The Ascendant: A Thriller

by Drew Chapman

  “A quarter million dollars,” Frye said. “Taxpayer money. Funneled into personal accounts, and thrown away.”

  “I don’t think they were his bets,” Duprés said. “Some of the accounts were out of money within minutes. Reilly is far more sophisticated than that. He had his team do the trades. I think he’s running them through a training exercise. But with real money. Live ammo, if you will.” There was a hint of admiration in the CIA man’s voice—as if Garrett Reilly’s intelligence and cunning had left an impression on him. Kline noted that. It might be useful later.

  Secretary Frye forged ahead. “And did you see this?” he asked, sliding an open laptop to the middle of the table. Its browser was open to Garrett’s anti-China blog. “It’s a website all about how the U.S. is at war with China. Am I crazy, or did you, Mr. President, not tell him directly that he was not to mention that? That this was a stealth operation? That nobody in the nation could know about it? And what does he do?”—Frye shook his head ruefully—“He announces the whole damn thing on the Internet.”

  Kline started to interject: “The blog isn’t traceable back to the Pentagon, or to—”

  “He’s making fools of us.” Frye cut in, slapping the laptop closed. “Just like he did when we brought him to D.C. in the first place. He has an ax to grind with the military because of his brother, and now that we’ve given him power he’s grinding that ax. Hard.” The secretary turned to President Cross, who had sat silently through the entire meeting, sipping his water and occasionally patting down his tie.

  “Mr. President,” Frye said, leaning over the edge of the mahogany conference table. The anger was suddenly gone from his voice; he spoke in a measured, even tone, a model of calm. “Garrett Reilly has given us no reports, no intelligence, no requests for troop movements. He’s done absolutely nothing. Now, do I care particularly about some experimental operation run out of the basement of the Pentagon? In general, no. Could care less. But we cannot wait around for a twenty-six-year-old hacker to fight our battles for us. We no longer have that luxury, if we ever did. It is obvious to every military mind in this room that the Chinese are bent on full-scale war.” He pointed to a bank of TV monitors mounted on the wall behind the commander in chief. One of the monitors showed the coast off eastern China—the South China Sea; the other showed the Sea of Japan. Both were blinking with Chinese naval and air force activity.

  “They steamed five Luzhou class destroyers out of Qingdao this morning, and a Jin class nuclear-powered sub is breaking dock right now. They are heading south to the Strait of Malacca. They secure the Strait, they will be in control of all trade to Japan, Australia, and pretty much anywhere else in the Pacific. One quarter of all the world’s oil goes through those straits. If we don’t get out in front of this, Southeast Asia and all our allies there run the very real risk of being swamped. Overrun by the Chinese.”

  “We don’t know that those are offensive actions,” Kline said, allowing a hint of annoyance to seep into his voice. “They could be naval exercises designed to showcase their sea power.”

  “If they were exercises they would have warned us about them,” Frye said. “Unless your people at the DIA missed something. Like they missed the Treasuries sell-off.”

  Kline winced. He took a long, quieting breath. He was not skilled at the political fight—it was not his passion—but Frye had Ascendant in his sights and was moving in for the kill. The secretary was set on crushing any project that drained money and power away from his office and from traditional military programs. But now was still not the time.

  Frye turned again to the president. “Sir, I believe we are fast approaching a make-or-break moment. They have repeatedly attacked us, our economy, our infrastructure, and now they are preparing for a major military conflict. Southeast Asia could be just the beginning. What we might well be facing is total global war.”

  President Cross frowned and took another sip of his water. Kline watched the president as he considered the secretary’s opinion. To Kline, Cross had never been a visionary—he was more of a caretaker president, pleased to have the job, and anxious not to screw it up. That pushed him toward conservative choices—which was just fine with Kline. He could use the president’s hesitancy. At least he hoped he could.

  “But why, Duke?” the president asked. “Why do they want to go to war with us?”

  Frye drew himself up in his chair. “Sir, I don’t know that it matters. They’re doing it, and we need to get moving. Their motives are, at this point, secondary. This nation must be defended by strength. We let that job fall to the weak and the undisciplined and we are doomed. I may be talking out of line, but with all due respect, sir, I have to pose the question: Do we want to be the administration that lost it all to the Chinese?”

  Kline blinked in surprise. He hadn’t thought the secretary would lay out the issue in such stark—and personal—terms. But he had, playing his realpolitik trump card and at the same time appealing directly to the president’s character flaws: his vanity and his desire for an unsullied legacy. He had to give it to Frye—he was a master of the game. Rumor was he had his eyes on the presidency. The secretary’s ambition was generally acknowledged to be boundless.

  Kline thought he saw the president flinch slightly in agitation. Cross waved a hand in the air. “What are you suggesting we do, Duke?”

  “Scrap the Ascendant program. If we have to, jail Reilly for fraud—”

  Kline barked involuntarily. “Fraud? Give me a break!”

  “He took a million dollars and funneled it into personal accounts. Those are actionable grounds right there,” Frye said. “Then we launch a real piece of military strategy. Steam the Pacific Fleet, battle ready, off the coast of Shanghai. Send the Fifth Fleet out of the Middle East to the Strait. Airlift troops to the eastern border of Kyrgyzstan, and double our forces in South Korea. We can do that in a matter of days. Confront the Chinese with what America does best—overwhelming force. That will put the fear of God in the party leadership and stop them dead in their tracks.”

  The room fell silent. President Cross took another sip of water, carefully wiping the drip of condensation from the glass. After a few moments, he turned to Kline. “General Kline, I know you dreamed up this program, but, frankly speaking—it seems to have turned into a fool’s errand.”

  Kline nodded. This was it. The moment. Ascendant would live or die on what he said.

  “Sir, Ascendant is a roll of the dice. We knew that going in. Yes, Reilly’s lost some money. But I don’t believe it was fraud, and it’s minor in the grand scheme of things. If he’s making anyone look like a fool, it’s me, and so far I’m willing to absorb the humiliation. I still believe in the project. And I believe in Reilly’s talents. But mostly, sir, I question the alternatives. Can we push the Chinese to the brink? Yes. But we haven’t the faintest idea how that would play out. It could escalate out of control in a matter of minutes. Seconds even. History has shown us that wars, once started, take on a life of their own. How many people would die? And who would end up, in the long run, the victor?” He paused and scanned the faces of the other men and women in the Situation Room. “I don’t have that answer, and I would posit that anyone in this room who claims to know is fooling himself.

  “Sir,” Kline continued, his voice low and steady, “I understand the risk. It’s my head on the chopping block as much as anyone’s. But I’m asking you to consider giving Ascendant more time. Not for my sake. Or yours. For the country’s sake.”

  President Cross rubbed his temples slowly with his fingers. The fan on a computer whirred quietly in the corner. All eyes in the room turned to him.

  “Duke,” he said, turning to the secretary of defense, “I’d like a comprehensive written plan of attack from you. Overwhelming force, but take into account casualties. The American people can only accept so many wars in so many years. I don’t want to lose Southeast Asia—but I don’t want Armageddon, either. I’ll expect it on my desk in twenty-four hours.”
>
  “You’ll have it, sir,” Frye said with an air of muted triumph.

  The president turned to Kline. “Reilly’s got two more days. If he gives us nothing, then I’m shutting down the program.”

  Kline exhaled. Two days. It wasn’t a victory, but it wasn’t a defeat, either. Yet. The president stood, signaling that the meeting was over. Everyone in the office stood with him. Cross started for the door, then stopped, turning one last time to look at General Kline.

  “And Hadley, see if you can talk a little sense into the kid. At least get him to tell us what he’s up to. I know he’s a pain in the ass, but, good Lord—video games?”

  51

  THE PENTAGON, APRIL 13, 11:32 AM

  There were two feeds from NSA computers that went directly into the Ascendant war room. One tracked data provenance, the other tracked phone-call patterns. Data provenance—the process of sorting massive amounts of cloud computing intel—was the future of intelligence gathering. But phone-call monitoring was the present. Garrett made sure to check them both once an hour.

  Just before noon on the third day of the Ascendant project’s official/unofficial existence, Garrett noticed a spike in phone calls to the help desks of five regional banks in the southeast U.S.: First Atlanta, Southern Trust, Montgomery Credit Union, Jackson People’s Bank, and Alabama Federal were all receiving massive customer complaints. Unexplained credit-card charges had suddenly started showing up on client statements. Worse, numerous checking accounts in each bank had been drained. When clients looked at their accounts online, they were empty. Zeroed out.

  Nine-one-one calls from fifteen counties in Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama went through the roof. Seven people had heart attacks. Three died.

  Garrett had Bingo and Jimmy Lefebvre investigate. It took them twenty minutes to find the connection. “The banks all outsourced programming of their websites to the same company in Vietnam,” Lefebvre said. “Eastern Star Data Programming, out of Saigon. But they’re not answering their phones.”

  Garrett hunted through his collection of dark net and hacker bulletin boards, and quickly found hundreds of usernames and passwords that had just come up for sale. They’d all originated out of Eastern Star. And they were all from the same five banks in the American South.

  “Someone took a shitload of account info and gave it to hackers all over the world,” Garrett told Bingo and Lefebvre as they stood at his shoulder, peering down at the list of asking prices for the stolen account info. “And then they let the hackers do the real damage.”

  “Smart,” Lefebvre said. “High level of deniability.”

  “Find out details on Eastern Star. Just because they were hacked doesn’t mean the Chinese did it.”

  Lefebvre and Bingo hurried to their computers. Garrett smiled: they were coalescing into a well-oiled machine. He called Kline to tell him what they’d found, but the news had already begun to go viral. Online chatter was exploding. Twitter feeds were buzzing.

  “What can we do?” Kline asked.

  “Well, the money’s all gone already,” Garrett said. “So, basically, nothing.”

  “That’s not good enough,” Kline yelled. “Do you understand the pressure we’re under? I just met with the president. About you! Do you fully understand the stakes?”

  “I guess I understand them now.”

  Kline barked something that Garrett thought sounded like a curse—but he couldn’t be sure—and then hung up on him. Hanging up on each other seemed to have become their preferred method of signing off.

  Bingo came back with more information half an hour later: the outsourced Vietnamese programming company was a wholly owned subsidiary of a Shanghai-based IT conglomerate with ties to highly placed Communist Party leaders, and had been staffed entirely with Cantonese-speaking ethnic Chinese immigrants known in Vietnam as Hoa people. That in itself meant nothing to Garrett—he wasn’t going to let himself get suspicious of every Chinese citizen or company as a knee-jerk response—but Saigon police had just detained a dozen of the company’s employees trying to board a 737 back to Shanghai.

  “Well,” Garrett said, “that’s probably all we need to know.”

  When news of the drained accounts finally hit the Wall Street Journal website an hour later, lines of spooked customers began to form outside the banks’ three hundred branches across the southern United States. They all wanted their money. In cash. Now. On the New York Stock Exchange, each bank’s Class A shares lost a third to half their value in a single afternoon. Just like that. Boom.

  Bingo, Lefebvre, and the rest of the Ascendant staffers watched the CNN coverage on the center digital screen. The war room was silent except for the echoing voice of a young, blond reporter doing a stand-up in front of a suburban Atlanta bank.

  “There is widespread panic here, Vanessa,” the reporter said. “Everyone is very scared about their money.”

  “Score another one for the boys and girls in Beijing,” Garrett said to no one in particular. “They see an opportunity and they jump on it. And they do not fuck around.”

  52

  THE PENTAGON, APRIL 13, 4:32 PM

  “They made you a general?” Avery Bernstein said, eyeing Garrett’s Army uniform scornfully as they walked across the paved pathways of the Pentagon’s open central courtyard. A café building stood in the center of the enclosed area; the high, five-sided inner walls of the structure surrounded them, making the courtyard feel more like a prison than a park.

  “It’s a major’s uniform,” Garrett said. “The president promoted me himself.”

  “The president? Really?” Avery shook his head in wonder. “Not sure whether to congratulate you or give you my condolences. I thought you hated the military.”

  Garrett sighed. His former boss had called at noon, saying he was going to be in D.C. for the day and did Garrett have a few minutes to talk. Garrett had said of course, happy to hear the sound of Avery’s voice, but the moment he hung up he realized that almost no part of the phone call made any sense.

  “You were in D.C. on a business trip? And you knew I was in Washington? How?”

  “They told me you were. A few days ago.” Avery hesitated. “No, that’s a lie. They called me this morning, asked me to come talk to you.”

  “They?”

  Avery swept an arm into the air, gesturing, in one sweep, to the officers and civilians walking through the courtyard with coffee and sandwiches in their hands, but also to the mammoth walls of the Pentagon itself. “Whoever it is you work for. The military. The government. A general named Kline. Said I should tell you to fly right. Get with the program, whatever the hell that program is, and do what you’re supposed to do. Of course he wanted me to be more subtle about it. Play to your patriotism. I said you had no patriotism.”

  “Maybe I’ve changed.”

  “Judging from your clothes, I would say you absolutely have changed.” He looked at Garrett, studying his face. “Not sure it’s for the better, either. Are you on board with everything that uniform represents?”

  Garrett turned away from Avery, hiding the hurt on his face. “When I told you I wanted to short Treasuries because the Chinese were dumping them, you said I had no moral center. Now I’m working for our country and you still give me grief. I can’t win.”

  They walked in silence. A dozen pigeons cooed and pecked at breadcrumbs under a wooden bench.

  “You’re right. I’m sorry,” Avery said, sounding genuinely remorseful. “I don’t always know why I say the things I do.”

  Garrett nodded. “Whatever.”

  “Look, this Kline guy didn’t sound happy, Garrett. Frankly, he sounded a little desperate. What is going on?”

  “Stuff,” Garrett said. “Weird stuff.”

  “Has to do with China?”

  “It might.”

  “The bank run in the South this afternoon?”

  Garrett said nothing. Avery stared long and hard at his former protégé.

  “Don’t look at me like th
at, Avery. I can’t say. Really I can’t.”

  Avery leaned close and whispered, “Are they watching us?”

  “Is who watching us? These guys?” Garrett said, nodding to an Army captain who walked past. “Maybe. Who gives a shit?”

  Avery abruptly grabbed Garrett by the elbow and turned the two of them around. “Walk with me,” he said, quickly moving the two of them toward the Courtyard Café at the center of the park.

  “What are you doing, Avery?”

  Avery pushed open a door to the café and ushered Garrett inside. “Give me two minutes.” The café was mostly empty; a busboy cleared plates from a counter and a waitress emptied a coffee urn. Half a dozen Pentagon staffers read or worked on laptops at tables across the room. Avery put his hand on the small of Garrett’s back and guided him toward the rear of the café. “There,” Avery said. “Men’s room.” He shoved open the men’s room door with his foot, and led Garrett inside. The bathroom gleamed white and smelled of disinfectant.

  Garrett frowned. “Are we gonna have gay sex? ’Cause, weirdly, I’m not in the mood.”

  Avery leaned close and whispered, “Somebody’s been asking for you.”

  Garrett blinked, surprised. “What do you mean?”

  Avery spoke in hushed, clipped clusters of words. “A man. Came to me. He knew about you. About the Treasury bonds. How you’d sniffed them out. He said you’d been taken to Camp Pendleton and that the government had drafted you to work for them.”

  “Who was he?” Garrett asked quietly. They were inches apart.

  “Called himself Hans Metternich,” Avery said. “Doubt it was his real name. He was European, I think. Middle-aged. Handsome. Didn’t seem like a spy. But then again, he didn’t seem not like a spy, either. He asked me to pass you a message.”

  “Christ, Avery, maybe he was a terrorist. What if he wants to kill me? Did you think of that before you went talking to some asshole named Hans?”

  “Then ignore him. But the car bomb at our offices? That almost killed you? He said it wasn’t terrorists.”