The Ascendant: A Thriller (39 page)

Frye turned to the Homeland Security agent. “I may be stating the obvious, Agent Stoddard, but it’s not good when a high-value prisoner under your supervision escapes.”

Agent Stoddard squirmed in his seat. “Sir, I will make up for it. That I promise you.”

“Of course you will,” Secretary Frye said quickly. “I have faith.” He smiled
blandly. “But Washington, D.C., is a complicated town. Lots of money at stake. Everyone wants power. Lots of competing interests.”

“Sir?”

“Organizations within the current structure are not always on the same page. They can even be at odds. People within those organizations believe they know what’s right for the country, and they act on those beliefs. But people can delude themselves. I believe this is the situation in which we now find ourselves.”

Agent Stoddard nodded quickly. Frye could tell that he was lost. But it didn’t matter. He would understand in time.

“The point is, sides are being set. Teams, if you will. And right now, there is a team working hard to thwart you. And me. And, quite honestly, the president. And no matter what your politics, you cannot work against the president. I suspect Reilly will soon be working against the interests of the president. So the question becomes, what do we do?”

“Find Reilly,” Agent Stoddard answered quickly.

“That would be a start.”

“And arrest him.”

Frye said nothing. The car was silent. A lawnmower started somewhere down the block. Frye watched Stoddard’s face as the realization of his new task dawned on him. “He might be armed,” Stoddard said.

“He might be.”

“We’ll have to assume he is. And take appropriate precautions when we encounter him.”

Secretary Frye let out a short breath. The message was sent, the course of action was clear. Men and women of commitment would do what needed to be done. “I have to get back to the Pentagon.”

Stoddard nodded, then quickly fumbled with the car door handle with his cast-covered left hand. He opened the door and climbed out of the car, standing briefly on the pavement of the Silver Spring street. He bent low to be able to look into the back of the gray sedan.

“Sir, thank you for this chance,” Stoddard said. “Homeland Security is on your side.”

“Glad to hear it,” Frye said, and shut the door.

M
urray’s Meats and Cuts had clung to life for fifteen years, but it was a relic in D.C.’s gritty Southeast side—a kosher butcher in an all-black neighborhood—and it had finally succumbed a year ago, going out of business with hardly a single local noticing its demise.

That it hadn’t been occupied in twelve months was good. That it was on a bad block, in a worse neighborhood, was better. That it sat across the street from a phone company switching station—an anonymous brick structure ringed with barbed wire—was perfect.

The team trickled in one by one, careful to show up after dark. Bingo was first. He’d been there already that afternoon, shown around by an eager—Bingo would say desperate—commercial real estate broker who swore he could get him the space for $1.50 per square foot. He’d even throw in the first month free.

Bingo noted to himself that there were no security sensors, not even a basic alarm, and then apologized for wasting the broker’s time. “Just not right for us,” he said. He returned that evening with a crowbar, a bolt cutter, and a flashlight, and cut his way into the rear entrance. The electricity was still on in the place—Bingo had noticed that, too—but he kept the lights out for security reasons.

Alexis arrived next. She’d been on the move for the last two days, never staying in one place for more than a few hours. She had spent half a day on buses, slept in a movie theater, and showered at a YWCA using a friend’s ID. When she got to Murray’s, she approved of it right away. It was big, and isolated, if a bit gloomy. There was a freezer in back where they could house server
computers, and multiple 220 outlets on every wall. No one could see in from the street—the windows had all been smashed in, and then boarded up with plywood—and no one was looking, anyway; that was the point of the crappy neighborhood. Alexis thought the splashes of blood on the walls of the cutting room were a bit gothic, but all in all, she could live with them. She gave the place a thumbs-up. Bingo took the praise with tempered enthusiasm; he seemed, to Alexis, to be sulking. She didn’t care. She didn’t have time to care.

Patmore, the Marine liaison, came next. He was the only service member Garrett said he trusted, and so he was the only one that Alexis had contacted. He arrived out of uniform, in sweatpants and a hoodie, and he seemed game for the challenge. In fact, he seemed downright excited.

“I love crazy,” Patmore told Alexis. “And this seems way crazy.”

That his superiors in the Corps had not signed off on this adventure was not mentioned. Alexis assumed Patmore knew, and if he didn’t, well, he would find out soon enough.

“People gonna shoot at us?” was all he asked, a bit too enthusiastically.

“I hope not,” Alexis answered.

Patmore just laughed.

The CIA rep, Sarah Finley, had agreed to come as well—Alexis had reached her directly through the agency—and arrived next, riding her bike from her Georgetown condo, but she had official cover for the operation, and she knew it. If everything fell apart, her bosses at the agency would stand up for her. They were, unofficially at least, on Garrett Reilly’s side. Everyone else was out in the cold. Finley, quiet and observant, said little and mostly watched from the shadows. To Alexis, she seemed to embody the essence of spook.

Alexis thought Jimmy Lefebvre would show last, if he showed at all. He seemed hesitant at the coffee shop that morning, and she didn’t blame him. He wasn’t DIA, wasn’t a gung-ho Marine, and could potentially look forward to a long, safe career at the Army War College. He would be risking all. If he decided against joining their little escapade, Alexis was okay with that, but she hoped that he wouldn’t turn around and report them to his superiors. He knew the address. He knew the time. And he had some sense of what they were up to. If Lefebvre talked to the Pentagon, they would be toast.

Garrett limped in at eleven that evening. Alexis thought he looked terrible—smashed up and weak, with bits of leaves and dirt in his hair. She could see that
he was trying to keep pain from registering on his face. She considered calling the whole thing off and taking him straight to the hospital, but he smiled broadly and said, “Show me the place, will you?”

She toured him through the rooms and the meat locker, and he seemed pleased; he was most pleased about being able to wash up with warm water in the kitchen.

She watched silently as he scrubbed the dirt from his cheeks.

“Thanks for the key,” Garrett said, “for the handcuffs.”

“Sure,” Alexis answered, searching for something to add, but failing.

“Came in useful.”

“I figured.”

They stared at each other awkwardly, then Garrett walked out without saying another word, to continue his tour.

Lefebvre rolled in at midnight, looking wary. He gave the place a once-over and seemed ready to bolt out the door. But then Garrett grabbed his hand and shook it.

“I really appreciate your coming, Lieutenant,” he said. “I know this is a risk for you. And way outside of what you’d normally do.”

Lefebvre still looked dubious. Garrett leaned close, and Alexis heard him whisper: “It’s going to be a battle, Jimmy. And I need soldiers.”

The lieutenant seemed to stiffen, and then relax. His shoulders dropped a bit. He let out a deep breath. He looked like he might stay.

Alexis shook her head in mild wonderment: Did Garrett know about Lefebvre’s medical condition? How the hell had he found that out? And was he using the lure of combat to get Lefebvre’s commitment? If he was, it was brilliant.
Garrett Reilly had learned how to lead.
It seemed so unlikely, given the unformed clay that Garrett had been at the start of the process, and yet the proof was in front of her: Lefebvre was on board, and it had been Garrett’s words that had secured him.

The group of them—six, including Garrett—assembled in the front room of the store, gathering by a dusty display case. Garrett smiled weakly at them, and Alexis thought she could see him wince in pain.

“You’re all here, which means there’s no backing out now. We’re in this until the end. Together. A team. And I don’t have to remind any of you that we also have a team member in China, on her own. At risk. She’s our responsibility as well.”

There were somber nods of acknowledgment from the group.

“A friend of mine should arrive in a couple of hours with our equipment,” Garrett continued. “We’ll assemble it, load software, cable up and get online. After that, we’re going to be housebound for the next couple of days. No going in and out. No seeing friends. We can’t let anyone spot us. We are underground, off radar, and we need to stay that way. My friend’s gonna bring cell phones too. A dozen for each of you. You get to make three phone calls from each one, no personal calls, then you’ll have to pop out the battery and toss the phone. People will be looking for us, and they will be looking hard.” Garrett fixed them each with a hard stare. “If we get compromised, we’re finished, so”—he motioned to the darkened store—“I hope you guys like abandoned butcher shops.”

There were chuckles from the group.

“I think Bingo should be the only one of us who can leave and come back,” Garrett continued. “He’ll get food, whatever else we need. But nothing exotic. I don’t want him going farther than a couple of blocks. There’s old mattresses in the storage room. They’re nasty, but it wouldn’t be a terrible idea to grab a little sleep, because once we get started, it’s going to be pretty much nonstop.”

Alexis watched as the others nodded in the gloom. Bingo pointed a flashlight around the room, and she could barely make out their faces. Maybe it was her own tension ratcheting up, but Alexis thought she saw a few of them stand a little straighter, their bodies ready for action.

“Any questions?”

After a moment, Patmore, the Marine, raised his hand and stepped forward with a grin. “Yeah, just one. Is this gonna work?”

“I have no idea,” Garrett said, shrugging and walking out of the room.

Well, he hasn’t gotten that polished at leading, Alexis thought, because he sure hasn’t learned how to lie yet.

She found him, twenty minutes later, curled up on a mattress in the back corner of the dimly lit freezer. She sat down next to him, tucked her knees up to her chest, and watched him silently in the semidarkness. His breathing was ragged. He rolled over after a few minutes and peered at her.

“Can’t sleep when I’m being watched,” he said.

“Sorry. I’ll go.” She started to stand.

“No. Stay,” he said. “I wasn’t sleeping anyway.”

Alexis sat back down. “How’re you feeling?”

“I’ll survive. I think.” He flashed her a faint smile, still lying sideways on the mattress. “I always wondered what it would be like to be tortured. Now I know.”

“And can you recommend the experience?”

“Absolutely. Big stress reliever. All your other troubles pale in comparison.”

Alexis laughed. Garrett pushed himself to an upright position. Alexis gathered up her courage, then said, “Garrett, I wanted to say that—”

Garrett cut her off sharply: “No.”

She stared at him, surprised, and slightly hurt.

“It’s too complicated,” he said, his voice softening. He stared at her, his blue eyes shimmering in the darkness. “You and me. We need simple. Right now, we need to focus on the task at hand. We need to get through this.”

“Okay,” she said, nodding and staring off into the darkness. “Sure.”

“And we will get through this.”

M
itty Rodriguez got the phone call from Garrett at seven-thirty on Tuesday morning and immediately went to work. First, she dropped off the grid. She had an alias from her hacker days—Sarah Beaumont, which Mitty thought was a pretty hilarious white-girl name—and a bunch of fake IDs, including a driver’s license and a debit card under her Beaumont name that she could fill up with cash. She swapped out the SIM card on her cell phone, checked around her block for surveillance—she didn’t see any—then bought herself a pair of movie-star sunglasses, just for stylin’, and was ready for action.

Next she hit the regular computer stores in New York City—Best Buy, J&R, Radio Shack—then ransacked the spare-parts bins in the electronics specialty joints on Flushing Boulevard. All the while, she was on the phone with her underground suppliers—the geeks, tech heads, hackers, and miscreants who built their own machines, souped up their own hard drives, and soldered their own motherboards. It was with them that she spent the big bucks. Garrett had transferred two hundred grand into her debit account, so money was not much of an issue. She visited her underground suppliers only after the sun went down. It was safer that way.

By eleven-thirty that night she had filled up her rented half-ton van with a hacker’s vision of paradise: monitors, keyboards, internal hard drives, external hard drives, work station shells, server boxes, routers, HDMI and SATA cables, coax cables, webcams, color printers, laser printers, digital projectors, fans, heat sinks, flash memory, card readers, phone jacks, landlines, cell phones, digital
relay boxes. And then there were the chips she had bought, almost all from her black-market sources: boxes full of dual-core processors, quad-core processors, hacked military parallel processors, stolen Intel chips, experimental AMD chips, underground Chinese chips that Mitty was pretty sure were fake but that she bought anyway because, well, what the fuck, she had the money. Plus enough video cards to power every gamer’s computer from Boston to Virginia.

While she was running around the city, collecting hardware, she logged her personal machine onto a hijacked server in Florida. From the Florida zombie server she downloaded every possible hacking tool she could think of: Nmap network mapping software for security auditing; a turbo-charged update of John the Ripper for password hacking; TCP port scanning software for finding network entry vulnerabilities; Kismet electronic network sniffers for sussing out intrusion bugs; Wireshark for browsing network mainframes; pOf for fingerprinting the operating software on a target network; Yersinia for hunting down weaknesses in IP protocols. All part of the basic toolkit of a network hacker. Some of these programs she knew from working with them herself, others had come recommended to her, others still she had heard rumors of but had never dared put on her own machine for fear they would prove uncontrollable, turning her own hacking fortress into a corrupted machine in thrall to some other hacker, in some other godforsaken part of the world. That scenario was to be avoided at all costs—to be hacked by a hacker was a mark of deep shame.