The Ascendant: A Thriller (6 page)

She was yelling at him: “Head down! Head down!”

Those were the last words he heard, because a millisecond later there was a flash of white light, a wave of sound that battered his ears, and a cloud of dust and debris that rocketed across his field of vision. Garrett could feel the pulse of an explosion. It thrust his body across the pavement, into Alexis’s, and rolled them over each other twice, maybe three or four times—he lost count—then deposited them both at the marble base of a building.

Garrett lay there for a moment. He blinked. He felt for his arms and chest, and then his face. He seemed to be all in one piece. Around him there was smoke and chaos. People staggered past, covered in dirt, one older lady with blood smeared across her face. Garrett got to his knees, but he was dizzy. He put his hand out for support, and it hit the shoulder of Alexis, squatting next to him. She seemed to be talking to him, her lips moving, but Garrett could hear nothing, and he realized the explosion had deafened him. Alexis grabbed his
hand. She was yelling at him, but he could make out the words only by reading her lips—“Are you okay?”

He nodded his head yes, and then tried to speak the words “I can’t hear you,” but he had the strange sensation of speaking without hearing himself, as if he were wearing noise-canceling headphones. He tried to yell, but the effect was the same, worse even, because his throat was rasping and filled with dust and smoke. He wanted to retch.

Alexis tapped her own ears, then shook her head sideways, indicating no, she couldn’t hear either.

“Come with me,” she said, or at least Garrett assumed she had said that, because he could see her lips moving. The two of them rose, unsteadily, to their feet. Alexis held on to Garrett’s hand and led him quickly down the street, past the lobby to his building. The plate-glass windows were shattered, laid about in tiny fragments across the marble floor. Garrett recognized the building’s security guard wandering from his desk. He looked dazed, lost.

Alexis dragged Garrett around the corner. There, on William Street, parked in front of a fire hydrant, was a gray SUV. The back door was open, and a stocky, crew-cut man in a black suit was holding it open and signaling for them both to get in. Garrett had a moment’s hesitation, but it was overridden by his dizziness and confusion. He and Alexis dove into the backseat, the door closed behind them, the SUV swerved out into the street, and Garrett had the instantaneous and very powerful thought that his life, in that one brief flash, had changed forever.

T
he SUV sped through the narrow streets of lower Manhattan, heading south. Police cruisers flew past them in the opposite direction, blasting down one-way streets the wrong way and jumping onto the curb. Garrett fought to slow down his breathing. He closed his eyes as he was jostled in the backseat, trying to focus on his hearing. He could begin to make out passing street sounds, and then the groan of the SUV engine. This calmed Garrett—at least he wasn’t permanently deaf.

He looked over at Alexis. Her face was covered in dust. She had traces of blood on her cheek and chin. She wore a brown suede jacket, which was now scraped and torn around the shoulders. Her mouth was moving—she seemed to be muttering to herself, and Garrett suspected that she too was testing her hearing.

“Can you hear?” he asked.

She nodded. “A little. You?”

“It’s coming back,” he said.

“Are you hurt?”

Garrett rolled his right shoulder. It was stiff, but not too bad. Nothing worse than he’d experienced playing high school football. “I’m okay. You?”

“I’m fine.”

“What happened?”

“Car bomb.”

“Who did it?”

“Don’t know.”

The SUV pulled under the East River Drive and onto the side street that bordered the water. They stopped at the edge of a dock that jutted out into the river. The whole drive had taken less than five minutes.

Alexis opened the door. “Come on. Let’s go.”

Garrett scanned the dock, the street around it. “This is the helipad.”

“Yes. We need to go. You need to see a doctor.”

“There are doctors in New York. Quite a few.”

“Someone just tried to blow you up. Do you really want to stay here?”

The stocky man who had held the door open was standing next to Alexis now, and Garrett could see a black pistol showing under the vents of his suit jacket.

“How do you know it was meant for me?”

“If it wasn’t meant for you, why did you run? You knew they were after you, so you ran.”

“You were watching me?”

“We had you under surveillance.”

“Why?”

“This is not the time. You’re in danger.”

Garrett shook his head, settling his body back into the seat. “I’m not moving until you tell me what the fuck is going on.”

Alexis wiped the dust and blood from her face. She took a deep breath. “There are people who would like to talk to you. They’ve been watching you. And they’re impressed. If you come with me now, I will introduce them to you. And they will explain everything.”

Garrett stared at her. Alexis nodded over her shoulder. “That helicopter is waiting to take us to Washington.”

T
he powder-blue Sikorsky Executive helicopter lifted vertically off the South Street helipad, dipped left briefly, then climbed to a thousand feet under a southwest compass heading. Within minutes, they were flying low and fast over the coastline of New Jersey.

Garrett lay back in the plush leather seat. Alexis made a series of cell-phone calls, talking quietly but forcefully into a Bluetooth headset. She seemed to alternate between anger and surprise. Garrett tried to hear her over the rotor and engine noise, trying all the time to regain control of his hearing, but gave up after a few minutes. He pulled out his own cell phone and tried to call Avery Bernstein, just to tell him he was okay, but Garrett couldn’t get any reception—Alexis Truffant’s military technology was clearly better than his. He closed his eyes, exhausted, the shock of the explosion having worn off, leaving him drained. His hands were trembling slightly. Just as he was on the verge of sleep, Alexis tapped him on the shoulder.

“You shouldn’t sleep. You might have a concussion.”

Garrett kept his eyes open after that. He watched the coastline rush past, then the inland scrub of South Jersey, then the yawning blue of the Delaware Bay. It was beautiful, whitecaps and sailboats and rusting freighters, all splayed out just below him. He had never flown in a helicopter before. As they sped over the Delaware peninsula, then across Chesapeake Bay and over the suburban sprawl that clustered between Baltimore and Washington, he ran over what had happened on the street in his head. He tried to focus on the face of
the slouching man, and then the second man on his cell phone. Was that bomb meant to kill him? His memory told Garrett that they had been watching him. Okay, he thought, if so, then Captain Truffant was correct, and the bomb was aimed at him. But why blow him up? Was this about the Treasury bonds? And Avery’s warning? But Garrett had already passed on what he knew. It made no sense. Given that it was a singular occurrence, it fit no pattern, and Garrett was not good at one-offs. His head still hurt from the explosion, so he decided to stop thinking about it.

He turned to Alexis when she was between calls.

“Where are we going? Exactly?” he asked.

“Bolling Air Force Base. It’s where my agency is headquartered. The Defense Intelligence Agency.” She smiled at him. “So now you know who I work for.”

“Woo-hoo,” Garrett answered, wagging his finger in the air.

The Sikorsky swung south to avoid the restricted air space over D.C., then approached Bolling by going up along the Potomac. From the air, the base seemed not unlike any other corporate mall or planned community, with tract homes, baseball fields, and a small marina on the river. It didn’t even have a runway. The Sikorsky set down on a helipad near a parking lot, and Garrett and Alexis climbed into a waiting black sedan. They were driven to the east edge of the base, where there was a small hospital.

Garrett was waved through an admitting room, past a triage nurse and into a green examination room. A young doctor was waiting for him. She cleaned the cuts on his face and shoulder, then ran him through a series of concussion tests, all of which he passed. The doctor handed him a card and asked him to call if he felt dizzy or nauseous. Alexis seemed to have disappeared—the doctor said she was going to examine her next—and in her stead a pair of military policemen escorted Garrett out of the hospital to a single-story, windowless office-park building. They brought him to a fluorescent-lit conference room, asked him if he’d like a sandwich—he asked for a turkey and Swiss—and then returned with the food and a soda ten minutes later.

Garrett ate hurriedly, and considered whom he might call. The truth was, there were only a few people who cared about his welfare, Mitty and Avery being top of the list. It occurred to Garrett that he might finally have managed to alienate everyone else he’d ever known. That thought made him grimace involuntarily, and he quickly put his phone away.

The moment he finished eating, a pair of black-suited men entered the conference room, and Garrett realized they had been watching him the entire time. He spotted the surveillance camera in the ceiling corner, and reminded himself to check for that kind of thing from now on. The men introduced themselves as Agents Cannel and Stoddard. They said they worked for Homeland Security. Garrett asked for ID, and they dutifully let him inspect their badges.

“We just want to ask you a few questions,” Stoddard, the older and larger of the two, said. Garrett assumed they would ask about the explosion, and what he’d seen, but instead they launched into questions about his family. How long had his father worked for the Long Beach Unified School District? How old had Garrett been when his father died? Had his mother ever held a job? What did she do now? Had Garrett ever been arrested? Within two minutes Garrett was growing angry.

“What do you care if I’ve ever been arrested?”

“These are just standard questions, Mr. Reilly.”

“Have you ever been arrested?” Garrett asked them.

“I have not,” Agent Stoddard said.

“Well, why not? You don’t party? You never have any fun?”

“I do have fun. Just law-abiding fun.”

Garrett grunted. “I just remembered. I did get arrested once. For multiple homicides. But I got a good lawyer and was acquitted.”

The Homeland Security agents simply pressed on with their questions. “How about your mother—”

“How about
your
mother?”

“—was she ever arrested?”

Somewhere into the fifth minute Garrett simply stopped talking. The agents asked a few more questions, then asked if Garrett would be answering any of them, and when he said nothing, they thanked him, folded up their notebooks, and left.

•  •  •

In a small observation room adjacent to the conference room, the two agents ducked their heads in and nodded to Alexis Truffant and General Kline, who were watching Garrett on a color monitor.

“One thing we could ascertain, General,” Agent Stoddard said, pointing to the video feed of Garrett. “He is definitely an asshole.”

Alexis smirked. “He’s off the charts on that.”

General Kline scowled as the Homeland Security agents walked away. He was no fan of that organization; they had no real jurisdiction on an Air Force base, and yet they strutted through the place like they owned it. Theirs was an ever-growing bureaucracy, and its steady encroachment made him uneasy. He took a deep breath and turned to Alexis. “Captain, if I bring him in front of who I’d like to bring him in front of . . .”

“. . . would he make you look like a fool?” Alexis finished his sentence.

“A terrible, stupid fool?”

“From what I’ve seen, sir, if there is even a slight possibility of his causing a disruption, then he almost certainly will.”

Kline studied Garrett on the closed-circuit feed. The young man was handsome, there was no denying that, but Kline thought he had a dangerous, almost feral look about him, as if he were a man-child raised by wolves and they’d just rescued him from the wilds of some vast northern forest. He was tapping his fingers repeatedly on the desk. He seemed impatient, twitchy, angry.

Kline rubbed his temples softly, fighting off a growing tension migraine. “I’ll make the phone calls. You find him some clothes and get him ready for dinner.”

T
he one-bedroom condo sat in the center of Bolling Air Force Base. MPs patrolled the front and back of the condo building. Inside, a pair of dark slacks and a clean button-down shirt, in Garrett’s size, were laid out on a bed; a blue blazer hung from the door.

“You pick these out?” Garrett asked Alexis.

“If I say yes, are you going to refuse to wear them?” she answered.

Garrett laughed. “I’m getting predictable.” He pulled off his shirt in front of her. She walked out of the bedroom and closed the door, but he nudged it back open so she could hear him. And see him. He wanted her to see him naked. Anything to make her uncomfortable. He pulled off his pants as well.

“Why didn’t the Homeland guys ask me about the bomb?”

“I don’t know,” Alexis said, studiously avoiding looking at the open door. “Look. We’re going to a dinner tonight. There will be important people there. People who are responsible for the future of this country.”

“I mean, I was a witness. And maybe even the target. It’s got to be the biggest news story in the country right now. That’s just weird.”

“If you could simply listen to what they have to say to you, that would be much appreciated. What they have to say is far more important than the bombing.”

“More important than whether I live or die?”

“Considerably more important than that.”

“To me, whether I live or die is surprisingly important.”