The Ascendant: A Thriller (7 page)

“I’m sure it is,” Alexis countered with undisguised disdain.

Garrett shoved the bedroom door closed and took a shower. When he came out, Alexis was gone and the front door was locked from the outside. He kicked the door once, and was pretty sure he could bust open its thin plywood frame with a little more effort, but he decided against it—what was the point? He didn’t have anywhere particular to go. He looked for a TV in the condo, but there was none, so he checked the news feed on his cell phone. CNN and
The New York Times
were reporting it as a terror attack, a car bomb, with multiple injuries but no fatalities; no group or person had claimed responsibility, and the city authorities had no suspects. Garrett was not mentioned in any of the news stories, but on thinking about this, he didn’t see why he would be. No one knew he had been downstairs or anywhere near the explosion. But then he realized that Avery Bernstein hadn’t called him. No one from Jenkins & Altshuler had, which was strange, given that he had essentially become a missing person. Perhaps Alexis Truffant had called his boss? She seemed like the type—no loose ends.

He called Avery’s office, but it went right to voice mail. They were closed for the day. He didn’t really have anything to tell Avery, except maybe that he was okay, had survived the bombing, but something told him that Avery already knew this. Avery was more connected to this whole thing than Garrett had realized. He was the nexus from which all subsequent actions had radiated out. Avery, Garrett decided, was up to speed.

Next he called Mitty Rodriguez, but she didn’t answer either. He left her a message, in case she was worried, but Garrett doubted she was; she was probably deep in the bowels of an online game and hadn’t even noticed the bombing. Mitty often gamed for days on end without coming up for air. Or for news of the world. It was understood that either of them could disappear for long stretches of time and the other wouldn’t freak out.

Alexis returned at six-thirty, as the sun was setting over eastern Virginia. She knocked on the condo door, unlocked it, and let herself in. Garrett did a double take as she stood there in the foyer in a short black dress and sheer nylons, with her hair flowing down around her shoulders and her lips bright red with lipstick. She looked stunning.

“We must be meeting some really, really important people,” Garrett said, nodding to her. “Because you look fantastic.”

“We are. And thank you for the compliment.”

Garrett followed her down the steps of the condo and into a waiting unmarked
Ford. A uniformed Air Force lieutenant drove, and Alexis and Garrett sat in back. Garrett felt a little like he was going to his high school prom—which he had not gone to, opting instead to get stoned on the beach and night-surf—and enjoyed the sensation. At least his prom date was pretty. They crossed the Frederick Douglass Bridge into Washington, D.C., proper. It was the first time Garrett had ever been in the nation’s capital. He stared out the window, and it seemed to him, even though he didn’t know the geography of the city, that the driver was taking them past every patriotic sight he could find. They circled the Capitol, lit up by spotlights, crossed the Mall, where he eyed the Smithsonian and the National Archives, then took a series of roundabout turns that brought them directly past the White House. It may have been a ploy, but Garrett enjoyed it nonetheless.

They drove past Foggy Bottom and the State Department, then crossed into Georgetown and maneuvered down a series of narrow, tree-lined streets filled with upscale town houses. They double-parked in front of a three-story brick brownstone on Dumbarton Street. Pairs of uniformed D.C. policemen stood guard halfway down the block on both sides, and a pair of dark-suited men that Garrett assumed were Secret Service agents blocked the door to the building. The agents stepped aside for Alexis, and Garrett trailed in her path.

The foyer of the town house was bathed in soft yellow light. Colonial-era furniture lined the hallway, and a pair of lush Hudson River School oil paintings hung opposite each other on the walls. The floors were veined slats of polished wood, topped with intricately woven rugs. To Garrett, the place reeked of money. And power.

“Nice,” Garrett laughed, examining an antique pewter teapot on a mahogany table.

A young, well-dressed African-American woman entered the hallway and smiled pleasantly at Alexis. “Captain Truffant. Good to see you.” The young woman turned to Garrett and took him in for a moment. “And you must be Garrett Reilly.”

“Yeah. That’s me.”

“A pleasure. I’ve heard a lot about you. I’m Mackenzie Fox. Assistant to the secretary. Come this way. Everyone’s here. They’re all waiting for you.” She opened a door at the end of the hallway and held it for them. Alexis entered,
disappearing from Garrett’s view, but Garrett paused a moment by Ms. Fox.

“Secretary of what?” he whispered to her.

“Defense.”

“Holy fuck,” Garrett gasped, before he could stop himself.

“Yes, holy fuck,” she said with a smile.

S
ecretary of Defense Duke Frye, Jr., spoke first, and Garrett recognized him immediately. He was a large man, with a head of thick, bright-white hair, broad shoulders, and blue eyes. His Texas accent was barely noticeable; he’d clearly worked to rid himself of it and now spoke more like the polished global businessman that he had been before being named secretary.

“Something to drink, Mr. Reilly? We’re pouring scotch tonight. Eighteen-year-old Highland Park. You know it?”

“Sure,” Garrett answered, tongue-tied, leaving his host uncertain as to whether he meant “sure” he knew the scotch or “sure” he’d have some.

Secretary Frye poured him a glass anyway. He handed it to Garrett, then shook his hand. “Duke Frye. I am the secretary of defense.” He fixed his eyes on Garrett, and Garrett felt a rare flash of fear and anxiety race through him. Frye was the first truly powerful man Garrett had ever met in person, and he scared Garrett. Not a lot, but just enough to throw him slightly off balance.

“Pleased to meet you,” Garrett said, and then quickly added “sir,” but hated himself immediately for doing it. He glanced at the dozen or so other people gathered in the large, sumptuous living room. A few were standing, two of them in front of a dark, windswept oil painting of George Washington on horseback that Garrett swore he’d seen before in an art history book. The rest of the guests were seated. Garrett quickly made out five or six men and women in uniform—generals by the looks of them. He thought he saw four actual stars on the lapel of the oldest of them, a lean, wiry African-American man in his sixties. The
other men and women were a mixed bunch, most in their forties, all wearing dark suits. Garrett could feel the buzz of power in the room. And they were all staring at him.

“I’m sure you are wondering why you are here, Mr. Reilly,” the secretary said. “So I think I’ll let this gentleman start things off. General Kline, would you do the honors?”

General Kline stepped to the front of the group. He was one of the few there without a drink. He thrust out his hand to shake Garrett’s, and spoke quickly in his clipped Boston accent. “I’m Hadley Kline. Head of the Analysis Directorate at the Defense Intelligence Agency. I’m also Alexis’s boss.” He nodded to Alexis, who had moved away from Garrett to stand unobtrusively in a corner. In the pecking order of the room she clearly did not rank.

Kline cleared his throat. “So, how do I start this?” Kline twitched, as was his habit, then launched in. “I’m sure you’ve heard the old cliché—generals are always preparing to fight the last war. Well, unfortunately, there’s truth in it. The armed services spend a lot of time and money grooming the next generation of leaders—West Point, Annapolis, the Air Force Academy. Bright men and women. We explain to them how the last war was fought. And then we tell them to think about how to fight the next one. But in the process we make them like us. We make them military people. That’s the whole point—we want them to be soldiers. But that . . .” And here Kline hesitated, carefully choosing his words, not for effect, but, Garrett guessed, to avoid insulting anyone else in the room. “That approach can have its drawbacks,” he finished.

Kline shot a quick glance around the room, as if scanning for objections. He found none.

“We are susceptible to groupthink, no matter how hard we try to stay independent. It is human nature to be influenced by others. It’s that ability that allowed the human race to evolve from being solitary hunters on the African savannah to standing around drinking scotch in a million-dollar town house in Georgetown.”

“Bought it for a couple million dollars,” the secretary broke in. “God only knows what it’s worth now. Damn real estate market.” There were chuckles across the room.

“Groupthink is especially prevalent in larger organizations,” Kline continued. “And the military is the largest of them all. I think I can say, without impugning
anyone here, that the military is not the world’s most outside-the-box group. We value discipline, bravery, integrity. Poets and entrepreneurs need not apply.” Again there was laughter.

“At least not until now.” Kline turned to a young woman sitting in the corner. She rose, smiling politely. She was Hispanic, no more than thirty, and wore a tailored black skirt suit. She offered Garrett her hand. They shook.

“Garrett, my name is Julia Hernandez. I work in the Treasury Department. I’m the undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence. I’m the person Avery Bernstein called the other day. With your news.”

“Oh.” Garrett looked her up and down. She was pretty, if you liked the librarian/dominatrix archetype, which Garrett did, on occasion. “So it was you that cost me forty million bucks.”

“You mean by propping up the dollar?”

“That’s exactly what I mean.”

“You were planning to profit from the sell-off in Treasuries?”

“Sure.”

“You weren’t troubled by that? Morally?”

“Not really. That’s my business.” He looked at the assembled generals. “We all have a business. You guys kill people. I short bad bond issues.”

Out of the corner of his eye Garrett saw Alexis Truffant flinch. She looked ready to body-tackle him. Garrett guessed she had a lot of skin in this game, but none of the generals had so much as twitched at his remark. Either they were a lot tougher than she was, Garrett thought, or they didn’t give a shit what he said. Probably both.

Julia Hernandez continued: “We believe that this is more than simply a bad bond issue, Garrett. We believe the Chinese are selling off Treasuries as a way to weaken the economy of the United States. To undermine the dollar and destroy our standing in the global marketplace. We believe—”

An older, deeper voice interrupted her: “We believe that this is an act of war.”

Garrett turned to the voice. It came from the four-star general. His crew-cut Afro was awash in gray, and his deeply lined face seemed almost sculptural. “A new kind of war,” the four-star said. “One we really haven’t seen before.” Garrett couldn’t place his accent exactly, but he guessed it was Chicago. South Side. The general stood up, and the secretary of defense nodded to him.

“Mr. Reilly,” the secretary said. “This is General Aldous Wilkerson. Decorated Vietnam War veteran and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

General Wilkerson waved the secretary off, then walked slowly up to Garrett. “The most dangerous attack, the one a general fears most, is the one he doesn’t understand, the one he never saw coming because it was deemed outside the realm of possibility. The attack that catches you completely by surprise: Hannibal’s elephants crossing the Alps, the Nazi blitzkrieg, two planes crashing into the World Trade Center. Those moments change the course of history. And they can destroy entire nations.”

The general’s words hung in the air. Garrett looked at the older man, the deep lines on his face. “And we’re at one of those moments?”

The general shrugged, as if unsure. Garrett liked that. He liked that this four-star general wasn’t so arrogant as to lecture Garrett on uncertainty. Uncertainty was one of Garrett’s specialties.

“My nine-year-old granddaughter understands more about computers and the Internet than I ever will,” Wilkerson said. “Send. Delete. Twitter. Facebook. Good Lord. I miss writing an old-fashioned letter. But people who know these things are telling me that our enemies could swamp us in a millisecond if they wanted to. If we were not on guard.” The general got up close to Garrett. “You concur with that assessment?”

“Isn’t that what the National Security Agency does? Protect us against attacks like that?”

“We’ve got agencies protecting us from threats all over the place,” the general said. “But none of them caught the massive, coordinated sell-off of U.S. Treasuries. Only you did.”

Garrett smiled as the realization dawned on him. He was surprised at himself for not seeing it earlier. “So you want me to help you find more of these in the future? Because I’m good at finding patterns. And I’m outside of the group-think of the military?”

General Kline took over: “We’ve been looking for someone like you, Garrett, for quite some time now, and the likes of you are not easy to find. Someone of a new generation. Raised on computers and the Web. Mathematically inclined. From a family of patriots like your brother, but himself outside of the military’s sphere of influence. Intelligent, unafraid of risk, aggressive, confident. Arrogant.”

Garrett snorted a laugh. “I feel so loved.”

“We speak plainly and directly, Garrett,” General Wilkerson said. “You might find that refreshing.”

Kline continued: “I could list all the characteristics that you possess, but it would take some time, and, frankly, I think you already know them. You know what you can do, and how you can do it. So here is what we are proposing. Let us train you in our defensive and offensive capabilities, but keep you physically and mentally separate from our war machine. Captain Truffant here will be your guide. She’ll bring you up to speed on what we can do, and what we can’t. Meanwhile, you’ll be free to track the very things that allowed you to predict what was happening in the bond market.”