The Ascendant: A Thriller (15 page)

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 attack 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.

She had helped write it.

She sipped her coffee and fantasized about how she would rip the malware to pieces, imagining it as a burglar in the night, breaking into her house, who she would personally blow to bits with her own 12-gauge digital shotgun. She laughed at the metaphor, but then came up short. Another container was
registering the malware. What the hell? That made three separate sections of the server farm that were infected. This was highly unusual. It occurred to Lillian that the malware might have self-replicated long ago, well before detection by her security software. If that was the case, then there might be many, many more computers infected. In fact, she thought, as a horrifying chill ran down her spine, the malware might have infected the entire . . .

But Lillian Pradesh did not even have time to finish the thought. At that very moment, her computer screen began to register a massive shutdown of server CPUs across the server farm. One, then two, then twenty, two hundred, a thousand, ten thousand, then . . .

. . . All of them.

Every single server in the two buildings, all 150,000 of them, all at once, turned off, the digital equivalent of going from the speed of light to zero in an instant. Lillian stared, openmouthed. Her computer screen showed her the completely unimaginable: they had been breached, compromised, and basically destroyed. Her entire server farm was offline. The attack had been swift and unrelenting. She was too stunned to even move. The only sound she heard was the blowing of the massive cooling fans on the floor of the cavernous server farm. They whirred and whirred, relentless, as the very thing the fans were meant to cool died.

Then her computer shut itself down as well. The entire building was dead.

G
arrett dipped his feet in the cold Pacific Ocean. He had tossed his shoes into the sand behind him, rolled up his jeans, then waded up to his knees in the frigid water. He didn’t mind the cold—it felt good on his skin. He needed to clear his head. It had been more than four days of uninterrupted work and his brain was fried. Behind him, he could make out a Marine sentry standing thirty yards back from the water, night-vision goggles flipped down, silhouette lit up by the full moon that hung low over the black horizon.

“Nice night, huh?”

Garrett turned. Alexis walked out of the darkness and stood at the edge of the water. Her face was bathed in silver luminescence, her body outlined by the white sand. She had changed out of her Army dress slacks and into jeans and an old Adidas T-shirt.

“Good night to be back in California,” she said.

“I always missed the beach in New York.” He stepped out of the waves and back onto the beach. “I missed swimming in it. Surfing in it. The Atlantic just doesn’t cut it.”

“Take a walk for a few minutes?” she asked.

“Sure.”

She turned, and they walked side by side on the beach, right along the invisible line where the waves broke and the water dissolved into the sand.

“Tell me about yourself,” she said. “About your life.”

“Nothing to tell.”

“Did you like your job at Jenkins & Altshuler?”

“I liked the money. And bond trading was easy. For me at least.” A wave rolled up to his feet.

“But?”

“But nothing. I didn’t give it too much thought. I just did it.” He looked at her, half her face in darkness, the other half illuminated by the rising moon. She was beautiful, her smooth olive skin glimmering in the dim light. “Now you tell me something. You like your job?”

“Love it,” she said, without hesitation.

“You ever had another job? Before the military?”

“Waitressing. In college. Which I hated. But I guess everyone should wait tables once in their lives.”

“You saw combat?”

“Waiting tables? Constantly.”

He laughed. She smiled briefly, then shook her head no. “Two tours of duty in Iraq. But logistics mostly. I never fired my gun.”

“Not once?”

“Nope.”

“You sad about that? Not shooting anyone?”

“Hardly. I didn’t join the Army to kill people. I would have, if I’d had to. But the occasion never presented itself.”

“So why did you join? I mean, if you weren’t looking to kill anyone?”

“To serve my country. To give back. To find purpose in my life.”

“Whoa. That’s a lot of sincerity. I was looking for something more cynical.”

Alexis smiled and shrugged. “I don’t do cynical well.”

“I’ve noticed.”

They walked for a moment in silence. The waves thudded against the shore, broke, and bubbled onto the sand. A thin line of foam zigzagged ahead of them into the night. Garrett looked at her. “So? Have you? Found purpose?”

“Absolutely. I’m the front line of defense. Keeping my country safe. Every morning I get up knowing exactly what I am doing and why I’m doing it. I love that feeling. To me, that’s purpose.”

Garrett tried to think of something cutting to say, but nothing came to mind. He let out a long breath instead. At his side, Alexis stopped walking, and her feet sunk into the sand. Her shoulder accidentally rubbed up against his.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you this question,” she said, “and I don’t want you to take it the wrong way. But if you’re so cynical, why’d you agree to help out? I thought you hated the military?”

“I hate what the military does.”

“What do we do?”

“Destroy lives. Lots of lives. Lives of enemies. The lives of its own soldiers.”

“Your brother’s life.”

“My brother’s life for sure.”

“And yet you’re here?”

“Yeah. I am here.” Garrett looked out at the black sea. He had been asking himself the same question, but found the answer to be elusive. Why the hell was he here, on a Marine base, aiding and abetting the one organization in the world that he absolutely detested, hands down, above any other?

“I can’t explain that one . . .” His voice drifted off. He watched the rhythmic waves rolling onto the sand. “I look for patterns. But my own life, it wasn’t falling into a pattern. It was just . . . random. Making some money. Losing some money. Drinking. Partying. Sleeping with a girl, not seeing her again. Back at work. Not that it was bad. It just wasn’t . . .
anything
. I can’t accept that. There are always answers.”

“You can’t live without patterns.” She seemed to say this more as a statement than a question, and Garrett nodded in the affirmative. It was a truth about him that he had known for a long time—since childhood, really—but it wasn’t a truth he volunteered readily. Alexis had sensed it intuitively. Garrett suspected she understood him a lot better than she let on.

“I try not to,” he said. “Without patterns, the world is too . . . chaotic. Truth is, chaos scares the shit out of me.”

“Chaos scares everyone.”

“Does it?” He smiled. “I guess I’m glad to hear that. What I mean is—nice to have company.”

Alexis watched his face carefully. “Are you happy with the decision? To join us?”

Garrett laughed. “Happy? Let’s not go overboard. I’m here, doing the job. That’s about as far as I’m willing to go.”

Alexis smiled at him. “Well, I’m happy with your decision. Very happy.”

Garrett cocked his head sideways. What had he just heard in her voice? A
softness, a quiet affection? It gave him chills. He turned to her—she had never looked quite so pretty as she did now. He thought about stepping forward to kiss her—it seemed like the right thing to do, even with Marine sentries staring at them through their night-vision goggles—when a voice rang out.

“Guys! We have a problem!” Lefebvre was sprinting down the beach. “Google is crashing!”

A
very Bernstein ducked into the White Horse Tavern on the corner of Eleventh and Hudson. The day had been slow, unproductive for most of the team, and tediously long for himself. The truth was, no one at Jenkins & Altshuler had recovered fully from the bombing. None of them had been hurt in the blast, but everyone had heard it, had their desks rattled by it, had seen the debris scattered across the pockmarked lobby and the shattered street. And rumors about Garrett Reilly had been flying around the office for days now.

At first all the other brokers had bought the story Avery had been told to spread—Garrett had been hurt, but was recovering, and had decided to take some time off by visiting his family in California. But coworkers who knew Garrett had trouble believing he would go anywhere near his family, especially if rest and relaxation were what was called for.

Now, ten days later, new stories were surfacing: Garrett had been the target of the bomb. He had happened onto some kind of top-secret financial scandal. He had been abducted by a foreign government and was being held for ransom. Avery tried to beat back the rumors, but that only stoked more speculation. This morning he had found an online bulletin board on the company servers dedicated to half-cocked theories as to who had detonated the bomb—Armenian extremists, irate Goldman Sachs directors—and where Garrett Reilly really was—in jail, a mental institution, two floors below the Jenkins & Altshuler offices, trading highly speculative derivatives. Avery shut the bulletin board down, but not before reading that he himself was suspected in Garrett’s
disappearance. “AB is complicit and not to be trusted,” read one post. “Watch your back around him.”

Well, they’re sort of right, Avery thought as he ordered a shot of Basil Hayden’s bourbon with one ice cube. He was complicit. But complicit was different from responsible. He was not
responsible
for what had happened, he had merely been a conduit for information. And still, he sighed as the bourbon’s hint of sweetness trickled down his throat; he worried about Garrett and what would happen to him. The government was a soulless machine. Its bureaucrats did not care a whit for who was ground up in its cogs. And as big a pain in the ass as Garrett was, Avery loved him. As corny as it sounded, Garrett really was the son he had never had. Avery would be devastated if anything happened to Garrett—utterly devastated.

“But what can I do now?” he muttered as he downed his drink, disgusted at the catty workers in his office, disgusted at the gossips in other financial firms across lower Manhattan, and disgusted mostly at himself for allowing the military to cajole and bully him. Why did he play along with their games, their secrets? He knew the answer—he played along because he was scared of them. He was scared of their power, their ability to ferret out nasty intelligence about his business, about his personal life, and he was even slightly afraid for his personal safety. He wasn’t one of those people who believed the United States government went around killing its internal enemies, but he wasn’t ready to put that theory to the test, either.

The truth about Avery was that he was a coward. He’d been picked on as a child, beaten up more times than he could remember for being short, geeky, and then, when he was a little older, for being gay. Avery had been out of the closet for years now, but he still recoiled at the memory of the savage pounding he’d gotten in high school when he’d dared to kiss another boy. The boy had panicked, desperate to hide who he really was, and told everyone at the school what had happened, and then Avery knew it would only be a matter of time before the starting nine of the baseball team trapped him in the men’s bathroom, which they did, and punched him and kicked him until he blacked out. Which they also did.