by Drew Chapman
“Blyad,” Bazanov hissed to himself as he reached for his phone. It was time to make calls of his own, to report back to Moscow. The day had turned into another disaster, as he had predicted it might. The runoff election was a mere two weeks away. Thirteen days, with the coming of the next dawn. He knew he should be more upset about that, frustrated with the incompetence of the Belarusian security forces, but he found that he couldn’t work up the anger.
The Kremlin would yell, the tanks on the border would rev their engines, but the truth was, despite all his protestations to the contrary, he understood that the citizens of Belarus were right to rise up against their iron-fisted dictator. They were right to want democracy and all the freedoms it promised. They were right because they’d been fed a steady stream of illusions from the West. Illusions about prosperity and the good life. All day and all night, on television and in pop songs, in magazines and movies, they saw dollars and Porsches and big-breasted women. They were told they could have all of these things if they emulated the West, if they were like the hypnotized fools of Paris and London and New York. Consumers, lemmings, mindless balls of greed and avariciousness. The citizens of Belarus were like moths to a flame. They could not help themselves. They wanted the things they were told to want. Who could resist?
No, Bazanov thought as the Tigr trucks hightailed it back down Svyardlova Street for safety, chased away by a hail of machine-gun fire, he would not punish the moths. What was the point of that? You had to go to the source of the problem, instead, and everything was in place to do just that. The process had already begun.
What he would do now was extinguish the flame.
OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA, JUNE 17, 8:15 A.M.
What bothered Bingo Clemens the most was that he wanted to do it. No matter the protestations to the opposite, no matter how much he complained about the work, the long hours, the dark, cramped rooms and the dangers to his health, Bingo wanted back in. He wanted to be part of the Ascendant team again. And that just killed him.
The phone call had come at seven thirty in the morning, his mother yelling upstairs to his closed door, “Bingo, a man on the line for you. From New York City. Says it’s important. Top secret. He won’t tell me his name over the phone.”
Bingo’s blood froze. Only one person could be calling from New York City with a top secret message.
Garrett Reilly.
He wanted Bingo’s help. He wanted Bingo to leave his room, and Bingo hadn’t left his room much for the last nine months. Not since the last time he’d helped Garrett Reilly. And that had almost got him killed. And yet . . .
He took the phone call.
“Bingo, I need you in New York,” Garrett said. “The team is coming back together.”
Bingo mumbled a nonresponse, running his thick fingers through his out-of-control Afro. Bingo was a former analyst for the RAND Corporation, an expert on all things military, and currently a shut-in.
“There’ll be a plane ticket waiting for you at SFO.”
“I saw your face on the TV,” Bingo whispered. “You’re in trouble.”
“Consider every phone call monitored. And act accordingly,” Garrett said. “And believe nothing.”
“What if I don’t want to do it?”
There was silence on the line, as if, Bingo thought, Garrett hadn’t quite understood the question.
“Maybe I should just stay here.”
“No. You’re coming East.” Just like that—as if what Garrett thought was the last word in what Bingo should actually do. The guy had not changed. He was still an arrogant son of a—
“And I need you to stop over in Palo Alto as well,” Garrett continued. “I’ll send you the address via the old method.” In the past, Garrett had communicated with members of the Ascendant team through instant-messaging applets in online shooter games. The avatars they used had nothing to do with their real names, and while they could be watched and read by intelligence agencies, they couldn’t be traced to physical locations. “I’ll send you some burner cell numbers as well. Call me from the road.” Then Garrett hung up.
The dread started immediately. A ball of worry right in the center of Bingo’s stomach. Yet, despite his anxiety, he packed a bag, almost as if on autopilot. Why was he doing this, stuffing two shirts—he only had a few shirts—and a couple of pairs of beige chinos into a carry-on bag? Doing exactly as he was told to do by Garrett, as if he were Garrett’s zombie slave? He knew the answer. It was simple. The month and a half he had spent with the Ascendant team last year had been the most exciting time in his life. More had happened to him in those few weeks than in all the other weeks of his life combined. No matter how much he complained about it and had been frightened by what happened, those were the memories that he replayed in his head over and over before he went to bed at night.
He’d had an adventure, and deep down inside, he wanted another one.
He finished packing and told his mother he needed to go to New York for a few days. She clucked and worried and pried, but he said it was classified business for the government. That made her cluck and pry more. His mother had been a full-on hippie in her prime, marching up and down the streets of Berkeley at the drop of a hat. Civil disobedience and mistrust of government were her raisons d’être, and the idea that her little boy—although Bingo wasn’t little; he was six foot two, and he was no boy now, having just turned twenty-seven—was going to work for the government sent her into paroxysms of worry and indignation.
“Do you realize what you’re doing? What this means? As a political statement?” she cawed as he dragged his carry-on bag down the front steps of their South Oakland bungalow to the waiting taxi. “Do you understand the implications?”
“Yes, I do.”
That seemed to shut her up. “Be careful!” she yelled as the cab pulled away from their house and headed down Martin Luther King toward the freeway and the Peninsula. “Don’t let them fuck you in the ass!” His mother had always had a unique way of expressing herself.
Bingo called Garrett from the middle of the Dumbarton Bridge, and Garrett told him what he wanted Bingo to do. That only increased his unease, but he was committed now—even though he still couldn’t completely wrap his mind around how that had happened—and he told the cabbie to wait as he rang the doorbell at the front door to the condo building on High Street in Palo Alto, just east of Stanford University. He was buzzed in and went up to the fourth floor. The door to the apartment was cracked open, and Bingo knocked tentatively, and when there was no answer, he went inside.
Celeste Chen was sitting on the couch, watching daytime TV—some kind of self-help show about unwed mothers—and eating popcorn from a bag. She looked bad: hair unbrushed, old shorts on, a stained sweatshirt hanging loosely around her shoulders. The condo was a mess as well. Paper plates of take-out food were scattered around the kitchen, with empty gin bottles under the sofa and piles of dirty clothes in the living room. The place stank, like cat pee maybe, although Bingo didn’t notice any cats around.
Bingo knew that Celeste—a twenty-eight-year-old linguist and code breaker—had been in China until recently, living underground with a persecuted revolutionary sect. She’d been there for six months, on the run, sick and starving, until the CIA had extracted her, against her will, and brought her home. Bingo had found this out from Alexis Truffant, but she had told him just the basics of the operation, even though he’d wanted to know more. She also asked Bingo to stop in on Celeste a few months ago and see how she was doing—but he never did. He didn’t want to have to face her despair, up close and personal. Also, he didn’t want to leave his room.
“Garrett wants you to come with me to New York,” Bingo said.
“Fuck Garrett,” she said.
“Does that mean no?”
She went back to watching the television without answering. Bingo called Garrett and told her what Celeste had said.
“Put her on the phone,” Garrett said.
Bingo gave her his cell phone. He could hear Garrett talking to her, but couldn’t make out what he was saying. Celeste grunted her answers—“Yes” and “No,” with the occasional “Fuck you” thrown in—and then she said, “Eat shit,” and tossed the phone back to Bingo.
“If she doesn’t come with you, then tie her up and drag her into the cab,” Garrett told him.
“You know I can’t do that.”
“Okay, fine. Just tell her it’s for her own good.”
“And if that doesn’t work?”
“It has to work. The shit is hitting the fan. You both need to get on that flight to New York. This is the last conversation we’re going to have on this number. Don’t use it again.” Then Garrett hung up.
Bingo thought about this. He went downstairs and told the cabbie it might be a while. The cabbie didn’t seem to care—he said the meter would have to keep running. Bingo went back upstairs and looked around. On closer inspection, the apartment really was disgusting. Along with the endless assortment of half-empty diet-soda cans, piles of unopened mail sat in stacks on chairs and on the kitchen table—a couple of the envelopes were lined in red and looked suspiciously like past-due notices. Celeste seemed to have completely given up on life.
Bingo pulled a chair into the living room and sat a few feet from Celeste. Her eyes never left the television. He liked Celeste, but he was a little afraid of her as well: she was smart and tough and had an acid tongue that she was not afraid to use.
“Alexis told me what happened in China,” Bingo said carefully, unsure how to reopen the conversation. “Being on the run and all. And the CIA pulling you out of the country. That seems harsh.”
“You have no idea, Bingo. None whatsoever. Go the hell away.”
Bingo sighed. He leaned his elbows onto his knees and tried to look as compassionate and caring as he could manage. He was, by nature, extremely shy.
“It hasn’t been easy for me either. What I mean is, when I went home, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I’ve been staying indoors mostly. Reading. And maybe playing a little bit of Xbox. A lot of Xbox. And the conclusion I’ve come to is that I’m not sure sitting in my house is a good thing. It’s kinda ruining my life. Maybe ruining your life too.” Bingo grimaced. “No offense.”
Celeste turned from the TV and took a long look at Bingo. “How I ruin my life is none of your business. And you’ve gained weight.”
Bingo sighed. That was true. He had gained some weight, maybe ten pounds. Or twenty. Or more. He hated talking about his weight. His dad had been an all-state high school offensive lineman. He’d been huge. Sadly, Bingo had inherited his size, but not his athleticism.
“I’m working on that,” he lied. “Going to the gym.”
“You said you hadn’t left the house.”
“I said mostly hadn’t left the house.”
“Why are you doing this, Bingo?” Her eyes narrowed. “Seriously. Why the fuck are you doing what that asshole asked you to do? Re-forming Ascendant? He’s a selfish jackass who will only bring you grief. Give me one good reason why you’re doing this and I’ll go with you. I promise. I’ll pack up and go right out the door. But it’s gotta be good, and it’s gotta be the truth.”
That took Bingo by surprise. He started to answer, then caught himself, shook his large head no, then started again and halted once more. He began to panic. He felt droplets of sweat form on his forehead and on the back of his neck. This was his best chance of getting Celeste downstairs and into the waiting cab—without force, at least—and he was blowing it. Then, in a flash, the answer came to him.
“I’m doing this because it’s what I was meant to do. And it’s what you were meant to do as well.”
• • •
Alexis took a shuttle flight from LaGuardia to Reagan National, caught a cab to her condo, then drove herself to Marine Corps Base Quantico in northeastern Virginia. She tried to keep an eye out for anybody following her, or tailing her car, but as far as she could see, she was clean. The FBI hadn’t put her relationship with Garrett together yet. Or if they had, they were sitting on it, waiting for a better moment to pounce. At Quantico, she checked in with the duty officer at the Marine Corps Embassy Security Group, a pinched-faced sergeant named Holmes, and asked to see Private John Patmore. The last time she had spoken to Patmore he was a lance corporal, but he’d recently been demoted back to E-1 private. His file said the cause was insubordination, which didn’t surprise Alexis. Patmore was a gung ho marine, but he had a fungible—some would say erratic—sense of military hierarchy. With Patmore, following orders appeared to be optional.
She found him sitting at an empty desk in the far corner of an unused file room. She entered without knocking and suspected that he’d been asleep. She cleared her throat.
“Captain Truffant,” Patmore grunted, head snapping up from his chest. He bolted out from behind the desk. “What are you doing here? I mean—not that you have to explain yourself, ma’am. Captain, ma’am.” He caught himself, straightened his back, and saluted her from the side of the desk, knocking over a raft of paper cups.
“Looking for you, Private.” Alexis scanned the dusty office. Filing cabinets lined one wall. Folding chairs were stacked against another. Other than that, the room was empty. “What do you do here?”
“Ma’am, I file reports. In those cabinets there. And when somebody asks to see them again, I pull them out and hand the reports back to them.”
Alexis could see a layer of dust on the top of the filing cabinets. “And how often does that happen?”
Patmore gestured briefly with his right hand, as if to point to an imaginary number in the air. But he stopped, mouth open, then put his hand back down at his side. “Once a week, ma’am. At most. I don’t think they put me here as a reward.”
“Why’d you get busted back to private?”
Patmore winced, waggling his head from side to side. “I said some stuff to the wrong people, ma’am. Probably shouldn’t have. I should probably keep my mouth shut most of the time.” He let out a long sigh, and his shoulders slumped slightly. “I was bored.”
Alexis smiled. “Well, you won’t be bored anymore. I’m having you transferred. You’re coming with me. You’re back in Ascendant. But we’re keeping that last bit a secret.”
Alexis thought she saw Patmore lift up onto his tiptoes. “Ma’am, this private is very happy to hear that news. Very much, extremely happy.”
NEWARK, NEW JERSEY, JUNE 17, 12:09 P.M.
First, Garrett hacked the Jenkins & Altshuler enterprise resource-planning system. That was just a fancy name for the company’s supply-ordering site, and hacked was a bit of an overstatement as well: Garrett already knew all the passwords for the planning system, so all he had to do was log on as an administrator and create a false account name. The guys in purchasing changed the passwords every month, but Garrett made a point of ordering a new chair or a printer every few weeks, just to keep himself in the know. He never knew when he would need to make J&A pay for something.
It helped that Garrett was a collector of passwords. He didn’t care much about computer-generated ones—they were, by definition, a random jumble of numbers and letters—but he found human-generated passwords fascinating. He could recall pretty much every password he’d ever heard or read, and at night, if he couldn’t sleep, he sorted them in his mind, arranging them into categories: passwords that were all numbers (rare), passwords that were mostly letters (more common), a decent mix of the two (most frequent), or ones that were numbers, letters, and symbols (most rare). He loved trying to parse the etymology of people’s ciphers, although he was regularly astonished by how many of them still used 12345678, or that almost as many simply used the word password. People were such creatures of habit.
Next he ordered couches, desks, chairs, and computers for the Newark
offices of Ascendant. Garrett knew that the J&A purchasing department checked new orders twice a month, on the first and the fifteenth, and any order under $10,000 was rubber-stamped, especially if it was furniture going to one of the company’s real estate holdings. The guys in purchasing were not the brightest bulbs; they spent an inordinate amount of time playing Magic: The Gathering and making penis jokes. Garrett also made sure to rent the furniture instead of buying it, which made it seem more like a sales staging deal than a purchase for a working office. The office supply store in Hoboken said they’d swing by in a few hours.
Garrett went downstairs to alert the guard at the front desk. He decided to swagger his way through the problem of being recognized. The guard was old, sixty-five at least, and his tiny body seemed lost in his baggy, dark blue uniform. Garrett started talking, loudly, the moment he stepped out of the elevator. He said he was from the start-up on the seventh floor—AltaTech Partners was the first name that popped into his head—and that a furniture delivery was due by the end of the day and could the guard please show them how to get to his offices. The guard said sure, taken aback and a little intimidated by Garrett’s attitude, but then seemed confused when he couldn’t find a record of any company called AltaTech Partners in the building.
“We just signed the lease yesterday,” Garrett said. “We’re going to take over the entire floor. But not this month. Next month. And the eighth floor too, but not until the fall. At least that’s the plan.” Garrett winked at the old guard, figuring if you were going to lie, then lie big. “We might go totally broke before then. You just never know, do you?”
“Yeah. Been there,” the guard said.
Garrett stopped talking for a moment and looked at the old man’s face, lined with wrinkles and age spots and a pink scar that ran from his chin to just behind his ear. Whatever he’d done before becoming a security guard, it had been a hard life, and Garrett could see the consequences on his skin.
