The Ascendant: A Thriller (25 page)

W
hen he saw Garrett Reilly enter the Oval Office, Major General Kline’s first thought was that the kid looked terrible. Pale, weak, a little disoriented. But coming into the White House will do that to you. Kline remembered his first visit to the big house, fifteen years and three administrations ago, and how he was damn sure he’d piss himself, right there, in front of President Bush and all his advisors. But on closer inspection, Reilly didn’t seem nervous or anxious. He just looked beat up, his face still bruised, stitches on his chin, a gash healing above his eye. Kline, of course, had read all about the bar fight in Oceanside, the fractured skull, the THC blood levels, and the night in an abandoned house in Detroit. Any one of those things could make a young man look less than his best; but roll them all into one and you were truly stressing an individual.

Kline liked observing people under stress. It showed you their true character. And he needed to understand what Garrett Reilly was made of; Kline guessed that his job depended on it. He was the architect of this project, and his career would rise or fall on its success. Hell, he thought, the fate of the nation might rise or fall on it as well.

There was something else about Reilly. It wasn’t that he was wearing a dark gray suit and a serious tie (which Kline had ordered for him yesterday so the kid could meet the president in something other than jeans and a T-shirt). Kline couldn’t quite put his finger on it at first, but then he realized, as he reached out to shake the kid’s hand, that Garrett Reilly looked older. Physically older, yes, and that was part of the injuries probably, but emotionally older too. The kid
had grown up. And that made Kline feel better. It made Kline feel safer. Maybe this meeting would go better than the last one.

President Mason Cross’s southern drawl snapped Kline out of his momentary reverie, and forced him to focus on matters at hand.

“Heard you had a scrape last night,” President Cross said, pumping Garrett’s hand and fixing him with a cool, familiar smile. The president, a tanned forty-five-year-old, was a salesman at heart: he’d made a fortune buying Tennessee medical clinics and turning them into a privately run network of HMOs, and he’d done it by talking all the doctors involved into entrusting their futures to him. It had been a good decision for the doctors—and for Cross. Major General Kline wasn’t so sure it had been good for the patients, but you can’t please everybody. Now, with multiple crises erupting on multiple fronts, Kline didn’t think a salesman was what the country needed. But Cross was what the country had, so he guessed they’d have to muddle through somehow.

“Christ almighty, what a disaster.” President Cross motioned for Garrett to sit on a couch, and the kid did, a little stiffly. Must still be hurting, Kline thought. He shot a look over to Captain Alexis Truffant, who was careful not to leave Garrett’s side, but who nodded discreetly back at Kline. I wonder if something’s going on with the two of them, Kline thought quickly, but then put it out of his mind. Truffant would not let anything like that happen. Would she?

“Eighteen people died in Detroit last night. Four in Toledo,” the president said, shaking his head in bewilderment. “Taking apart their own city like that. I can’t claim to understand it. Well, we’re just thankful you weren’t hurt too bad. How you feeling?”

“Pretty good, Mr. President,” Garrett said, betraying no emotion that Kline could discern. “Head hurts a little. I’ll survive.”

“Well, that’s good, because that’s a precious head you got,” the president said, smiling. “Lot of brains in there that have been helping the country, from what I’ve read. You’ve been passing on some good information to us. Very good information.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Don’t thank me. Thank the good Lord that made you that way, right?” President Cross said, looking Garrett in the eye.

Garrett stared back at the president, a hint of confusion in his face. The president’s words hung there as Garrett said nothing. Kline had to keep himself
from laughing—he couldn’t stomach Cross’s surface-level piety, and Garrett clearly was baffled by it. From what he knew about Reilly, he didn’t think the kid had ever set foot in a church, much less prayed to God.

Cross covered the awkwardness with more talk, ever the salesman. “You know why I called you here today, Mr. Reilly?”

“To brief you on what we’ve found, sir?”

“No, son,” the president said, shaking his head quickly. “I got people briefing me on stuff night and day, till it’s coming out of my ears, thank you very much. No, Lord knows I do not need another briefing.”

Alexis Truffant snuck a quick look over at Kline, who nodded almost imperceptibly. This was the moment, he thought to himself. But he’d let the salesman in the room do the talking.

“I love this country, Mr. Reilly. I love it very much. And I will do whatever it takes to keep it safe. I will lay down my life for the United States of America. And I assume that everyone in this room feels the same way.” The president’s sweeping look around the room was met by a wave of grave nods and muttered affirmations. Kline noticed that Reilly, however, said nothing. Maybe, Kline thought, the kid hasn’t changed that much after all, is psychologically incapable of going with the program.

“And as you have made so abundantly clear to me, and many others in government, this great nation—that has stood independent for two hundred plus years—is under attack. From a powerful and duplicitous enemy. An enemy that doesn’t seem to want to declare its intentions, and yet is going about harming us every day, faster and faster, in ways that just a few months ago we would have thought unimaginable. Isn’t that right, Mr. Reilly?”

Garrett hesitated, then nodded. “Yes sir. It is. I think.”

“Cities burning. The real estate market crumbling. Our currency under siege. The stock market attacked. They’re hitting us hard. Body blows. And those blows are taking their toll. I don’t think I am overstating the case when I say we are reeling. But they haven’t launched a single actual missile, or fired a single rifle. No bullets coming at us. No real ones, anyway. And nobody knows anything about the orchestration of it. The American people are completely in the dark. Story on Fox News ten minutes ago said the power-plant failure was a software glitch. A glitch? Hah!”

President Cross shook his head, going quiet for a moment, then stood
and started pacing the room. As he spoke, he turned his head repeatedly to Garrett. “Mr. Reilly, I would unleash the full might of the U.S. military on the Chinese—I would rain down hell on them—if I thought it was the best thing for the country. But the Chinese are just as capable in a nuclear sense as the Russians. Maybe more so.”

President Cross took a breath, paced a moment longer, then waved his hands in the air. “I would be dishonest if I said that there aren’t some in my administration who are pushing hard for a traditional military response to what’s been happening. But I’m not certain we can risk that. I’m not saying we couldn’t win, but good God almighty . . . what a thing it would be.”

The president stopped, rubbed his chin, shook his head. “The long and the short of it is, Mr. Reilly, we cannot go the tried-and-tested route. We need to be clever. We need to be mysterious. We need to think one, two, maybe three or four steps ahead of our enemy. We need modern, outside-the-box leadership.”

The president stopped his pacing right in front of Garrett’s seat on the couch. He pointed a long, slender finger at the young man. “What we need is you.”

Lines formed at the edges of Garrett’s mouth. Kline thought he saw the young man pale slightly. “Excuse me?” Garrett said.

“I want you to prosecute a stealth war against the Chinese. You will have whatever resources you need. Money, men, technology. You name it, it will be at your fingertips. You will marshal all the power of that spectacular brain of yours and bring it down hard, like a hammer, on our enemies. I want you to smash the daylights out of them. And I want you to do it in ways that they do not see coming. And, just as important, I want you to do it without anybody noticing. No bullets, no missiles. We cannot let the public know that we are fighting a war with China. Absolutely not. Nobody outside of a few people we deem necessary can have any knowledge of this. The consequences of the public finding out would be vast and potentially disastrous. To our economy. To the world. You’re going to attack our enemies, defeat them soundly, and nobody can ever be the wiser. It will be as if it all never happened.”

There was silence in the room. All eyes turned to Garrett, whose jaw hung ever so slightly slack from his face. Kline shivered involuntarily as he waited for Garrett’s response. It was sink or swim. For Kline. For the country.

“I thought I was being trained to spot attacks, not plan them,” Garrett finally said, eyes blinking.

“You thought wrong,” President Cross answered.

“I’m not sure . . . I’m not sure I know how to do that.”

“You took out three companies of the best Marines money can buy. And you never had any of your boys fire a shot. You humiliated them. From what I’ve been told it was masterful.” The president turned to Major General Kline. “Were those not your words, Major General?”

Kline nodded slowly but confidently. “Those were my words, Mr. President.”

“We have very little time to waste, Mr. Reilly,” President Cross said. “But if you need the rest of the day to think on it, take it. I’d like you to report for work tomorrow morning, oh-seven hundred.”

Kline watched as Garrett gulped, and then repeated the president’s words, as if to reassure himself that what he’d just heard was real. “You want me to lead an underground war against the Chinese?”

“Not lead it, son,” the president said. “Win it.”

“Y
ou’re mad that I didn’t tell you?” Alexis asked from the driver’s seat of the black SUV. “About the plan?” They were crossing the low, broad expanse of the Arlington National Bridge, the black Potomac River eddying lazily below them. Garrett turned away from the window. They were the only ones in the car; their previous driver had gone back to Bolling with General Kline.

“You knew the whole time,” he said, not a question but a statement.

“I did.”

“Bring me in, educate me, then put me in charge. A setup from the beginning.”

“Not a setup, Garrett. A recruitment. We’d been looking for someone like you for more than a year. Someone young, brilliant, brave, and outside of the military.”

“We?”

“It was General Kline’s idea originally. But he and I put the program together. It took two years. A lot of hard work and not a lot of money.”

“So I’m part of a program?”

“We’re all part of a program. Every one of us. You used to be part of the Wall Street program, now you’re part of the U.S. military program.”

“Convenient logic.”

“You saying it’s not true?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore.” He looked at Alexis. “What’s the program called?”

“It has a code name.”

“Which is?”

“Ascendant.”

“Ascendant?” Garrett said. “Like, China is ascendant?”

“Or, like, you are. Or, like, the program is. We developed Ascendant because the world is changing. Fast. Faster than a large, bureaucratic organization like the military—or the government—can keep up with. We saw threats out there, and we thought the only way this country could handle them was through a project like this. Nobody outside of the DIA believed Ascendant was viable. Until you came along.”

It sounded to Garrett like there was a hint of pride in her voice. He shivered involuntarily. Suddenly the whole world seemed to have expectations of him.
Everyone was making plans for Garrett Reilly.

“How did you get involved?”

“General Kline recruited me. Specifically for Ascendant. It was a long shot,” she said, smiling over at Garrett. “But I’ve always had a weakness for long shots.”

“Have there been other recruits? Before me?”

“None that fit as perfectly.” Alexis hesitated. “Or made it this far . . .”

Garrett considered this: there had been others before him. Maybe a whole host of them. Brilliant young recruits. Or misfits.
Or suckers.
It made his head ache again. They rode in silence for a few minutes.

“Where are you taking me?” Garrett asked.

“The place I go every time I return to D.C. I thought you’d like to see it.”

He stared at her, studying her face for clues, but she turned away to focus on the traffic. The SUV traveled straight from the bridge onto Arlington Memorial Drive, then onto the quiet roads of Arlington National Cemetery. The headstones of the soldiers were endless, row upon row of them: plain white, some faded to gray, etched with names, dates, and details of rank, flowers and wreaths laid on the occasional marker. Garrett stared at the immensity of the place, and the multitude of the dead. Alexis parked in the northwest corner of the burial ground, section 20. She got out of the vehicle, and Garrett followed her, slowly, warily.

She waited for him at the edge of a field full of headstones. “There are sixteen Truffants buried in Arlington. All related to me. First one died in the War of 1812. We’ve had a casualty in every American conflict since.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel patriotic?”

“Being a citizen of a democracy requires sacrifice.”

“Plenty of people don’t sacrifice anything.”

“That doesn’t make it right.”

“That doesn’t make it wrong, either. Okay, so the Truffants have spilled a lot of blood. Maybe you guys should call it a day, become dentists. A hell of a lot safer.”

Alexis gave a short laugh, then pointed toward a distant row of grave markers. “I didn’t bring you here to see my family.”

And suddenly Garrett knew exactly why she had taken him here—he couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen it earlier—and a sadness welled up in him that seemed infinite, a wave of despair that threatened to engulf his entire body. An empty place had opened up in the pit of his stomach and reached out to the tips of his fingers and toes. He felt hollow.