The Ascendant: A Thriller (33 page)

“You need to find this Tiger guy,” Garrett said as he stared at the photo from the Chinese market one last time. “You need to make contact, and tell him he has friends outside of China. Friends who will support him in any way possible.”

“It’s a needle in a haystack,” Celeste said. “If he even exists, the odds of finding him are astronomically small.”

“From here, maybe. But from inside the country, I don’t think so. You need to go to China.”

Celeste let out a laugh. “What?”

“If you go to those provinces that have been blacked out, there’s still gotta be people living there,” Garrett said. “They will know what happened. And they’re going to talk. They’ll talk to you.”

“That’s insane. I’m a grad student, not a spy.”

“Exactly. And that’s what everyone will see you as. A student knocking around China.”

Celeste shook her head vigorously. “You have no idea what you’re asking for, Garrett. You have a building full of professionals to send to China—”

“A whole building full”—Garrett cut her off—“and none of them found what you did. Not a one. I don’t trust them. Any of them. They’re company men. They have no imagination. They don’t think like we do.
Like you do.
And, anyway—I don’t know whose side they’re on, but I’m pretty sure it’s not mine.”

Celeste grimaced with indecision. They asked the State Department liaison—a young, serious woman named Tea—if Celeste could get a rush tourist visa to China without raising eyebrows, and she said yes, and that a seat on a plane would be easy to find as well.

Celeste said she had to think about it. Garrett watched her pace in the hallway outside of the war room, calling friends on her cell phone, then pacing some more. After twenty minutes she came back inside.

“You’re not leaving forever,” Garrett said. “This is a reconnaissance trip.”

“The party won’t see it that way. They do not like foreigners getting involved in domestic politics. I could get arrested. I could go to jail for a long, long time.”

“Or you could change the world.”

Celeste scowled at him. “Give me a fucking break, Garrett. You’re the last person I’d expect that kind of bullshit from.”

Garrett shook his head. “Not bullshit. It’s true.”

Celeste fell silent. She rubbed her hands together, squeezing at her fingers hard. They had been talking in strained whispers. Around them Garrett could hear the constant click of fingers on keyboards. Finally, Celeste nodded her head. “I’ll need to call my mom. And pack.”

“You won’t regret this.”

“I’ll leave this afternoon. And I already regret it.”

She collected her laptop and her bag and hustled out of the war room. As she left, Garrett had the realization that he was sending his first soldier into combat, so he ran after her and caught her by the elevator. He didn’t know quite what to say, and she looked distracted and slightly confused.

“Is there something else?” she asked. “You want me to bring you back a T-shirt?”

Garrett gave her a brief hug. “Just be safe. And good luck.”

Celeste gave him a baffled look, said, “Okay,” and then disappeared into the elevator.

Garrett hurried back into the war room and brought Bingo and Jimmy Lefebvre to a quiet corner in the rear. He told them what Celeste had found.

“That’s brilliant,” Lefebvre said, eyes dancing with the news. This was the kind of thing he, as a War College researcher, lived for: political and cultural foment was happening right in front of their eyes, on one of the biggest stages in the world, and only he and a few other people in the entire country knew about it. Garrett could tell he was ready to spin out theories on the Tiger for days.

“We need to tell Kline. And the State Department,” he said. “And also—”

“No,” Garrett cut in. “That’s exactly who we don’t need to tell.” If he had learned one thing since telling Avery Bernstein that the Chinese were selling off U.S. Treasuries, it was that information was a valuable commodity, and he had no intention of disseminating it to the rest of the military before he was good and ready.

“If we don’t tell them, we could be in deep shit.”

“And if we do, then we lose all leverage. If you’re worried about getting into trouble, fine, walk away now. I’ll swear I never told you anything. But don’t expect any more information out of me. Ever.”

Lefebvre hesitated, then agreed, reluctantly, to keep quiet. But even in his reluctance, Garrett could sense a change in the lieutenant: up until now, there had still been a formality with Lefebvre, and a reserve between him and Garrett.
But with this news, a final wall had been breached: Lefebvre was all in. He even gave Garrett a spontaneous squeeze of the arm.

“This is big,” Lefebvre said. “Really big. You did good.”

“Not me,” Garrett said. “Celeste.”

“Okay,” Lefebvre said, beaming. “
We
did good.”

Bingo shuffled his feet and grimaced, as if he hadn’t quite made up his mind how to feel. Then he nodded in agreement. “It’s pretty cool,” he said. “Way cool.”

Garrett didn’t tell anyone else in the war room. He was beginning to like a few of the Ascendant staffers better—Patmore, the Marine liaison the most—but he still didn’t trust them. He decided it would be best if they just kept their minds on video games and online trading.

It wasn’t until late that night, when he stepped through the front door of his apartment in Bolling and saw his laptop on the kitchen table, that he remembered his furtive e-mails from that morning. He grabbed his laptop and jogged back out to the bushes at the edge of the Air Force Base. And there it was. An encrypted response to his account. Garrett decoded it quickly.

The subject line said, simply: “Orange Line tomorrow.” And in the body of the e-mail it read: “Ride it, Hans.”

Garrett immediately deleted the e-mail, then canceled the entire account. He knew that accounts and deleted e-mails often stayed on servers for months after having been erased, but it was a chance he would have to take. From what Garrett could tell of the inner workings of the military, if they caught on to what he was doing in the next twenty-four hours it would be a miracle. They were two steps behind in everything, all the time. They were like the post office, but with guns.

He considered the various options for losing his minders that night as he went to bed, and had come up with a plan by the time he was out the door at six the next morning, jogging down to the waiting military police car. It had been the same MPs driving him to and from the Pentagon every day for the past week now, so they had grown accustomed to his routine, which was what Garrett decided he would use against them. Two of the last three days he had asked them to stop at a Starbucks in northern Alexandria so he could buy a tall, nonfat latte. One of the MPs stayed in the SUV, the other stood guard at the front of the Starbucks. They never went inside with him, and they never accepted his offer to buy them each a grande drip.

Garrett had chatted up a pretty, dark-haired barista on his last visit, and had watched her carry a bag of trash out the back door. This morning, he paid
for his latte and made for the bathrooms, but hung a hard right before he got there, sprinting out the back door and into an alleyway. He dumped the latte into a trash can and ran hard, a block and a half, to the elevated Braddock Road Metrorail station, where he pulled off his military jacket and shirt, tossed them into the bushes, and paid his fare. Now he was wearing a white T-shirt and blue Army dress pants, an odd look, but at least he wasn’t in full uniform. He bolted upstairs to catch the train. It arrived two minutes later, and he boarded a Blue Line train into the city, checking out the window to see if the MPs had followed him. They hadn’t. But they would soon, he knew that much for sure.

He changed trains four stops later, getting on a Yellow Line train into the heart of D.C., then changed again at L’Enfant Plaza for an Orange Line train. L’Enfant Plaza was packed with commuters at seven in the morning, so he had no problem blending in, but he kept his head down anyway, in case the police were looking for him already. Though he doubted they were. It had been half an hour since he had bolted from the MPs. Half an hour was barely enough time to call General Kline at the Pentagon, much less set up a search effort.

He rode the Orange Line out to the eastern edge of the city, to the last stop, New Carrollton, then walked across the platform and boarded the next train headed west. He moved from car to car, changing at stations so as not to attract attention. At the Metro Center station he found a discarded Georgetown University sweatshirt and put it on, but it smelled like vomit, so he tossed it a few stations later. He thought he saw the conductor staring at him for a few stops, maybe even studying his face, but he wasn’t positive about this, so he tried to put it out of his mind.

He wasn’t sure how long he could ride the same Metro line back and forth before he became too bored or too hungry, but he didn’t have to wait for the answer to that question, because at the West Falls Church station, just outside of Arlington, a young blond woman sat down opposite Garrett and smiled at him. She was pretty, with platinum hair and carefully applied red lipstick. Garrett had smiled back at her, taking in her long legs, when a man took the empty seat next to him and said in a slight German accent, “It will be best for you if you don’t look over at me and see my face. That way, if they ask you later, you can say, honestly, that you don’t know what I look like. So maybe keep staring at her, yes?”

Garrett silently cursed himself for being taken in so crudely by a pretty face. He swore to himself that if he survived this train ride he would work hard on this character flaw, because it was beginning to get him into deep shit. He nodded
his head and kept his eyes on the blonde, who was watching him carefully now, all the flirt drained from her face.

“Okay,” Garrett said, bracing himself for a bullet to the head. “Fine. I like looking at her. She’s cute.”

“I am Hans Metternich.”

“And I’m Zoltar the Magnificent,” Garrett said.

Metternich chuckled. “You have a sense of humor, Mr. Reilly. I like that. Even your encryption clues were amusing.”

“Are you going to shoot me?” Garrett asked, silently counting the number of people in the Metro car. Seventeen, excluding himself, Metternich, and the girl. Enough witnesses to maybe dissuade a killer from an open assassination. “Because there are a lot of people watching.”

“I have no interest in killing you, Mr. Reilly. Quite the contrary,” Metternich said.

“Okay, great. That’s a relief. Then can we cut to the chase? Who tried to blow me up in front of my office?”

“Your own government.”

Garrett turned his head in surprise, but Metternich quickly raised his arm to shield his face. “Don’t. It would be a mistake to identify me. For your own safety.”

“Bullshit,” Garrett said. “Why would they do that?”

“To heighten a pervasive sense of fear. To feed the military-security industry that lives off taxpayer money. And to get you to come over to their side. Terrorism is a numbers game. If there’s not enough terror, then there’s not enough money made available to combat it. If you reduce it down to its essence, terror is money.”

Garrett said nothing, but thought about this statement, while Metternich continued: “Think about it. A big, bombastic attempt on your life that puts you in little real jeopardy. And no one is actually killed. A showpiece.”

“You have no idea if that’s true,” Garrett said.

“I have sources inside the government who have vouched for this information’s veracity. Highly placed within the Defense Intelligence Agency. I believe you are working with them. No?”

“Who the fuck are you?”

“A very interested third party.”

“Interested in what?” Garrett said as the train rolled to a stop at Dunn Loring-Merrifield station. “Why are you telling me all this?”

“Because I want you to know that you are being fed lies. So that you know that what you are involved in is not what it seems.”

“Why do you give a shit about lies or what I do?”

“Because you are being used as an instrument of change. And you have no idea what that change actually is. But the reality of it is so enormous that it will shape the future of the world for the next hundred years. And your own government wants you to drive it.”

A chill ran down Garrett’s spine. A handful of commuters trudged off the train. The doors remained open.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Garrett said.

“Because you are willfully ignoring the truth,” Metternich said. “Because you like the attention and the praise and the excitement. But there will come a moment when the truth will be too obvious to ignore. When you will have to make a choice. And I want to help you make the right one.”

“You are completely full of shit.”

A bell rang, alerting riders that the doors would close in ten seconds.

“Perhaps, Mr. Reilly,” Metternich said, quietly, precisely. “Or perhaps what I’m saying is truer than you want to admit. According to some people, we are on the verge of war between two global powers. Ask yourself: Who profits most from such a war? Once you answer that question, I would urge you to decide if you want to be a part of it. If you want to lead it. Because a war between the United States and China would just be the beginning. The real war would come next, and that one would be waged against all of us.”

The doors started to close, and in a flash Metternich and his blond helper were leaping through them. They slipped out of the train just as the doors slammed shut, and all Garrett could see was the backs of their heads as they hurried for the stairs out of the station. Garrett let out a long breath and realized he’d been holding his shoulders tight practically the entire conversation with Metternich. He tried to replay the conversation in his head, but in less than two minutes the train was pulling into Vienna station. The conductor announced the final stop, a bell rang, the doors opened, and into the car rushed a dozen burly men in gray suits, guns drawn, mouths open, screaming at Garrett to freeze or die.

Garrett tried to put up his hands in surrender, but they threw him off his seat and slammed him to the floor before he could raise them above his shoulders.