The Ascendant: A Thriller (31 page)

Everything about this was layers of an onion: secrets and then deeper secrets. The patterns Garrett treasured weren’t falling into place—and that gave him pause. What if there were puppet masters out there? Perhaps he’d been seduced so completely by Alexis, and by the Pentagon and the president—making him a major, giving him a uniform, putting officers under his command—that he had forgotten to think for himself.

With that in mind, he asked his drivers to take him back to Bolling early
that evening—at 11:00 p.m.—and got a few hours’ sleep. He woke up at four, predawn, threw on sweats, ate a protein bar, stuffed his laptop into a backpack, and jogged out of his Bolling AFB apartment complex an hour before his MP escorts were due to take him back to the Pentagon. They’d stopped locking his door from the outside after that first day with Alexis, but after the incident with Avery in the men’s room, he was working on the assumption that someone, somewhere, would be watching him. Taking an early-morning jog seemed relatively innocuous. They wouldn’t arrest him for that.

He ran hard along a dirt jogging path on the edge of the base. After ten minutes of running he found a thicket of trees that ringed the northern perimeter of Bolling, and which also hid a cyclone fence that bordered the base. He slipped off the path and into the trees. Beyond the fence—just outside of the base—Garrett could see a strip mall and a row of two-story, stucco apartments. Garrett booted up his laptop and started searching for Wi-Fi sources that weren’t password protected. It took him five minutes and a walk of about a hundred yards before he found one with a sufficiently strong signal. The rest was simple.

First he signed up for a new e-mail account. He used his real name on the account, figuring this Hans guy would need to know it was he who had sent it. Next he wrote an e-mail—“I am in DC, ready to talk”—and then encrypted it with PGP encryption software. PGP—otherwise known as “pretty good privacy” software—was about as close as you could get to unbreakable coding software, especially at the 2,048-bit level. Sure, with a supercomputer big enough and weeks of time you could break the code, but Garrett figured whoever was watching him really didn’t have a lot of time. Even the National Security Agency had raised a fuss about PGP encryption, arguing that it could be used as a tool for terrorists to send e-mail messages without American agencies being able to spy on them. But PGP was still out there—in fact, it was only getting stronger, with new open-source versions showing up on the Web every week.

But sending an encrypted e-mail was pointless if the receiver of the e-mail didn’t have the key to decrypt it. An encryption key was like a guide to figuring out a scrambled message—without the guide, the message was meaningless. But with the key in hand, a software program could easily decipher even the densest code. However, if Garrett sent the key via e-mail, then he was back to square one—anyone who intercepted that e-mail would use the key to read his previous, encrypted e-mail. Garrett figured this was where he would have to get creative.

He downloaded a chapter of Clausewitz’s book
On War
from the Web—the chapter was titled “Boldness,” which Garrett thought was cute—and then copied the first 715 characters of that chapter into his computer. He chose the number 715 randomly. Next, he made an encryption key—again using his PGP software—so that whoever possessed that key could decode his earlier e-mail. For this, he took the first 715 letters from the Clausewitz “Boldness” chapter and made them the key. He decided that was too straightforward, so he repeated the last steps, only this time he found the Clausewitz text in its original German, downloaded the first 715 letters from that version, encoded them, and sent them off to the “warbyothermeans” e-mail address. Anyone who told you their name was Hans Metternich, Garrett figured, better have the language skills to back it up.

Next he signed up for an online PayPal account. PayPal was famous for their security encryption. Of course that security was used almost exclusively to protect shoppers from having their credit-card numbers stolen while making purchases online, but that didn’t mean that a clever coder couldn’t use it for their own purposes. Garrett then sent a seven-dollar-and-fifteen-cent payment to [email protected], and added a message with the payment.

The message said: “Be Boldness.”

Garrett figured that if Hans Metternich had half a brain he would be able to figure out to use the book chapter as a key to the encryption, and the first 715 characters as the length of that key. And if Hans didn’t have half a brain, then Garrett wanted nothing to do with him.

H
ans Metternich preferred women to men—that is, in the realm of the physical—by a slight margin. But in his line of work, where one often needed to get close to a person, and do it quickly, sex was a useful tool, and given that a percentage of his subjects were gay men, Metternich would do whatever it took.

Not that Metternich—and Hans Metternich was simply the name he had been using lately, not his real name by any stretch of the imagination—minded terribly. The truth was, Metternich was ambivalent about sex. It didn’t particularly excite him, with men or with women, and never really had. To him it was a biological imperative, hardwired into the human brain to allow us all to procreate, and nothing more than that. The corporeal human form was too full of flab and smells and jagged imperfections to stir his imagination. He understood that he was unusual in this, that it set him apart from most of the rest of his species, but he accepted his own frigidity, and had learned to exploit it to accomplish more in his career. That he had figured out that other humans—of both sexes—found him attractive had been paying dividends for him for quite some time now.

Humanity’s endless need to have sex was one of Metternich’s greatest weapons.

Which is why he found himself enfolded between the legs of a large, buff, hairless aerospace engineer in a hotel room in Miami Beach. Metternich knew the engineer carried a set of design schematics somewhere among numerous hi-tech gadgets he traveled with, and for the past twenty-four hours Metternich
had been trying to tease out the whereabouts of those schematics in any way he could. That it took half a bottle of vodka and fellatio in an expensive hotel room was all part of the job. Now Metternich knew that the schematics were in a password-protected file in a flash drive tucked into the man’s socks, and he knew how he was going to get them. He was, in fact, about to finish the process of acquiring said schematics when the incoming e-mail chime sounded on his smartphone. That specific chime—from the haunting French horn solo at the start of Brahms’s piano concerto in B-flat major—told him that the message was linked to a certain address, an address that only two people in the world had. One of those people Metternich wanted to speak to in the worst way.

“Nice ringtone,” the engineer said, splayed out on the bed, his wilted form draped across the sheets. “Classical music, right?”

Metternich forced a half smile to his lips, nodded in the affirmative, then hurried to his phone. He would deal with the engineer in just a moment. First the e-mail. He checked the inbox on his phone. Yes. The e-mail was from the party he had hoped it would be from. But it was unreadable—encrypted.

Not that he hadn’t expected this.

He had encryption software on his computer, probably five different programs he kept loaded for just such occasions. He pulled his laptop from a leather briefcase and booted it up as the engineer watched lazily from the bed.

“That PGP software?” the engineer said, squinting without his reading glasses. “You decrypting something?”

“Maybe.”

“Cool. Can I help? I’m pretty good with that stuff.”

“Perhaps later,” Metternich said, shifting his body slightly to block the engineer’s view of his computer screen. He checked the inbox on his laptop. Another e-mail had arrived, this one from PayPal. He had been sent money. Again, the sender was the person he most ardently wanted to speak to. But to collect the money—and any messages contained in the missive—he had to sign up for a PayPal account. Metternich didn’t like leaving unnecessary footprints on the Web, but he would make an exception in this case. He had started to go through the steps of setting up a PayPal account when the engineer, still splayed naked on the bed, began to paw at his leg.

“Come back to bed. You can play with your computer later.”

Metternich tried to ignore him. He opened the PayPal account and collected
the money. Seven dollars and fifteen cents. His mind raced. Why that amount? There was a note attached to the payment. It read: “Be Boldness.”

Metternich narrowed his eyes, concentrating.
Be Boldness? Seven-fifteen?
They were clues, obviously, but to what? To the encryption key, perhaps? But the message didn’t say “Be Bold.” It said “Be Boldness.” Boldness? Wasn’t that the title of a chapter in . . . ?

The engineer snaked his hand across Metternich’s lap and into his crotch. That broke his focus. He snapped the hand away, annoyed.

“Ouch. That hurt.” The engineer frowned. “I get it. You want rough?” He grabbed Metternich’s arm, but that was his first—and last—mistake. Metternich caught him by the wrist, and in one fluid, powerful motion, spun the engineer’s arm up and around, twisting his shoulder hard. The engineer cried out in pain and surprise, but because he was lying on the bed, without anything to secure himself to, he had no choice but to spin his body to keep his arm from snapping. The next thing the engineer knew he was lying facedown on the bed, his right arm twisted tight behind his back. Metternich jammed his free elbow into the engineer’s back, hard and fast, directly between his ribs.

The engineer grunted, exhaling hard. Metternich knew—from years of experience—that losing a lungful of air would significantly shorten a person’s fight time, so he quickly, almost effortlessly, slid his body on top of the engineer’s, locking his own legs around the other man’s legs and his right arm securely around the man’s neck. He pressed hard on the engineer’s larynx, cutting off his air flow, using his body to keep the engineer from moving, and simply held on as tightly as he could.

After a few minutes of muted, desperate thrashing, the engineer stopped moving. Metternich held him tight for another five minutes, just to make sure. It sometimes took a surprisingly long time to choke a man to death, and Metternich was nothing if not thorough.

Lying there, muscles rigid, killing another man, Metternich zeroed in on the answer—
the sender was using Clausewitz
. Yes! Very clever, using his own reference to
On War
to hide clues. Metternich liked the sender already. He liked him very much.

Metternich unwrapped his arm from the lifeless engineer’s throat and settled in to the business of code busting. This was what he lived for.

Mysteries.

Now those were sexy.

C
eleste Chen hated online games. She hated shooting and sneaking around post-apocalyptic war zones. She also had no interest in money markets or options to buy stocks. It made no sense to her, no matter how hard she tried to focus on it. In fact, she hated everything about the war room: it was dark, gloomy, and filled with too many macho military men wearing cheap cologne and speaking in weird, abbreviated Army jargon: “POS this.” “Where’s the NSTCF?” “Why don’t we have EMCON-4?” It was all nonsense.

So when Garrett had told her that she didn’t have to play games or trade futures anymore, that she should instead keep looking for signs of the Chinese government’s desperation, Celeste happily picked up her laptop and fled to a Starbucks in the Alexandria Commons strip mall. It was quiet, uncrowded, and, most important, it wasn’t within earshot of Garrett Reilly.

He might be brilliant, but he could be a real prick as well.

Case in point: when she had come to him, exasperated, after two days at the Starbucks, and said she had looked everywhere, and that there was no sign of a rebellion or disturbance in China, Garrett had said, “Don’t be a pussy. Look harder.”

She had stormed silently out of the war room.

She spent the next day reading the online versions of the big-city daily newspapers—the
Shanghai Daily
, the
Xinmin Evening News, Dazhong Rìbào
out of Shandong,
Xiaoxiang Morning News
from Hunan—and then the party organ papers like the
China Youth Daily
, the
China Public Security Daily
, and the Ministry
of Justice’s
Legal Daily
. But she had already been combing through these papers for weeks now, with little to show for it.

The main problem was that she didn’t know exactly what she was looking
for.
Had it been the mention of a specific person or an incident, she could have scanned whole pages quickly, and dispensed with enormous sections of the papers that were extraneous. But Garrett had been vague: he wanted evidence of something that
might
be worrying the central government, and that could be almost anything. The leaders of the Chinese Communist Party were a skittish group of old men who saw phantom enemies at almost every turn. When the Arab world erupted in protest in the spring of 2011—and was called by some the Jasmine Revolution—the party banned the selling of jasmine anywhere in the country. Jasmine farmers were wiped out, all on the potential linkage of a flower with rebellion. The party leadership was spooked by its own shadow.

On day three she went back to the war room and told Garrett that she was no good at finding patterns. “It’s not what I do.”

“Well, learn,” he said. “It’s your job.”

Celeste was used to Garrett being a jackass, but it occurred to her that he had gotten noticeably more obnoxious since Alexis had disappeared. Celeste guessed that they must have had a thing; now Alexis had flown the coop and Garrett was hurting. That surprised Celeste—not the realization that they had shacked up, which seemed perfectly reasonable, but that Garrett cared if a woman left him or not. To Celeste, Garrett seemed incapable of adult emotion. She would have figured he saw Alexis Truffant as just another conquest.