The Ascendant: A Thriller

by Drew Chapman

  “And you think you know who is doing this?”

  Garrett nodded confidently, arching his back lazily and then plopping his feet onto the coffee table in front of Avery’s office couch. He was so bloody fucking sure of himself, thought Avery, amazed that so much arrogance could radiate from someone who had done so little—so far—to earn it. It was still what most annoyed Avery about Garrett. But then again, the older man thought, that was the trait in Garrett that most annoyed everybody. Twice in the last six months Avery had had to talk an older trader out of moving to Stern, Ferguson because Garrett kept bragging about the returns he’d made that day.

  If only he weren’t so right so much of the time.

  “You want to tell me?”

  “You don’t want to guess?” Garrett asked with a smile.

  “Damn it, Garrett, I’m the CEO of a multibillion-dollar international trading—”

  “The Chinese,” Garrett blurted out, cutting him off.

  Avery sputtered to a stop. He took a deep breath. “Explain.”

  “The bonds were bought twelve years ago at auction through a third-party intermediary out of Dubai. Trading house called Al Samir. The People’s Bank of China uses them—”

  Avery cut in: “A lot of people use Al Samir.”

  “Sure,” Garrett continued, “but who else has two hundred billion in cash to throw down on U.S. bonds? In one shot? Maybe three sovereign wealth funds in the whole world.”

  “Speculative. Means nothing.”

  “I’m getting there.” Garrett smiled, clearly relishing the fact that he knew something Avery didn’t. “I’m like a lawyer building a case.”

  “Fine. Continue,” Avery grunted.

  “There’s been a pattern to the trading. Sixteen different brokerage houses. But none of them are in China, or anywhere in Asia for that matter. If you were Chinese and wanted to dump bonds, but wanted to throw off suspicion . . .”

  “You’d use houses anywhere else but your turf,” Avery said, finishing Garrett’s sentence. “Interesting, but still speculative.”

  “Trading started at 1:04 a.m., Greenwich Mean Time. Which is nine o’clock in the morning in Beijing. Start of their trading day. Means someone over there woke up, pushed the button, and tracked all day.”

  Avery nodded, listening carefully, a ball of worry beginning to grow in his stomach. He rubbed his thumb uneasily along the worn teak handrail of his old college desk chair. “You have more?”

  “Oh yeah, big time,” Garrett said. “The kicker was the sell times. After the CUSIP numbers, it’s how I knew something was up. Sell times from every one of the brokerage houses were in a pattern. Timed to the second. I didn’t see it at first, but then I just followed them for a while, and bingo, I knew.”

  “What was the pattern?”

  “Four, fourteen, four, fourteen. A repeating loop.”

  “That means nothing,” Avery said, oddly disappointed. Somewhere in the back of his mind he’d wanted Garrett to be onto something.

  “To you. And me. But if you’re Chinese . . .”

  Avery squinted, the awful truth of what Garrett was saying becoming suddenly clear. Avery had spent five years teaching mathematics at the University of Hong Kong, five long years immersed in Chinese culture. He whispered: “Four means death.”

  “And fourteen means accident. The two most unlucky numbers in China. If you were going to attack your enemy through numbers, and you were way superstitious, you’d sell their bonds every four and fourteen minutes. And the Chinese are crazy superstitious.” Garrett smiled, then he shrugged, a touch of humility seeping through. “I had to Google that whole last bit. I really don’t know crap about China.”

  Avery tried to take in the enormity of what he was hearing. The implications of Garrett’s speculation were vast.

  “If this is true . . .” Avery hissed.

  “It’s true,” Garrett interrupted, rolling up his white shirtsleeves as if to signify how much hard mental work he’d done. “Guaranteed.”

  “Then you know what it means?”

  Garrett nodded enthusiastically. “Flooding the market with U.S. debt will make interest rates skyrocket. Economic panic. And the dollar will crater.”

  Avery frowned. “You seem happy about this.”

  “Happy? Not happy? I don’t give a shit. But I know it’s a way to make money. And that’s what we do, right? Make money?”

  “You want to bet on a falling dollar?” Avery said slowly, carefully. The ball of worry in his stomach had exploded; a wave of nausea was rising in his throat.

  “Fuck yes!” Garrett said, popping out of his seat with excitement, arms waving. “I want to short the shit out of it. I mean, if the Chinese are dumping secretly now, that means they’re going to dump openly later. Probably pretty soon. So, hell yeah, I want to bet on a falling dollar. Bet the farm.”

  Avery looked out the window, gazing due west. A plane was on its final descent into Newark Liberty airport. “Garrett, you realize it has the potential to destroy the American economy?”

  “But we’ll be stinking rich,” Garrett said. “So who cares?”

  Avery turned to look at the young man, whom he had taught as an eighteen-year-old, nurtured and cared for, and was suddenly overwhelmed by the desire to pack it up and head back to Yale, to give teaching another go-round, because it was clear to him that in his twenty years behind the lectern, he had fallen far short of his goal of imbuing the youth of tomorrow with even the most basic sense of morality.

  3

  WASHINGTON, D.C., MARCH 24, 4:14 PM

  Major General Hadley Kline could barely keep still. His compact, barrel-chested body, which usually twitched and jerked in rhythmic time to his continuous train of hyperactive thoughts, was now a blur of motion. His arms whirled like windmills as his head shook, his thick tuft of black hair bobbing as he circled the long table at the center of the bland conference room in the basement of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Office of Analysis Building. A large, white, unremarkable structure tucked in a corner of suburban Washington, D.C.’s Bolling Air Force Base, the DIA building housed the American military’s nexus of all spying, planning, and reconnaissance, and General Kline was the head of the Analysis Directorate. His group’s job was to track all of the voluminous information that flowed into the military’s intelligence machine and make sense of it. In a nutshell, General Kline was there to figure things out. And he loved doing it.

  “First question,” Kline barked excitedly in his thick, South Boston accent. “Is it true?”

  The table was crowded with two dozen staffers, young men and women from all the different services, all in uniform, scanning laptops and open file folders. Howell, a young Air Force captain from Texas, snapped an answer: “High probability, sir.”

  “High? How high?” Kline focused in on Howell. “Certainty high?”

  “Ninety percent, sir.”

  “How’d we find out?”

  “NSA intercept of a phone call to the Treasury Department, sir,” a female lieutenant called out from the back of the table. “Made from an unsecured cell phone.”

  “And the call came from”—Kline stopped briefly to tap on an open laptop set at one end of the table—“Avery Bernstein? I know him, don’t I? How do I know him?”

  The analysis staffers knew the drill. Kline used his own form of the Socratic method, holding a long, engaged, combative argument—with himself—in front of everyone who had any chance of adding information to The Pile. That’s what Kline called the imaginary open box into which his team dropped useful intelligence: The Pile.

  A young black Army captain, Caulk, projected a corporate PR photo of Avery Bernstein onto a flat screen. “CEO of Jenkins & Altshuler, a New York trading firm, sir. Was a professor of advanced mathematics at Yale before that. Served on the previous president’s Council of Economic Advisers . . .”

  “Yes. Right. That’s how I know him. We did a deep background on him, didn’t we?” The conversation came quic
kly now.

  “We did, sir.”

  “He was clean?”

  “He was, sir.”

  Kline wheeled again, hands scratching at his neck, as if digging out an unseen mosquito bite. “How’d they react at Treasury?”

  A broad-shouldered captain shouted from the back: “No official word—”

  Kline interrupted angrily: “Official word is for fucki—”

  The captain didn’t let his boss finish: “—but my inside source said that the advanced warning will allow them to buy up the excess supply in the market before word leaks out. Sir.”

  Kline smiled. He didn’t mind getting interrupted. He despised the pompous regimentation of the armed services. Titles, saluting, pay grades—in Kline’s experience, they were all impediments to productive, creative thinking. He was in it for one thing, and one thing alone: the thrill of the hunt.

  “Okay,” Kline growled, pausing to look out at his assembled team. “The big question? Why? Why’d the Chinese dump a crapload of our Treasuries in secret?”

  Captain Howell spoke first: “Annual Taiwan arms sale bill comes up in Congress in two weeks. This is a warning shot off our bow. Stop selling F-16s to their enemy.”

  “Not impossible, but conventional,” Kline barked. “Anyone have an idea with balls on it?”

  Captain Howell reddened as muffled laughter echoed in the room.

  A female lieutenant colonel stood up. “Sir. Malicious mischief. To keep us off balance while they make deals with the rest of the world.”

  Kline shrugged. “More ballsy. But two hundred billion is a wicked lot of mischief.”

  The broad-shouldered captain broke in. “Sir, aren’t we overlooking the most reasonable explanation? The Chinese no longer think U.S. Treasuries are a good investment, so they’re getting rid of them. They’re doing it in secret in order not to upset the world markets. Or make us angry. We’ve been waiting for the Chinese to dump our Treasuries for a while now.”

  Kline stopped pacing and nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, Captain Mackenzie, that is the most probable explanation.” He scanned the room. “Are we in consensus?”

  There was a general nodding of heads. Kline waited. And then a sly smile cracked the right side of his rugged face. A young, black-haired Army captain rose up from the back of the conference table. She stood ramrod straight, lithe, and naturally athletic, her intense blue eyes focusing in on Kline. Good Lord, she was beautiful, Kline thought, quickly reminding himself that he was happily married, and that coming on to a military subordinate was punishable with life-ruining jail time.

  “Yes, Captain Truffant?” he asked. “You have an alternate theory?”

  “Yes sir, I do,” Alexis Truffant said quietly but surely. “It is only a theory.”

  “For now, everything we say is theoretical. Speak.”

  “Sir, I think . . .” She hesitated. “I think China just declared war on us.”

  The intakes of air around the room were audible. And so was the silence that followed. Kline nodded without saying anything, still staring at Alexis Truffant’s sparkling blue eyes. She was physically beautiful, yes, but she was also in possession of the ability to think logically and independently, no matter what the situation, or how intense the pressure. To Kline, that was true beauty. It was why she was here.

  She continued: “I just think it’s a war we’ve never seen before.”

  • • •

  Kline caught up with Alexis as she waited for the elevator back to her office on the third floor. “Captain Truffant, walk with me.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Alexis turned and quickly fell in step with General Kline. “You want to query me on my war thesis? I have reasons that I think—”

  “No. I agree with you.” Kline cut her off. “Selling our Treasuries in the shadow market is as close to a declaration of war as you can get these days. Even if we’ve been expecting it. And I also agree that it will be a war that we don’t really understand.”

  “Oh, I, I . . .” Alexis stammered in surprise, immediately regretting it, waiting for her boss to jump all over her. She’d been with Kline long enough—two years now—to know he brooked no hesitation or indecision. He wanted the people working for him confident, determined, and forceful—even if they were wrong. But instead of chiding her, he shook his head quickly.

  “Was it Bernstein who spotted this?”

  “No sir, a subordinate in his office.”

  “We have a name?”

  “Garrett Reilly. Twenty-six years old. Bond trader.”

  “Twenty-six? He performed a pretty spectacular feat of intuitive mathematical investigative work.”

  “He did, sir.”

  “We know anything else about him?”

  “His name is on the lease on a two-bedroom apartment in lower Manhattan. He’s in an impressive tax bracket for a twenty-six-year-old. Yale dropout. Graduated Long Beach State with a computer science and math degree.”

  “Dropped out of Yale to go to Long Beach State? Shows a distinct lack of judgment.”

  “Dematriculated Yale two days after his brother was killed . . . in Afghanistan.”

  Kline pulled up short and stared at Alexis. She continued: “Marine Lance Corporal Brandon Reilly. KIA at Camp Salerno, June 2nd, 2008. Sniper round to the neck.”

  Kline said nothing and, for once, didn’t move. Alexis watched him, knowing exactly what gears were turning in her superior’s head. After ten long seconds, Kline nodded slowly, almost imperceptibly. “Garrett Reilly? You think he could be the one?” The question hung in the air. “For Ascendant?”

  Alexis Truffant had asked herself the same question when she first glanced at Garrett Reilly’s file two hours before. She had studied the young man’s picture, his handsome, boyish face, blue eyes, the sullen, almost arrogant smirk on his lips; she had run his brief work and education history through the brute logic processing of her own extremely ordered brain. They’d been looking for someone for more than a year, with no success, and the clock was ticking; funding for the project was about to run out. And so she answered her boss, couching her response as carefully as possible, because Alexis Truffant was, at heart, intensely risk averse: “A distinct possibility, sir.”

  Kline stared at his subordinate, and Alexis knew he was looking for some trace of doubt on her face, some hint of reservation. The Army was a quagmire of double-talk and hedged bets. So she took a deep breath and said it again: “Distinct possibility.”

  Kline nodded, wheeled, and started to walk away. He barked over his shoulder: “You know the drill, Captain. Get to it.”

  “On it, sir,” she said, already running for the elevator.

  4

  NEW YORK CITY, MARCH 24, 9:27 PM

  Garrett sat at a table in the back of McSorley’s, near the bathrooms, where it smelled more like stale urine than stale beer, but he didn’t care because he was with his friends, and the three of them had already plowed through four pitchers of half-and-half and six shots of tequila, and anyway, the back afforded him the best view of all the other half-wits in the crowded East Village bar, and Garrett loved casting scattershot aspersions. Like the four young, gray-suited hedgies at the window, singing an off-key rendition of that stupid Journey song they played to end The Sopranos—he could really hate on them.

  “Fucking hedge-fund guys,” Garrett growled between sips of beer. “Look at those assholes. Hedge funds are a Ponzi scheme. How can people not see that?”

  Mitty Rodriguez, five foot four and two hundred pounds of squat, Puerto Rican gaming programmer, and Garrett’s best friend, raised her beer in a salute. “Why don’t you get off your sorry ass and hit one of them? Knock his teeth out.”

  “Maybe I will,” Garrett said, sizing up the biggest of the hedgies: six foot two, muscled, looked like he might have been a lacrosse player.

  Shane Michelson shook his head. The lanky junior currency analyst with bad skin was by no means a fighter. “Can we please not get kicked out of another bar, Gar
e? Please. I’m running out of happy-hour spots.”

  “Yeah. Sure. Fuck ’em. I’m going to make more money this week than they’ll make in their entire lives.”

  Shane shook his head disbelievingly. “How you gonna do that?”

  Garrett scanned the young women standing at the bar. One caught his attention: striking, tall, olive-skinned. “Dollar’s gonna tank. And I’m going to ride it all the way to the bottom.”

  Shane laughed. “Garrett. I’m a currency analyst. The dollar shows no sign of tanking.”

  “Maybe you’re not a very good currency analyst.”

  Mitty gave out a squeal of delight. “Ooo. Bitch slap. Catfight, catfight!”

  “Fuck you, Garrett.” Shane looked away, pissed. Then his curiosity got the better of him. His friends knew better than to discount Garrett’s boasts entirely; they had a nasty habit of coming true. “What do you know? Tell me.”

  “T-bond dump. It’s coming. Sovereign wealth fund. Flooding the market. Carnage on the horizon.”

  “I didn’t see excess Treasuries on the block.”

  “Federal Reserve probably buying up the excess. So no one panics. Hey, see that girl at the bar?” Garrett nodded. “I think she’s checking me out.”

  “Who would want to kill the dollar? Is it the euro zone? They’re our friends.”

  “She’s a hottie.”

  “Russia? They don’t hold enough of our debt. An Arab state? We’d nuke them. The Japanese? It would sink their economy.”

  “Can we not talk about money for a change?” Mitty said. “I did a forty-man raid on Kel’Thuzad today. Almost took the Citadel, but that pissant Nefarian screwed me . . .”

  Garrett smiled. He and Mitty were kindred souls—tech-obsessed gamers who lived as much online as they did in the real world. They’d met in a first-person shooter chat room and become best friends long before they ever set eyes on each other. Virtual life was what bonded them. That, and a deep-seated love of stirring up trouble. Mitty was the only person Garrett knew who could piss off as many people as he could, and do it faster as well. Some nights it seemed like there were entire neighborhoods of New York City where the two of them were no longer welcome.