The Ascendant: A Thriller

by Drew Chapman

  Mao had struck fear in all those who opposed him, whether in the ruling class of China’s corrupt government, or in the lackeys who worked for him once the Communists seized power. Mao was tough when he had to be, and then brutal later on when being humane would have sufficed. He was a committed partisan, and he never showed weakness. It was Mao who had single-handedly shaped what was now modern China, and no matter what reforms had been implemented since his death, no matter how much growth and capitalism had been allowed to flourish in the country, it was Mao’s shadow that blanketed the country. It was his steely personality that ruled the Communist Party. And it was the party that ran China.

  Only Garrett wasn’t so sure that Mao, were he alive today, would be so happy with the state of modern China: the wild disparity between rich and poor, the population drain from interior farms to coastal cities, the growing power of the party and the disenfranchisement of the peasants. Everything that Mao had fought so hard against was now the norm in modern China. The bureaucrats and princelings in the party today more resembled the corrupt aristocrats of prerevolutionary China than they did the reformers of Mao’s heyday. And things were clearly getting worse—the locomotive that was Chinese modernization was barreling down the tracks, unchecked.

  Everything they had studied in the past week painted a picture of a country deep in the wilds of change, a change so profound and all-encompassing as to render the nation unrecognizable, even to people who had visited it as recently as ten years ago. And if the last time you’d visited China was in 1976, when Mao died, then you’d feel like a space traveler visiting an entirely new planet. China had completely remade itself.

  All of which led Garrett to the realization, finally, at 3:30 in the morning, lying on his bunk, that the leaders of modern China might revere Mao, but if he were to miraculously walk into a party Politburo meeting tomorrow morning . . . he’d probably have them all shot.

  25

  CAMP PENDLETON, APRIL 4, 6:17 AM

  On the morning of day four Garrett began to get his wind back.

  He’d gotten up before Alexis and started a run on his own. Something about being on a military base and seeing all the other young men and women working at being fit made him want to give it a try. He ran hard, sweating, grunting, straining, even sprinting up and down a few hills. Garrett thought this wasn’t just progress but a minor miracle. His legs still ached with each stride, but his gag reflex lessened, and his toes didn’t chafe horribly into the front of his running shoes. He even found he wasn’t longing for a bong hit quite so desperately.

  “Good pace on those hills,” Alexis said as she caught up with him at the base of the last incline before their barracks. She wasn’t even panting. “Didn’t think you had it in you.”

  “Is that supposed to make me feel better or worse?”

  Alexis shrugged, then sprinted past him up the dirt path. Garrett didn’t bother trying to match her speed up the hill; he was happy just to finish without doubling over.

  He paused at the top of the bluff and watched the Marines as they practiced and maneuvered on Camp Pendleton’s seemingly endless expanse of scrub brush and beach. Each morning he had observed them as he shuffled past—watched as motorized assault vehicles splashed off landing boats and onto smooth beaches, listened as lieutenants urged their platoons over crumbling concrete walls, and studied silently as swarms of new recruits fired, ducked, advanced, and then fired again at the myriad shooting ranges scattered across the base.

  It was on this hillside that Garrett began to glimpse the dread groupthink that the general had mentioned; the bravery, the physical fitness, but also the mindless obedience and grinding repetition. He began to think that to be a soldier was to be worn down, stripped of one’s distinct and original thoughts, and then remade into a killing machine, an automaton that did what it was told.

  There was something distinctly wrong about that—all those men and women, doing what they were told without question, never stopping to probe at the efficacy of the commands being barked at them. He didn’t even have to go so far as to think about lives being at stake, grieving families being left behind—he knew all about that—no, what was wrong with what he was observing was much simpler: it seemed like a waste of brain power.

  And that, to Garrett, was inexcusable.

  • • •

  When he returned to the barracks, Alexis, Bingo, Celeste, and Lefebvre were already sifting through a new batch of intelligence briefs. Garrett grabbed a stack and thumbed through them. Half an hour in, a small dispatch buried deep in a natural-resources report caught his attention. A demolition expert named Sawyer had called an FBI field office in Denver a week ago to report a job he’d done for an undisclosed client: destroying the Henderson Canyon Molybdenum Mine. The FBI had tried to contact the DIA, but the message hit detours within the interagency bureaucracy. And, anyway, it was too late—the mine had already been blown; the molybdenum inside it was unrecoverable.

  “Hey, Bingo,” Garrett asked, still in his sweatpants and T-shirt. “Molybdenum. We use that for military stuff, right?”

  “Transition metal,” Bingo answered. “Used in alloys in fighters, tanks, satellites, missiles.”

  Garrett looked up the mine’s ownership online. An international consortium had bought the mine, and the House Energy and Commerce Committee had rubber-stamped the sale. Rare earth metal mining was a high-cost, low-margin pursuit. An Australian businessman had been the figurehead for the consortium, and had promised to keep the mine open, but he resigned two weeks after the purchase and was nowhere to be found.

  “We need to do a chain-of-title search,” Garrett told Alexis. “I think this is important.”

  Alexis called the DIA, and within an hour an analyst called back. He had worked up a paper trail for the buying consortium—loans, stock guarantees, and voting-rights certificates—that led east, across the Pacific, and ended on the shores of Victoria Harbor, in the glittering office buildings of downtown Hong Kong. It was circumstantial evidence, but Garrett thought it damning.

  “The Chinese government was behind this,” Garrett said.

  “All that money just to destroy a mine? Seems like a waste,” Celeste said.

  “Not really,” Garrett replied. “Now we’re at their mercy. They’ve cornered a rare earth metal market. They’ll make back their investment by raising prices at Chinese mines in a year. Maybe less. And we’re screwed.”

  “That’s if it really was the Chinese that did it,” Lefebvre countered.

  “It was them. Guaranteed.”

  Lefebvre shot Garrett a skeptical look. “And why are you so sure, Mr. Reilly? Maybe it was just international businessmen making a cost–benefit decision.”

  Garrett leaned back in his chair and thought about this. Why was he so sure? It wasn’t a full-blown pattern, but something about it ran a shiver through the base of his spine in a familiar way. Mines. Money. Destruction. Rare earth metals. They were linked, that much was obvious, but there was also an organizing principle at work here. What was it?

  “Mao,” Garrett said, the answer coming to him in a flash.

  “Excuse me?” Lefebvre said.

  “Mao would have destroyed that mine. Asymmetric warfare. Destabilize a more powerful enemy through targeted hit-and-run attacks on his materiel infrastructure. Mao did it all the time during the revolution. The party reveres Mao. They’re just doing what he would have done.” Garrett looked over to the lieutenant. “I’m sure . . . because it fits.”

  Lefebvre stared at Garrett in amazement: “You read the books I gave you?”

  “Yep,” Garrett said. “Mao’s books in particular: On Guerrilla Warfare. Political Democracy. Also two biographies.” Garrett shrugged. “Truth is, I skimmed the bios.”

  Garrett thought he saw a trace of a smile forming at the corners of Lefebvre’s face. “Well, since you put it that way,” Lefebvre said, adjusting his glasses and leaning back in his chair. “I have to concur with Mr. Reilly. It was the Chinese
government.”

  Garrett beamed: he suspected he’d just broken through to the lieutenant.

  Alexis looked over at Lefebvre in surprise, but before she could say anything, Celeste nodded vigorously from the other side of the table: “I’m with them. China.”

  Bingo ducked his head. “Me too.”

  Garrett grinned as Alexis let out a short breath, pushed back her chair, and stood up. She was still dressed in her running shorts and a fitted Lycra top.

  “All right, then,” she said. “I’ll call Washington.” She paused and shot each of the four of them a quick look, almost, Garrett thought, as if to give them another chance to tell her that they considered Garrett a lunatic. But nobody said anything, and Alexis strode quickly out of the room, pulling out her cell phone as she left.

  When she returned a minute later she stared right at Garrett, a look of what he could only describe as satisfaction on her face, as if she were thinking, Son of a bitch, we might have something here after all. But she didn’t say that. What she said was: “Shower up. We need to keep going.”

  “Yes ma’am,” Garrett said, and headed back to his room.

  • • •

  Bingo Clemens caught the real estate sell-off in Las Vegas later that morning. Celeste was running Garrett through a primer on Confucian ethics on the other side of the room, and Bingo was using his free time to trawl military blogs. Someone had posted a comment on a blog out of Nellis AFB outside of Vegas about all the condos that had come on the market, and how no one knew who had done it.

  Rumors were spreading about a precipitous drop in prices and two real estate brokers who had committed suicide. Someone else wrote that he’d heard the New York Times had been calling around, but their reporters couldn’t find the original owners of the seven hundred properties. They’d all been sold through multiple limited-liability corporations from around the country, with dummy names and fake addresses. In Nevada, all it took was ten minutes and seventy-five dollars to create your own LLC online. In other states it was even easier.

  Bingo took the news to Alexis.

  “Interesting,” she said. “How’d you find it?”

  “Well,” Bingo said, “I was trying to think in patterns. Like Garrett.” He scratched at the scruff on his chin, then gave her a crooked smile. “He’s badass.”

  Alexis almost spit out her coffee. “Okay,” she said, recovering. “Go tell the group.”

  Bingo called the team together and told them about the mystery he had discovered.

  “Not a mystery,” Garrett said. “We all know exactly who did it. It dovetails perfectly with the mine destruction and the Treasuries sell-off. A high-value asset sold suddenly and without warning at a considerable loss. Owners who go to great lengths to stay hidden. And no obvious purpose to the transactions other than to freak people out. They’re sowing chaos in the American economy.”

  “Well, we’ll need to prove that,” Alexis said. “So—any ideas?”

  There was momentary silence, until Bingo raised a hand from the corner. “The DIA has supercomputers, right?”

  Alexis nodded.

  “We could ask them to drill down into online incorporation records. There’s gotta be state databases that their computers could sort through pretty fast.”

  “Worth a try,” she said and handed Bingo her cell phone. “Call Kline. Have him hook you up with Analytics.”

  “I’m really not so good on the phone asking people for—” Bingo started to say.

  “Badasses know how to work the phones,” Alexis said, cutting him off.

  Bingo frowned and took the phone. He called General Kline and told him, with Garrett at his side, coaching him, what they wanted without mentioning any specifics, and Kline forwarded him to an information officer. Bingo gave the guy a couple dozen search parameters—Las Vegas, condominiums, thirty-year-fixed mortgages, LLC, real estate corps, among others—and a five-year time frame, and asked, politely, if he could please expedite the search.

  The results came back in half an hour. Most of it was white noise, but one name did surface a few too many times to be completely random: an offshore shell company in the Bahamas called Fifty-Four MT. The owners were listed as local Bahamians, but when Alexis called, they knew nothing about the business, claimed to have been paid five hundred bucks to sign the ownership documents, and generally sounded very, very drunk.

  It seemed like a dead end. They couldn’t exactly blame the Bahamas. But Garrett wouldn’t let it go. “The name is a clue,” he said, scowling. “Somebody out there wants us to figure it out.”

  That was all the prodding it took for Celeste Chen. “It’s not just a clue, it’s code,” she said. “Fifty-Four MT? MT might stand for, what? Mount? Mountain? Montana? The fifty-fourth mountain in Montana?”

  She spoke to herself quietly and quickly, pacing, while everyone else watched her, then let out a guttural grunt of surprise and revelation.

  “No, not fifty-four—you idiot!” she blurted out. “Five. Four. Fifth month, fourth day. May fourth. MT stands for movement, not mountain. The May Fourth Movement. It’s a historic anti-imperialism protest from the 1920s. It’s considered the birth moment of Chinese communism.”

  Bingo, Alexis, and Lefebvre broke out in spontaneous applause. Garrett just nodded his head. “Good code breaking,” he said. “Seriously cool.”

  “Well done,” Alexis said to Celeste. Then she turned to the rest of the team. “All of you. Well done.”

  Alexis typed up a report and sent it in an e-mail to General Kline, who dutifully relayed the information to the Treasury Department and the president. That afternoon, a dozen unnamed real estate speculators flew into Vegas’s McCarran airport and started snapping up condos for 25 percent over listing price, no questions asked. The Las Vegas real estate market wobbled, but it didn’t collapse.

  Just before nightfall, Kline cc’ed the entire team on a one-word e-mail. It said, simply: Nice. Garrett laughed when he read it, but he couldn’t deny that he enjoyed the praise, however bare-bones.

  26

  THE DALLES, OREGON, APRIL 4, 7:09 PM

  Lillian Pradesh knew computers. She had grown up with them, practically having one thrust into her crib when she was a baby. Her father, an Indian immigrant and Microsoft engineer, had made sure of it. “The computer is the future,” he had said. “Make it a part of your body.” And so she had. She could code with the best of them. She could debug any piece of software. She could network a hundred computers together in less than two hours. She could build her own laptop, work station, even a mainframe. And she had, more times than she could remember—the first one at the tender age of nine. All of these skills had gotten her a free ride at MIT, a postgraduate degree from Carnegie Mellon, and a sweet job at Google. At thirty-one, she was the youngest director of regional network operations the company had ever had.

  Her fiefdom was two football field–sized buildings on the banks of the Columbia River in The Dalles. Their code name was 02, and inside the massive, bland, white buildings were 150,000 clustered computers, housed in semi-truck-sized containers, with massive fans blowing cool air up into them twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year.

  Lillian monitored the servers night and day. She was familiar with all the specs—top secret of course—and every piece of hardware and software in the place. Routers, switches, hard drives, DNS servers, filters, firewalls. Everything. You might even say that she loved the servers, all 150,000 of them. Loved their humming efficiency, loved the way they spat out answers in milliseconds, directing search results to every conceivable corner of the globe. She felt, as her father had told her, that they were an extension of herself. A part of her body.

  So on a late Monday afternoon, when her screen flickered a warning about a malware intrusion on one of their servers, she took it personally. It happened every day, all the time, and yet it still made her skin crawl. These were her servers, damn it. They were as much a part of her personality as her sense of humor. How dare anyone a
ttack them?

  It was a small piece of code, buried deep in the operating instructions of a quad core 2.5 GHz Pentium class, Linux-based squid server. It was currently up and running, so she couldn’t look at the code until she had isolated it and killed it. She wasn’t too worried, because the Google security software was written to automatically block malicious code on infected servers from the rest of the farm. And it did that, all in the bat of an eye. But then that same piece of malware showed up in another container’s worth of servers, this one in building two, unconnected to the first infected container.

  Immediately, the security software isolated that container as well. Lillian breathed a sigh of relief. She would have to call her superior, the director of all networking operations in Silicon Valley. She did a quick scan of the malware. It was self-replicating, as all malware was, and well hidden. Lillian checked the access requests buried in the server logs. They were essentially a road map of what the malware had been doing. What jumped out at Lillian right away was the access request in the data head of the code. It was asking to get into the programmable logic controller data bloc—or PLC—in the original server software. This was seriously treacherous code, aimed at shutting down servers in a big way. She still couldn’t read it, but she could see what it was up to. It seemed to be trying to rewrite code in the brain stem of her beloved servers. That wasn’t hard in and of itself—many cyber attacks tried to do just that. What was surprising was that it had gotten past the initial Google intrusion prevention software. The company had some of the best computer security code in the world. In Lillian’s opinion, it was the best in the world.