The Ascendant: A Thriller (3 page)

Kline smiled. He didn’t mind getting interrupted. He despised the pompous regimentation of the armed services. Titles, saluting, pay grades—in Kline’s experience, they were all impediments to productive, creative thinking. He was in it for one thing, and one thing alone: the thrill of the hunt.

“Okay,” Kline growled, pausing to look out at his assembled team. “The big question? Why? Why’d the Chinese dump a crapload of our Treasuries in secret?”

Captain Howell spoke first: “Annual Taiwan arms sale bill comes up in
Congress in two weeks. This is a warning shot off our bow. Stop selling F-16s to their enemy.”

“Not impossible, but conventional,” Kline barked. “Anyone have an idea with balls on it?”

Captain Howell reddened as muffled laughter echoed in the room.

A female lieutenant colonel stood up. “Sir. Malicious mischief. To keep us off balance while they make deals with the rest of the world.”

Kline shrugged. “More ballsy. But two hundred billion is a wicked lot of mischief.”

The broad-shouldered captain broke in. “Sir, aren’t we overlooking the most reasonable explanation? The Chinese no longer think U.S. Treasuries are a good investment, so they’re getting rid of them. They’re doing it in secret in order not to upset the world markets. Or make us angry. We’ve been waiting for the Chinese to dump our Treasuries for a while now.”

Kline stopped pacing and nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, Captain Mackenzie, that is the most probable explanation.” He scanned the room. “Are we in consensus?”

There was a general nodding of heads. Kline waited. And then a sly smile cracked the right side of his rugged face. A young, black-haired Army captain rose up from the back of the conference table. She stood ramrod straight, lithe, and naturally athletic, her intense blue eyes focusing in on Kline. Good Lord, she was beautiful, Kline thought, quickly reminding himself that he was happily married, and that coming on to a military subordinate was punishable with life-ruining jail time.

“Yes, Captain Truffant?” he asked. “You have an alternate theory?”

“Yes sir, I do,” Alexis Truffant said quietly but surely. “It is only a theory.”

“For now, everything we say is theoretical. Speak.”

“Sir, I think . . .” She hesitated. “I think China just declared war on us.”

The intakes of air around the room were audible. And so was the silence that followed. Kline nodded without saying anything, still staring at Alexis Truffant’s sparkling blue eyes. She was physically beautiful, yes, but she was also in possession of the ability to think logically and independently, no matter what the situation, or how intense the pressure. To Kline, that was
true
beauty. It was why she was here.

She continued: “I just think it’s a war we’ve never seen before.”

•  •  •

Kline caught up with Alexis as she waited for the elevator back to her office on the third floor. “Captain Truffant, walk with me.”

“Yes sir.”

Alexis turned and quickly fell in step with General Kline. “You want to query me on my war thesis? I have reasons that I think—”

“No. I agree with you.” Kline cut her off. “Selling our Treasuries in the shadow market is as close to a declaration of war as you can get these days. Even if we’ve been expecting it. And I also agree that it will be a war that we don’t really understand.”

“Oh, I, I . . .” Alexis stammered in surprise, immediately regretting it, waiting for her boss to jump all over her. She’d been with Kline long enough—two years now—to know he brooked no hesitation or indecision. He wanted the people working for him confident, determined, and forceful—even if they were wrong. But instead of chiding her, he shook his head quickly.

“Was it Bernstein who spotted this?”

“No sir, a subordinate in his office.”

“We have a name?”

“Garrett Reilly. Twenty-six years old. Bond trader.”

“Twenty-six? He performed a pretty spectacular feat of intuitive mathematical investigative work.”

“He did, sir.”

“We know anything else about him?”

“His name is on the lease on a two-bedroom apartment in lower Manhattan. He’s in an impressive tax bracket for a twenty-six-year-old. Yale dropout. Graduated Long Beach State with a computer science and math degree.”

“Dropped out of Yale to go to Long Beach State? Shows a distinct lack of judgment.”

“Dematriculated Yale two days after his brother was killed . . . in Afghanistan.”

Kline pulled up short and stared at Alexis. She continued: “Marine Lance Corporal Brandon Reilly. KIA at Camp Salerno, June 2nd, 2008. Sniper round to the neck.”

Kline said nothing and, for once, didn’t move. Alexis watched him, knowing exactly what gears were turning in her superior’s head. After ten long seconds,
Kline nodded slowly, almost imperceptibly. “Garrett Reilly? You think he could be the one?” The question hung in the air. “
For Ascendant?
”

Alexis Truffant had asked herself the same question when she first glanced at Garrett Reilly’s file two hours before. She had studied the young man’s picture, his handsome, boyish face, blue eyes, the sullen, almost arrogant smirk on his lips; she had run his brief work and education history through the brute logic processing of her own extremely ordered brain. They’d been looking for someone for more than a year, with no success, and the clock was ticking; funding for the project was about to run out. And so she answered her boss, couching her response as carefully as possible, because Alexis Truffant was, at heart, intensely risk averse: “A distinct possibility, sir.”

Kline stared at his subordinate, and Alexis knew he was looking for some trace of doubt on her face, some hint of reservation. The Army was a quagmire of double-talk and hedged bets. So she took a deep breath and said it again: “Distinct possibility.”

Kline nodded, wheeled, and started to walk away. He barked over his shoulder: “You know the drill, Captain. Get to it.”

“On it, sir,” she said, already running for the elevator.

G
arrett sat at a table in the back of McSorley’s, near the bathrooms, where it smelled more like stale urine than stale beer, but he didn’t care because he was with his friends, and the three of them had already plowed through four pitchers of half-and-half and six shots of tequila, and anyway, the back afforded him the best view of all the other half-wits in the crowded East Village bar, and Garrett loved casting scattershot aspersions. Like the four young, gray-suited hedgies at the window, singing an off-key rendition of that stupid Journey song they played to end
The Sopranos
—he could really hate on them.

“Fucking hedge-fund guys,” Garrett growled between sips of beer. “Look at those assholes. Hedge funds are a Ponzi scheme. How can people not see that?”

Mitty Rodriguez, five foot four and two hundred pounds of squat, Puerto Rican gaming programmer, and Garrett’s best friend, raised her beer in a salute. “Why don’t you get off your sorry ass and hit one of them? Knock his teeth out.”

“Maybe I will,” Garrett said, sizing up the biggest of the hedgies: six foot two, muscled, looked like he might have been a lacrosse player.

Shane Michelson shook his head. The lanky junior currency analyst with bad skin was by no means a fighter. “Can we please not get kicked out of another bar, Gare? Please. I’m running out of happy-hour spots.”

“Yeah. Sure. Fuck ’em. I’m going to make more money this week than they’ll make in their entire lives.”

Shane shook his head disbelievingly. “How you gonna do that?”

Garrett scanned the young women standing at the bar. One caught his attention:
striking, tall, olive-skinned. “Dollar’s gonna tank. And I’m going to ride it all the way to the bottom.”

Shane laughed. “Garrett. I’m a currency analyst. The dollar shows no sign of tanking.”

“Maybe you’re not a very good currency analyst.”

Mitty gave out a squeal of delight. “Ooo. Bitch slap. Catfight, catfight!”

“Fuck you, Garrett.” Shane looked away, pissed. Then his curiosity got the better of him. His friends knew better than to discount Garrett’s boasts entirely; they had a nasty habit of coming true. “What do you know? Tell me.”

“T-bond dump. It’s coming. Sovereign wealth fund. Flooding the market. Carnage on the horizon.”

“I didn’t see excess Treasuries on the block.”

“Federal Reserve probably buying up the excess. So no one panics. Hey, see that girl at the bar?” Garrett nodded. “I think she’s checking me out.”

“Who would want to kill the dollar? Is it the euro zone? They’re our friends.”

“She’s a hottie.”

“Russia? They don’t hold enough of our debt. An Arab state? We’d nuke them. The Japanese? It would sink their economy.”

“Can we not talk about money for a change?” Mitty said. “I did a forty-man raid on Kel’Thuzad today. Almost took the Citadel, but that pissant Nefarian screwed me . . .”

Garrett smiled. He and Mitty were kindred souls—tech-obsessed gamers who lived as much online as they did in the real world. They’d met in a first-person shooter chat room and become best friends long before they ever set eyes on each other. Virtual life was what bonded them. That, and a deep-seated love of stirring up trouble. Mitty was the only person Garrett knew who could piss off as many people as he could, and do it faster as well. Some nights it seemed like there were entire neighborhoods of New York City where the two of them were no longer welcome.

Shane closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them in surprise. “China?”

Garrett stood up, straightened his loosely hung tie, and smiled. “I’m going home with her tonight.”

Shane shook his head: “No way. The yuan is tied to the dollar. We sink, China sinks. Their exports to us will go in the toilet. Why would they do it?”

Garrett stared at Shane. He was drunk, and tottering, but even tottering Garrett radiated an arrogant self-assurance. “I haven’t quite figured that part out yet. But the Chinese are sitting on 2.7 trillion dollars in cash, so I’m guessing they’ll do just fine. See you guys tomorrow.”

He waded across the crowded bar, weaving unsteadily between tables. He stopped short when he reached the girl at the bar. One of the hedgies was chatting her up. Garrett scowled—fucking hedgies—then elbowed his way between them. “Dude. Sorry. I was talking to her already. You’ll have to go back and sing some more with your friends.”

The hedgie—it was the lacrosse player, and he was big, for sure—shot Garrett an angry look. “You out of your mind? I was talking to her. Fuck off, buddy.”

Garrett smiled at the young woman. She didn’t seem particularly impressed with either of them. Garrett leaned close: “What I meant to say was, in my head I’ve been talking to you for the last hour. We’ve been having this amazing conversation. But then this joker interrupted us, and I knew I had to come to your rescue.”

The young woman snorted a half laugh. The lacrosse player grabbed Garrett by the shoulder. “I’m gonna crack your fucking head in, asshole.”

Garrett let himself be turned around. He looked the lacrosse player up and down. “Lemme guess. Duke. Econ major. Varsity lacrosse. Third year at Apogee Capital Group?”

The lacrosse player gaped. “How the fuck did you know that? You been stalking me?”

Garrett smiled. “Why would I bother stalking
you
? No, it was easy. Apogee Capital is four blocks away. But they’re down seventy percent on the year. Your suit is a knockoff from Hong Kong, not Kiton from Italy, and your shoes are at least two years old, which, for a hedgie, is ancient. They were hiring three years ago, but not now, so you’re a bottom-rung guy and you’ve stayed at the bottom, but you got the job because Apogee’s CEO played lacrosse at Duke, which is where your accent places you, and only a hedgie loser would sing Journey at the top of his lungs in a crowded bar.”

The next thirty seconds were a blur to Garrett. He knew for sure the hedgie took a swing at him, and also that he was ready, so he ducked left and drove his right fist into the hedgie’s solar plexus. He’d used that move on the streets of Long Beach more times than he could count. He wasn’t the strongest guy out
there, but he was quick and he was an experienced street fighter. He kicked hard at the doubled-over hedgie, then raced toward his three hedgie friends, who were crossing the bar to join in. Garrett shot a kick at the first one’s knee, putting him out of commission, then shoved the second one into the third, the two of them tumbling onto a table, sending pitchers of beer and glasses shattering to the ground. By this time the entire bar was in motion, some people running for the exits, others trying to get a better view. A few girls were shrieking as Mitty rumbled across the room to get a couple of licks in—she never missed a chance to throw a punch—but she was too late, because the hedgies were down for the count and Garrett was already out the door and onto the street, looking for an alley to sprint down and resigning himself to the fact that he was going to sleep alone tonight.

Garrett ran for three blocks, due east, figuring the hedgies would never find him, then slowed for half a block and vomited into a trash can. He wiped his mouth clean, still tasting the hot dog he’d had for lunch but feeling better, and was cutting across Tompkins Square Park when out of the corner of his eye he saw someone following him, about a hundred yards away. He hurried across the park without looking back, then tucked around the corner of a building on Avenue B and Tenth. He waited, thirty seconds at most, then jumped out as the person who was following him turned the corner. He grinned. “Couldn’t stay away, could you?”

It was the girl from the bar.

G
arrett ordered two coffees, a plate of fries, and a bowl of avgolemono soup. “Two spoons for the soup,” he told the waitress at the Greek diner. “The lady will probably want to share.”

The waitress shrugged and shuffled off to the kitchen, passing a series of travel-agency posters with pictures of whitewashed houses on stark Aegean islands. The lone other customer at the diner’s counter sipped his coffee and read a paperback.