The Ascendant: A Thriller (28 page)

When the captain—Hodgkin, according to his nametag—looked confused, Garrett threw his hands in the air in astonishment: “You know, Xbox? PlayStation? You never gamed before?”

Hodgkin returned an hour later with bagfuls of hardware and discs:
Halo 4
,
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare
,
Battlefield 3
,
KillZone
,
Skyrim
, and half a dozen others, all of them first-person shooters or role-playing games, all of them capable of being hooked up to a worldwide network of other gamers: massively multiplayer online role-player games, or MMORPGs, in player lingo.

Garrett had everyone in the war room sign up for accounts, then jacked the game feeds to the screens hanging on the front wall. Seven screens. Seven different games. He took the controls on one, and ran the newbies through the first steps, so they wouldn’t get their avatars decapitated each time they were respawned.

He called Mitty and told her he was getting her military clearance, and that he was looping her onto his assault team on the D-Day Invasion for
Medal of Honor
.

“Military clearance?” she asked excitedly. “That mean I can launch Predator drones?”

“Yeah, whatever,” Garrett said. “Can we focus on the task at hand?”

The room watched as Mitty took out German pillboxes with ease. The Marine Corps liaison—Patmore—was particularly impressed when Mitty roasted a whole company of Nazis with her flamethrower. “My kind of woman,” he said with barely contained lust. Patmore was an experienced gamer, as were a few of the other analysts; downtime at a Marine base meant a fair number of hours playing shooters. Patmore also seemed a little crazy. Garrett liked that.

Garrett told the men and women who had been placed under his command that he wanted them staring at their computer screens, killing Nazis and Orcs, until their eye sockets went fuzzy, until their bodies stiffened from disuse, until everything else in the world disappeared and all that was real to them existed only on a server somewhere in the Internet cloud. Because, and this he kept to himself, if they were going to be at the cutting edge of a new war—a secret, undetectable cyber/financial/psychological war against the Chinese—then they had better get comfortable living virtually. From here on in, the virtual was real. And the real was virtual. They were one and the same.

Next he had Celeste, Bingo, and Lefebvre brought from their hotel to the war room. The three of them—as awed and spooked as Garrett had been when he first walked into the Pentagon—spent a good twenty minutes staring silently at all the gleaming military intelligence paraphernalia.

“So what do we do?” Lefebvre asked him.

“Play games,” Garrett said.

“Why?”

“Practice.”

Celeste frowned. “That seems really stupid. Where’s Alexis?”

Garrett shrugged. “No idea.”

Celeste scanned the room. “They left you in charge, didn’t they?” When Garrett didn’t answer, her mouth twisted in disgust. “What a disaster,” she muttered, and walked away.

The three of them picked up game controllers anyway and started to play.
Bingo kicked ass—he was a ringer. Garrett had never seen him quite so happy. Lefebvre held his own—he had played some before. But Celeste got slaughtered every time she entered a game. She did not look amused.

By early afternoon the war room felt more like a college frat house than a command center, replete with tortilla chips and empty cans of Red Bull. Garrett was no fan of fraternity houses, but anything was better than the Pentagon. Although, in truth, he felt he was taking a page from the military’s book: just like new recruits were worn down by their drill sergeants at Camp Pendleton, then remade to be order-following killing machines, Garrett was breaking these men and women of their former ties to the physical world, and would rebuild them to live in the global data stream. This was boot camp for the next war.

The games also served a personal purpose for Garrett, which was to help him stop thinking about Alexis. It was hard, but not impossible—and getting ever so slightly easier as the hours wore on. The pain was becoming something bearable.

Next, Garrett asked for money. A million dollars. That seemed like a puny amount of cash, given what he would trade on Wall Street, and chump change compared to what the military spent every minute of every day on tanks and missiles. He went to the liaison from Treasury—a young woman named O’Brien who had her hair pulled back in a bun, wore a dark blue pantsuit, and spent most of her time talking quietly on her cell phone—and blurted out: “I need a million dollars.” He did it mostly to see what he could get away with, but O’Brien didn’t blink an eye, just called her superiors, and in twenty minutes Garrett had an online bank account with the money waiting for him. A million dollars, just like that.

This, Garrett thought, is something a guy could get used to.

He split the money equally between everyone in the room—there were eleven of them, so they each got $90,909—and had them open online trading accounts. The CIA rep—her name was Finley, and she seemed to anticipate exactly what Garrett wanted—supplied them with fictional names and bogus Social Security numbers for the accounts. Garrett told them to start playing in futures options, fixed-income securities, and commodities, on the fringes of the markets, and he gave them a quick tutorial on how to do it. He said he wanted them making money by the end of the next business day, and he didn’t want them to stop gaming, either. Or to stop watching the cable news feeds on the
TVs at the front of the room. Monitor your games, your market positions, and world events. And don’t drop the ball on any of them.

That sent the officers and liaisons into a controlled panic. A few of them managed to eke out profits by the end of the day, most broke even, but one analyst lost his entire float in twenty minutes. He did not get refunded.

General Kline walked into the war room at four that afternoon, stared at the video games on the projection screens, saw the tortilla chips scattered on the floor, and left without saying a word. Garrett thought he saw a look of horror cross the general’s face, which he found gratifying.

Garrett ordered half the team to spend the night in the war room: three he allowed to sleep on cots he had placed in back, three he kept gaming and trading. The other half of the team he sent home for four hours of sleep, telling them he expected them back at dawn. He told them not to call anyone, or talk to anyone. This was going to be a deprivation chamber.

He went home at midnight as well—driven back to Bolling Air Force Base by a pair of MPs—and slept restlessly for a few hours, dreaming briefly of Alexis, and then of his mother. He woke at four in the morning, watched CNN, Fox News, and CNBC, looking for hints that something was afoot between America and China, but the news was all about riots and shootings and politicians skewering each other. If war had broken out, America didn’t know it.

It was invisible.

He had his drivers pick him up at four-thirty and bring him back to the war room. Most of the shift that had gone home was back already, gaming and trading. Garrett sent the overnighters home for a few hours’ rest, giving them the same orders: talk to no one, see no one, fuck no one. Live here. Not out there.

There was an e-mail waiting for him from Mitty. The power-plant worm had definitely come from China. The code contained traces of embedded Chinese Python programming language, as well as some bits of Mandarin BASIC. She’d copied as many blocks of the code as she could, just before it deleted itself, but none of it was particularly revealing; it was simply malicious—and very clever. But at least Garrett knew for sure now—the power-plant hack had been another Chinese rocket launched in the quickly escalating conflict.

When Celeste Chen arrived from the hotel at 6:00 a.m., he had her buy a domain name—Chinawar—and start a blog. He ran the blog through offshore proxy servers, so no one could trace it back to the Pentagon. He told Celeste
what to write. The blog was more of a rant, really, about how much the blogger hated the Chinese and their culture and their food and how ugly their women were—anything Garrett could think of to piss people off. They made up a pseudonym—USA Patriot Boy—then placed a long list of meta-tags in his headers—
sex
,
Chinese whores
,
God bless the USA
,
kill shot
, and
President Xi Jinping
. Garrett did a keyword density analysis for search engine optimization, and then linked the blog to as many articles about China as he and Celeste could find. At the end of the first set of entries he asked his readers how they would go about attacking China.

By midday he was getting 2,000 hits an hour, as well as lengthy, racist screeds about why America should invade the People’s Republic. By 7:00 p.m. those numbers had doubled. And so had the clicks coming from behind China’s government censorship wall. Those page views were skyrocketing. Someone over there was paying attention.

General Kline called three times on day two, each call growing increasingly tense in tone: What are you doing? Why are they playing games? Are you following what the Chinese military is doing? Did you know their air force flew sorties over the Strait of Malacca? The American Pacific Fleet is now on high alert.
Do you have a plan, Garrett?

Each time Garrett said, “I’m kind of busy. Can I call you back?” On the third call he hung up on Kline, mid-sentence.

The afternoon of day two he relieved Celeste Chen of her gaming duties. She was proving to be comically bad at it, and not getting any better, and Garrett thought she could be better used elsewhere. He told her to take her laptop and go back to researching Chinese desperation. What were they so afraid of? Search, search, search, he told her, and don’t come back until you find something. Celeste seemed quite happy to be released from the war room. She left without saying goodbye.

Garrett slept in the war room that night, uneasily, waking over and over again on his lumpy cot, feeling detached from his body, as if split in two. Part of him was lying in the Pentagon, staring off into space, while the other part was making love to Alexis, holding her face in his hands, kissing her, whispering to her. If love was a drug, as some half-witted pop song claimed, then it was an insidiously dangerous one, and he vowed never to try it again—which was weird, because Garrett enjoyed most drugs.

But on the morning of day three he found that his heart didn’t ache quite as much as it had yesterday, and that was a surprise to him. How had that happened? Was it the old trope that time heals all wounds? He still wanted Alexis back, still wanted to see her face, kiss her lips, but he could live with that longing now. It wasn’t all-consuming. It occurred to him, as he splashed water on his face in a sterile Pentagon bathroom, that perhaps this was what it felt like to grow up.

By midday of day three, some of the Ascendant war room staff had begun to make money in the futures market. More important, they had begun to sense the ebb and flow of data that drove prices. Bingo and Lefebvre were even getting a step ahead of that data, and betting on which way things would go, which was exactly what Garrett wanted.

“Buying and selling stocks,” Lefebvre muttered with practiced irony. “Daddy would be so proud.”

They had also gotten proficient at their online games. Commies and Cubans and brain-eating zombies were falling like flies. Every officer, male and female, old and young—and most of them were young—had risen tenfold in their game levels, accumulating points and fresh lives, and pocketing spells, armor, and ammunition. Garrett had a few of the best of them hook up with gamers in China, forming teams with their Asian counterparts and chatting as they played. Garrett fed them questions: Is the government watching you? Can you speak freely? How strong is their censorship software? The answers were vague or the questions were ignored entirely, but that was okay with Garrett. They were probing, digging, circling.

Meanwhile, from her apartment in Queens, Mitty Rodriguez had begun to torture the war room. She had played so many games for so long, and knew so many people on the inside of the gaming industry, that she had accumulated a massive cache of cheat codes. Cheat codes—or cheats, as gamers called them—were bits of code written into games that, once discovered, allowed hard-core gamers special advantages over the rest of the playing multitudes. Cheats gave you special powers, like the ability to jump to new locations, or new weapons that could kill faster or more broadly. And the hardest to come by allowed you to do things in games that nobody—absolutely nobody else—was allowed to do. One of those things was to kill your own team members without being penalized.

Normally only the enemy was available for slaughter. There were games that allowed for players to be hit by “friendly fire,” in order to boost realism, but those were rare. If gamers could shoot anyone—even team members—without consequences, then chaos would rule. So the game manufacturers set up fail-safes to stop them: points were deducted; an on-off switch was used. But Mitty had found a same-team kill cheat for every one of the games that she—and the members of Garrett’s war room—played, overriding any existing game rules. And she used it to horrifying effect.

The first Garrett heard about it was when Patmore, the square-jawed Marine liaison, came to him practically in tears. “Every time I’m about to kill a whole shitload of alien bugs, she blasts me to smithereens. And then she screams at me through the headset and calls me a faggot. There’s nothing I can do about it. It’s not fucking fair,” Patmore said, waving his controller in the air, then adding, “Not fucking fair—
sir
.”

“Well, that’s life,” Garrett said, amused but uninterested.

An hour later, two more of his analyst/gamers made the same complaint. Mitty had capped them in the head, in three different games, without warning and for no particular reason, essentially invalidating the hours they’d just logged trying to get their characters as far in the game as they had. It was soul crushing.