The Ascendant: A Thriller

by Drew Chapman

  Alexis stepped into the path of the oncoming sergeants, blocking them both. “He changed the parameters of the game. That’s not cheating. It’s why we chose him in the first place.”

  Secretary Frye lowered his voice threateningly. “You really want to take his side in this, Captain? Because if you knew he was giving out access codes, then you will be court-martialed just as quickly.”

  “She didn’t know anything about it,” Garrett said. “I did it on my own. And if you want to send me to jail for it, fine.” He put out his hands as if ready to be cuffed. “But I think it’d be kind of ironic to arrest me for behaving like the enemy you’re looking to defeat.”

  The two sergeants looked to the secretary for further orders. Duke Frye scowled and waved them forward. “Take him away.”

  “No!” Alexis shouted, sidestepping the first sergeant. She grabbed his wrist and had started to put him into an armlock when a voice rang out, gruff and unhappy.

  “He’s not going anywhere.” General Wilkerson, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stepped into the tent, flanked by a pair of aides, navy commanders in white dress uniforms and blue windbreakers. Captain Marsden, his entire support staff, and Alexis all snapped to attention.

  Secretary Frye blinked in surprise. “General. When did you . . . ?”

  “Last night. I was in San Diego.” He walked up to Secretary Frye and lowered his voice to a whisper. “I don’t want to make you look bad in front of these men, but you’re going to have to let him go.”

  Frye stiffened. “You don’t have the authority.”

  “The president wants him in Washington by nightfall.”

  Frye’s face tightened. He jammed his hands into his coat pockets. “Of course I won’t contradict the president,” he hissed.

  Wilkerson put his arm around Frye’s shoulder. “There are no more rules anymore, Duke. No more rules anywhere.”

  Frye let out an angry breath as HQ radio blared to life. It was the pilot of the lead Cobra gunship: “Sir, we picked up their tracking GPS signal. Enemy is hiding in Mess Hall Seven, off Basilone Road. Should we engage?”

  Everyone in the room looked to Garrett, who turned his hands palms up, in a gesture of sly amusement. “We figured you guys would stash tracking devices in our gear, so we left it all in the mess hall this morning. Not really fair if you’d followed us from the get-go.” Garrett smiled. “But my guys have no coats, so they’re kinda cold outside. Can we call it a day?”

  Captain Marsden grabbed the microphone. “Negative, Cobra One. Field exercise is terminated. Return to base.”

  38

  CAMP PENDLETON, APRIL 9, 8:01 AM

  The Marine Humvee spun gravel as it roared down from the hilltop HQ tent. Garrett sat in back, next to Alexis. General Wilkerson sat in front with the driver. His two aides rode in a follow vehicle. The sun had risen over the mountains; the California chaparral was alive in an explosion of yellows and reds.

  “There’s a naval transport waiting for you at Miramar,” Wilkerson said. “Pack your stuff and get down there in the next hour. They’ll fly you direct to Andrews. The president would like to meet you first thing tomorrow morning.”

  “The president of the United States?” Garrett asked.

  “Yes, that president,” Wilkerson grunted.

  The Humvee pulled up in front of their barracks. The general craned his head back to look at Garrett. “Reilly, I’d advise you to stop pissing off the secretary of defense. He’s a very powerful man. Screw with him too much and he will tear out your heart and eat it while you’re still breathing. You get my meaning?”

  “Yes sir,” Garrett said, liking the general more and more with each moment.

  “I was considering giving you another piece of counsel—which was to stop being such an asshole to everybody, all the time—but it seems to work for you, so carry on.” The general stared at Reilly, then shrugged. “Now get the hell out of my Humvee.”

  Garrett and Alexis scrambled out of the vehicle. The moment the back door closed, the Humvee rumbled off in a cloud of dust. Alexis watched it go, shaking her head in disbelief. “The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff just advised you to keep acting like an asshole. That’s got to be some kind of a first.”

  “What can I say? I’m a trailblazer.”

  Garrett went to his room and stuffed what few clothes he’d accumulated into a backpack, then met Alexis in the building’s open, central room. She had a duffel bag ready at her side. Celeste, Bingo, and Jimmy Lefebvre were standing across the room. None of the three was carrying bags. Garrett pointed to them. “They’re not coming?”

  Alexis shook her head no.

  “I think they should.”

  “They weren’t asked.”

  “They’re part of the team.”

  “I don’t have transit orders for them.”

  Garrett sat down on a rolling office chair. “They don’t go, I don’t go.” Alexis stared at Garrett, astonished. He smiled at the team. “You do wanna come, right? Washington, D.C.? The Lincoln Memorial?”

  Lefebvre laughed in amazement. “Not sure I’ve ever met anyone quite like you.”

  “That’s a good thing, right?” Garrett asked.

  “Never been to D.C.,” Celeste said. “So, yeah, I’m in.”

  “I don’t really love flying,” Bingo said. Celeste glared at him. “But okay.”

  Garrett grinned at Alexis. “Just following the beloved chairman’s advice.”

  • • •

  The U.S. Navy C-37A Gulfstream roared off the tarmac at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, gained altitude quickly over the Pacific, then banked north on its route toward the East Coast. The ten swiveling seats on the inside of the converted business jet were leather, in navy blue and aqua—not as plush as some of the corporate planes Garrett had read about, but plenty nicer than anything he’d ever been on. He laughed as Bingo and Celeste put their feet up and toggled every switch they could find, while Alexis and Lefebvre—the only true noncivilians in the passenger section—tried to play it cool, pulling out briefing folders and pretending to study them. But Garrett could tell they were just as awed as the rest of them.

  Garrett drank a Coke from the onboard fridge, then booted up his laptop. He studied it for an hour, then moved to an empty seat next to Alexis and slid the computer onto a tray in front of her. On the screen was a dense scroll of computer code. Alexis glanced at it, then at Garrett.

  “This supposed to mean something to me?”

  “It’s the malware that took down the Google server farm. Copies of it have been circulating on the Web. I had my friend Mitty in New York take a look at it.”

  “When did you have this done?”

  “Before I got the crap beat out of me. But she e-mailed it to me before we took off from Miramar. The code is very sophisticated.”

  Alexis scanned the lines of code. “Would have to be if it was able to take down Google.”

  “Unfortunately, that’s not the half of it.”

  “Meaning?”

  “You heard of Stuxnet?”

  “The virus that attacked the Iranian nuclear power plant a few years ago?”

  “Actually, it attacked the Siemens-built centrifuges that worked in the Iranian power plant.”

  “Okay.”

  “It was a carefully constructed worm that hid its identity when introduced into a computer. Once inside a computer it checked to see if the computer was running a specific type of Siemens machine. If it wasn’t, the worm shut itself down. But if it found a Siemens centrifuge, it replicated itself and attacked the programmable logic controller. Which was big shit, because PLCs run everything in this world. Almost anything mechanical has a PLC in it. Assembly-line machines, stoplights, airplane controls.”

  “The plane we’re on . . . ?” Alexis asked nervously.

  Garrett nodded. “Is chock-full of PLCs. Once you start attacking PLCs with computer worms and malware, the hacking genie is out of the bottle. That’s why people we
re so upset about Stuxnet. And angry at the countries that might have created it.”

  “Us?”

  “Maybe. Or Israel. Or both of us, together. We’ll never know for sure. Once Stuxnet was inside the Siemens machines, it took over the PLCs and started issuing bogus commands. It threw the Iranian centrifuges off kilter, spun them really fast, and centrifuges are delicate things, but it also made the machines send out false readings that made the technicians monitoring them think everything was fine. The centrifuges spun themselves out of service and were destroyed.”

  “So the code I’m looking at on your computer did the same thing to Google’s PLCs?”

  “Ran their hard drives at one hundred times maximum speed. Overheated in minutes. Ruined them all. Shut the entire server farm down. Destroyed millions of dollars’ worth of machinery.”

  “But you’ve isolated it. It can be stopped?”

  “Isolated, yes. And stopped at Google.”

  “But not on other computers?”

  “Mitty got about halfway through, but couldn’t get any further because the code was written to self-destruct—erase itself basically—twenty-four hours after use. The copies were incomplete, but she thinks there’s more to it. That it’s hidden in layers under the erased level of code.”

  “I’m not liking the sound of that.”

  “She thinks the Google attack was a test run. To see if it would work on a heavily fortified network.”

  “So there’s another target?”

  “The code is complex, and the commands are hidden. But there are hints. Of another worm. A companion. That’s probably already in circulation. Letters strung together. Binary code that references pieces of machinery.”

  “What kind of machinery?”

  Garrett scrolled through the code, stopping at a section dense with stop/repeat and if/then commands. “General Electric machinery. Specifically boiling-water reactors.”

  “Boiling-water reactors? You mean like they use in nuclear power plants?”

  Garrett nodded.

  “Oh shit.”

  “Gets worse,” Garrett said. “The execute command date is today.”

  39

  CHENGDU, CHINA, APRIL 9, 9:04 PM

  Hu Mei was happy, even though she was surrounded by people she barely knew. She’d just eaten the first home-cooked meal she’d had in months, and it had been delicious, if strange. The air in the small dining room was thick with the smell of aniseed, shallots, ginger, chili peppers sautéing in sesame oil, and freshly steamed cod. She had drunk two entire glasses of húangjĭu, or yellow wine, which was rare for Hu Mei. She almost never drank alcohol, but the food tonight had been lăo là le (“very spicy”), as hot as you could get in Sichuan cooking. She wasn’t used to spicy Sichuan food. It had made her mouth and tongue numb; she had needed the wine to keep from choking.

  The wine had made her tipsy—enough so that the dining room in the old masonry-block home seemed cozy instead of small, and the family that had fed her—the Lu family; a barking mother, a sullen father, two laughing uncles, a garrulous grandmother, a shy young girl, and three overly friendly dogs—seemed amusing instead of foreign and raucous. They had a modest home on a sloping hillside, fifteen miles outside of Chengdu, with a dirt yard in back, some chickens, and a pig.

  One of the uncles was a loyal supporter, vetted through and through, and he had vouched for the rest of his family; they knew who Hu Mei was, and who was after her, but still she would be safe here tonight. Once a supporter brought her into their home, the rest of the family had to keep quiet out of self-preservation—there was no telling who the government would decide to arrest or prosecute. If you harbored a traitor to the state, your entire family was suspect. It was twisted logic, but it worked to Hu Mei’s continuing advantage. The party, Hu Mei had learned, could be its own worst enemy.

  The Lu daughter—Mei thought her name was Jia Li—cleared the dinner plates, careful not to spill any food. They were not rich; food would never be wasted. Mei guessed her to be about eleven, bony and awkward, head bowed and hair tied up in back. She shuffled in slippers across the poured-concrete floor.

  That was me twenty years ago, Hu Mei thought to herself. The little girl clearing plates for her family, hurrying to heat water so she could wash dishes in the kitchen. That had been hard work for a young girl, but Hu Mei had done it without fail, her mother coming to help when the men started talking about planting or the weather. She missed her family. A wave of sadness passed over Mei. She missed her husband, Yi. It had been a long, lonely year since his death.

  At the table, the two uncles started to argue about sports. Something about a man named Jeremy Lin, and was he really Chinese? He had been born in San Francisco, one of the uncles said, but his parents were Taiwanese, and that made him Chinese. Hu Mei had only the faintest idea who Jeremy Lin was—she guessed he played basketball, probably in America. One of the uncles was demanding that Lin return to China and play for the Shanghai Sharks.

  “It is the only honorable thing to do,” he said. “It is his blood!”

  They began to shout. Everyone had an opinion. At the beginning of the meal they had treated Hu Mei with a quiet respect—she was an infamous dissident, and any notoriety was a form of status in China now—but once everyone had had their fill of wine, the real Lu family was revealed, and they were a chaotic, bickering bunch.

  Hu Mei quietly excused herself from the table and slipped into the kitchen. The shouting receded into the distance. The daughter was dutifully washing dishes in the sink. Mei grabbed a small dish towel and started to dry them.

  “No, no,” Jia Li said, looking horrified. She stepped sideways to block Mei’s path to the wet plates and cups. “You mustn’t. I will clean.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Hu Mei said. “They are talking about a basketball player. I don’t care about basketball. Or basketball players.” Hu Mei smiled at the young girl. “I think I don’t even care about people who talk about basketball players.”

  Jia Li laughed. She shot a quick look at the dining room. “If my mother comes in, then will you stop helping, please? Before she sees you?”

  Mei nodded with a grin. “Of course.” She understood the family code: a guest could not help clean or cook. That would be an unforgivable breach of etiquette.

  Jia Li returned to scrubbing dishes, and Hu Mei dried them at her side. It gave her a quiet pleasure to return to a mindless domestic chore. All those months making decisions and leading people had taken a toll on Hu Mei. Lately, she yearned for the tranquil rhythms of her past life; if they found her drying dishes, so be it.

  “May I ask you a question, please?” Jia Li said, pausing in her cleaning.

  “Of course. Ask me anything.”

  “Why do you hate China?”

  Hu Mei’s breath caught in her throat.

  “My mother says you want to destroy the country. That you want to tear down the government. And we will all suffer. No more jobs. No more food.”

  Hu Mei tried to force an easy smile to her lips. How could she explain herself to this little girl? If she were a true revolutionary, she would have a homily at the ready—something about the people, the government, with animals perhaps as the characters, frogs or foxes, to make it all easily digestible. Simple. Plainspoken.

  “It is like doing the dishes,” Mei said. “You don’t enjoy doing it, but your parents tell you to, so you must. Everyone listens to their parents. But China is not your parent . . . China is a place.” Her voice sounded thin and desperate. She stuttered to a stop. “No . . . what I mean is . . .”

  Jia Li stared at her, confusion in her eyes. Hu Mei grimaced. She was no revolutionary. She was a peasant from Huaxi Township. How could she explain the death of her husband? The grief? The loss of her home, her farm? The anger of her neighbors? How could she explain to this little girl about the corruption that lived everywhere around her? That was throttling the people of the nation?

  Before she could say another word, Jia Li’s
mother stepped into the kitchen, carrying an armful of dishes. The moment she saw Hu Mei and her daughter, face-to-face, clearly in the middle of a conversation, her face froze in a disapproving scowl. She rushed between the two of them, laying her dishes in the sink. “I will finish the cleaning,” she said quickly, authoritatively. “Jia Li, go to bed. Right away. Now. Go.”

  Jia Li bowed and scurried toward the door. Mei quivered in frustration. She had to say something. She could not let this child—this miniature version of herself—go away thinking that everything Hu Mei had done was destructive. Was evil.

  “Jia Li,” Hu Mei called out, her brain suddenly clear. The little girl stopped. “You are a lovely child.” The girl looked up at her. “May you have everything you desire in this life. Love. Wealth. Children . . .”

  The girl brightened.

  “And justice,” Hu Mei continued. “Perhaps one day even . . . power.”

  Jia Li stared at Hu Mei, brow tight in thought, then she ducked her head once more, and hurried from the room. Her mother watched her go, then stared daggers at Hu Mei, who instinctively ducked her head as well.

  “Please forgive my intrusion,” Mei said. “Although I am grateful for your hospitality, I will not burden you with my presence. I will collect my belongings and leave right away.”

  She walked for the door, newly sober and weary once more, certain only that she would not be sleeping in a cozy, warm bed tonight. Perhaps she would find a secluded field and an old blanket. And under the cold, dim stars, she would work on her revolutionary homilies.

  40

  45,000 FEET OVER GARY, INDIANA, APRIL 9, 5:31 PM

  Bingo knew what trouble was all about.

  He’d grown up in Oakland; his dad was black, a high school history teacher, but his mom was white, an ex-hippie who took great pleasure in stirring the pot—strikes, protests, civil disobedience, you name it, she signed up for it. Bingo had taken crap for his mom’s antics—and her race—pretty much every day of his life. He’d been taunted, chased, beat up. As a result, Bingo tried like hell to avoid confrontation. And other people. He was happiest in his room, shades drawn, with a book or a video game, studying the specs on the latest iPhone or dissecting Hitler’s mistakes at the Battle of Stalingrad.