The Ascendant: A Thriller (23 page)

“What if the virus hits when you get there? And the place blows up?” she asked.

“That won’t happen,” Bingo said, trying as much to reassure himself as Celeste. “They’ll shut down the core if there’s a problem. They’ll go offline immediately. It’s very safe.”

“Tell that to the Japanese,” Celeste said.

It was six o’clock when they touched down in Detroit. A green Ford Taurus was waiting for them on the tarmac. Alexis took the wheel, punching in the coordinates for Pointe Mouillee on the car’s GPS, while Garrett rode shotgun, and Bingo sat in back, humming to himself. Bingo hummed when he was nervous. As they were pulling out of the airport, Lefebvre ran after them and rapped on the car’s trunk; when Alexis stopped the car and rolled down the driver’s-side window, Lefebvre slipped her his Beretta M9.

“Just in case,” he said. “Detroit and all.”

Alexis tucked the handgun under the seat and took the highway south toward the Enrico Fermi station. Traffic was light and they got there in forty-five minutes, the plant’s distinctive inverted-cone water-cooling towers becoming visible through the trees and freeway billboards from nearly a mile away. Alexis presented her Army ID at the gate, and the security guard checked it quickly. He told them the NRC had called and cleared their status. To Bingo he seemed distracted, and that only made him more nervous.

“Everything okay?” Alexis asked him.

“Uh, yeah,” the guard said, glancing at the computer inside his gatehouse. “I think so.”

Bingo grimaced. Not a good sign. The guard gave them visitor’s badges
and waved them in. The plant was huge, with a hulking containment building, ponds, and a pair of cooling towers near the lake. Alexis drove to the main operating building, took a visitor’s parking space, and then the three of them hurried inside.

Engineers, mechanics, managers, and radiation EMTs were scurrying through the halls, barking into walkie-talkies, cell phones, and at each other. Bingo had never been in a nuclear power plant before, but this did not seem normal. It seemed desperate. Garrett tried to ask for directions to the control room, but no one would take the time to answer him. One red-faced engineer simply pointed down the hallway as he ran in the opposite direction.

Garrett, Alexis, and Bingo walked through a pair of heavy, steel-framed double doors—and were met with chaos. The power plant’s control room was alive with voices and motion: a dozen engineers were gathered around a bank of computer monitors, shouting and typing frantically on keyboards. A shift supervisor seemed to be leading them, trying to organize the fracas into something resembling a rational discussion. Phones were ringing everywhere, and high-pitched alarms were cycling on and off across the room.

The shift supervisor—a portly man in a plaid shirt—saw Alexis in her Army uniform and raced toward her, arm and finger already extended in an accusatory point. “How the hell did you know?” he yelled. His plastic-laminated badge read: “Coyle.”

“What’s going on?” Garrett said.

“Who the fuck are
you
?” Coyle barked. “Who the fuck are any of you?”

“You’ve been attacked by a computer worm,” Garrett said. “You need to tell me what’s happening.”

“I don’t need to tell you shit,” Coyle said. Then he scowled, seeming to have a change of heart. He waved at the row upon row of operating consoles. “Every goddamned sensor in this room is giving us different readings. Nothing matches.”

“That’s the malware,” Garrett said. “We need a copy of it. And you need to shut everything down right away. Manually. You cannot trust your computers. You need to go offline, you’ve been breached.”

“We shut down, and it can take months to restart a plant.”

“Your computers will give you false readings until the reactors fail. And then you’ll have a meltdown on your hands.”

Coyle started to respond, then gritted his teeth and turned to his band of engineers. “Start the countdown to shut down number two reactor. Now! We are going offline. Scramming in sixty seconds!”

Garrett yelled after him—“We need a copy of the worm!”—but Coyle had moved on.

“Shit,” Garrett said.

Bingo took a deep breath. Well, if he really was part of a team that went looking for trouble, he might as well embrace the mission with gusto. He slid next to Garrett. “Where would we find it? The worm?”

“Not sure. Probably in whatever program regulates the cooling rods.”

Bingo reached into his pocket and pulled out a purple flash drive. He waved it in the air. “I’ll need five minutes.”

Garrett grinned. “You da man.”

“I’m not, actually,” Bingo said and sat down in front of an unused computer. Garrett and Alexis hovered over him as he started scrolling through programs. “But you should get the car started.”

“Why?” Alexis asked, worry leaking into her voice. “You said they can shut down the reactors safely.”

“They can,” Bingo said, looking up at the two of them. “But every nuclear power plant for five states is running GE water boilers. They’re all going to have to shut down at the same time. Probably in the next ten minutes. And when they do”—Bingo tried to smile—“the whole grid’s going to fail.”

C
larence Othello Hawkins, precinct captain of the All Mighty Vice Lord Nation, South Detroit Division, knew one thing, and he knew it stone cold: if the Detroit PD caught him tonight, he would spend the rest of his natural-born days in jail. He already had two felony convictions on his record—one of them a violent assault in a 7-Eleven robbery—and a third meant three strikes would kick in, and Clarence would rot in the joint until he was so old he had to use a motherfucking cane to stand up.

Clarence was no fool. He’d wiped his prints off the gun he’d just tossed over a backyard fence, but he couldn’t be sure he’d gotten them all off. He’d fired the gun just fifteen minutes ago at a little punk-ass bitch from the Four Corners Hustlers. He didn’t think he’d hit the Four Corners bitch, but maybe he was wrong and now the cops were after him for attempted murder. Or maybe the Four Corners Hustler had died. Not that he cared. He hated Hustlers, always moving in on his territory. But if he died, then Clarence might be wanted on a murder rap. And there was no way Clarence was doing life for murder. No fucking way.

He sprinted as fast as his twenty-four-year-old legs would carry him, south on Charlotte Street in the Cass Corridor, past the burned-out buildings and the church with the caved-in roof, then right across the vacant lots on Second Avenue, tromping down weeds and kicking garbage as he ran. He peeked over his shoulder and saw that a second squad car had joined the first one. Both cars had their cherries going, lighting up the Michigan night, and now their sirens were
on as well, howling like dogs and waking up the whole damn neighborhood. Not that anyone in this neighborhood went to bed early anyway.

Shit, Clarence thought to himself, now I’m caught for sure. He wished, briefly, that he hadn’t thrown away his gun. He would’ve turned and used it on the cops when they came to get him—at least he could’ve taken out a couple of those fuckers before they dropped him. Suicide by cop. There were worse ways to go. And Clarence figured he didn’t have that long to live anyway. Not on the streets of Detroit.

He sprinted across the vacant lot on Second and Charlotte, knowing the cop cars couldn’t traverse the deeply pitted grass and dirt. He leapt over a chain-link fence on Peterboro, hung a right, and dashed as hard as he could for the apartment complex halfway down the block. Little J lived there, on the second floor. J’s spot was infested with Vice Lords. The cops would have serious trouble on their hands if Clarence could haul his ass up there. That was his salvation—his chance to live one more day as a free man—and in Detroit, one day more was all you could really ask for.

He dug deep to outrace the police cruisers. The orange halogen streetlights guided his path toward the front door. Only a hundred yards now. And Clarence could dash a hundred yards in ten seconds. He’d done it in under that in high school. Sectional Champ in 2006. Goddamned gold medal. Not that he cared. Wasn’t really made of gold, and nobody made any money running track, anyway.

The cops had taken the long way around the vacant lot—he was definitely going to beat them. And then he saw it. Two more PD cruisers streaking the opposite direction down Peterboro, heading right at him, cutting off his escape route.

Motherfucker, he thought, slowing. He was screwed. He jogged to a stop, bending over to catch his breath, putting his hands on his hips. The cop cars raced at him. Game over. Well, it had been a good run, some fine times, parties and girls and a little money on the side. He wasn’t going to get all weepy about his life ’cause he was tough and there was a lot worse shit out there than going to prison. Some people said prison for a Vice Lord was like a country club, all set up with drugs and twinks to keep the rough boys satisfied. But still, Clarence thought, sucking in a last lungful of cool Detroit air, he did like it better on the outside. The outside was good. Inside was a heavy load. He considered
his options quickly, taking in any last chance of a possible escape. And then it happened . . .

All at once. Like the hand of motherfucking God, Clarence thought. A goddamned miracle.

Boom!

Every single light, in every single building and on every single street corner, went out. All at the same time. Detroit went dark. Pitch-black like the inside of a cave, no streetlights, window lights, building lights. Nothing but the moon and stars above.

All of a sudden, Clarence thought happily to himself, the police got way bigger problems on their hands than just catching my sorry ass. He grinned. And as he took off running, he thought . . .
Tonight will be all right after all.

T
hey were five miles from the power plant when Detroit went dark. The streetlights just winked out, starting in the north, on the periphery of Garrett’s vision, then rolling south across the flat midwestern landscape like an inky wave.

“Holy crap,” Garrett said.

Alexis turned on the car radio. Half the stations were dead, but a few came back online in a matter of minutes. They had reports from across the city: the blackout was extensive, all of Detroit was out, along with a host of suburbs. Windsor, Ontario, was also dark, as well as Ann Arbor and south all the way to Toledo, Ohio.

Another radio station said that Cleveland had experienced a brownout, while Cincinnati had gone black entirely. Chicago was struggling to stay online. Power technicians across the Midwest were juggling transmission lines, trying to keep the center of the country lit. But they were losing the battle. The grid was going down.

Garrett watched this new shadow world pass by the car’s windshield; it was profoundly dark out. A few emergency lights flickered in office-park windows, as well as car headlights that passed them on the street, but other than that, it was a night as black as one in the fifteenth century. Garrett marveled at how the modern world could be left so helpless so quickly, just by cutting off its electricity. It was terrifying. He fiddled with the car’s GPS, but it had stopped picking up a signal.

“I thought these things worked off satellite feeds,” Garrett said.

“They do,” Bingo answered. “Maybe the feed gets relayed through cell towers. And those are all down.”

“I’m sure there’s a map in the glove compartment,” Alexis said.

“A map?” Garrett said. “You mean, like, on paper?”

Alexis didn’t laugh, and Garrett fished a torn city street map from a stack of license and registration documents. It was old and faded and Garrett had to use the light from his cell phone to read it. He directed them north, away from the power plant, toward the general vicinity of the airport, but almost immediately they noticed pockets of glowing orange in the distance.

“Fires,” Garrett said, changing stations on the radio. “Looters. Maybe rioters.”

WWJ reported the first structure fires just south of downtown. The police and fire department were responding to calls all over the city. Alexis reached down and slid Jimmy’s gun under her leg, for easier access. Garrett navigated them east, away from the center of the city, trying to find the Fisher Freeway—which would get them right to the airport—but the blocks were entirely dark, the street signs unlit and obscured, and he missed the on-ramp, overshooting it by several blocks and ending up in a battle-scarred neighborhood of run-down homes and vacant lots.

Garrett had known bad neighborhoods, growing up in Long Beach, but he’d never seen anything quite like this area of South Detroit. The wreckage and the waste of it chilled him: row after row of darkened, ruined houses and buildings, punctuated by vacant lots that seemed to glow in the moonlight and the flicker of nearby fires.

“Wow,” he hissed. “Insane.”

Alexis gripped the wheel hard. “My thoughts exactly,” she said, and as soon as she said it shots rang out from behind them, the
pop-pop-pop
of a handgun clearly audible above the engine noise. She stomped the gas, turning quickly onto a broader boulevard. There was hardly any traffic on the streets, and people were burning garbage in trash bins on the sidewalks. Many of the storefronts had smashed-in windows, and young men and women were climbing out of the stores with armfuls of food and clothing and electronics. A few men in hoodies ran into the street to try to block their route, but Alexis swerved, laying her hand on the horn and cursing them. “Idiots!”

“Easy,” said Garrett. “I’ll get us out of here.” He checked the map again, but
without knowing what the name of the boulevard was, he was basically guessing.

“Take a right,” he said.

Alexis pulled the car around a corner; there was a blur of motion to their right and then
boom
, another car T-boned their Taurus on the passenger side. There were shrieks as the National Guard car was spun 180 degrees, the outside world circling wildly around them, and then the car landed with a thick crunch against a parked minivan. Garrett hadn’t buckled his seat belt—it hurt his ribs—so his body was snapped forward like the end of a cracking whip.