The Ascendant: A Thriller Read online

General Kline stepped to the front of the group. He was one of the few there without a drink. He thrust out his hand to shake Garrett’s, and spoke quickly in his clipped Boston accent. “I’m Hadley Kline. Head of the Analysis Directorate at the Defense Intelligence Agency. I’m also Alexis’s boss.” He nodded to Alexis, who had moved away from Garrett to stand unobtrusively in a corner. In the pecking order of the room she clearly did not rank.

  Kline cleared his throat. “So, how do I start this?” Kline twitched, as was his habit, then launched in. “I’m sure you’ve heard the old cliché—generals are always preparing to fight the last war. Well, unfortunately, there’s truth in it. The armed services spend a lot of time and money grooming the next generation of leaders—West Point, Annapolis, the Air Force Academy. Bright men and women. We explain to them how the last war was fought. And then we tell them to think about how to fight the next one. But in the process we make them like us. We make them military people. That’s the whole point—we want them to be soldiers. But that . . .” And here Kline hesitated, carefully choosing his words, not for effect, but, Garrett guessed, to avoid insulting anyone else in the room. “That approach can have its drawbacks,” he finished.

  Kline shot a quick glance around the room, as if scanning for objections. He found none.

  “We are susceptible to groupthink, no matter how hard we try to stay independent. It is human nature to be influenced by others. It’s that ability that allowed the human race to evolve from being solitary hunters on the African savannah to standing around drinking scotch in a million-dollar town house in Georgetown.”

  “Bought it for a couple million dollars,” the secretary broke in. “God only knows what it’s worth now. Damn real estate market.” There were chuckles across the room.

  “Groupthink is especially prevalent in larger organizations,” Kline continued. “And the military is the largest of them all. I think I can say, without impugning anyone here, that the military is not the world’s most outside-the-box group. We value discipline, bravery, integrity. Poets and entrepreneurs need not apply.” Again there was laughter.

  “At least not until now.” Kline turned to a young woman sitting in the corner. She rose, smiling politely. She was Hispanic, no more than thirty, and wore a tailored black skirt suit. She offered Garrett her hand. They shook.

  “Garrett, my name is Julia Hernandez. I work in the Treasury Department. I’m the undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence. I’m the person Avery Bernstein called the other day. With your news.”

  “Oh.” Garrett looked her up and down. She was pretty, if you liked the librarian/dominatrix archetype, which Garrett did, on occasion. “So it was you that cost me forty million bucks.”

  “You mean by propping up the dollar?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean.”

  “You were planning to profit from the sell-off in Treasuries?”

  “Sure.”

  “You weren’t troubled by that? Morally?”

  “Not really. That’s my business.” He looked at the assembled generals. “We all have a business. You guys kill people. I short bad bond issues.”

  Out of the corner of his eye Garrett saw Alexis Truffant flinch. She looked ready to body-tackle him. Garrett guessed she had a lot of skin in this game, but none of the generals had so much as twitched at his remark. Either they were a lot tougher than she was, Garrett thought, or they didn’t give a shit what he said. Probably both.

  Julia Hernandez continued: “We believe that this is more than simply a bad bond issue, Garrett. We believe the Chinese are selling off Treasuries as a way to weaken the economy of the United States. To undermine the dollar and destroy our standing in the global marketplace. We believe—”

  An older, deeper voice interrupted her: “We believe that this is an act of war.”

  Garrett turned to the voice. It came from the four-star general. His crew-cut Afro was awash in gray, and his deeply lined face seemed almost sculptural. “A new kind of war,” the four-star said. “One we really haven’t seen before.” Garrett couldn’t place his accent exactly, but he guessed it was Chicago. South Side. The general stood up, and the secretary of defense nodded to him.

  “Mr. Reilly,” the secretary said. “This is General Aldous Wilkerson. Decorated Vietnam War veteran and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

  General Wilkerson waved the secretary off, then walked slowly up to Garrett. “The most dangerous attack, the one a general fears most, is the one he doesn’t understand, the one he never saw coming because it was deemed outside the realm of possibility. The attack that catches you completely by surprise: Hannibal’s elephants crossing the Alps, the Nazi blitzkrieg, two planes crashing into the World Trade Center. Those moments change the course of history. And they can destroy entire nations.”

  The general’s words hung in the air. Garrett looked at the older man, the deep lines on his face. “And we’re at one of those moments?”

  The general shrugged, as if unsure. Garrett liked that. He liked that this four-star general wasn’t so arrogant as to lecture Garrett on uncertainty. Uncertainty was one of Garrett’s specialties.

  “My nine-year-old granddaughter understands more about computers and the Internet than I ever will,” Wilkerson said. “Send. Delete. Twitter. Facebook. Good Lord. I miss writing an old-fashioned letter. But people who know these things are telling me that our enemies could swamp us in a millisecond if they wanted to. If we were not on guard.” The general got up close to Garrett. “You concur with that assessment?”

  “Isn’t that what the National Security Agency does? Protect us against attacks like that?”

  “We’ve got agencies protecting us from threats all over the place,” the general said. “But none of them caught the massive, coordinated sell-off of U.S. Treasuries. Only you did.”

  Garrett smiled as the realization dawned on him. He was surprised at himself for not seeing it earlier. “So you want me to help you find more of these in the future? Because I’m good at finding patterns. And I’m outside of the group-think of the military?”

  General Kline took over: “We’ve been looking for someone like you, Garrett, for quite some time now, and the likes of you are not easy to find. Someone of a new generation. Raised on computers and the Web. Mathematically inclined. From a family of patriots like your brother, but himself outside of the military’s sphere of influence. Intelligent, unafraid of risk, aggressive, confident. Arrogant.”

  Garrett snorted a laugh. “I feel so loved.”

  “We speak plainly and directly, Garrett,” General Wilkerson said. “You might find that refreshing.”

  Kline continued: “I could list all the characteristics that you possess, but it would take some time, and, frankly, I think you already know them. You know what you can do, and how you can do it. So here is what we are proposing. Let us train you in our defensive and offensive capabilities, but keep you physically and mentally separate from our war machine. Captain Truffant here will be your guide. She’ll bring you up to speed on what we can do, and what we can’t. Meanwhile, you’ll be free to track the very things that allowed you to predict what was happening in the bond market.”

  “You want me to be your early warning system?”

  “In a way, yes.”

  Garrett thought about this. “What about my old job?”

  “You’ll be put on leave from that job. It will still be there when you get back. Alexis has already cleared this with your boss, Mr. Bernstein.”

  Garrett cracked a smile—he’d been right about Avery as well. The old man was in on the secret. At least part of it. “And I get paid for this?”

  “You’ll have a base salary. It won’t be huge, but it will be something. Your responsibilities will far outweigh your pay grade.”

  General Wilkerson cut in: “Money is not the point here, Garrett. This is part of a larger civic responsibility. You will be protecting our nation. So what do you say?”

  The room fell sil
ent. Again, Garrett felt all eyes on him. He waited a moment, as if considering, but he had known what his answer would be for a while. He shook his head.

  “I’ll pass,” he said.

  There were muted whispers among the gathering. Secretary of Defense Frye stepped up, a look of anger and concern on his face. “What we’re asking you to do is a great honor, Garrett. Don’t you love your country?”

  “I do, absolutely,” Garrett said, with a smile. “I love my country. I just hate the fucking morons who run it.”

  • • •

  Captain Alexis Truffant shot a look over to her boss, General Kline, and grimaced. Kline just shook his head and shrugged his shoulders, as if to say, What can I do? The quiet tension that had built in the room was gone, replaced by a low chatter of angry conversation. Garrett stood in the middle of the room, smiling pleasantly.

  “Hey, someone want to tell me where the bathroom is?” he said. “I gotta go pee.”

  Mackenzie Fox, the assistant to the secretary of defense, led Garrett angrily—and silently—out of the room, while Alexis and General Kline huddled in a corner.

  “You called it, Captain,” General Kline said with a hint of resignation in his voice. “He has a deep-seated antipathy toward the armed services.”

  “It’s more than that, sir,” Alexis said. “He hates everybody. It’s part of what made him a good candidate.”

  “So what now, General Kline?” the secretary asked, as he and General Wilkerson joined them. “Because that was a bit of a disaster, and we’ve still got a problem on our hands. And, quite honestly, your program’s not helping much.”

  Alexis could see General Kline stiffen. She knew the secretary and her boss were not good friends—on the contrary, Frye worked consistently to marginalize any new DIA initiatives. Alexis guessed he was a man who hoarded power.

  “We could push harder with Reilly,” Kline said. “But I’m not sure it’s worth our time or effort. There are other candidates out there. We’ll keep looking. We’ll find someone.”

  “Sir,” Alexis cut in, “I hope I’m not being too forward, but I believe we can still recruit Mr. Reilly. Bring him onto the team.”

  “That seems awfully optimistic,” General Wilkerson said.

  “Sir, I agree. It is,” Alexis continued. “But I think there is something in him that wants to help. We just need to connect with that.”

  “You gonna connect with it, Captain? With that hidden part of him?” the secretary asked with a sly, almost lewd smile on his face.

  Alexis started to answer but was cut off by Mackenzie Fox’s urgent bark. “He’s climbed out the bathroom window.”

  “Shit!” General Kline said. “Don’t we have Secret Service around the house?”

  “They’re out front. They didn’t see him,” Fox said. “They think he jumped a neighbor’s fence and left via O Street. They’re radioing D.C. police right now.”

  The secretary of defense laughed. “He’s free to go, Mackenzie. He’s not under house arrest. He’s not a prisoner.”

  “We could charge him,” Alexis said.

  “With what?” Frye said. “Pissing us off?” The secretary snorted as he walked away. “Didn’t like him anyway. Thought he was an ass.”

  • • •

  After Garrett climbed over a wrought iron fence and then tiptoed across a carefully tended backyard garden, he jogged east on O Street, then turned south and walked until he found a cab. He didn’t know D.C., but told the driver—a Sikh with a beige turban—to take him to the nearest Greyhound station. The Sikh, Indian dance music blasting from his radio, got him there in ten minutes. At the station, Garrett bought a ticket for the next bus leaving D.C., which happened to be a 10:35 p.m. express to Greensboro, North Carolina. He made the bus two minutes before it left, found a pair of seats in the back all to himself, pulled the battery and memory card out of his cell phone, and then curled up to sleep until they reached the tobacco state. The last thought he had before he drifted off was a lingering image in his brain of Secretary of Defense Frye’s face as he told those military half-wits to go fuck themselves. God, he loved sticking it to people.

  Especially people who deserved it.

  14

  LUOXIATOU, CHINA, MARCH 26, 8:07 AM

  Hu Mei stepped out of the deserted alley, past the slatted wooden gate and into the small, circular garden that lay tucked behind a cinder-block shack. She closed the gate to the alley and locked it from the inside with a sliding length of wood, finally pausing to catch her breath and let the late winter sun warm her face for a moment or two. She had been on the move for the past fourteen hours, walking through the night with just a pocketful of stale mantou buns and a plastic bottle of water to keep her going. It had been bitterly cold out—the temperature near freezing—but now the sun was up and its faint rays warmed her hands and face.

  Hu Mei rolled her stiff shoulders to get the blood flowing in her body. Around her, lining the hillside, were row upon row of concrete and cinder-block homes, each of them one room, the better ones with wood smoke curling up from their rudimentary chimneys, the less good with layers of plastic sheeting tacked inside their windows. It was a tough life here, in Luoxiatou, in central China. So many people had already left for better jobs in the coastal cities: the young people had cleared out; the able-bodied who were middle-aged worked in the mines; the old folks simply scratched out a living doing whatever they could.

  Hu Mei checked the scrap of paper the old man had given her in the last town. On it were directions, and a name, Bao. Bao was an old woman—so Mei had been told—but she was a sympathizer, and had promised to give Hu Mei a meal and a bed for a few hours. That’s all Mei needed. A few hours’ rest, some food, and the chance to meet another person who believed in her cause.

  Was this the place? Mei asked herself silently as she looked around the yard. If she made a mistake, she would be caught. And if she were caught, she would be jailed, beaten, and executed. Probably all within a few days.

  So a mistake was out of the question.

  But where was the old woman whose house this was? Why hadn’t she come out to meet her? Hu Mei’s heart raced. She forced herself to remain calm, but a prudent amount of anxiety would keep her alert. And alert meant free. Alert meant alive.

  Hu Mei could feel the authorities, like the Chinese winter, forcing themselves down upon her since the rebellion in Huaxi Township four months ago. Rebellion. That was what she was calling it. The government called it a criminal provocation. But that is what they called anything they did not like. And they did not like what had happened: the humiliation of two hundred of their officers; disarmed, forced to flee, eighty of them beaten, twenty-five badly enough to be sent to the district hospital. Word had spread through the valley like a brush fire, leaping from village to village. Word of mouth was still Hu Mei’s best ally. There had been postings on the Internet, but those were scrubbed by government censors almost as fast as they appeared. But the government could not monitor chitchat between villagers, men riding on buses, women at the market, or schoolchildren walking home at the end of lessons. These people were spreading the word, and the word was potent: Hu Mei was the tip of a very sharp sword, and that sword was swinging at the neck of the government.

  She laughed mirthlessly at her own far-fetched metaphor. Swords? Necks? How ridiculous. The Communist Party was massive and vastly powerful. Her minuscule rebellion was a mere irritant, not a potential death blow. And yet, the reaction she felt all around her—the squadrons of police officers searching for her and her followers day and night, the wanted posters with her name on them, the preposterous stories of her numerous lovers and vast wealth—all were signs of a government that feared her. Or at least feared what she represented. And that, along with the weak March sun, warmed her.

  An old woman shuffled into the garden from her home. Hu Mei sighed deeply—this would be Bao. She had not made a mistake. She would be safe, at least for another twelve hours. The old woman’s face was
deeply wrinkled, her white hair pulled back under a scarf. Her gray eyes were mere slits in the morning sun. She bowed immediately before Mei, as if approaching a dignitary. Mei hated that. Groveling. It was unbecoming in anyone, but especially a wise old woman.

  “Shīfu,” the old woman said. Master.

  “Do not call me that,” Mei said quickly. “Please, do not.”

  The old woman straightened herself with barely a nod. Her eyes darted around the garden, and immediately Hu Mei’s anxiety shot back to the surface. What was the old woman looking for?

  “What is it?” Mei asked.

  The old woman hesitated. She clenched her gnarled hands briefly. “I tried to send him away . . .”

  “Send who away?”

  “I said I had never heard of Hu Mei. But he did not believe me.”

  Mei scanned the garden. She tried to see back into the alley behind her, but the wooden fence was too high. “Who did not believe you? Who!” she hissed.

  “The man,” the old woman said. “From the party.” Bao looked back down at the hard-packed dirt. “He has been waiting in my house all morning.”

  Hu Mei’s blood froze. How could this have happened? She had followers in every local township. She had a network of sympathizers and spies. They tracked policemen and bureaucrats everywhere she went, keeping Hu Mei safe, keeping the movement alive, and now this old woman was saying that it had somehow all gone wrong? Here in this tiny out-of-the-way village?

  She took a deep breath and managed to gasp: “Is he alone?” Her chest was tight.

  “I am, comrade.” A potbellied man in a worn suit stepped out of the shack and into the frosty garden. His feet splayed apart like a duck’s, and his large bald forehead was shiny in the weak sun. He pushed importantly past Bao, elbowing the old woman to one side. “I am alone, but I am not alone. A party member is never alone in China. I have policemen—fifty of them—all over this town. So no, I am not exactly alone.”

  Hu Mei spun around, reaching behind her, into the folds of her winter jacket. She had a short shiv of a knife tucked into her belt, just above her hip. Now would be the moment, she thought, to stab this man and run from this place. She could overpower him before he understood what she was doing—just run the knife quickly into his chest, then flee the village. Hu Mei was sure this fat, soft, party flunky would not be quick or strong enough to stop her. He spent all his time behind a desk, eating candy and signing meaningless proclamation papers. She should end his pitiful life, here and now.