The Ascendant: A Thriller Read online

  And yet, she didn’t. She hesitated. Perhaps he was not here to arrest her. Perhaps he did not even know who she was. He did not seem ready to grab her, no matter the self-importance that wafted off him like the smell of rotting meat. And if she did stab him, it would be Bao, the old woman, who would take the blame. Hu Mei could not do that to her. That was not her nature.

  “You are,” the party official said, “who I believe you to be, are you not?”

  “Who are you?” she answered, trying to give herself a few more moments to think this through, to consider her options.

  “I am Party Township Director Chen Fei. A humble and obscure provincial official with little real power. Around me and above me are the powerful and the wealthy. But what do I have?”

  Hu Mei frowned. This was the usual bureaucratic prelude: after professions of powerlessness and poverty came the subtle—or not so subtle—requests for a bribe. Perhaps he was simply out for himself, looking for a handout? That would be a relief, Mei thought. She had a few yuan. She could pay off this man. And then move on.

  She released her grip on the knife in her belt and mentally started to count the money in her pocket. Mei was about to claim poverty herself—the customary retort—but she waited. There was something about this Chen Fei. His approach did not make sense. He could make far more money turning Hu Mei in than extorting a few yuan from her.

  “I can see by the look on your face,” he continued, “that you are confused. Allow me to sit, will you?” Without waiting for a reply he squatted on a piece of wood covering a patch of frozen mud in the garden. “Yes, I know you are the bandit Hu Mei. I know you have stolen money from poor shopkeepers, have personally slit the throats of many policemen, and have many husbands, from whom you demand constant sexual satisfaction.”

  Hu Mei started to respond, but the party man cut her off. “And I know all these things to be untrue as well.” He smiled up at her, as she was now standing above him, and he was drumming on the frozen ground with his fingers. “But still, they are amusing to repeat.”

  Hu Mei pushed a weak smile to her lips. “Party Township Director Chen, if you know these things to be lies, then why are you here?”

  Chen Fei looked up at Hu Mei. His wispy black hair lay motionless on his half-bald scalp. His eyes were flat and dull; Hu Mei had seen many men like him before. They were dead inside, from years of kowtowing to other soul-dead men just above them, and now they took simple pleasure in extracting pain from those below them. But then, as she stared at him, the most unexpected thing happened. Tears welled up in the party township director’s eyes and trickled down his cheeks, tiny drops of water that steamed in the winter air. His once stolid, lifeless face suddenly broke into a shattered picture of pain.

  “I, too,” he said, stammering, and then regaining his breath, “I too have lost someone I dearly loved. My son, in the mines, two years ago. An explosion that should never have happened. So many boys killed. My Yao was one of them. No safety measures, no escape routes. Just dig, dig, dig, make money for someone else.” He stared up at Hu Mei. “The world means so little to me since.” Now tears were freely coursing down his face. “And then I heard your story. About your fight. About what happened in Huaxi Township.” He gasped for breath, emotion bubbling out of him. He stopped, wiping the freezing snot from his nose, took a breath, and continued.

  “They want us to find you. Us, the provincial officials. To hunt you down. To kill you. And this morning, when I suspected that it was you my villagers were hiding, I considered it. I knew I would receive a reward. And influence as well. And yet . . .” Again, he broke down in tears. “Forgive me.”

  Chen Fei struggled to his feet, and turned away from Hu Mei, hiding his grief. And then, in one swift motion, he turned to her again, a small wooden, lacquered box in his hand. The trim was painted black, and the Chinese symbol for peace, Hé, was written on its top. “Take it. For you.”

  Hu Mei took the box, confused. She opened it, slowly, carefully. Inside were sheets of folded paper. She opened the first sheet, the edges of the paper crackling in the cold, crisp air. In cramped, artless calligraphy was a list of names. She thumbed quickly through the other sheets. By each name was an address. By some were phone numbers. A few had e-mail addresses. There were hundreds of names. Maybe thousands.

  The party township director smiled through his pain. “They are suspected of provocation. Of being enemies of the party. But they are not. I know that they are not. They are just citizens. Unhappy citizens.”

  “But why?” Mei asked. “Why give this to me?”

  “So that you may talk to them. So that they may become followers.” The party director dropped to his knees and bowed deeply, his face touching the hard, cold ground at Hu Mei’s feet, only inches from her worn, ragged shoes.

  “Followers of the great Hu Mei.”

  15

  BOLLING AIR FORCE BASE, WASHINGTON, D.C., MARCH 26, 3:11 AM

  It was three in the morning and Alexis Truffant was tired. The three cups of coffee weren’t helping. They were just making her jumpy and short-tempered. Not that she wasn’t used to sleepless nights—they were, in her experience, one of the defining conditions of military life. That, and bad food.

  Well, she thought as she worked the phone at her desk in her windowless room at Bolling AFB, at least she had warned General Kline about Garrett, telling him that he was hardwired for aggression, contrariness, and arrogance and was an odds-on favorite to cause trouble. She hadn’t held anything back—quite the opposite.

  Still, she was angry at herself for allowing it to get that far, angry for letting a glimmer of hope and expectation sway her judgment. She couldn’t help taking some responsibility for what had happened at the defense secretary’s brownstone. It was just part of who Alexis Truffant was: a leader. And leaders took responsibility.

  It was a portion of what made her a great Army officer. It was why she had graduated third in her class from West Point, and why she was a captain at age twenty-eight, and would soon make the jump to major. When Alexis was given a task, she took it personally; she followed through, took pride not just in her work but in the larger mission. She had guided forty-two consecutive resupply convoys down the most hazardous highways of central Iraq without losing a single soldier. It was why she had wanted to enlist in the Army in the first place—a deep-seated sense of being responsible for the safety of the nation, as crazy and overblown as that sounded. She was a caretaker. To Alexis, it felt completely natural to want to protect other people, whether you were related to them—or even knew them—or not. It was a roundabout way of coming to patriotism, but to Alexis it made sense. It felt true.

  But Alexis suspected that this wasn’t why General Kline had recruited her into the Defense Intelligence Agency. The military was full of bright young leaders-to-be. No, it was something else. It was, Alexis guessed, that she didn’t quite belong. She was a woman in what was still a man’s business, a thinker in a world full of warriors, and a skeptic in an organization where it was the true believers who often shot to the top. Those things kept Alexis slightly off balance, made her wary of conventional wisdom, and General Kline seemed to want that. He had said as much when he first interviewed her, two years ago, in the Bolling AFB cafeteria.

  “People who think they know exactly what’s going on are dangerous,” he had said as they had sipped sodas. “Nobody ever knows what’s really going on. Nobody.”

  Alexis had written that down on a notepad later that night, and reminded herself of it every day that followed. Nobody ever knows what’s really going on. Nobody.

  So, she thought as she glanced at the wall clock that read 3:20 a.m., the only thing that she was reasonably sure of was that Garrett Reilly was out there, and she needed to find him. He had clearly been the target of an assassination attempt and was now in the open and vulnerable. But, additionally, Alexis felt she needed to give him one more chance, because despite what had happened, and all appearances to the contrary, she thought
there was some part of Garrett that wanted to be led down a different path. She believed she could sense who needed saving and who was beyond help, and one thing was clear to her—Garrett Reilly was not beyond help.

  Earlier in the evening she had tried to cajole the D.C. police into taking Garrett’s escape seriously, but when she couldn’t provide specific charges against him, they had said they would issue an alert at the beginning of the next shift, though she doubted they actually had. In any case, no sightings came in from officers on patrol. Next she called the TSA chiefs at Reagan and Dulles airports, but Garrett hadn’t boarded a plane at either location. She tried a few car rental companies, but none of their offices were open, so she figured he hadn’t fled D.C. by that mode of transportation. That left trains and buses, and she knew both would be a nightmare to track. She checked the Greyhound schedule online, and narrowed the number of buses he could have taken that night to seventeen. Amtrak was a bit better: only four trains had left Union Station since nine that evening. But, all told, those trains had stopped fourteen different times since leaving the D.C. metropolitan area.

  There was another alternative, and that one seemed reasonable to Alexis: Garrett had simply stayed in Washington, maybe taking a motel room or sleeping in a park. Either way, she finally decided, there wasn’t much point in looking for him as he traveled. If she couldn’t find him, then whoever had tried to blow him up in New York probably wouldn’t be able to either. Instead, she thought, she would try to find him once he arrived. She went home to her Arlington condo at 4:00 a.m. and slept for five hours. She woke at nine, called General Kline, told him her plans, and caught an 11:30 US Airways shuttle to New York City.

  She had never liked New York. Alexis was a country girl at heart; she had spent her entire childhood on a farm in rural Virginia, surrounded by rolling hills thick with flowering dogwoods. She could ride a horse almost before she could walk; she could fish, hunt, and tell you every species of warbler in the woods around her home. Virginia made her happy. It was more than home. It was where her soul lived. Still, she respected New York’s energy, its life, even if she hated its concrete and glass. To Alexis, New York was an animal that you treated with a wary caution: dangerous if you let your guard down, but a bounteous prize if you could manage to tame it.

  She rented a car at LaGuardia and drove into Manhattan, then parked near Wall Street so she could pay a visit to Jenkins & Altshuler. She wasn’t looking forward to it. She had called Avery Bernstein the day before, from the helicopter, and told him that Garrett was fine, but more than that she couldn’t say.

  Avery’s response had crackled in her ear over the spotty cell phone connection: “If anything happens to Garrett Reilly I will bring all my connections and all my money down on your head in a shitstorm. And I have a lot of fucking money.”

  Now, a day later, walking through the bond-trading room, Alexis could see that everyone at the firm was on tenterhooks—the building lobby was still a crime scene and a dust-strewn wreck. Only half the trading employees had made it to work that day. And Avery Bernstein was apoplectic.

  He hissed at her as they stood toe-to-toe in his office, the blinds pulled down so no one else in the firm could see their argument. “What the fuck do you mean you don’t know where Garrett is?” Spit flew from his lips as he waved a stubby finger in Alexis’s face. “Yesterday you told me he was with you in some freaking helicopter? And now he’s missing? How the fuck did that happen?”

  Alexis remained calm. Staying cool under fire was another one of her leadership qualities. Her voice barely above a whisper, she said a search for Garrett was under way, and if he called Avery, could Avery please alert her immediately. Avery continued to growl curses at her, and the Army, as she walked out of his office. Not that she blamed him. He had done what he thought was a good deed by calling the Treasury Department. But events had overtaken him, his firm, and one of his best employees.

  No good deed goes unpunished.

  Alexis grabbed a salad from a downtown deli, then drove her car thirty blocks to Garrett’s apartment, at the corner of Twelfth and Avenue B. She found a parking spot in front of an ice-cream shop and went up to ring his buzzer. There was no answer. She tried his cell, but it went right to voice mail, so she settled back into her rental car and waited for Garrett to return, watching the tourists and the street people, the fabulous mothers dressed in clothes Alexis could never hope to afford, the immigrants yelling into their cell phones in a dozen different languages, the businessmen marching purposefully to their next appointments. She told herself stories about the lives of some of the more eccentric passersby; she listened to AM radio; she booked herself a room in a hotel two blocks away and slept four hours that night before getting back into her car to keep the vigil going.

  She waited and watched for two days, on and off, before deciding it would be more profitable to look elsewhere.

  • • •

  Garrett thought Greensboro, North Carolina, was quaint. He was only there for four hours, and that was between midnight and 4:00 a.m., so he really had no idea how quaint it was, but he thought he’d give the place the benefit of the doubt. He caught the first bus out of Greensboro, and that was a local to Nashville. Exhausted, he found a motel in Nashville, paid cash, and slept for twelve hours, then caught another bus to Oklahoma City. It was on that bus that he realized he was heading west, toward home, even though he hadn’t planned on it. He hadn’t planned on anything, not consciously, anyway—he just wanted to keep moving. In Oklahoma City he decided to finish what he’d started, and bought a ticket on a Greyhound direct to downtown Los Angeles. By then more than seventy-two hours had passed since he had climbed out of the secretary of defense’s bathroom window in Georgetown. He was wrung out, hungry, and his clothes stank. He used the last of his cash—he thought he might get tracked if he used a credit card—to buy jeans and a T-shirt in a Mexican clothing store near Pershing Square and a Subway sandwich with no drink, and then caught the Blue Line to Long Beach. Sitting in the sleek light-rail car with a host of Mexican immigrants and rowdy schoolkids, Garrett felt his stomach tighten. He hadn’t been home in four years.

  He walked from the Long Beach transit mall to his mother’s house. It took him an hour, but he was glad for the exercise and the time to collect his thoughts. He stood for ten minutes outside the house he had grown up in, in the rough working-class neighborhood called Drake Park, letting the Southern California sun warm his skin. A few gangbangers drove by in their lowriders, music thumping from bass speakers set just below their rear windshields. Nobody stared. Nobody really gave a shit. Garrett knocked on the front door, hard and repeatedly, until he could hear his mother turning off the television. She peeked through the iron-grated screen door. Garrett watched her face. It had grown more creased in the time he’d been gone: there were scabby red streaks on her cheek, as if a cat had scratched her, and her black hair was flecked with gray. Never a tall woman, Inez Reilly seemed even shorter to her son now. An unlit Newport hung from her mouth. Garrett knew she was only forty-five, but she looked sixty-five, and not a day younger.

  “Garrett?” Inez blinked over and over again. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

  16

  LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA, MARCH 30, 1:28 PM

  Garrett sipped the Budweiser his mother had given him. It was cold, which he expected—the one thing his mother knew how to do was store alcohol. She sat opposite him on a threadbare purple couch. She had turned the TV back on in the other room, full volume; an infomercial blared. Inez Reilly looked at her son, tugged on her cigarette, then sipped her own beer.

  “You living in New York now?” Her accent had singsong traces of Mexico in it, that slightest of California-Sinaloa lineage, the weird in-between of the Mexican-American born in California and raised speaking Spanish. Garrett had to admit he loved hearing that accent. It reminded him of the good things of his childhood: handmade corn tortillas, ranchera music at backyard weddings, his childhood dog, Ponzo. That was
about it, though. Everything else about his childhood sucked.

  He nodded a yes to his mother.

  “That’s a cool city, right? I never been there.”

  “It’s okay. You know. A lot of people. Stuff.”

  Silence enveloped the room.

  “Your brother went there. To work. Some kind of money thing. I haven’t heard from him in a while, though.”

  Garrett sighed. “No. That’s me, Mom. Garrett.”

  She stared at him. “Yeah. Right.” She relit her cigarette and drew deeply on it. Garrett sniffed the air. It didn’t smell entirely of tobacco, but Garrett couldn’t place the odor: it was faintly chemical, almost like burning plastic.

  “So how you like it?”

  “New York? It’s okay. I like my work.”

  “A money thing, right? Like finances?”

  He nodded and his mother stared off into space for a minute. Her eyes were unfocused. Garrett knew she was drunk, but then it occurred to him that she was high as well, and then he placed the odor: she was smoking methamphetamine, which was full of additives. That explained the scratches on her face. She’d become a tweaker: an addict who couldn’t stop scratching herself. Garrett grimaced at the realization. It disgusted him. She had been so lively, so smart once. She had been top of her class at Long Beach Poly High School, could have gone to a UC school on scholarship, but got married instead. Had kids. And drank. The waste of it made Garrett want to run from the house.