The Ascendant: A Thriller (16 page)

The incident didn’t make him tough. Or brave. It made him cautious. He didn’t kiss a boy again until he was twenty-seven, and even then he was sure his world would come crashing down around him. But it didn’t, and slowly Avery gained his dignity as a scholar, later a businessman, and eventually a gay scholar and businessman. But he still stayed away from gay bars, and kept his sexual identity mostly to himself.

He dropped a twenty-dollar bill on the bar and hurried out into the cold. Lower Manhattan was dark and quiet, for a change. The tourists were gone for the day; it was too cold and wet for anyone to stay outside for very long. Avery pulled his coat collar tight around his neck and put his head down against the relentless wind blowing off the Hudson River. His brownstone was three blocks away, due west, and Avery needed to get home. He needed to curl up in bed with a good book—he was a voracious reader of historical fiction—and wait for the sunrise and promise of a new day.

He was dreaming of falling into the intricate plot of the thriller of Imperial Rome he’d been reading when he noticed a short, thick-set man in a down jacket appear out of the shadows and walk directly toward him. Avery was crossing Washington Street, a block from home, and he got the distinct sense that this man was heading for him—that he was aiming to intercept him.

Avery’s shoulders tightened and he quickened his pace. The short man did the same. Avery looked up and down the street, and now he cursed the street’s emptiness, which only seconds ago he’d enjoyed. Where were the packs of Irish tourists when you needed them? He was on the verge of breaking into a run when the man caught up with him and asked quietly: “Avery Bernstein?”

Avery kept walking—he was in the middle of the street—and decided not to slow down. If this man knew him, or had business with him, he could do it as they walked.

“Who are you?” Avery said.

“My name is Hans,” the short man said as he jogged to catch up with Avery. “Hans Metternich.” He had a thick accent that Avery pegged as Dutch probably, or maybe Danish. His face was square and clean-shaven, and he was noticeably good-looking. But Avery was still not going to slow down.

“I don’t know you,” Avery said.

“No reason you should,” the man said, falling into a quick walk alongside Avery. “But I know you. At least I know about you.”

Avery gave him a worried look. And now that he heard the man speak more, Avery thought his accent wasn’t Dutch or Danish, but actually a put-on. What kind of name was Hans Metternich? The guy could have been from Bensonhurst for all Avery knew.

“I need to have a word with you,” Metternich said.

“Well, it’s late, and I don’t talk to strangers on the street, so why don’t you
call me tomorrow at the office?” Avery walked a little faster. Only half a block until his home. He clutched at his cell phone in his pocket. He would call the police in a heartbeat if this man came at him.

“I would call you at your office, yes, for sure, but, I don’t know if you are aware of this—people are listening to your phone calls.”

Avery pulled up short. He stared at the man in the down coat, trying hard to memorize the particulars of his face. “Who are you?”

“I am an investigative journalist.”

“Journalists call on the phone,” Avery said.

“As I said . . .”

“People are listening to my calls. Who?”

“Hard to say. Government. Police maybe. There are a host of suspects.”

“How do you know this?”

“I have investigated,” Metternich said brightly, amused by what he seemed to consider a joke. “That’s why I use
investigative
in front of the
journalist
part.”

Avery shivered in the cold April wind. The two of them had stopped walking. Avery’s brownstone was in sight now, just a quick sprint from where they stood. “Bullshit. You’re a journalist like I’m a UPS driver. What do you want?”

“I need to get in touch with Garrett Reilly.”

Avery thought he felt his heart skipping a beat. Shit, he thought.
What the hell is going on?

“I know all about his discovery of the Treasuries sell-off by the Chinese,” Metternich continued. “And that the government took him away.”

Avery took a moment to collect his thoughts. “Why do you need to get in touch with him?”

“I have things to tell him.”

“Such as?”

“Who set off the bomb in front of your offices. And why they did it. It was not terrorists, as the police and media have suggested.”

Avery stared at this man. Was he a lunatic? A crank come to discuss crank theories, like so many other people who seemed to have sprung up lately around the Jenkins & Altshuler offices? “I don’t know where Garrett is.”

“I know you don’t. He has been taken off the grid. But I have reason to believe he is being kept at a Marine base in California.”

“If you know so much about him, then why are you talking to me?”

“Because at some point in the next few days, or weeks, he will call you. Or the people who are keeping him will call you. They will put you in touch. Maybe ask you to see him? Or talk to him? I don’t know for sure. But I believe this will happen. And when you do see him, I would like you to pass him my name. Hans.”

“That’s it? Just your name?”

“No, no,” Metternich said, eyes twinkling with amusement and, Avery thought, mischief. “Tell him to make himself known to me. So that I can make contact with him. But tell him to be clever about it. Very clever.”

The man named Hans Metternich reached into his pocket and Avery flinched, afraid of what was about to happen. Metternich smiled. “Don’t worry, Mr. Bernstein. Just a piece of paper. On it I have written my e-mail address. If you could give it to Garrett when you see him?”

The man handed the paper to Avery, and Avery, out of habit—and he immediately wished he hadn’t—took it. Metternich bowed slightly, then backed away from Avery, lips still curled into a smile. “Sorry to have startled you, Mr. Bernstein. And I am most sorry for the odd circumstances surrounding our meeting.” With that, he turned and hurried down the street.

Avery watched him go a moment, then shouted after him. “Hey! You! Hans!”

Metternich pirouetted in a pool of orange lamplight. Leaves and plastic bags swirled at his feet. “Yes?” he said.

“Why do you need to tell Garrett anything? What fucking business is it of yours?”

Again, Metternich smiled—a mischievous, knowing, slightly cynical smile that Avery, had he been in a more comfortable place and a better mood, would have found charming.

“Because Garrett Reilly is at the center of something very new, and very important. Important not just to you and to me, but to millions of people in this country. Billions more people on the planet. Garrett thinks he is doing one thing, but in fact he is doing something else altogether. He should know this, because everything is not as it seems and, at the risk of sounding melodramatic, very much hangs in the balance.”

Metternich bowed again, then broke into a run and within seconds cut around the corner of Washington Street and disappeared into the New York City night.

“I
t’s loading super slow,” Bingo said as he stared at his computer screen, waiting for his response page to load. “Molasses slow.”

Celeste and Jimmy Lefebvre stood over his shoulder, waiting for the ever-present blue, red, orange, and green Google logo to appear. Garrett and Alexis were hunched over a second screen. Alexis counted to herself as the logo on her page appeared in bits, faltered, then finally assembled itself on the screen.

“Eleven seconds,” she said. “That’s miserable. Something’s up. Google’s load time is usually measured in milliseconds.”

The team went into overdrive, each of them searching the Web for something anomalous, something that would explain a crash at Google. They checked the wire news services, which had nothing—it was midnight on the East Coast—but a few online bulletin boards were already buzzing with complaints, most of which were aimed at Internet service providers. The slowdown seemed to be confined to one company—Google—and they weren’t commenting, at least not publicly.

Alexis tried calling Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, but no one was answering the phone at ten o’clock at night. Then, around midnight, Garrett found a bulletin, just issued, from the Oregon Department of Energy. It was composed of one terse paragraph, which said, without explanation, that there had been a sudden drop in electricity usage in the Pacific Northwest. It wasn’t a huge decrease, compared to the overall burn rate in the Washington-Oregon-Idaho area, just five percent, but it was enough to necessitate a
rapid redistribution of power to keep the electricity flowing efficiently in the region’s grid. But what caught Garrett’s eye was where the drop had originated: along the Columbia River, on the border between Washington and Oregon, in a tiny town that Garrett had heard of for only one reason.

Alexis had Lefebvre call the Oregon Department of Energy. They confirmed the drop-off, and said, as Garrett suspected, that it was entirely from one generating station: The Dalles hydroelectric dam on the Columbia River. They had gone from thirty megawatts of power usage to almost zero in under a minute.

Bingo did a double take when he heard the name: “The Dalles? Isn’t that where they built . . . ?

Garrett nodded. “Google server farm.”

“Good Lord,” Lefebvre said.

“The only way they get a shutdown of power that fast is if that farm went completely offline,” Garrett said.

Alexis stared at her screen, grimacing. “And the only way Google goes offline all at once . . .”

Garrett finished her sentence: “. . . is if they’ve been hacked. Massively hacked.”

The room went quiet. Garrett let out a long breath, then broke the silence: “I don’t know about you guys, but me, I think that if they’re hacking Google at the same time as they’re selling Treasuries, blowing up mines, and crashing the real estate market
. . . then we’re at war.
”

DEFENSE MESSAGING SYSTEM

TO: MAJ. GEN. HADLEY KLINE, DEFENSE INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

FROM: CPT. ALEXIS TRUFFANT, US ARMY

TRANSCRIPT OF CONVERSATION, RE: CHINESE GOALS/MOTIVES FOR RECENT CYBER/ECONOMIC ATTACKS

PARTICIPANTS: TRUFFANT, CPT. ALEXIS; CHEN, CELESTE; LEFEBVRE, LT. JIMMY; CLEMENS, ROBERT (BINGO); (NAME REDACTED)

LOCATION: EDSON RANGE MESS HALL, CAMP PENDLETON

CONVERSATION WAS RECORDED, APRIL 5, 2:47 AM,
THEN TRANSCRIBED VERBATIM.

TRUFFANT:
Look, I know you guys are tired and want to go to bed, but we need to figure out why this is happening. I get that we’re being attacked, but without a reason behind the attacks I’m not sure we can figure out how to stop them. So anyone want to posit a theory?

LEFEBVRE:
I think they’re showing us that they have the ability. A show of strength. Politically, it would fit with a rising Chinese nationalism. Pride in their success and place in the world. Pride in their ability to hack.

TRUFFANT:
You’re saying they’re just showing off?

LEFEBVRE:
I suppose. A shot across our bow.

(NAME REDACTED):
Yeah, but they’re doing it all in secret. Black market attacks and hacking. Who the hell are they showing off to?

LEFEBVRE:
Our intelligence services.

(
NAME REDACTED
):
So it’s a spy game, and we’ve got nothing to worry about, because it’s not going anywhere? It’s peacock feathers?

LEFEBVRE
:
I might not use exactly those words . . .

TRUFFANT
:
I have a problem with that. I mean, maybe you’re right—but maybe you’re not. If we buy into that idea and we’re wrong, then we’ll be facing a disaster. And we will have missed it. Like General Wilkerson said—the war the generals didn’t see coming ends up swamping them.

CHEN
:
What if it’s not exactly showing off, but more malicious mischief. They’re trying to weaken our economy, our infrastructure, you know, be disruptive, but avoiding out-and-out conflict. Inflict damage that can be denied and move on.

TRUFFANT
:
Industrial espionage?

CHEN
:
Sure.

(
NAME REDACTED
):
But they’ve tossed a lot of money away in the process. Selling Treasuries and condos. There’s no profit in that, and industrial espionage is specifically built around profit. So they’d be losing money to profit, which makes no sense. I think this is bigger. I think this is war. And wars always start for a reason. All wars are about something, right, Bingo?

CLEMENS
:
Well. Um. Yeah. Sorta. Land or money. Sometimes revenge, but that’s less common.

CHEN
:
If it’s land, then the motive is Taiwan. China has never recognized the island’s claim to independence. They believe everyone who lives there is actually a part of the People’s Republic. It’s an obsession with them.

TRUFFANT
:
But why attack us? And why now?

CHEN:
Distract us. Panic us about something else. While we’re preoccupied with our own problems, they invade Taiwan.

CLEMENS:
It would take a million soldiers from the People’s Army to do that. But they’ve got a million soldiers to spare.

CHEN:
And I hate to say this about my ancestral people, but they’d sacrifice a million soldiers in the blink of an eye. The soldiers would die proud. As a nation, they’re extremely nationalistic. And growing more militaristic by the minute.

(NAME REDACTED):
They’re animals and we’re not. That what you’re saying?

CHEN
:
No. All nations go through phases of intense nationalism. Not every nation has the resources to act on those feelings. China does now, and maybe they’re doing it. So (
EXPLETIVE DELETED
), (
NAME REDACTED
).