The Ascendant: A Thriller (12 page)

“Yes, of course,” Xu Jin said, baffled by the whole thing. “And in the writing of it. The writing of this code you did. There are the things I asked for?”

Again Gong Zhen shrugged.

Ahhrr!
Xu Jin wanted to throttle the boy. Did he not realize that lives depended on this? More than that, the fate of nations was hanging in the balance? No, Xu Jin thought to himself, he does not realize this. No one does. Except for myself, a few members of the Standing Council, and some equally high-placed enemies in the United States of America. And that was the whole point, wasn’t it? Attack and defend so that no one ever knew what was going on.

“So. How long would it take you to implement our plan? To get the process rolling? If we wanted to start soon, today, for instance? Can your people do it?”

Gong Zhen swung back to his monitor, tapped out a few keystrokes. The screen blinked, and without another word, Gong Zhen went back to playing that damned dragon-slaying game again. Director Xu watched in astonishment. Had this boy no sense whatsoever? He grabbed Gong Zhen by his shoulder and shook him roughly. “I asked you a question!” His voice rose above the clack of keyboards and the hiss of lips sucking on dozens of individual cigarettes. “When can you do this?”

Gong Zhen blinked rapidly again, as if he were already on another planet with his dragons and chain-mailed warriors.

“When?” Xu Jin barked again. “When can you start it?”

Gong Zhen frowned at the director. “I just did.”

G
arrett’s head was swimming.

He was exhausted, hungry, his legs ached, and he was having trouble keeping his eyes focused. They had been at it for three days straight—not that he could really separate the days from the nights anymore. The streak of red sunlight that washed through the open barracks window and across his computer screen wasn’t helping. Was that the sunrise or the sunset? It was all a blur.

The process had started the moment Alexis had booted up her laptop, three days ago. She had explained that Garrett would be working with each member of the team individually, for four hours at a time. After four hours, they would break for food, and then he would be passed on to the next member; another four hours, more food, then the next handoff. Alexis said they should work for as long as Garrett could endure. Then they would sleep—never more than a few hours—and get right back to it.

Lieutenant Lefebvre was Garrett’s first instructor. Alexis sat them in a corner of the main barracks room, opened the windows to allow in a breeze, brought hot coffee, and let them have at it.

It wasn’t at all what Garrett expected: Lefebvre didn’t lecture Garrett, so much as he engaged him in a fast-paced, carefully structured conversation. It was all politics, all the time—most of it concerning China.

Lefebvre pulled up jpegs on a computer screen. These, he said, were the highest ranking members of the Chinese Communist Party Politburo. These were their names, and this was where they came from. This was each one’s philosophical
point of view. Lefebvre urged Garrett to ask questions, and he did. Why were they all men? (The party hierarchy was overwhelmingly male and extremely sexist.) Why were they all old? (It was a slow-moving, conservative bureaucracy.) How come Chinese exchange students got so much acne when they came to the United States?

At the last question, Lefebvre pressed his lips together in a tight, uncomfortable smile. He looked at Garrett like he could barely stand his company . . . and pushed on.

These were the Spratly Islands, claimed by China, Japan, and Vietnam. Vast oil reserves lay within their territorial waters. It was a burgeoning hot spot. Fine, now, this was the difference between a princeling—the offspring of a high-ranking party member—and a Chinese bureaucrat who had worked his way up the ranks. This was China’s most recent GDP, its primary imports, exports, a brief history of its conflict with Korea, India, Russia. These were the world’s primary trade routes; these were the Strait of Malacca. The U.S. Navy patrolled here. And here. And here.

Garrett doubted he’d remember any of it. When he stared out the window, watching the helicopters bank left over the beach and south toward San Diego, the lieutenant snapped at him: “Focus please, Mr. Reilly. We don’t have a lot of time.”

Garrett started to say fuck you, but caught himself. Lefebvre was goading him, for sure, but Garrett couldn’t figure out why. On the Garrett Reilly scale of How Big of an Asshole Had I Been, he’d barely even gotten started with Lefebvre. Still, Lefebvre clearly didn’t like him. When Garrett asked Alexis about this, she just shrugged.

“Maybe you offended him. You seem good at that.”

During a five-minute break, Garrett did an online background check on Lefebvre. He’d been right about the money—the lieutenant was the heir to an old, and dwindling, Georgia timber fortune. Huh, Garrett thought, that’s interesting, because now he was a low-level researcher at the Army War College. He liked that little bit of family rebellion. Garrett tried to see his Army records, but those were on a secure Human Resources server, and he didn’t have time to hack it. He’d get to that later.

Lefebvre ended their session by giving Garrett a stack of books, three feet high, on Mao, the party, and the current state of the Chinese economy.

“You really expect me to read all this?”

“I don’t expect anything of you,” Lefebvre said with that same distasteful look.

Next it was Celeste Chen’s turn. Much to Garrett’s relief, Celeste didn’t lecture him. Instead, they read Asian papers together. She called them up online and then translated the gist of any article he pointed out, steering him away from pieces that seemed completely off topic. They read the
Gōngrén Rìbào
(the Workers’ Daily), the
Guanming Rìbào
(the organ of the Communist Party), the
Nongmin Rìbào
(agricultural news), and the
Jiefangjun Bao
(the mouthpiece for the People’s Liberation Army). They sampled papers from Japan (
Asahi Shimbun
and
Mainichi Shimbun
), from Malaysia (the
Star
), and from Hong Kong (
Sing Tao Daily
). They read economic news, cultural news, and political news, but mostly they looked for any mention of the United States, for any reason: diplomacy, trade, movies, conflict, criticism . . .
war
.

At first, Garrett wasn’t entirely sure what she was trying to teach him, but reading through the papers had a calming effect on him. He closed his eyes and began to imagine that Celeste’s voice was actually the voices of Chinese citizens. They were talking to him. Telling him how they felt about the world. He let their opinions wash over him, drinking them in.

That’s when he realized that they—Alexis and the DIA and whoever else was behind this—were treating him as if he were a computer. They were feeding him massive amounts of data and expecting him to sort it, filter it, process it, and then spit out answers—answers that would come in the form of pattern recognition. This revelation cheered him considerably: this he could do, and do well. Hell, he could mine patterns out of chaos in his sleep.

Celeste stayed cool to Garrett, clearly not interested in him in any way sexual or romantic, which disappointed Garrett, given that he viewed pretty much any good-looking woman as a possible hookup. He asked her if she had a boyfriend.

“Don’t even go there,” she said, barely pausing as she read through an article about hackers in the
China Public Security Daily
. “I’ll kick your fucking teeth in.”

Garrett laughed. He thought she might be a lesbian, which was okay with him, especially given how hot she was. But Celeste knew her stuff, that much was evident, and Garrett marveled at her grasp of languages. She was able to slip from Mandarin (her immigrant parents spoke it at home) to Japanese (learned it at school) to Cantonese (picked it up in her spare time) in quick succession,
and all with equal fluency. She even spoke passable Arabic. Her linguistic skills seemed to be on a par with his ability to sort data—she mastered languages on an unconscious level, and that, to Garrett at least, was way fucking cool.

In the evening Alexis had food brought in. It was nasty cafeteria slop, obviously from the nearby Marine mess hall—beans and wilted salad and a mystery meat—but Garrett was starving, so he didn’t care. He drank three cups of coffee and a Diet Coke. The moment he finished eating he was moved on to the next session, which belonged to Bingo Clemens.

Bingo talked in a steady, low whisper, barely audible, his face hunched over a computer keyboard. Garrett had to lean close to hear him, and also to see the screen past Bingo’s large, fleshy head. Images flashed past—missiles and warships and planes and more missiles and maps and soldiers—while Bingo’s voice rambled on without interruption: “. . . the tactical range of an AGM-84 Harpoon antiship missile is 278 kilometers . . . the Chinese have six Jianghu V–class frigates in service in the South China Sea . . . the Russian Federation has four armies headquartered in its Eastern Military Command, guarding its border with China . . .” Garrett interrupted him occasionally, asking him to slow down or explain an acronym, and Bingo would stop on a dime and go into even more excruciating detail.

Then Garrett, jonesing to get high, asked Bingo if he knew where Garrett could score some weed. Bingo fell silent for almost a minute, and then said, flatly, “You should not smoke pot. It’s bad for you.”

That was the sum total of the conversation.

It was clear to Garrett that Bingo was a seriously odd bird, but in a way that he kind of liked. He seemed incapable of harming a living thing—he scooped up stray spiders in coffee cups and released them in the brush outside—but when Garrett caught him playing
Call of Duty
on a laptop late that night, he saw the burning intensity of a killer in Bingo’s eyes. Bingo was slaughtering Soviet agents with abandon, grunting in pleasure whenever a soldier bit the dust. That was when Garrett decided that the two of them were connected, however tangentially. Like Garrett, Bingo was a hard-core geek. Like Garrett, he had rage issues. He even had crappy social skills, a problem with which Garrett could sympathize.

By three in the morning Garrett was wrung out and asked to go to sleep. He sacked out in a small bunk room with a thin mattress and a window that was painted shut. An American flag hung on one wall, along with a Marine Corps
recruiting poster. A square-jawed Marine in a white dress cap held a gleaming silver sword in front of his face. Brandon had brought home a poster just like it after he had signed up for the Corps. The few, the proud, the Marines, he had said over and over again, half taunt for his little brother and half catechism for himself.

Garrett ripped the poster off the wall and stuffed it into a garbage can, then curled up and passed out without taking off his clothes.

•  •  •

Day two had started at 6:00 a.m., with Alexis pounding on his door.

“Get up,” she said. “We’re going for a run.”

“
We’re
not doing anything,” Garrett said, a pillow over his head. “You go for a fucking run.”

Alexis opened the door anyway and shook Garrett roughly. “You need exercise. Good for the brain.”

“My brain is fine,” he said. “Fuck off and die.”

She put a portable radio next to the bed and turned it on. Kesha screeched through the tinny speaker. She turned on the lights and pulled back the curtain on the window, flooding the room with sunlight.

“Ah,
shit
,” Garrett said. “Have a fucking heart.”

Garrett staggered out of bed and pulled on a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt that she had left on a chair for him. He stumbled out of the barracks into the early-morning light and blearily put one foot in front of the other, following Alexis down a dirt path, working his way up to a reluctant, if steady, shuffle.

It was awful: the dust, the rocks, the dry wind, the sweat, the thirst, the pain in his muscles. He had never liked exercise of any kind, always thought it a waste of his time—after all, he was in perfectly good shape, and could push an elevator button as well as the next guy—and running seemed the ultimate in pointlessness. The fact that Alexis was able to lope effortlessly up and down hills like some kind of African springbok only furthered his humiliation. When she waited for him to catch up every quarter mile he had to restrain himself from smashing in her kneecaps with a rock.

After twenty minutes he dropped to his knees and began to dry-heave. Alexis relented, and walked him back to the barracks for the next set of sessions.

The rest of day two was more of the same: politics with Lefebvre, Chinese culture with Celeste, military briefings with Bingo. Four hours, then food, four hours, then food, and on and on into the night.

Alexis oversaw every session, sitting nearby, taking notes and asking questions. She didn’t seem to tire, ever, or get distracted when her cell rang, which it did regularly. As far as Garrett could tell it was mostly General Kline badgering her for progress reports. If she was standing close enough he could hear the general barking at her about schedules and funding, and sometimes about the military, and once even about the president. Alexis would answer in flat, even tones—yes sir, no sir—never letting Kline’s hyperbolic emotions ruffle her. That impressed Garrett, because keeping his cool was one of the things he was truly terrible at.

The other thing that impressed him was her flexibility. She was clearly running the show, but Garrett had to admit that she did it without ever throwing her weight around or restricting the conversation to subjects deemed “on topic.” That surprised Garrett. His first impression of her had been that she was a rigid thinker, and he despised rigid thinking. Fluidity and change were the intellectual seas in which he swam. But Alexis was not so easy to pin down. She let the flow of information swing from place to place, arena to arena, and she showed no irritation when Garrett wanted to explore with Celeste—conversationally, of course—the differences between male and female masturbation, or when, exhausted and cranky, he finally told Lefebvre that diplomacy was a waste of time, and that the U.S. should just nuke China off the face of the earth.