The Ascendant: A Thriller

TO THE THREE EXTRAORDINARY WOMEN IN MY LIFE: LISA, AUGUSTA, AND NORA

H
u Mei woke to the sound of firecrackers. Two sets of rattling, rapid-fire explosions cut through the quiet country night, echoed, and then abruptly died. That was the agreed-upon signal—as many packets as the sentries could light in the shortest amount of time—and it meant the police were moving down the one road that led through the narrow, twisting ravine and into Huaxi Township, probably in buses, followed by a pair of jeeps carrying party officials. The officials always stayed in back, out of the line of fire, but nearby, so they could have their pictures taken and claim credit after the police did their dirty work.

These would be prefecture-level officials, Mei thought as she rolled off the foam sleeping pad laid across her makeshift tent; minor party functionaries from Taiyuan, city of the endless steel mills, or maybe even one step up, pompous municipality magistrates from Jinan. Mei didn’t care. No matter who they were or where they came from, she hated them with her entire being: mind, heart, soul.

Hu Mei sat on her knees and folded her blanket neatly—she prided herself on her attention to detail, her unhurried tranquility in the face of impending chaos—then stowed it in her backpack. She closed her brown, thirty-two-year-old eyes and took a moment to contemplate the memory of her husband, Yi, the creases of his lopsided smile, gentle lips, the funny flop of black hair that he used to brush across his forehead. Just the briefest thought of him, dead now six months, brought her comfort. The day would be troubled, she knew this, and that was exactly why she started it with a meditation on Yi’s face. He was, after all, why she was here in the first place.

The grind and groan of a bus engine brought her back to the present. They were close now, out of the ravine probably, passing the marshy ponds on the edge of town. She crawled from her jury-rigged tent—a bolt of blue plastic stretched between bent sticks—and was hit with the first cold blast of a November dawn. The cold didn’t bother her. She had grown up on a farm, had risen before sunrise practically every morning of her entire childhood to feed pigs and chickens and goats. She was a peasant and she knew it, and, like the cold, that didn’t bother her either. On the contrary—she was proud of it.

Hu Mei cupped her hands to her mouth and bellowed as loudly as she could:
“Qi lai! Qi lai! Jĭngchá lai le!” Get up, get up! The police are coming!

In the darkness, Mei could see the other men and women climbing out of the tents that made up their protest city on the trampled barley field, at the edge of the fence that ringed the pesticide factory. Of course no barley actually grew in the field. It was as dead as her husband, poisoned and worthless. Everything in Huaxi was poisoned and worthless, everything except the money that came out of the factory.

“
Kuài, kuài
,” she said, clapping her hands.
Quick, quick!
Most of the protestors—there were eighty-seven in all—were already on their feet, sticks and banners at the ready. Mei knew that none of them had eaten yet, or had tea, and that all of them were cold. She also knew each was ready to lay down his life for the cause. Each had had his land rights taken, forcibly, secretly, and without warning by the party, which had transferred those rights to the factory owners—a consortium of investors from Shanghai—who had then built this monstrosity. And they had all suffered for it. Their fields had shriveled, their pigs had died, and now, worst of all, they and their loved ones were getting sick: breathing sickness, stomach sickness, skin sickness. Mei didn’t know the names of the diseases, but she knew those diseases were killing them. The factory was going to kill them all, and no one was going to help them. Not the village party leader; he was fully
fŭ bài
—corrupt
—
not the township leader, the provincial magistrate, not even the leader of all of China’s Communist Party, Xi Jinping himself. They all suffered from
dào dé dún luò
—moral decadence. They were all deaf to the villagers’ pleas.

But not for much longer. Not if Hu Mei could help it.

The buses’ headlights swept across the ragged protest tents. The air brakes hissed as the buses stopped and their doors folded open. Black-uniformed riot police trundled off the buses and into the field, quickly forming two straight lines, one behind the other. Mei guessed there were about two hundred of
them; she could see their batons and shields flashing in the pink of the dawn, but their faces were covered by black neck scarves. Even from across the field, Mei could sense the policemen’s confidence. They would sweep across the protest village, smash the tents, batter any villagers who got in their way, then arrest the remainder and haul them off to the provincial jail in Taiyuan. A routine maneuver—the protestors were nothing but peasants. They used firecrackers as warning signals. Firecrackers? That was how backward they were.

Hu Mei suppressed a smile. If the police and the party thought they were simpletons, then so much the better.

Mei slipped a cell phone from her pocket. It was shiny and new, unused, not her old phone, the one the police were tracking, and blocking. This one was a gift from a cousin who worked in Chengdu. He was a quality-assurance manager in a cell phone factory. He had stolen two crates of them, along with SIM cards and a list of anonymous phone accounts, and given them all to Mei, who then handed them out to every like-minded person she knew in the Huaxi Valley. Five hundred cell phones. Five hundred untraceable numbers. Five hundred families and their friends, all waiting for a signal from Mei. She calculated them to be about two thousand people. What the party lackeys didn’t understand was that all these villagers, from Huaxi and every neighboring town, felt the same way as Mei—their hearts were bitter. They had been wronged, cheated, ignored.

And here’s the other thing the party didn’t understand. The villagers—these peasants—they trusted Mei. She and her husband, Yi, had spent a lifetime doing good for them, bringing their sick grandparents soup, helping in the middle of the night when a sow gave birth, clearing the milfoil from their ponds so they could have drinking water. Hu Mei loved helping her fellow villagers—it was in her blood—and they loved her for it.

Her fingers tapped quickly across the tiny keyboard: “
Tóng zhì men. Shí jiān daò le
.”
Comrades. Now is the time.

She looked across the trampled field at the eyes of the policemen, now visible in the cold morning light. Arrogant. If she were asked, that was how she would describe them: arrogant. But they wouldn’t be arrogant for long, because there were two thousand angry peasants waiting for them, awake, hiding in the darkness, gripping an armory’s worth of sharpened farm tools.

Hu Mei smiled at the thought of it. And pressed send.

G
arrett Reilly did
not
bake that morning, which was unusual. He hadn’t dipped into his bag of Hindu Skunk because it was a Tuesday, and new bond issues priced in the market on Tuesdays, usually right at 8:00 a.m., and if you were stoned when the new issues priced you would miss a step, and if you missed a step you would make mistakes, and if you made mistakes you would lose money.

Garrett Reilly hated losing money.

So he was straight, and he was happy about it, which was doubly unusual. Mostly when he was sober he was angry: angry at his parents, his brother, the government, corporations, his boss. Everybody and everything. He considered anger a constant—his equilibrium state. But when he was high, a fuzzy, contented peace settled on his brain as he watched the buy and sell numbers float across his Bloomberg terminal. Stoned, he could ignore the twenty ringing phone lines at his elbow, and he would wander to the large, noisy room’s single window and watch the seagulls circle over Rockefeller Park and glide out over the Hudson River, or he would trade video-game tips and stories of botched hookups with his coworkers at the other cubicles. They were all young, horny, indifferent to the wider world if it didn’t involve money. Or sex.

But today was different. He had fielded all the calls, had bid on the bonds conservatively, but well, and had made enough money for his firm—Jenkins & Altshuler—to justify his growing salary. That was all run-of-the-mill. Garrett Diego Reilly, two weeks past his twenty-sixth birthday, with a freckled, black-haired, half-Irish, half-Mexican face and the languid drawl of a kid from the slums
of Long Beach, California, was a rising star at the firm, a bond trader, probably the best young talent the company had, maybe the best in all of lower Manhattan, so a day of profits was normal. What wasn’t normal were the Treasury bond CUSIP numbers scrolling across his screen. T-bonds, as they were called, were long-term, government-issued debt, backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. Treasury, and there were a lot of them out there—trillions of dollars’ worth. They had, by and large, financed the deficit spending of the last two presidential administrations, and accounted for a massive amount of the country’s red ink. A CUSIP number—named after the Committee on Uniform Securities Identification Procedures—was a way of tracking every bond and share of stock sold in the United States and Canada. Every T-bond had a nine-digit alphanumeric CUSIP number.

Garrett knew his CUSIP numbers. His memory for numbers was photographic. He could scan a page of new bond issues and then repeat them back, number by number, verbatim, a week later. It was part of the reason Garrett, a janitor’s kid, had gotten into Yale. That, and a push from his nagging older brother. It was also part of how he’d landed a job at Jenkins & Altshuler, and then risen to the top of his department. But it wasn’t the entire reason. That came from another, related skill: pattern recognition.

Garrett didn’t just memorize numbers. He sorted them, ranked them, shifted them into discrete categories, until a pattern emerged. A flow. Until the numbers made sense. Garrett didn’t mean to do it—he just did it. Obsessively, 24/7, 365. It was simply how he saw the world, how he interpreted information. It wasn’t even that he
found
patterns.

He sensed them.

Just the barest hint of a pattern—in numbers, colors, sounds, smells—would start a tingling feeling at the base of his spine, the faintest electric shock that was somewhere between pleasure and alarm. As the pattern, whatever it happened to be, became clearer to him, the tingling dissipated, melding quickly into hard fact. It was always at that point that he knew he had a recognizable, quantifiable thing in front of him—a sine curve of equity prices, a three-to-one ratio of descending musical notes, a purple-to-green blended fade of bus transfer colors—and he would jot it down or discard it and move on to the next one. It didn’t matter if there was purpose or intent behind the patterns; Garrett simply saw them, felt them,
everywhere
, and then recorded them in his brain. Just like that. Every minute of every hour of every day.

And
that
was another reason he smoked marijuana: when he was stoned, the tingling went away, patterns melted into the chaotic white noise of everyday life, and Garrett became, at least momentarily, like everybody else. Information wasn’t sorted. It simply
was
. And that was a relief. Getting high was a vacation from Garrett’s singular ability.

But today, he wasn’t high. He was straight. And he could feel the pattern emerging from the CUSIP numbers on T-bonds being sold all around the world since yesterday, 1:04 a.m., Greenwich Mean Time. The familiar tingle had started just after his second coffee. This one was an almost sensual pulse as he read what must have been the four hundredth CUSIP on a bond selling out of the Middle East. He had read that number five times. And then he let the memory of all the other CUSIP numbers he knew wash over him like a tsunami of digits. And just like that,
boom
, a pattern emerged.