The Ascendant: A Thriller (44 page)

“You mean Golden Shield is not working?”

“No. More than not working. It no longer exists.”

That caused Xu Jin’s heart to trill alarmingly. He put a hand on his chest to calm himself. He searched for a reasonable response.

“Well, then, turn off the entire Internet. Pull the plug. On the whole thing.”

“Sir, that is not possible,” the toad named Yuan said. “There are too many lines of data coming in. And anyway, now the worm has taken control of the servers. That seems to be its secondary purpose: to keep the trunk lines open.”

“You mean the purpose of the virus is to open up the Internet? Anyone can read anything they like on their computers? Right now?”

“Yes, Director Xu.”

“But . . . how do we stop it?”

There was no answer on the phone line. Director Xu Jin barked, louder this time: “Yuan Gao! Answer me!”

“My name is Le Lin, Director Xu.”

“I don’t give a shit what your name is,” Xu Jin roared. “I only care how we are going to stop this. Tell me now! How are you going to put Golden Shield back up?”

“Director Xu,” Le Lin said, the words catching in his throat, “I have no idea.”

T
he room was humming with activity. Cell phones were ringing, computers were beeping, text alerts were dinging softly in the darkness. Garrett let his fingers run across the keyboard, calling up different windows on his half dozen screens, delving deeper and deeper into the data recesses of the planet’s information flow.

Internet traffic was beginning to spike in and out of the Far East. That meant that users in China were discovering that they suddenly had access to a whole new world of Web content. Word would spread fast. Traffic would grow all day, peaking in the afternoon as people logged on in the office towers of Shanghai and Tianjin.

Garrett’s eyes flickered over the small TV screens on his left. CNN and Fox were doing stand-ups on the North Korean plane incident, with their respective reporters posed outside the White House. It was night. Late. The TV frame was dark. The BBC was also beginning to cover the story, breathlessly, with talking heads already spinning out possible scenarios on the fate of the American passengers: jail, soft captivity, bargaining chips? Would the Chinese get involved? Could anyone sway the North Korean government?

He scoured the wires for news out of Beijing. Nothing yet about the Golden Shield hack; but, then again, Garrett hadn’t expected anything. The party would do its best to cover up the whole thing. Didn’t matter, because Garrett had already leaked word to the
New York Times
and the
Washington Post
. They would be all over it. That story would start to blow up in just a few minutes.

Garrett let the data wash over him. Screen upon screen, window within window. There were charts and graphs and numbers; there were faces on the TV and voices from those faces. Garrett let his mind wander over the information, let his eyes distinguish the outlier data from the median numbers, let his ears tune into the key words:
diplomacy, China, pressure.
He settled back into his chair, fingers energetically working the keyboard, eyes darting left and right, high and low, while his body sank into the soft cushion of the leather seat.

The patterns will come. Their direction will become clear. And Garrett would nudge them. Here. There. Up. Down. He raised his hand over the front edge of a computer screen and pointed to Bingo in the corner of the room.

Bingo nodded, knowing exactly what Garrett meant—time to release the next pack of hounds.

M
itty Rodriguez knew she wasn’t the world’s hottest bikini babe: yes, she was a few pounds overweight; and, no, she hadn’t had a professional haircut in a year, but at least she showered regularly. These video-editing dudes, they smelled like homeless people. All three of them. The Motel 6 room where she met them? Management was gonna have to hire a carpet-cleaning service after their visit.

Garrett had told her to fly them down from New York to D.C., on the last shuttle of the day out of LaGuardia. He called them Moe, Curly, and Larry, said he had worked with them once, back in the day, when he was doing gaming in L.A. She flew them down on the ten-thirty flight, told them to take a cab to the motel in the District’s southeast side. They were all in their twenties; one was bald, one had a Jew-fro, and the other just looked dense. But Mitty had to admit, stinky as the threesome were, those boys could edit. And compile. And Photoshop.

Mitty sipped her Mountain Dew as the one called Moe—the bald one—blathered on about the video clip. He had a Brooklyn accent and wore his Yankees cap backwards, as if he were some kind of OG badass, which he clearly wasn’t.

“See, look at this bunch of dudes right there, top right corner of the frame,” Moe said as he pointed to the seventeen-inch laptop he’d set up on the motel bed. The video still frame was of a city street, shot from above, from a second- or third-story balcony. It was hard to tell exactly; the camera had been shaky up
until the freeze frame, and the lens was a wide-angle one. In the top right of the screen stood a mass of people—maybe two dozen or so—all with their arms raised high, as if about to throw something. A few were screaming. Many had bandanas wrapped around their faces. The ones whose faces could be made out were clearly Asian. Mitty could see that for certain.

“I see ’em,” Mitty said.

“Those motherfuckers are Koreans,” Moe said proudly. “I took ’em off this news footage I stole from work at Channel Five News. From the archives. Some Korean protest about some shit. I don’t know. They’re always protesting over there. Know what I mean?”

“Sort of.”

“And these jokers down here.” Curly did the pointing this time. His accent was only slightly less thick. “These guys are from all that crazy shit that went down in Egypt. You know, the Arab Spring? Those guys are Muslims, which is fucked up, right?”

“I guess,” Mitty said, squinting to see if she could tell that the rear wave of protestors in the video—all the way in the back of the frame, barely recognizable as people at all, much less Arabs—were not Chinese. No, not possible. They just looked like angry protestors. “And the street? That’s a street in China?”

“Guaranteed, one hundred percent Chinese street, or your money back,” Moe said, smiling gleefully. “Got it off YouTube. A video about crazy Chinese drivers.”

“Play it for me. From the beginning.”

“Sho ’nuff, boss,” Moe said, restarting the short digital video in his computer editing program. On the screen, a phalanx of black-uniformed riot police charged down a street. They wore black metal helmets with hard plastic visors, and carried baseball-bat-sized truncheons, which they waved menacingly at arm’s length.

“Those are Chinese police?”

“From a riot in Tibet. A monk-ass dude filmed them. Only I doubled up the number, and changed their body movements a little, so it looks like different people.”

The police were suddenly met with a hail of rocks and bottles. They hoisted shields and arms above their heads. A few of the policemen fell to their knees. But before you could see what happened to the injured policemen, the jittery
camera panned down the street to the protestors. Now, not stop-frame, but live and continuous, the army of protestors seemed huge and enraged. They chanted and howled and lobbed bricks and road stones at the police.

“And that’s from a bunch of different protests?” Mitty asked.

“Top-speed, high-res rendering, baby. I can make the normalist shit look totally crazy. You know how long it took me after you called? Four hours.
Four hours, bitch.
”

Mitty stared at Moe. “You call me bitch again,” she said, her voice dropping an octave, “I’ll tear out your rectum with my fingers.”

Moe’s face fell momentarily. “Sorry,” he said weakly. “Just an expression.”

On the screen, the protestors surged forward, breaking the ranks of the police. A few riot policemen were trampled underfoot, lost from the screen; other police fled in the face of superior numbers. And suddenly, the video stopped. Mitty looked over at Moe: “What happened?”

He shrugged. “I figured short was better than long. Keep ’em wanting more.”

“Okay,” Mitty said. “You have others?”

Moe shot a conspiratorial look at Curly, who tapped on the keyboard of his own laptop. On his screen, a dozen tiny tiles popped up, all in a cluster. Each one seemed to show a different freeze-frame angle on a different street, with different policemen, and different protestors. Lots and lots of protestors.

“I got a million angry Chinese,” Curly said happily. “All just sitting around on my laptop. Waiting for some motherfucker to upload ’em. Right?”

Moe and Curly burst into cackling laughter, while the one dubbed Larry just sat there, staring into empty space.

Moe grinned expectantly at Mitty. “Right? Am I right?”

Mitty grimaced. She hated these morons. But they got the job done.

“You are so right. Let’s roll,” she said. “ ’Cause I gotta get back to headquarters before the fun starts.”

C
herise Ochs Verlander hung up the phone just as three of her other lines lit up. It had been that way for the last four hours. It seemed to Cherise, who was sitting in the middle of the now bustling
New York Times
newsroom, that she currently had four different page-one stories, all breaking at exactly the same time. It was insanity. And it was all happening at three-thirty in the morning.

She’d never seen anything like it: an American jetliner had made an emergency landing in North Korea. Half an hour later word had leaked out that the Chinese Internet wall had been massively hacked. Ten minutes after that, rumors from a military source hinted that the American and Chinese navies were facing off in the South China Sea. Apparently, both navies were on full combat alert. In between all those leads came reports—from an FBI source—that there was some kind of rogue operation blossoming in D.C., and that Homeland Security was putting a full court press on finding the source and destroying it. What kind of rogue operation, no one was really sure.

All of these stories would have been front page, above the fold, on a normal day. Today, Cherise thought, they might need to run half a dozen separate front pages.

She answered the first line. “Cherise Verlander.”

“Cherise, hey. Art Saunders, State Department.”

“Mr. Saunders,” she said, eyes widening. Saunders was the deputy secretary of state, one rung beneath Madam Secretary herself. “You’re up early.”

“Lot going on. Have you checked YouTube?”

“Not since I saw that cat singing the National Anthem yesterday.”

“I’ll send you a link. Amazing stuff. All live. From ten different cities, all over China.”

“Okay,” she said, slightly baffled. “Can you tell me what it’s about?”

“All hell breaking loose,” Saunders said. “Check it out. Gotta run.”

“Wait, I need a comment on the United flight that made that emergency la—” But Saunders had hung up. Cherise sighed.
What the fuck?

She checked her e-mail. There were ten e-mails from the deputy secretary already waiting in her inbox. This had to be preplanned. She clicked on the link in the first e-mail. A new browser tab popped up, and a YouTube video began to load. The descriptive tags on the page were all in Mandarin. She stared, stunned.

Cherise didn’t read Mandarin, but she knew a riot when she saw one. And she was looking at ten of them.

B
y the time he got to the White House Situation Room at 4:10 in the morning, the president had been awake for exactly nine minutes. He was unshaven, his hair was unwashed; he wore a sweatshirt, slacks, and a pair of sneakers with no socks. He’d only gotten two hours of sleep. He hated looking disheveled, but sometimes the job required it.

The entire national security team, including Jane Rhys, his national security advisor, was already gathered in the Situation Room. Cross noticed immediately that Secretary of Defense Frye was there as well, and that Frye did not look happy. The team rose from their chairs when the president rushed in. He waved a distracted hand in the air: “Please. Sit. Too early. Just bring me up to speed.”

An aide brought him a mug of coffee, black, no sugar. President Cross saw Jane Rhys shoot a quick glance at Secretary Frye—she got no response—then lean forward. “Mr. President, as you know from last night’s briefing, at approximately ten p.m., local time, a United Airlines 777 made an emergency landing at Pyongyang International Airport. The captain sent out a distress call. He said he had an engine fire and requested clearance to land. His request was denied—the North Korean air traffic controller told him to continue on to Seoul—but the captain landed in Pyongyang anyway. Safely. The plane was evacuated. After that point, our new information gets sketchy. We believe the crew and passengers have been taken into custody and are currently being interrogated.”

“Can the North Koreans do that? Interrogate our airline passengers?” Cross asked.

“Unfortunately, they can do anything they like on their own soil. And it appears they have some reason for doing it. The distress call and landing were suspicious. Why the captain chose Pyongyang is a mystery. Also, the passenger manifest lists a certain number of government and military employees. Using aliases.”

President Cross took another sip of coffee and rubbed his eyes wearily. Before he could ask a question, his national security advisor continued. “Approximately twenty minutes later, we monitored a massive shutdown of Chinese servers that provide that country with a censorship wall around their Internet access. They call it the Golden Shield. We suspect a potent virus, but we are not sure. The shutdown was unprecedented in scope and speed.”

“These two things are connected?” Cross asked.