The Ascendant: A Thriller

by Drew Chapman

  The main problem was that she didn’t know exactly what she was looking for. Had it been the mention of a specific person or an incident, she could have scanned whole pages quickly, and dispensed with enormous sections of the papers that were extraneous. But Garrett had been vague: he wanted evidence of something that might be worrying the central government, and that could be almost anything. The leaders of the Chinese Communist Party were a skittish group of old men who saw phantom enemies at almost every turn. When the Arab world erupted in protest in the spring of 2011—and was called by some the Jasmine Revolution—the party banned the selling of jasmine anywhere in the country. Jasmine farmers were wiped out, all on the potential linkage of a flower with rebellion. The party leadership was spooked by its own shadow.

  On day three she went back to the war room and told Garrett that she was no good at finding patterns. “It’s not what I do.”

  “Well, learn,” he said. “It’s your job.”

  Celeste was used to Garrett being a jackass, but it occurred to her that he had gotten noticeably more obnoxious since Alexis had disappeared. Celeste guessed that they must have had a thing; now Alexis had flown the coop and Garrett was hurting. That surprised Celeste—not the realization that they had shacked up, which seemed perfectly reasonable, but that Garrett cared if a woman left him or not. To Celeste, Garrett seemed incapable of adult emotion. She would have figured he saw Alexis Truffant as just another conquest.

  Huh, she thought, you learn something new about people every day.

  So she continued hunting, angry, but persistent. She read through each article that could be of interest, from beginning to end: an old woman’s lawsuit over property rights in Tianjin; an artist’s arrest for painting a mural deemed threatening to the state; a truck driver’s sit-in on the highway that linked Beijing to the western coal mines. Even innocuous stories held the promise of a tidbit of information: a school assembly about teacher firings in a rural district outside of Wuhan hinted at parent discontent, but revealed little else; a ceremony where a medal of gratitude was given to a citizen of Xi’an after he plucked a woman from an icy river talked about the food line that the woman had been standing in, but nothing else in that day’s paper mentioned it; a murder trial was shut down in a northern Yingkou courthouse after one of the witnesses had an outburst about the corrupt local provincial committee chair, but the trial—and the witness—were never mentioned again. They were promising threads, but they led nowhere.

  Celeste also scoured social media sites. Unfortunately for her, Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr, and Twitter were all banned by the Chinese government; they sat behind the infamous Golden Shield—the Great Wall of Censorship—a vast array of computers filtering and blocking every byte of digital information that entered the country. The native social networking sites—Sina Weibo, RenRen, YouKu—were heavily censored, although Chinese users had become adept at slipping euphemisms past the government monitors. “Great Actor” meant the prime minister—he’d been called that in a dissident’s novel. “Sixty-Four” was code for June 4, the date of the Tiananmen Square massacre. But the party censors caught on quickly, and even the code words were scrubbed, usually within hours of first appearing online.

  More informative—and lively—were blogs, loaded on anonymous servers, or sometimes through machines in Hong Kong or Macau, and photo essays. The photos masqueraded as tourist albums posted for the pride of China, but if you studied them carefully you could parse out bits and pieces of useful information on local goings-on: a smattering of antigovernment graffiti, a soldier standing guard over a town that wouldn’t seem to need guarding, a billboard partially defaced by a street artist before it was discovered and torn down by the authorities. But these, too, were hard to find, and required days, if not months or years, of searching. You had to be lucky, rather than good, to get hard intel from these scattered sources.

  But then, on the morning of her fourth long day in the Alexandria Commons strip mall Starbucks, Celeste Chen got lucky.

  She got very, very lucky.

  56

  THE PENTAGON, APRIL 14, 2:22 PM

  Celeste found Garrett ensconced at his desk in the war room, deep into an online shooter game. She didn’t recognize the game, and didn’t care.

  “Garrett,” she said, sitting next to him. “I found something.”

  Maybe it was the tone of her voice—or maybe he was finally bored of so many hours of video games—but Garrett put his controller down immediately and swiveled his chair to face Celeste. “I’m all yours.”

  “You know how I’ve been looking through newspapers, social networks, but haven’t found anything?”

  “I’m aware.”

  “Well, I started searching blogs. About China. That were written by people who had been in China but had left. I figured they had the freedom to write about their experiences and post them without Chinese government interference.”

  “Smart,” Garrett said.

  “I found a travel blog written by a Chinese-American. Adopted. In her twenties. She went back to China to try to make contact with her birth parents.”

  “Is this unusual?”

  “No. Adopted Americans pour back into China on a daily basis. But here’s the thing—she had narrowed down her search to a coal-mining province in central China. Real poor area. Targeted an orphanage in Huaxi Township. Small place. Rural. Finally, she gets there, only the authorities won’t let her in. She has to wait in a neighboring town. She speaks Mandarin, says everybody’s on edge, but she can’t figure out why. Finally, a week passes, soldiers let her into Huaxi Township, only the place is silent. No one will talk to her, a bunch of the homes are empty. Everyone in the township is scared. She doesn’t know why. The orphanage is shut down, she’s disappointed, goes back to the States and writes about it. She doesn’t give it a whole lot of thought because it’s got nothing to do with finding her parents, quits writing, goes back to her job as an administrative assistant in Cincinnati.”

  “Okay,” Garrett said, looking carefully at Celeste. “I’ll be honest. That doesn’t sound like much.”

  “I did a search for Huaxi Township after that. Baidu search, websites, newspapers, official bulletins. There was nothing.”

  “Well, maybe nothing happened in—how do you pronounce it?”

  “Huwa-shee. But almost every township, no matter how small, gets some kind of mention in some kind of official document, somewhere in China. Or mentioned on Sina Weibo. It’s their social media. At least once in six months. Huaxi Township is mentioned every week or so before November 16th of last year. After that, nothing.”

  “Okay. Interesting. But maybe it’s been slow there for a while.”

  “Maybe. But then I thought maybe we’ve been looking for the wrong thing all this time. We’ve been looking for an incident. A protest, a trial, a piece of political theater. Something we can grasp and say, This is the cause. But that’s not how modern China works. So I started looking for the absence of anything. Negative space. A void.”

  Celeste watched Garrett’s reaction. She knew him well enough by now to guess that he would pick up on her line of reasoning very quickly. Sure enough, he tilted his head ever so slightly, his eyes boring into hers. “As if there had been an incident, but someone erased it?”

  Celeste nodded, hands waving excitedly now: “So then I did searches on the citizens of the township. I could only find half the residents listed in the population census. Okay, maybe they don’t keep good records. Weird, but possible. They tend to keep very good records in China.”

  “I’m liking this,” Garrett said.

  “It gets better. I searched for surrounding townships, villages. In the week or so after November 16th they were all mentioned regularly online. Then, one by one, like lights going out, they disappear from view.” She plugged an ethernet cable into her laptop and a map of north-central China flashed on Garrett’s right-hand computer monitor. It was centered on rural Huaxi Township. Huaxi was in red. Then it went bl
ack. As Celeste clicked on a timeline, a narrow swath of rural geography turned black alongside it, bit by bit.

  “Watch the black grow. Late November. Early December. Christmas. January. Late January.” A widening gyre of black began to emerge in the center of the map. “All these districts and villages have disappeared from social media and the news. It’s the opposite of news. Negative news. A void.”

  Garrett stared at her. “That,” he muttered, “is a pattern. That’s a fucking pattern.”

  “Yes,” Celeste said, knowing she had just received the highest order of compliment from her newly promoted boss. “It is.”

  Garrett turned to her: “So what happened? I mean, what was the incident?”

  “The news and background on the area has been picked pretty clean. Here’s what we do know: before November 16th of last year, the biggest employer in town was a plastics-petrochemical plant. Built four years earlier. They specialize in chlorine solvent derivatives, including highly toxic pesticides, but they have a wide range of products. Shipping mostly to the Middle East and Africa. Owned by a consortium of bigwigs in Shanghai, almost all of them with strong party connections.”

  “Maybe there was an explosion or a gas leak, killed a bunch of people, they swept it under the rug?”

  “Could be. But industrial accidents happen regularly in China, and the government might hush it up, but they aren’t obsessive about it. And they eventually punish the guilty, even if they are well-connected. We’d hear about it. But whatever this is, they’ve clamped down on it like a vise. So I went back further, to before the plant was built. There was land appropriation involved. Land rights are an evolving issue in China. It’s still, technically, a Communist state. The government owns everything. But when industrialists want land for a factory, they usually get it. As far as I can tell, that’s what happened in Huaxi. There was a smattering of protests, but it went nowhere.”

  “So we’re back to zero?” Garrett said, his voice deflating.

  “No. Almost zero. But not quite.” Celeste tapped onto her laptop and a new picture flashed on Garrett’s screen. It was of a young woman, Asian, pretty, standing in an open-air market in a small town. She was trying to smile, surrounded by vendors hawking crates of eggplant and garlic, but her heart clearly wasn’t in it, the edges of her mouth turned slightly upward in forced gaiety.

  “That’s the author of the travel blog. Her name is Annie Sinclair Johnston. Her traveling companion, a girlfriend, took this photo a day after they left Huaxi Township on their way to Beijing. She posted them on Facebook, and tagged Annie. That’s how I found it. The name of the town is Dengxu. It’s about fifty kilometers from Huaxi. And the date of the photo would put it about twenty-four hours ahead of the government news vacuum. Notice anything?”

  Garrett stared at the picture. There was nothing unusual about it: just a tourist posing in a slightly exotic local marketplace. But then he saw it. “The guy. The vegetable seller. In the background.”

  Celeste nodded and then zoomed in on a young man standing behind and to the right of the girl in the photograph. He had turned his face from the camera, obscuring it, but in his hand he held a piece of paper with Chinese characters written on it. It looked like a price tag for the eggplant in the basket at his feet.

  Garrett stared, transfixed. “He’s turning away from the camera. He doesn’t want his face photographed.”

  “But he did want the sign taken,” Celeste said. “He photo-bombed them.”

  “What’s it say? My Chinese is rusty,” Garrett said.

  “Yu Hu. It means: I’m with the tiger.”

  “The Tiger?”

  “Hu is a Chinese surname. But with a slight change in intonation, it can also mean tiger.”

  Garrett was silent as he absorbed, and then quickly processed, this information. “You’re saying it’s the equivalent of flashing a gang sign? That he’s telling us he backs this person Hu. That he’s a supporter?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

  Garrett shook his head skeptically. “That seems like a stretch. A major stretch.”

  “Clearly you’ve been too busy playing Modern Killbot to read every word of our daily briefing packets.” Celeste pulled a file triumphantly from her bag and laid it on the table. “This is a cable from the U.S. ambassador to China. Sent two days ago. A brief on his meeting with the minister of state security. Most of it is the usual diplomatic drivel, but then on page three there’s this.”

  She folded back pages and read from the file’s final sheet: “At the end of the meeting Ambassador Towson told the minister . . .” Celeste looked up at Garrett with a smile. “And I quote—‘Your tiger is still in its cage.’ At this, the minister reacted with alarm and demanded to know what the ambassador meant by his statement. The ambassador apologized and said he had meant nothing. However, Ambassador Towson found the exchange odd, strained, and potentially of value. The term tiger seemed to have unusual, even extreme significance to the minister.”

  Garrett stared at her in amazement.

  Celeste nodded and put the file back in her bag. “Hu—the Tiger—is a person, Garrett. He scares the shit out of the minister of state security. He’s important, secret, and he attracts followers. Remember, this picture was taken just hours ahead of the government news vacuum.”

  “And what kind of secret, important person attracts followers?” Garrett asked, but he already knew the answer.

  “An insurgent,” Celeste said. “And why would the authorities clamp down on every bit of news from an area that was growing in size by the week?”

  “If that insurgent was leading a true grassroots movement,” Garrett said. “The news vacuum is covering up a revolution . . .”

  Celeste rushed to finish his sentence: “. . . and the Tiger is its leader.”

  57

  THE PENTAGON, APRIL 14, 5:02 PM

  Garrett and Celeste spent the afternoon analyzing her Chinese rebellion theory, poking holes in the facts, such as they were, but also playing out what it could mean for them—Americans trying to get a grip on China’s recent actions—if it were true. The implications were enormous—a burgeoning revolution in the heartland of China unraveled the mystery they had been grappling with for weeks. With that one piece of information, all the other details fell into place: the Chinese government was terrified of the Tiger’s rebellion, and a war with the U.S. was a potent, if risky, way to deflect attention from it.

  It was as simple as that, and, in both their estimations, possibly the most important piece of news coming out of China in the last fifty years. It was beyond huge.

  It was history-altering.

  But there was also the distinct possibility that it was wrong, that there was another, more mundane explanation for everything Celeste had found—a random photo, an industrial accident, the coincidence of a common surname, a diplomat’s misstatement. Happenstance. But Garrett didn’t think so. He’d spent his life—literally since he could remember—picking out the patterns in the spiraling mass of humanity’s chaotic information flow, and now, with this bit of news fitted carefully into the mosaic of world events—all the cyber attacks, the bluffs and boasts, the threats to the dollar and U.S. markets—all of a sudden the chaos made sense. The facts fit a pattern.

  It gave Garrett hope, but he needed more: to take action, he—and, by extension, his military minders—would need proof, not just pictures and graphs and theories.

  “You need to find this Tiger guy,” Garrett said as he stared at the photo from the Chinese market one last time. “You need to make contact, and tell him he has friends outside of China. Friends who will support him in any way possible.”

  “It’s a needle in a haystack,” Celeste said. “If he even exists, the odds of finding him are astronomically small.”

  “From here, maybe. But from inside the country, I don’t think so. You need to go to China.”

  Celeste let out a laugh. “What?”

  “If you go to those provin
ces that have been blacked out, there’s still gotta be people living there,” Garrett said. “They will know what happened. And they’re going to talk. They’ll talk to you.”

  “That’s insane. I’m a grad student, not a spy.”

  “Exactly. And that’s what everyone will see you as. A student knocking around China.”

  Celeste shook her head vigorously. “You have no idea what you’re asking for, Garrett. You have a building full of professionals to send to China—”

  “A whole building full”—Garrett cut her off—“and none of them found what you did. Not a one. I don’t trust them. Any of them. They’re company men. They have no imagination. They don’t think like we do. Like you do. And, anyway—I don’t know whose side they’re on, but I’m pretty sure it’s not mine.”

  Celeste grimaced with indecision. They asked the State Department liaison—a young, serious woman named Tea—if Celeste could get a rush tourist visa to China without raising eyebrows, and she said yes, and that a seat on a plane would be easy to find as well.

  Celeste said she had to think about it. Garrett watched her pace in the hallway outside of the war room, calling friends on her cell phone, then pacing some more. After twenty minutes she came back inside.

  “You’re not leaving forever,” Garrett said. “This is a reconnaissance trip.”

  “The party won’t see it that way. They do not like foreigners getting involved in domestic politics. I could get arrested. I could go to jail for a long, long time.”

  “Or you could change the world.”

  Celeste scowled at him. “Give me a fucking break, Garrett. You’re the last person I’d expect that kind of bullshit from.”