The Ascendant: A Thriller Read online

  McAfee bolted from the elevator the moment it reached the surface. Sawyer lingered a moment, then shut the door and walked to the outer edge of the farthest mine building, a low-slung brick building where he had rigged the blasting control panel yesterday. McAfee joined him, this time accompanied by two bulky, gun-toting guards. Sawyer asked one of the guards to put out the first warning. The guard barked into a walkie-talkie. Sawyer armed the control panel.

  “Put out the second warning, please,” he instructed the guard, who broadcast it into the walkie-talkie.

  Sawyer glanced over his shoulder. The protestors were inching closer to the fence that surrounded the mine, knowing what was about to happen. A phalanx of guards inside the fence moved to block their view. Sawyer turned one last time to McAfee.

  “I just don’t understand,” he said, emotion creeping into his voice. “Why would a new owner buy a mine for a hundred million dollars and then destroy it? Can someone, somewhere, explain that to me?”

  McAfee looked serenely unperturbed. “Mr. Sawyer. You and I, we are employees. We are hired once, and if we want to be hired again, we do our jobs without question. The owners of this mine have their reasons. I do not care what they are, and neither should you. My records indicate you are being paid $213,000 for your demolition services. That is twice your initial bid. If you want the remainder of your fee, then you should push that button. And push it now. I have a flight to catch.”

  Sawyer put his thumb on the red button that would send an electric pulse down the blasting wire to the detonator caps, heating the explosive to charge level and destroying the Henderson Canyon Molybdenum Mine. He thought he heard someone yell “Don’t do it!” from the parking lot. But maybe not. He pressed the detonate button. There was a faint rumble, like distant thunder. The ground under his feet shook, pebbles dancing on the dirt. Pine trees above him swayed, and then were still.

  And that was it. The mine was obliterated.

  The protestors in the parking lot turned despondently away from the fence and climbed into their cars. Sawyer watched them go.

  McAfee handed him a piece of paper and smiled. “So, Mr. Sawyer, I trust we’ll meet again on the next one. If there is a next one.”

  Sawyer looked down at the piece of paper. It was a check, made out to Matt Sawyer, for $58,500.

  Sawyer grimaced and thought: What the hell have I done?

  8

  NEW YORK CITY, MARCH 25, 5:48 AM

  Garrett woke up alone in his airy, fourth-floor walkup apartment Wednesday morning, hungover and annoyed; first and foremost at Avery, for calling the Treasury Department and spilling the beans about the bonds. To Garrett’s mind, Avery had broken the first rule of the finance game—don’t leave money on the table. But Garrett knew Avery well, knew that he was by nature conservative, and he could forgive his old professor his weakness on that front. After all, Garrett reasoned as he made a cup of instant coffee, pulled on a new pair of slacks, and took a quick, satisfying bong hit, if he’d really wanted to make the big score he should have kept the news to himself and shorted the dollar on his own. With the leveraging power of a new currency derivative he’d been toying with, Garrett could have easily parlayed his guess about the Chinese into a profit of $40 million for the firm in less than a week.

  But he hadn’t done it, and Garrett knew part of the reason he hadn’t was vanity. Deep down inside he wanted to tell someone—someone of importance—that he’d figured it out, that he’d caught a sovereign wealth fund manipulating the global markets before anybody else had. He was proud of himself, and he wanted the world to know, and to celebrate him. Which brought him to the second person he was annoyed with: Captain Alexis Truffant.

  Here again he was of two minds. On the one hand, he was furious that she had brought up his brother, used a cheap psychological trick to get a rise out of him. Why she would want to get a rise out of him he hadn’t figured out yet. But he would. And how dare she—and her nameless bureaucratic spy agency—go digging around in his past? In his life? What business was it of theirs? The idiocy of not telling him things, the pompous secrecy, their air of importance, all of it drove him to distraction. It was everything that was wrong with the armed forces in this country. It was the same shroud of secrecy that he had encountered when he tried to find out about his brother’s death in Afghanistan. The same stonewalling, the same cheap use of the national security card. The memory of the hours he spent on the phone with the Armed Services Bureau of Records, trying to get a clear story as to who had actually shot the bullet that cut through his brother’s neck, made his stomach churn. Why hadn’t they done an analysis of the slug? Couldn’t it have been friendly fire? There had been Army Rangers in the vicinity at the time of the shooting.

  He could feel the acid pooling in his gut. He hated them. All of them, even the cute, young ones like Truffant.

  And yet, he was also secretly proud. Proud that they—whoever they might actually be—had thought enough of his analysis to investigate him. The big bad federal government had come after him, Garrett Reilly, a junior bond trader working out of a cubicle in lower Manhattan. He liked that. He liked that he could throw stones that caused ripples in the giant lake that was the nation’s intelligence-gathering bureaucracy.

  Garrett walked the twenty blocks south and west to Jenkins & Altshuler and still got there by 6:30, half an hour earlier than anyone else in the office. He checked the overnight London Interbank Offered Rate (the LIBOR, the rate used by banks when they loaned each other money) and the values of the euro, yen, and yuan. He scanned the prices on intermediate-grade corporate bonds that had been issued overnight. Mostly he eyed the price of the dollar, keeping a tracking window open on his Bloomberg terminal, looking for even the slightest hint of a move. But none came. The dollar held steady across the board, against all other currencies. Garrett swilled more coffee. At 7:30 he jogged up one flight of stairs to the twenty-third floor and sat in the chair outside of Avery Bernstein’s office. Liz, his redheaded, middle-aged secretary, was already there, answering the phone. Garrett smiled at her, but she ignored him; then he checked the time on his cell phone, and waited. Avery Bernstein, tweed jacket draped over his shoulder and a Wall Street Journal tucked under his arm, walked in two minutes later. Garrett popped out of his seat.

  “I don’t understand why you called the Treasury Department . . .”

  “Garrett—”

  “You destroyed any chance we had of riding a down trend. If the dollar—”

  “Garrett!”

  “—crashes now we’ll have no advance warning and we’ll be—”

  “Shut up!”

  Garrett fell silent. Normally, when people told him to shut up, Garrett hit them. But he couldn’t hit his boss. And, anyway, he liked Avery. A lot. Thought of him—sometimes—as the father he’d never had.

  “Come into my office.” Avery disappeared into his office. Garrett followed and Avery shut the door behind him, then sat at his desk. Garrett could see lower Manhattan out the window behind Avery, a writhing landscape of miniatures: people, cars, and helicopters, all specks in the distance.

  “Sit down. Say nothing.”

  They sat in silence for what felt, to Garrett, like five minutes, but in reality was more like thirty seconds. Avery booted up his computer and tucked away his briefcase.

  “You have stumbled upon something very serious . . .”

  “I didn’t stumble on it. I did the resear—”

  “Shut. The fuck. Up.” The tension in Avery’s voice made the words crackle. Garrett pressed his teeth together. Avery’s eyes scanned the walls and desktops of the office, as if searching for uninvited guests. Or, Garrett suddenly realized, listening devices. A chill ran down Garrett’s neck.

  Finally, Avery looked at him. “This is what I will say to you. And it is all I can say to you.” Avery fixed Garrett with a long, unhappy stare. “Are you listening?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is not you buying a Texas muni bond on the c
heap. Or me trying to talk you out of quitting Yale. This is big. This is scary. Bigger and scarier than you can imagine.”

  There was silence in the room. Then Avery said, “What did I just say to you?”

  “That this is big. And scary. Bigger and scarier than I can imagine.”

  “You have learned how to listen. Good. So. I have been contacted by people. People I cannot name. And they have told me, in no uncertain terms, that you are to keep the information you have gleaned to yourself. You are to say nothing. To no one. Now. And forever. Is that also clear?”

  Garrett started to reply, to argue that he didn’t give a shit what the military or the government wanted him to do, but then he caught a glimpse of the flat, worried expression on Avery’s face, and thought better of it. He nodded a yes.

  “It’s clear,” Garrett said.

  “Okay. Go back to work.”

  Garrett stood, went to the door. Avery called after him. “Garrett, one other thing.” Garrett turned, and watched his boss. Avery was wincing slightly, as if pain were suddenly radiating through his body. Garrett had known Avery for eight years, and understood that he was a worrier, through and through, but he’d never seen his old professor look quite so afraid.

  “Please,” Avery said, swallowing hard. “Be careful.”

  9

  JENKINS & ALTSHULER, NEW YORK CITY, MARCH 25, 8:32 AM

  The bond trading room was abuzz with chatter and ringing phones. Garrett sat at his desk and tried to focus on his work. The phone rang, he answered, and tried to give coherent responses, but his mind was elsewhere.

  Be careful. Say nothing.

  Why was this so big? Were the Chinese really at war with the United States? He had made that claim to Captain Truffant almost as a dare. He checked online sites—the New York Times, the AP wire, Google News—and then foreign sites as well—the BBC and Times of London. There was no mention of hostilities between the U.S. and China. Anywhere. Not even some minor diplomatic incident, a trade dispute or a political prisoner jailing that threatened to escalate into something more serious.

  He forced himself not to think about it. He bought and sold bond futures for the next four hours, but he wasn’t sharp. He was hungover, a little stoned, and now tense and disoriented. He ended the morning session down $43,000.

  At twelve-thirty he took his usual fifteen-minute lunch break and went downstairs to grab a falafel from Abu Hasheem’s street cart, which was always parked a block north of his office. Garrett liked Hasheem. The falafel vendor was from Lebanon but was a fast convert to all things American. He was a diehard Knicks fan. Garrett teased him about this. Garrett was a Long Beach boy—he had spent his life following the Lakers.

  Garrett paused as he stepped out of the lobby of his building, on the corner of John and William streets, and stood for a moment to take in the sounds and smells of lower Manhattan. A taxi honked. A truck rumbled past. The March light couldn’t reach the street down here, blocked by the looming skyscrapers of the financial district. Garrett watched the stock traders and bond salesmen hurry to their lunches, jackets pulled tight against the wind. He stepped out of the shelter of his building and joined the flow of pedestrians moving east on John Street.

  And that was when he felt it. That tingle of unease at the base of his spine. It felt like a chill almost, like a single drop of ice water trickling, very fast, from the base of his brain to the middle of his spine, and then radiating out like a faint, cold shock through his arms and legs. It was familiar to Garrett, how he felt when he discovered a pattern in a seemingly random swirl of chaos. And yet this was slightly different—it was a break in the usual. Something, somewhere near him, was wrong, deviating from the norm. Adrenaline flowed through him. He walked quickly, spooked, Avery’s warning—Be careful—echoing through his thoughts.

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw a young man in a gray sweatshirt watching him from across the street, slouching against a beat-up, white, windowless Chevy van. And then a second man, in a leather jacket, halfway down the block, cell phone to his ear, also watching him, eyes locked onto Garrett. The man in the leather jacket turned away quickly, still on his phone. Garrett felt another jolt of adrenaline course through his body. Were they watching him? Or just watching the street, as Garrett himself was doing? Was he being paranoid? Had Avery thrown off his delicate sense of what was normal, and what was a ripple in the normal?

  He kept walking, cursing under his breath. The idiots in the military, spreading fear and paranoia. They played their stupid games and now he was playing along with them. But he wouldn’t. Men in sweatshirts were men in sweatshirts, and New York City was full of them, whether they watched him or the pretty girls going the opposite way. He marched east another twenty steps, and then he stopped abruptly, for no reason that he could clearly state, except that every nerve in his body seemed to be telling him to do just that: stop.

  A young woman carrying a salad bumped into him, muttered an “Excuse me,” and walked past. Garrett’s eyes flickered back and forth between the two men he had noticed, one ahead of him, the other moving parallel to him. Looking closer, he could see that one of them was Asian, but the other had turned away from him. Garrett pivoted 180 degrees, as if on an internal autopilot, and started to walk back toward his office. His mind was suddenly, inexplicably blank. He seemed to know one thing, and one thing alone: Get back to your building.

  Behind him, he heard a sharp, staccato shout, and then an engine revving. He shot a look back over his shoulder and saw the slouching man running in the opposite direction down the street, away from Garrett, while the white van he had been leaning against pulled into the street and raced toward him. Garrett watched as the van picked up speed, and then suddenly, the driver’s-side door opened and a small, dark man in a T-shirt and jeans leapt out, hitting the pavement at a sprint in the opposite direction, leaving the van to drift down the street, unguided, by itself. The small dark man ran east on John Street as Garrett watched, frozen. The van ricocheted off the side of a parked Hyundai, then barreled down the street, out of control. A taxicab honked angrily. The other pedestrians on the street—businessmen and delivery boys, secretaries and tourists—began to run. Everyone now seemed to have sensed the impending trouble that Garrett had felt in his bones. He shook himself from his frozen reverie, pivoted on his left foot, and broke into a run. He managed five steps down the street before he was suddenly tackled by someone emerging from a doorway and thrown to the ground. He landed hard on his shoulder, slamming into the pavement, then rolled, and caught a quick glimpse of the face of Captain Alexis Truffant.

  She was yelling at him: “Head down! Head down!”

  Those were the last words he heard, because a millisecond later there was a flash of white light, a wave of sound that battered his ears, and a cloud of dust and debris that rocketed across his field of vision. Garrett could feel the pulse of an explosion. It thrust his body across the pavement, into Alexis’s, and rolled them over each other twice, maybe three or four times—he lost count—then deposited them both at the marble base of a building.

  Garrett lay there for a moment. He blinked. He felt for his arms and chest, and then his face. He seemed to be all in one piece. Around him there was smoke and chaos. People staggered past, covered in dirt, one older lady with blood smeared across her face. Garrett got to his knees, but he was dizzy. He put his hand out for support, and it hit the shoulder of Alexis, squatting next to him. She seemed to be talking to him, her lips moving, but Garrett could hear nothing, and he realized the explosion had deafened him. Alexis grabbed his hand. She was yelling at him, but he could make out the words only by reading her lips—“Are you okay?”

  He nodded his head yes, and then tried to speak the words “I can’t hear you,” but he had the strange sensation of speaking without hearing himself, as if he were wearing noise-canceling headphones. He tried to yell, but the effect was the same, worse even, because his throat was rasping and filled with dust and smoke. He wanted to retch.r />
  Alexis tapped her own ears, then shook her head sideways, indicating no, she couldn’t hear either.

  “Come with me,” she said, or at least Garrett assumed she had said that, because he could see her lips moving. The two of them rose, unsteadily, to their feet. Alexis held on to Garrett’s hand and led him quickly down the street, past the lobby to his building. The plate-glass windows were shattered, laid about in tiny fragments across the marble floor. Garrett recognized the building’s security guard wandering from his desk. He looked dazed, lost.

  Alexis dragged Garrett around the corner. There, on William Street, parked in front of a fire hydrant, was a gray SUV. The back door was open, and a stocky, crew-cut man in a black suit was holding it open and signaling for them both to get in. Garrett had a moment’s hesitation, but it was overridden by his dizziness and confusion. He and Alexis dove into the backseat, the door closed behind them, the SUV swerved out into the street, and Garrett had the instantaneous and very powerful thought that his life, in that one brief flash, had changed forever.

  10

  NEW YORK CITY, MARCH 25, 12:47 PM

  The SUV sped through the narrow streets of lower Manhattan, heading south. Police cruisers flew past them in the opposite direction, blasting down one-way streets the wrong way and jumping onto the curb. Garrett fought to slow down his breathing. He closed his eyes as he was jostled in the backseat, trying to focus on his hearing. He could begin to make out passing street sounds, and then the groan of the SUV engine. This calmed Garrett—at least he wasn’t permanently deaf.

  He looked over at Alexis. Her face was covered in dust. She had traces of blood on her cheek and chin. She wore a brown suede jacket, which was now scraped and torn around the shoulders. Her mouth was moving—she seemed to be muttering to herself, and Garrett suspected that she too was testing her hearing.