILVER SPRING, MARYLAND, APRIL 17, 4:13 PM

  Secretary of Defense Frye sat in the backseat of an unmarked car, parked unobtrusively on a quiet suburban street in Silver Spring. He stared at the Homeland Security safe house that, until a few hours ago, had held Garrett Reilly, but was now unoccupied. A deep weariness and disappointment ran through his body.

  No one ever lived up to your expectations in this town, he thought. No one.

  He shifted his body slightly to face the man sitting nex
t to him in the darkened Chrysler. Agent Paul Stoddard had his left hand and forearm in a cast; he had dark, black stitches laced into the skin on his temple, over his left eye. The eye itself was ringed with a black and purple bruise. He looked like he’d been beaten with a baseball bat.

  “How did he escape?” Frye asked, his face betraying none of the emotion he felt coursing through his veins.

  “We’re not sure, sir,” Stoddard answered. “He managed to disengage his hand restraints. That caught us by surprise.”

  “How’s that even possible? He’s a kid. With a skull fracture.”

  Agent Stoddard grimaced sheepishly. “We have a forensic team going over some video we had running. We think he may have had help.”

  Frye frowned. “Help? Who else saw him?”

  “Well, sir, us,” Stoddard said, pausing. “And DIA personnel.”

  Secretary Frye let out a short puff of breath. He knew exactly who had seen Garrett Reilly, and why. Oh, he knew. Did no one in this town have any sense of loyalty?

  “General Kline?” Frye said.

  “Yes sir.”

  “And that girl who works for him . . . ?”

  “Captain Truffant, yes sir.”

  Frye bit down hard on his lower lip. “I want twenty-four-hour surveillance on both of them. Get a warrant if you have to.”

  “Already ordered, sir. We’re tracking Kline, but Captain Truffant has gone off the grid. Cell phone turned off. Not at home, or her office.”

  “No, of course not,” Frye said. “She’s disappeared. And she’ll remain invisible until we no longer need to find her.” Frye could taste a hint of blood in his mouth. He had bitten through his lip in frustration. “What about Reilly?” he asked. “We have leads on his whereabouts?”

  “The FBI has been briefed. They’re putting a team on it.”

  “What do they know about the case?”

  “That Reilly is a national security threat.”

  “Metro PD informed?”

  “We thought that would be”—Stoddard hesitated as he searched for the right word—“imprudent.”

  Secretary Frye gave him a long look. “Why? What’d you do to him?”

  “We interrogated him. Aggressively. Sir.”

  Frye snorted a quiet laugh. “Almost wish I’d been there for that.”

  There was a minute’s silence in the car. Frye wiped the droplet of blood from his lips. He had built a long and illustrious career, in business and in politics, zeroing in on the sources of problems and then fixing them with a combination of intelligence and raw power. He was never indiscriminate with that power, but he believed—truly and fervently—that if you hesitated in the application of targeted force, you would be lost. Chaos would swallow you whole. That was true in business, in politics, and in national defense—particularly in national defense.

  Frye turned to the Homeland Security agent. “I may be stating the obvious, Agent Stoddard, but it’s not good when a high-value prisoner under your supervision escapes.”

  Agent Stoddard squirmed in his seat. “Sir, I will make up for it. That I promise you.”

  “Of course you will,” Secretary Frye said quickly. “I have faith.” He smiled blandly. “But Washington, D.C., is a complicated town. Lots of money at stake. Everyone wants power. Lots of competing interests.”

  “Sir?”

  “Organizations within the current structure are not always on the same page. They can even be at odds. People within those organizations believe they know what’s right for the country, and they act on those beliefs. But people can delude themselves. I believe this is the situation in which we now find ourselves.”

  Agent Stoddard nodded quickly. Frye could tell that he was lost. But it didn’t matter. He would understand in time.

  “The point is, sides are being set. Teams, if you will. And right now, there is a team working hard to thwart you. And me. And, quite honestly, the president. And no matter what your politics, you cannot work against the president. I suspect Reilly will soon be working against the interests of the president. So the question becomes, what do we do?”

  “Find Reilly,” Agent Stoddard answered quickly.

  “That would be a start.”

  “And arrest him.”

  Frye said nothing. The car was silent. A lawnmower started somewhere down the block. Frye watched Stoddard’s face as the realization of his new task dawned on him. “He might be armed,” Stoddard said.

  “He might be.”

  “We’ll have to assume he is. And take appropriate precautions when we encounter him.”

  Secretary Frye let out a short breath. The message was sent, the course of action was clear. Men and women of commitment would do what needed to be done. “I have to get back to the Pentagon.”

  Stoddard nodded, then quickly fumbled with the car door handle with his cast-covered left hand. He opened the door and climbed out of the car, standing briefly on the pavement of the Silver Spring street. He bent low to be able to look into the back of the gray sedan.

  “Sir, thank you for this chance,” Stoddard said. “Homeland Security is on your side.”

  “Glad to hear it,” Frye said, and shut the door.

  67

  SOUTHEAST WASHINGTON, D.C., APRIL 17, 8:22 PM

  Murray’s Meats and Cuts had clung to life for fifteen years, but it was a relic in D.C.’s gritty Southeast side—a kosher butcher in an all-black neighborhood—and it had finally succumbed a year ago, going out of business with hardly a single local noticing its demise.

  That it hadn’t been occupied in twelve months was good. That it was on a bad block, in a worse neighborhood, was better. That it sat across the street from a phone company switching station—an anonymous brick structure ringed with barbed wire—was perfect.

  The team trickled in one by one, careful to show up after dark. Bingo was first. He’d been there already that afternoon, shown around by an eager—Bingo would say desperate—commercial real estate broker who swore he could get him the space for $1.50 per square foot. He’d even throw in the first month free.

  Bingo noted to himself that there were no security sensors, not even a basic alarm, and then apologized for wasting the broker’s time. “Just not right for us,” he said. He returned that evening with a crowbar, a bolt cutter, and a flashlight, and cut his way into the rear entrance. The electricity was still on in the place—Bingo had noticed that, too—but he kept the lights out for security reasons.

  Alexis arrived next. She’d been on the move for the last two days, never staying in one place for more than a few hours. She had spent half a day on buses, slept in a movie theater, and showered at a YWCA using a friend’s ID. When she got to Murray’s, she approved of it right away. It was big, and isolated, if a bit gloomy. There was a freezer in back where they could house server computers, and multiple 220 outlets on every wall. No one could see in from the street—the windows had all been smashed in, and then boarded up with plywood—and no one was looking, anyway; that was the point of the crappy neighborhood. Alexis thought the splashes of blood on the walls of the cutting room were a bit gothic, but all in all, she could live with them. She gave the place a thumbs-up. Bingo took the praise with tempered enthusiasm; he seemed, to Alexis, to be sulking. She didn’t care. She didn’t have time to care.

  Patmore, the Marine liaison, came next. He was the only service member Garrett said he trusted, and so he was the only one that Alexis had contacted. He arrived out of uniform, in sweatpants and a hoodie, and he seemed game for the challenge. In fact, he seemed downright excited.

  “I love crazy,” Patmore told Alexis. “And this seems way crazy.”

  That his superiors in the Corps had not signed off on this adventure was not mentioned. Alexis assumed Patmore knew, and if he didn’t, well, he would find out soon enough.

  “People gonna shoot at us?” was all he asked, a bit too enthusiastically.

  “I hope not,” Alexis answered.

  Patmore just laughed.

/>   The CIA rep, Sarah Finley, had agreed to come as well—Alexis had reached her directly through the agency—and arrived next, riding her bike from her Georgetown condo, but she had official cover for the operation, and she knew it. If everything fell apart, her bosses at the agency would stand up for her. They were, unofficially at least, on Garrett Reilly’s side. Everyone else was out in the cold. Finley, quiet and observant, said little and mostly watched from the shadows. To Alexis, she seemed to embody the essence of spook.

  Alexis thought Jimmy Lefebvre would show last, if he showed at all. He seemed hesitant at the coffee shop that morning, and she didn’t blame him. He wasn’t DIA, wasn’t a gung-ho Marine, and could potentially look forward to a long, safe career at the Army War College. He would be risking all. If he decided against joining their little escapade, Alexis was okay with that, but she hoped that he wouldn’t turn around and report them to his superiors. He knew the address. He knew the time. And he had some sense of what they were up to. If Lefebvre talked to the Pentagon, they would be toast.

  Garrett limped in at eleven that evening. Alexis thought he looked terrible—smashed up and weak, with bits of leaves and dirt in his hair. She could see that he was trying to keep pain from registering on his face. She considered calling the whole thing off and taking him straight to the hospital, but he smiled broadly and said, “Show me the place, will you?”

  She toured him through the rooms and the meat locker, and he seemed pleased; he was most pleased about being able to wash up with warm water in the kitchen.

  She watched silently as he scrubbed the dirt from his cheeks.

  “Thanks for the key,” Garrett said, “for the handcuffs.”

  “Sure,” Alexis answered, searching for something to add, but failing.

  “Came in useful.”

  “I figured.”

  They stared at each other awkwardly, then Garrett walked out without saying another word, to continue his tour.