The Ascendant: A Thriller (50 page)

Son of a bitch, Celeste thought.
He was right again.
And with that, Celeste Chen understood the path her life was taking—she was about to become a true and devoted follower of the Tiger.

I
t was madness. Dark, streaked with light, blinding, choking gas, and black figures pouring in from the doorway, screaming as they came.

“Down! Federal agents! Everyone down!”

Garrett tried to duck under the tunnels of yellow flashlight beams as they crisscrossed the room. He caught a glimpse of Sarah Finley, the CIA rep, and Mitty diving to the floor, hands over their heads. He knew he couldn’t escape, so he wasn’t trying, but keeping whoever had raided the operations center at bay for a few more minutes wouldn’t hurt. He needed all the time he could get. He scrambled toward the freezer in back.

A hand grabbed his forearm. It was Lefebvre. “Follow me. Use the side door!”

“They’ll be waiting,” Garrett said.

“Garrett Reilly!” someone screamed. “Where is Garrett Reilly!”

The tear gas seared the inside of Garrett’s nose and mouth, burning them with a raw, acrid taste. Lefebvre tugged hard on Garrett’s arm. “They want you dead!”

“Reilly!”

Garrett and Lefebvre stumbled toward the side door. Garrett had to squeeze his eyes three-quarters shut from the gas and the flood of halogen streetlight that was now pouring through the broken front windows.

“Garrett Reilly!”

They came up short as the side door burst open, a federal agent filling the
doorway like a creature from a horror film, face swathed in a gas mask, semiautomatic rifle swiveling back and forth, looking for prey. Lefebvre turned on his heels and tried to tug Garrett with him. They scrambled away from the SWAT commando and back into the heart of the raid.

Garrett slowed. He knew there was no place to run. He was done, and he knew it. He yanked his arm free from Lefebvre’s grip and put his hands up in the air.

“Here! Garrett Reilly! I’m right here!” he yelled.

Flashlight beams snapped toward his voice, bathing him in yellow light. He squinted, as much from the gas as the illumination. Through the haze, he could see half a dozen more commandos ringing the edge of the room, their boots planted on the backs of his team, their rifles cocked and ready, hitched up into their shoulders. A large man in a suit and a bulletproof vest raised a pistol and aimed it at Garrett.

“Reilly?” the man said.

Garrett recognized him, even in the darkness; he recognized his voice and his girth. Agent Paul Stoddard, from Homeland Security. His torturer.

“
Reilly?
” Agent Stoddard barked.

“You know it’s me, asshole,” Garrett said.

Stoddard trained his gun on Garrett’s chest, and Garrett braced himself for the impact of the bullet that would surely end his life. There was no time for him to run or jump, or even move. This was it. The end.

Stoddard pulled the trigger. There was a flash, and the thunderous report of a pistol, at the same time as a blur raced in front of Garrett and someone yelled, “No!”

Something thudded into Garrett, slamming him backwards, and he crashed to the ground, a great weight landing on top of him. Garrett twisted as he fell, trying to break the fall. The weight settled onto Garrett’s midsection, as Garrett pulled himself to a sitting position. He looked down.

Jimmy Lefebvre was in his arms, blood was pumping from his chest.

“Damn it,” Lefebvre said, groaning once. “Damn it all.”

Everyone in the room started to yell again, and Garrett could see some of his team members rise off the ground, shouting “Jimmy!” and “Goddamn it!”

“I think I’m dying,” Lefebvre gurgled, looking up at Garrett.

“Ambulance! Call an ambulance!” Garrett yelled.

“No. You don’t understand. I’m dying.”

“Jimmy—no you’re not.” But Garrett could see that he was. His eyes fluttered and then lost focus. His breathing rattled. Garrett could feel the life draining out of him. And just like that, Garrett knew he was dead.

Jimmy Lefebvre was dead.

Garrett’s mouth went dry. He had never held a dying man before. He wanted to bring Jimmy back to life; he felt it should be possible, and yet . . . he knew it was not. He struggled to breathe.

“You next,” a voice growled.

Garrett looked up, stunned. Agent Stoddard was standing over him, his pistol trained on Garrett’s head, five feet away.

Garrett shook his head, the energy drained out of him, his eyes dripping tears from the gas and the shock. “You wanna shoot me? Go ahead, do it. But you’re being filmed. Every second of this is being uploaded to a website.”

Agent Stoddard blinked in surprise. He swiveled his head, looking from wall to wall, from corner to corner. The gun wavered in his hand.

“Webcams,” Garrett said. “In every room. Every corner. So go ahead. Shoot me, Agent Stoddard. Pull the fucking trigger. But just know that the world is watching.”

Stoddard gritted his teeth. Every eye in the room was on him. His hands began to shake. And then a voice cracked the silence.

“Garrett!” Mitty pushed free of the commando restraining her. “The Shanghai webcam!”

She pointed to a monitor hung on the far wall. Through the smoke, in grainy stop-motion video, a great mass of humanity was visible, marching, in step, down Nanjing Road in central Shanghai. The transmission was splotchy, but there were clearly thousands—if not tens of thousands—of people, walking together, arms swaying in unison, mouths open, yelling something, maybe singing, filling the entire width of the street, and trailing off into the distance. And they kept coming. More and more joining in the march, filing in from side streets and stepping off the buses and out of office buildings. It seemed like there was a limitless supply of people. An infinite multitude. And maybe there was.

Garrett held Lefebvre tightly in his arms and whispered, as much to Lefebvre’s still body as to everybody else.

“It’s happening,” he said. “We did it.”

H
alf a world away, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party watched the same crowds, in a cramped technical observation room, from closed-circuit surveillance feeds, and he watched them with the same stunned expression as Garrett.

“How many people?” the general secretary asked.

“We cannot be sure yet, sir,” the computer programmer said, toggling the view on the monitor from one Shanghai street to another. In every shot, from every angle, the crowds just kept growing larger. They seemed impossibly large, as if all of rural China had emptied out into one city, for one day. “They do not seem to be done arriving.”

“Millions,” the general secretary said.

“Where are they going?” asked the chairman of the Central Military Commission. “Do we know that, at least?”

The general secretary’s face went from tense to relaxed, as if struck by divine revelation. A hint of a smile crept onto his lips. “They are going where they are going.”

The general secretary wiped his glasses clean, his old habit, then replaced them on the bridge of his nose and turned to the chairman of the Central Military Commission. “Call back our forces. We need every available patriot on the streets.”

“But the Americans?”

“We cannot fight the Americans and our own people at the same time. We have been defeated. Now we must retreat.”

E
nsign Hallowell white-knuckle-gripped the arms of his swivel chair. His entire body was tense in anticipation of the launch of the first Chinese missiles. The People’s Navy frigates were forty kilometers due west of the
Decatur
. A ship-to-ship weapon fired at that distance would splash the
Decatur
in thirty seconds. The radar operators called it the Blink Zone. Blink and you were dead.

Hallowell’s eyes followed the green blips of the Chinese warships, as well as the swift streaks of the J-15 Shenyang fighter jets that were tracing long, looping circles just beyond the frigates. It was a full complement of Chinese naval and air power, and they seemed a hairsbreadth away from pulling the trigger.

The radar room XO craned his head over Hallowell’s shoulder, staring down at the ensign’s screen.

What were the Chinese waiting for? Hallowell thought. For us to shoot first?

Hallowell knew that his side might do just that. They had two squadrons of F-18 Hornets tracking the Chinese jets. All the antiship missiles on board the
Decatur
were locked on to their Chinese counterparts. The fire-control officers sitting on either side of Hallowell had their fingers hovering over their launch buttons.

At the first sign of a Chinese strike, they would counterlaunch. And then it was every ship and plane for itself. It would be a bloodbath.

Ensign Hallowell’s heart thudded loudly in his chest, distorting the sharp
beep of the radar ping in his headphones. They had trained him to move beyond his own anxiety at the navigation/radar school, but it wasn’t easy. Fear was pulsing through his veins.

“Thirty-five kilometers,” he said out loud, even though he knew every other operator in the room had the Chinese on screen now. Everyone was watching. Everyone was listening. “Missile impact would be twenty-five seconds.”

Hallowell thought he heard a collective intake of breath, but then realized it was his own gasping. A voice crackled through the shipboard intercom. It was the captain: “Launch missiles on my mark. Five . . .”

Hallowell narrowed his eyes, as if expecting a punch, tightening the muscles in his entire body.

“Four, three . . .”

And then Hallowell saw it. The faintest trace of a course correction in the lead Chinese frigate. Were they peeling off?

“Two . . .”

The radar chirp line swept another circle around Hallowell’s screen. Yes, the lead frigate was definitely veering off.

Hallowell barked: “They’re bleeding off! Enemy targets changing course!”

“One . . . Mark . . . Fire.”

The radar room XO yelled: “Hold fire! Repeat.
Do not fire!
”

The XO ducked his head to look at Hallowell’s screen. The two fire-control operators on either side of him leaned in to watch as well. All four Chinese frigates were coming about now, steaming north, parallel to the American fleet. The lead frigate was even beginning to turn farther, heading back west toward mainland China.

“He’s going home,” Hallowell whispered. And then, louder: “They’re going home!”

The radar room let out a spontaneous cheer as the captain barked over the intercom: “XO, where are those missiles?”

The radar room XO grabbed the intercom as Hallowell and his fellow radar operators slapped each other high fives. Hallowell let out a laugh. There would be no war. Not yet, at least. Not here. And not now. He might make it back to Dallas after all.

G
arrett listened to the footsteps. He’d been listening to them for the last two days. They had been from guards, mostly, with food trays, a slow, uncaring shuffle. Then came the occasional observer, hesitant, watching, footsteps that came, stopped, started again. A doctor had walked in once to take his blood pressure and check his eyes: his footsteps were those of someone who had been lost, passing his cell, then coming back. Then the damn guards again, with another tray of food. The slop that passed for meals at the Virginia federal detention center had been awful, but Garrett didn’t care.

He couldn’t move his thoughts off of Jimmy Lefebvre’s dying face. The blood that had soaked his hands. That last strangled breath.

He had died saving Garrett’s life, intentionally putting himself in the way of Stoddard’s bullet. But for Lefebvre, Garrett would be dead now. It was an astonishing thought, and it haunted Garrett, a life-for-life trade that could never be undone.

It weighed him down with grief. And confusion.

Why had Lefebvre done it? In that split second of decision-making, as the trigger was pulled, what had he been thinking? Garrett could only guess, and guess he had, constantly for the past forty-eight hours. Had Lefebvre wanted to see combat so badly, and wanted it for so long, that he had jumped at the chance for self-sacrifice? Was it simply instinct, the desire to save lives? Or had he decided that the world needed Garrett alive more than it needed Jimmy Lefebvre?

That last thought terrified Garrett; if it were true, that was a responsibility he would not be able to bear—not if he hoped to keep his sanity.

The problem was that he had little else to think about. He’d been cut off from all news since he’d been arrested; the data flow that he had been immersed in for the last few days was gone, completely and totally. He had gone from digital master of the universe to shut-in. For all he knew, World War Three was raging just outside the detention-center walls.

Garrett didn’t think so, though.

Maybe it was the demeanor of the guards, their relaxed shuffle, the detached look in their eyes as they scanned his cell for signs of disturbance or suicide attempts. They didn’t seem like people worried about the coming apocalypse. Or maybe he was simply projecting his hopes onto the last bit of news he’d received: a million people flooding Shanghai, putting the fear of God into the Chinese Communist Party.

But maybe he was wrong. Maybe the world
was
burning up.

The steps he heard now were different. They were fast, clipped, direct. They stopped in front of his door with a purpose. Garrett looked up from his single bunk. The door swung open.

Homeland Security Agent Cannel stood there, his face angular and drawn, the corners of his lips turned down slightly, as if he had a bad taste in his mouth. He held an electronic clipboard in his arms. Behind Cannel were two detention-center guards in full uniform.

“Reilly, Garrett?” Agent Cannel asked.