The Ascendant: A Thriller (26 page)

“Third row, seventeenth marker,” Alexis said. “I’ll wait here.” She walked quickly back to the car.

Garrett just stood there for a moment, unable to move, either toward the grave site or away from it. Finally, after what seemed like an hour of indecision, he trudged, feet leaden, to the third row, and then to the seventeenth marker. All the soldiers in the neighboring plots had been killed in the last five years, either in Iraq or Afghanistan. Garrett stopped at the seventeenth marker and read the headstone:

B
RANDON
P
ABLO
R
EILLY

L
ANCE
C
ORPORAL

US M
ARINES

P
URPLE
H
EART

A
FGHANISTAN

M
AY 14, 1982–
J
UNE 2, 2008

There were no flowers on Brandon’s grave, no wreaths or teddy bears, no boxes of cookies or framed snapshots. It looked, to Garrett’s eye, like no one had ever touched his brother’s headstone. Maybe no one had ever visited it. He stood there, looking down at it for a full five minutes, not really thinking of anything in particular, not remembering Brandon, or fuming about the way he
had died. His mind was oddly blank. It had never occurred to him to wonder where his brother was buried; he dimly remembered a letter from the Marines, but he’d torn it up without reading it carefully. He had been angry and bitter and oblivious of the details. And probably stoned as well.

He bent low and ran his fingers along his brother’s first name, the letters sharply etched into stone. He did it in order to say that he had done it, that someone had purposely visited Brandon’s grave, and not as some sentimental gesture. That done, he walked back to the SUV and climbed in. Alexis was already sitting behind the wheel.

“Was bringing me here part of the program as well?”

She shook her head no. “From here on in, the program is whatever you make it.
You are the program
.”

Garrett laughed briefly, bitterly, then looked away. Instantly, the laughter was replaced with pain. He winced as the darkness welled up in him again. He could feel tears building, sadness taking physical form, distorting the corners of his mouth and the muscles around his eyes. He tried desperately to get a hold of himself.

“I miss him,” Garrett said. “I miss him so much.”

Alexis reached out and touched his face, and Garrett could no longer control himself.

He began to weep.

He was humiliated, but there it was, the plain, naked truth—he was bawling his eyes out in front of an Army officer, a woman no less, and one whom he was deeply attracted to. He felt like a fool, but he also felt free, cleansed, strangely lighter. He cried hard, like he had meant to cry—had wanted to cry—for years. All those years of missing his brother; all those years of bitterness and rage; all those years of loneliness. When Brandon died he had left Garrett all alone in the world. The one person he could count on had abandoned him, and that had ripped a hole in Garrett’s world too large to ever be repaired. It had rent the fabric of his life, distorting, in some way, every feeling he’d had since the day he learned of the killing.

And then suddenly the weeping turned into laughter, and Garrett was laughing through the tears streaming down his face, and he said to Alexis, “What the fuck is this all about?”

He really had no idea—it was all new to him, this emotional catharsis.
Every day seemed to bring another revelation. It was wearing him out. He continued to laugh, if only because that seemed to be the path he was now on, and he didn’t have the strength to do something else.

Alexis laughed as well, and Garrett wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his suit jacket. And then, before Garrett could register how it had happened, he was kissing Alexis, holding her head in his hands and kissing her, his tongue in her mouth, and her hands groping the back of his neck. She was breathing hard, and holding him tightly, and he could taste the salt of his own tears, and he wondered if she could taste them as well. They moved their bodies closer to one another, and he could feel the warmth of her chest against his, through his suit and her uniform.

She pulled away from him abruptly, shoved the key in the ignition, and started the car. They drove hurriedly out of Arlington, without saying a word, and then south, out of the cemetery and into Alexandria. She parked in front of a riverfront brick building and led Garrett inside. In the elevator Garrett clawed at her uniform and she yanked off his tie, and by the time they made it to her condo half their clothes were pulled off. She slammed the door shut and they dove into bed.

Garrett loved the feel of her body—a mixture of soft and firm, muscled and yet distinctly female. She was in spectacular shape. They felt each other’s bodies, exploring, teasing, before he plunged into her and she groaned in pleasure. They writhed rhythmically, on top of each other, arms and legs intertwined. Garrett wanted to stay inside of her forever, just live there, attached to each other at their cores. She came loudly, intensely, her eyes locked on to his, and he followed her shortly after, happily, contented and, for the first time in a long time, at peace.

By then night had fallen, and the two of them fell asleep in each other’s arms. He was not lonely. He felt whole.

S
he should have seen it coming.

Riding in the back of a truck half-stacked with wooden crates of garlic, her most trusted assistants and lieutenants at her side, Hu Mei could see how obvious it had been: one minute the plaza outside the apartment building had been filled with passersby and street vendors, and the next it was empty. How could she not have understood that this meant the police had sealed off the area and were about to move in? And how had they known? Who had tipped them off to the meeting?

She gazed at the faces of the other men and women swaying back and forth as the truck thudded over a potholed street. There was Chen Fei, the onetime party township director who was now her head of security. He had cuts and scratches along his face from where he had battled a police officer. But he could not have betrayed her now.

Why? Because he could have done it a month ago, with far less trouble.

There was Li Wei, a nurse from the south, who was dabbing at Chen Fei’s cuts and trying to hide her tears. Could she have been the traitor? Hu Mei doubted it. Li Wei had little else in her life: no husband, no children, no parents. Without the movement, she would have nothing. That made her loyal.

Lin Chao, a political science student at Peking University, sat to Hu Mei’s right. He had been shot in the raid—his arm was bandaged, and a dark red patch of blood had soaked through the white linen of his shirt. He would live, thanks to the incompetence of the police, and Li Wei’s careful ministrations,
and he did not seem overly worried about the wound. On the contrary, he seemed pleased. Lin Chao was a true believer. His only dream in life was to die on the barricades, a protest banner in his hands, a slogan on his lips. A wound only made him purer. There was no way Lin Chao had tipped off the authorities. He would rather die—literally.

Mei grimaced as the truck turned a corner, and a box of garlic pressed against her shoulder. A policeman, trying to arrest her, had swung a baton at her, connecting with her arm, just above her elbow. Chen Fei struck the policeman down a moment later, but the damage had been done. Her arm radiated pain. She could barely move it.

It was a miracle so many of them had escaped. Two of her inner circle had been shot dead as the first policemen stormed the building. Four were captured soon after that. Seven had escaped onto this truck with Mei. Eleven others had managed to scatter into the crowd of onlookers that had gathered. They would melt into the backstreets of Chengdu, and survive to fight another day.

But just barely.

This had been their fourth close call in as many weeks. The police were getting smarter, more determined. Stealthier. And there was the real possibility of a mole within the movement’s leadership. She scanned the faces of the three other people riding in the truck: Huang Jie, her strategist; Gao Gang, a computer expert; Wan Chen, who wrote her pamphlets. All shell-shocked, all trying to hide their fear. Had one of them betrayed her?

No, Hu Mei thought as the sickening smell of diesel wafted up through the cracked floorboards, this had happened because the movement had grown so large. There were so many people, in so many places, working with her—working with the organization—that some of them had to be informers, or plants, or spies. And none of them needed to be within her inner circle—there were endless opportunities to overhear a meeting time or location, and then to tell state security. It seemed to be the nature of growth—the more people you brought in to help you, the fewer you could actually trust.

“How did this happen?” Lin Chao barked over the roar of the truck engine. He pointed an accusatory finger at Chen Fei. “You let it happen.”

Chen Fei growled and shook his head. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Go back to school.”

“School? The students will save China,” Lin Chao roared.

“Like they did at Tiananmen?” Chen Fei snarled, lips curled in a cruel smile.

“You and your party are killing the soul of the country!”

“Enough!” Mei said. Her head hurt, her arm hurt, her stomach was turning with the combined stench of garlic and diesel exhaust. “If there is blame to be assigned, I will take it. I should have seen the police coming. I should have examined the surrounding area more closely. It is
my
fault.”

That silenced them. It always did. Take responsibility for failure; share credit for success. It was what came naturally to Hu Mei. It was what made her a leader of men. And women. But she knew, sitting in the back of that truck, roaring away from their most disastrous mistake yet, that she was actually failing, not leading.

She could not go on like this forever, running and hiding, striking glancing blows at the party behemoth. No, that was a losing game. They were mere flies buzzing around a horse. A nuisance. Soon enough they would find her, catch her, grind her to dust. They would execute her, alone, no witnesses, as they did all people they branded as traitors to the state—and they had branded her as that months ago.

When that happened, the movement would fall apart.

She needed to strike an overwhelming blow. But how? She didn’t know. And the people in the truck, her closest advisors, could not help her. It wasn’t that they weren’t smart or committed. It wasn’t that they wouldn’t lay down their lives for Hu Mei—she suspected they all would do so if asked. No, it was that they were followers, marching behind her as she led the way, and what she needed most right now was an equal, a confidant who would walk at her side. Someone who could match her, idea for idea; someone she could open up to, plan with, dream with. In her mind’s eye he was a handsome young man, daring and heroic, and maybe she could even love him, although she expected never to love again.

Together they would start a true reformation in China. Doing it herself—exhausted, wounded, bouncing in the back of a garlic truck—was proving to be too hard. Too complicated. There were too many details that, if overlooked, could lead to disaster, too many life-or-death decisions where her instincts had started to fail her.

But where would she find such a person? It seemed impossible. China was huge and crowded, but not huge and crowded enough. Trust—the real trust of a soul mate—was, to Hu Mei’s mind, a rare commodity. Rarer than silver or gold. Rarer than love. And more valuable. But she felt that without it she would make another mistake. Then another.

And eventually one of those mistakes would kill her.

G
arrett woke to the sound of his cell phone ringing insistently on the bedside table. It was General Kline.

“A pair of MPs will knock on your door in ten minutes. They’ll be escorting you to the Pentagon.”

Garrett rubbed his eyes, scanning Alexis’s condo. “I’m not at the base.”

“I know,” Kline said. “The MPs will have a service uniform for you. Ten minutes.” He hung up.

Garrett looked for Alexis, but she wasn’t in bed.

“Alexis?”

She didn’t answer. Garrett pulled on his pants and searched the small apartment, but she wasn’t there. He looked for a note, or any sign of communication, but there was none. He showered quickly and was drying off when Kline’s military policemen arrived. The pair of them were young and stood ramrod straight in the doorway of the apartment. The younger of the two laid a plastic-wrapped Army uniform over the back of a La-Z-Boy.

“Sir,” he said. “Your uniform, sir.”

Garrett pulled the plastic off the blue Army service uniform and held the jacket up to the light. There was a seven-pointed gold-colored oak leaf pinned to the shoulder.

“I’m a major?” Garrett asked.

The MPs glanced at each other. “Sir, did we bring you the wrong uniform?”

Garrett took several minutes before he decided he would actually put the
uniform on. He seemed to remember telling Alexis—it felt like months ago, but in reality was only a week and a half—that there was no way he would wear a uniform, Army, Navy, Marines, or sanitation worker. And yet here he was, standing in her bathroom, looking at this highly starched piece of blue fabric and contemplating getting into it. He decided to give it a try, and when it was on, he stared at himself in the mirror. It was beyond strange. Brandon had been the one to wear a uniform, not Garrett. He remembered how heroic his brother had looked when he walked in the door in his Marine jacket, broad smile plastered across his face; how his mother had cooed over him, and how secretly jealous Garrett had felt.

It didn’t just feel wrong for Garrett to be dressed as a soldier, it felt almost illegal. And yet, he sort of liked it. It fit well, and he had to admit that it made him feel powerful. There was an aura to it.