The Ascendant: A Thriller (30 page)

Nine-one-one calls from fifteen counties in Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama went through the roof. Seven people had heart attacks. Three died.

Garrett had Bingo and Jimmy Lefebvre investigate. It took them twenty minutes to find the connection. “The banks all outsourced programming of their websites to the same company in Vietnam,” Lefebvre said. “Eastern Star Data Programming, out of Saigon. But they’re not answering their phones.”

Garrett hunted through his collection of dark net and hacker bulletin boards, and quickly found hundreds of usernames and passwords that had just
come up for sale. They’d all originated out of Eastern Star. And they were all from the same five banks in the American South.

“Someone took a shitload of account info and gave it to hackers all over the world,” Garrett told Bingo and Lefebvre as they stood at his shoulder, peering down at the list of asking prices for the stolen account info. “And then they let the hackers do the real damage.”

“Smart,” Lefebvre said. “High level of deniability.”

“Find out details on Eastern Star. Just because they were hacked doesn’t mean the Chinese did it.”

Lefebvre and Bingo hurried to their computers. Garrett smiled: they were coalescing into a well-oiled machine. He called Kline to tell him what they’d found, but the news had already begun to go viral. Online chatter was exploding. Twitter feeds were buzzing.

“What can we do?” Kline asked.

“Well, the money’s all gone already,” Garrett said. “So, basically, nothing.”

“That’s not good enough,” Kline yelled. “Do you understand the pressure we’re under? I just met with the president. About you!
Do you fully understand the stakes?
”

“I guess I understand them now.”

Kline barked something that Garrett thought sounded like a curse—but he couldn’t be sure—and then hung up on him. Hanging up on each other seemed to have become their preferred method of signing off.

Bingo came back with more information half an hour later: the outsourced Vietnamese programming company was a wholly owned subsidiary of a Shanghai-based IT conglomerate with ties to highly placed Communist Party leaders, and had been staffed entirely with Cantonese-speaking ethnic Chinese immigrants known in Vietnam as Hoa people. That in itself meant nothing to Garrett—he wasn’t going to let himself get suspicious of every Chinese citizen or company as a knee-jerk response—but Saigon police had just detained a dozen of the company’s employees trying to board a 737 back to Shanghai.

“Well,” Garrett said, “that’s probably all we need to know.”

When news of the drained accounts finally hit the
Wall Street Journal
website an hour later, lines of spooked customers began to form outside the banks’ three hundred branches across the southern United States. They all wanted their money. In cash.
Now.
On the New York Stock Exchange, each
bank’s Class A shares lost a third to half their value in a single afternoon. Just like that. Boom.

Bingo, Lefebvre, and the rest of the Ascendant staffers watched the CNN coverage on the center digital screen. The war room was silent except for the echoing voice of a young, blond reporter doing a stand-up in front of a suburban Atlanta bank.

“There is widespread panic here, Vanessa,” the reporter said. “Everyone is very scared about their money.”

“Score another one for the boys and girls in Beijing,” Garrett said to no one in particular. “They see an opportunity and they jump on it. And they do not fuck around.”

“T
hey made you a general?” Avery Bernstein said, eyeing Garrett’s Army uniform scornfully as they walked across the paved pathways of the Pentagon’s open central courtyard. A café building stood in the center of the enclosed area; the high, five-sided inner walls of the structure surrounded them, making the courtyard feel more like a prison than a park.

“It’s a major’s uniform,” Garrett said. “The president promoted me himself.”

“The president? Really?” Avery shook his head in wonder. “Not sure whether to congratulate you or give you my condolences. I thought you hated the military.”

Garrett sighed. His former boss had called at noon, saying he was going to be in D.C. for the day and did Garrett have a few minutes to talk. Garrett had said of course, happy to hear the sound of Avery’s voice, but the moment he hung up he realized that almost no part of the phone call made any sense.

“You were in D.C. on a business trip? And you knew I was in Washington? How?”

“They told me you were. A few days ago.” Avery hesitated. “No, that’s a lie. They called me this morning, asked me to come talk to you.”

“They?”

Avery swept an arm into the air, gesturing, in one sweep, to the officers and civilians walking through the courtyard with coffee and sandwiches in their hands, but also to the mammoth walls of the Pentagon itself. “Whoever it is you work for. The military. The government. A general named Kline. Said I should
tell you to fly right. Get with the program, whatever the hell that program is, and do what you’re supposed to do. Of course he wanted me to be more subtle about it. Play to your patriotism. I said you had no patriotism.”

“Maybe I’ve changed.”

“Judging from your clothes, I would say you absolutely have changed.” He looked at Garrett, studying his face. “Not sure it’s for the better, either. Are you on board with everything that uniform represents?”

Garrett turned away from Avery, hiding the hurt on his face. “When I told you I wanted to short Treasuries because the Chinese were dumping them, you said I had no moral center. Now I’m working for our country and you still give me grief. I can’t win.”

They walked in silence. A dozen pigeons cooed and pecked at breadcrumbs under a wooden bench.

“You’re right. I’m sorry,” Avery said, sounding genuinely remorseful. “I don’t always know why I say the things I do.”

Garrett nodded. “Whatever.”

“Look, this Kline guy didn’t sound happy, Garrett. Frankly, he sounded a little desperate. What is going on?”

“Stuff,” Garrett said. “Weird stuff.”

“Has to do with China?”

“It might.”

“The bank run in the South this afternoon?”

Garrett said nothing. Avery stared long and hard at his former protégé.

“Don’t look at me like that, Avery. I can’t say. Really I can’t.”

Avery leaned close and whispered, “Are they watching us?”

“Is who watching us? These guys?” Garrett said, nodding to an Army captain who walked past. “Maybe. Who gives a shit?”

Avery abruptly grabbed Garrett by the elbow and turned the two of them around. “Walk with me,” he said, quickly moving the two of them toward the Courtyard Café at the center of the park.

“What are you doing, Avery?”

Avery pushed open a door to the café and ushered Garrett inside. “Give me two minutes.” The café was mostly empty; a busboy cleared plates from a counter and a waitress emptied a coffee urn. Half a dozen Pentagon staffers read or worked on laptops at tables across the room. Avery put his hand on the small
of Garrett’s back and guided him toward the rear of the café. “There,” Avery said. “Men’s room.” He shoved open the men’s room door with his foot, and led Garrett inside. The bathroom gleamed white and smelled of disinfectant.

Garrett frowned. “Are we gonna have gay sex? ’Cause, weirdly, I’m not in the mood.”

Avery leaned close and whispered, “Somebody’s been asking for you.”

Garrett blinked, surprised. “What do you mean?”

Avery spoke in hushed, clipped clusters of words. “A man. Came to me. He knew about you. About the Treasury bonds. How you’d sniffed them out. He said you’d been taken to Camp Pendleton and that the government had drafted you to work for them.”

“Who was he?” Garrett asked quietly. They were inches apart.

“Called himself Hans Metternich,” Avery said. “Doubt it was his real name. He was European, I think. Middle-aged. Handsome. Didn’t seem like a spy. But then again, he didn’t seem
not
like a spy, either. He asked me to pass you a message.”

“Christ, Avery, maybe he was a terrorist. What if he wants to kill me? Did you think of that before you went talking to some asshole named Hans?”

“Then ignore him. But the car bomb at our offices? That almost killed you? He said it wasn’t terrorists.”

“Who’d he say it was?”

“He wouldn’t tell me. Said he could only tell you.”

“Fuck that,” Garrett said. “I don’t give a shit who he is. Or what he has to say.”

“Fine,” Avery said, “I’m just a messenger. If you change your mind, he said you should make yourself known to him and he’ll contact you.”

“How am I supposed to do that?”

There was a loud bang, and the bathroom door burst open. A pair of military policemen—young, grim-faced and large—rushed quickly into the room. “Major Reilly,” the first one said in a booming voice. “You are needed back at the command center.”

Garrett turned, stunned. Had they followed him into the bathroom? “What are you doing in here?”

“I can escort you there right away, sir,” the military policeman said.

“Fuck you!” Garrett stepped forward to get in the MP’s face, but Avery grabbed him by the hand, as if to shake it. Garrett could immediately feel a scrap of paper in his palm, and he knew that Avery had just passed him a note.

“Great to see you again,” Avery said, pulling Garrett close. “Really great.”

The moment the words were out of his mouth the second policeman—buzz-cut and thick-necked—grabbed Avery securely under his arm, long fingers pressing almost to the older man’s bone, and pulled him away from Garrett. “Mr. Bernstein, your flight is boarding in thirty minutes,” he said.

“Ouch, that hurts,” Avery said.

“A driver will take you to the airport,” the MP said.

Garrett balled up a fist, ready to drive it into the MP’s face, but the first MP stepped between them. “Sir,” he said simply and directly, clearly ready to put Garrett on the ground if he tried anything. “I’m ready to escort you back now.”

“I’m fine, Garrett,” Avery said, as they tugged him toward the door. “I need to get back to New York anyway.”

“Avery, I want to—” Garrett said, the scrap of paper clutched tightly in his fist.

“Keep up the good work,” Avery cut in. With that, he was led from the bathroom. Garrett let out a short, disbelieving laugh and stared at the remaining MP.

“Hey, asshole,” he said, “why the fuck are you watching
me
?”

The MP smiled grimly and said nothing.

[email protected].

Garrett peeked at the e-mail address scribbled on the scrap of paper that Avery Bernstein had pressed into his hand, then shoved the paper into his pocket and continued to pace the back of Ascendant’s hushed war room.
War by other means?
At first Garrett thought it might be a reference to Malcolm X. He seemed to remember some kind of black militant quote about “any means,” but when he looked it up on the Web he realized the actual quote was “By any means necessary,” so Malcolm X was out of the picture.

When Garrett plugged the phrase into Google (which had recovered fully in its response time, one week out), the top result was from the early-nineteenth-century German military theorist Carl von Clausewitz: “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” Was that a joke? Was someone trying to seem clever? Because that e-mail address wasn’t clever, it was idiotic, clearly the work of a tech amateur. To Garrett, clever was 2,048-bit encryption. Quoting some dead German douche bag was just lame.

And Hans Metternich? Who was named
Hans
? Garrett’s rational side was telling him to ignore the whole thing. But Avery was the most conservative, risk-averse person Garrett knew. For him to chance getting his neck wrung passing on a message—didn’t that mean Garrett should take it seriously, or at least not totally ignore it?

Besides, truth be told, the last month of Garrett’s life
had
played out like a paranoid movie script, rife with bombs and secret programs. And now he’d
learned that military policemen had him under surveillance. For fuck’s sake—it’s not like he’d asked to work in the Pentagon.
They
wanted
him
here.

He scanned the war room. A few staffers were playing games; two were trading FOREX futures online; a few more were monitoring incoming CIA and NSA intelligence feeds. Did he trust any of them? Probably Bingo, he thought. Bingo had no particular allegiance to the military. He could count on Celeste as well, if only because she seemed to hold the armed services in as much contempt as Garrett did. And Lefebvre? Garrett was less positive about him. The two of them had settled into an edgy détente, but Garrett thought that Lefebvre’s future lay inside the military machine, not outside of it.

Trust those three or not, there were a host of unresolved questions that were nagging at him, and he wasn’t ready to bring them up with anyone else. Who
had
been responsible for the car bomb? If Garrett had been the target, why hadn’t they tried to kill him in a more direct way, like shooting him with a gun? Why hadn’t anyone claimed responsibility? And where were the suspects? Now, looking back, he realized he should have pressed for the answers to those questions sooner, but there had always been more urgent issues—like the possibility of the next global war.

And yet, even
that
had begun to trouble Garrett. He was pretty sure that all of these disparate attacks were the work of one country—and that that country was China—but the evidence was still circumstantial. Yes, there had been blackouts, riots, bank runs, and a dilution of the U.S. currency, as well as cyber attacks and manipulation in the real estate and stock markets, but all of those things had happened numerous times in the past, and no foreign power had been responsible—it was just life in the modern world, the cycles of capitalism and the citizenry’s response to hard times. Garrett had no proof of centralized coordination. And while the Chinese government’s desperation was a good guess as to motivation, it was still a guess. He longed for something more concrete.