The Ascendant: A Thriller (40 page)

All told, it cost her $93,546.88, which she thought was a pretty good deal.

She made her last purchase just after midnight, meeting an acne-covered Russian teenager in front of Gray’s Papaya at Seventy-second and Broadway. He said his name was Sergei, but Mitty guessed that was an alias, not that she gave a damn—the kid came highly recommended. In hacker circles he was considered King Shit, a magic man who could break into any network, anywhere, anytime. Mitty transferred $25,000 into his bank account from her mobile phone (she loved that she even had $25,000 to transfer—thank you, Garrett Reilly), and he handed her a 32-gig flash drive.

“Any instructions?” she asked him.

“Yes,” he said with a trace of a Russian accent. “Don’t use it to hack NORAD. They get pissed off, try to kill you.”

Mitty grinned. “Fucking awesome.”

Then, with her van full of goodies, and the passenger seat loaded with
beef jerky and Mountain Dew, Mitty headed south on Interstate 95 toward Washington, and drove through the night. She made it to D.C. by four in the morning, easily found the address Garrett had sent her, parked in an alley, then watched delightedly as a team of grunts, geeks, and bureaucratic types hauled the bounty into a vacant storefront and warehouse.

Mitty didn’t have an opinion yet about the rest of them, but she liked being around the soldiers, all that muscle and short hair. It made her weak-kneed, even though she knew she didn’t have a chance with any of them. A girl could dream.

Then she saw Garrett. The boy looked like shit: pale, like he hadn’t seen the sun in months, which she guessed might have been the case, and skinny, way too skinny. He was glad to see Mitty, gave her a hug, but she thought she saw him wince a couple of times, as if walking—even just talking—was painful for him. She asked him if he was okay, and he waved her off, said yeah, sure, just tired, but she didn’t buy it. He reminded her of a friend who’d been in a massive car accident and spent the next two years limping around with a cane.

She hoped to God Garrett would be okay. She loved Garrett. He was a no-shit pain in the ass, but also, underneath it all, one of the very good guys.

Garrett toured her through their new home, Murray’s Meats and Cuts. Mitty said she thought the place was gross, but Garrett pointed out that freezers and cutting machines had drawn a lot of power, so the wiring was adequate to run all her new toys without fear of setting off alarms at Potomac Electric. Or blowing fuses. Also, they could force the freezer air into the rest of the store, to cool off the computers. She agreed it was clever, but still kind of bogus; if she’d wanted to work at a butcher shop there was an Italian place that was always looking for help around the corner from her apartment in Queens.

They spent the early morning setting up the computers. Garrett and his military goons dealt with the off-the-shelf, prebuilt computers—they just plugged them in and loaded them up with software. Easy as pie, from Mitty’s point of view. Garrett introduced Mitty to Bingo, whom she had spoken to on the phone a whole bunch, and then the two of them got down to building the fancier, more exotic machines. She liked Bingo. He was a true geek, a misfit from birth, way more interested in machines and the numbers that they spewed out than actual people. And though he was a little on the heavy side—and Mitty was not one to cast stones, anyway—she thought he was damn cute. And big. Way big. He stammered when she stared at him. She dug that.

Him, she could fuck. Mitty made it a personal goal to sleep with him within forty-eight hours. Time allowing, of course. And also if she could find something resembling a bed to do it in.

The two of them assembled a pair of paralleled machines, each running quad processors and a fucking ton of memory, then loaded Sergei’s Armageddon intrusion software on the master computer, making sure to wall it off from the rest of the group’s network. Mitty wasn’t positive the kid hadn’t written code that would simply make the computer explode and kill them all. He seemed like the type.

By noon everything was built and networked. Now they just needed to throw the switch and tap into a mainline Web artery. Alexis Truffant—Garrett’s prissy West Point bitch—said she’d already arranged for an OC-3 Internet connection, paid for anonymously, without any tracking info, that would come right in off the Verizon relay station across the street, but Mitty didn’t buy that for a second. First off, if this was going to be a true underground hacking operation, then they should tap directly into a hulking OC-48 and get them some of that sweet 54 gigabytes per second, without signing up for anything, anywhere. And they should do it themselves. That was hacker credo. Secondly, where did this Alexis chick get off bossing everyone around, with her tight T-shirt and perky tits? Mitty hated women like that, acting like they owned the fucking world, and all the men in it. They made her want to barf.

Mitty argued her point for a while, but Garrett overruled her, and they fired up Alexis’s connection. Everything seemed to work fine, but Mitty warned them not to do anything obviously backdoor until they were sure the hookup was really invisible. For that purpose, she booted up the TCP scanner she’d downloaded the day before. It worked like a broad-spectrum radar, but in reverse, letting her know whether she was visible to other people trying to find her. Their port of entry onto a backbone connection seemed to be throwing out multiple, simultaneous IP return numbers—meaning anyone trying to trace their activity would end up staring at a list of thousands, if not millions, of randomly generated addresses. This was good, Mitty thought, but she still wanted one extra layer of protection, so she told Garrett first thing tomorrow morning she would start hunting for the link to the nearest fat cable and patch them into that on a secondary feed.

But not now. Now she needed to sleep. And to work on getting Bingo in the sack.

H
u Mei rode her Flying Pigeon bicycle happily down the uncrowded streets of the old neighborhood of Baoding, a small city some ninety miles west of Beijing. “Small” being relative, of course. There were more than a million people dodging in and out of the traffic of Baoding, but to Mei, who was still getting used to the extreme urbanization of coastal China, a million wasn’t so bad. It paled in comparison to the manic pace of Shanghai. Baoding, she decided, was her kind of city.

And the Flying Pigeon bicycle, provided to her by a supporter in the northern suburbs, was definitely her kind of bicycle: it was at least as old as she was, a good thirty years, if not older, rusted in parts, paint flecking off the chassis, but it was sturdy and dependable. It didn’t call attention to itself like some of the gleaming mountain bikes she saw young men pedaling, and that was perfect for Mei. She absolutely could not afford to call attention to herself. Not now, after the near disaster in Chengdu, and then all the hard work she’d done in the last week to calm her followers and make sure they were safe. She had dispersed her inner circle to points around China; she had decentralized the leadership. Some had complained—they wanted constant access to her—but Hu Mei knew it was the right thing to do. The only thing to do.

Mei allowed a brief glimmer of pride to puncture her usual modesty: with her back to the wall, she had kept the movement—and herself—alive. That made her quietly proud. And happy. Of course it made others in China considerably less happy. The party was ratcheting up the pressure: rumor had it that if
you as much as mentioned the word
Tiger
on the street you could land in jail. You could be beaten. You might be executed.

The thought of it made her blood boil. Innocent people, jailed and dying, and for what? Saying the wrong word? It was obscene.

Two men were following her, also riding bicycles. They rode twenty meters behind her, seemingly uninterested in the young woman pedaling ahead of them, but in fact watching every intersection, every sidewalk, for signs of the police or agents of the Ministry of State Security. There was a third rider, half a block ahead of them, scanning the streets for roadblocks or security checkpoints or the closed-circuit surveillance cameras that seemed to be springing up on every corner. If they came across a temporary barricade or a phalanx of policemen, the lead rider would make a quick hand signal to Hu Mei, telling her to veer left or right. The lead rider would then go through the checkpoint, just to throw off suspicion. Dodging a roadblock registered immediately as suspicious behavior, and the police took suspicious behavior as a tacit admission of guilt, and then proceeded accordingly. Once again—prison, beatings, death.

But the police—and the party—still did not know what she looked like. She had seen a few leaflets distributed here and there, but none of the doctored photographs on those handouts looked anything like her. It would be a miracle if someone recognized her from the government’s description. So for now, the warm sun shining on her face, the spring breeze caressing her hair, Hu Mei was still safe.

But today would be a test of that safety. Today would be a radical step outside the tried-and-true path. Today could get her killed. Or today could be the opening she had been looking for. She hoped for the best—and prayed she had prepared adequately for the worst.

She turned left on Yonghua Street, past the Xiushui shopping center, with its slabs of hastily erected white concrete walls, and started looking in earnest for the restaurant where the meeting was supposed to take place. The restaurant—Ming’s Family Style, it was called—was run by a middle-aged man sympathetic to the cause. His father had died in a reeducation camp during the Cultural Revolution, starved to death by a cadre of comrades overeager to prove their fidelity to the Maoist cause. The government had never apologized, had barely bothered to alert the survivors of the patriarch’s death, and the family had never forgotten that. They nursed a lifelong grudge. That made them valuable to Hu Mei. That made them loyal.

She spotted the sign for Ming’s Family Style halfway down the block. She slowed her Flying Pigeon, searching the cramped street for any signs of a police presence, or just simple surveillance. But there was none, at least none that Hu Mei could see, only a sign over the restaurant that boasted that they served the best
lú roù huŏ shāo
—baked wheat cake stuffed with minced donkey meat, a Baoding specialty—of any establishment in the city. Mei laughed: she had seen the same pronouncement on practically every sign for every restaurant for the last ten blocks. They loved their donkey meat in Baoding. Hu Mei was no fan of that supposed delicacy, but she was starving after having ridden her bicycle twenty miles into town, so even a little donkey would be a welcome prize at this point.

The hunger in her belly mixed with the low-level anxiety in her blood as she parked her bicycle and scanned the plate-glass window in the front of Ming’s. A family sat eating lunch at the counter. An older couple sipped tea by the window, a bowl of steaming soup between them. They were not what Hu Mei was looking for. Besides a waiter and a cook peeking out from behind a glass-bead curtain, the restaurant was empty. Disappointment washed over Mei. Was this the wrong restaurant? Did she have the time wrong? No, it was ten minutes after noon. Or had she been tricked? Were the police about to swoop down on this tiny street and arrest her?

A young soldier stepped out of a jewelry store down the block, and Hu Mei had a moment of gut-wrenching panic, but he only picked at his gums with a toothpick, spit loudly on the sidewalk, and strolled off in the opposite direction, unconcerned with Mei or anyone else on the street. Mei exhaled loudly, then peered back into Ming’s.

And that was when she saw her: a young woman stepping out of the bathroom in the back of the restaurant. She was pretty, Hu Mei’s age, nicely dressed in a white blouse. Mei watched her for a moment, sizing up her face, her posture, her attitude, even the shoes on her feet. All these things Mei considered keys to understanding the intentions of another human being: a hunched-over person was slothful; a timeworn face could betray bitterness; flashy shoes might tell Mei that the person she was dealing with was a narcissist, more concerned with image than with substantive issues.

But this woman showed none of these things. She stood straight, she smiled, and her shoes were pale-blue running sneakers. Nikes, Hu Mei guessed.

Okay, Mei thought as she reached for the restaurant door, time to take another chance. Maybe the last one I’ll ever take.

C
eleste Chen had to admit that the donkey cakes were not as bad as all that. Yes, they smelled odd, and the bread around the meat had been flecked with green, but the meat itself had been smothered in spices—she tasted fennel, cinnamon, pepper, and ginger—giving it a pungent kick that hid the fact she was eating a relative of the horse. And, anyway, it wasn’t the taste that had sent her running to the bathroom.

It was her nerves.

Ever since she’d made contact with the journalist in Hebei who had promised to connect her with Hu Mei, her stomach had been tied in knots. She found it incredible that she would be taken into anybody’s confidence, much less that of a Chinese journalist and follower of the now infamous Tiger, but she quickly realized that Hu’s followers were everywhere. What had seemed like a random encounter with a member of the insurgency’s inner circle had soon revealed itself to only be scratching the surface. After two days in Shanxi Province, it seemed to Celeste that half the people she met, no matter how random the encounter, knew who Hu Mei was, and most of them supported her. To Celeste, it quickly became clear why the government was so terrified of the Tiger.

They had every reason to be. This was more than a grassroots movement. This was a tsunami.

The journalist had told Celeste she would need to be vetted, and so she had spent a day waiting in a cinder-block shack in the coal mountains of Shanxi,
being interviewed by a series of young men and women, each asking variations on the same questions: Where was she born? Was she really American? How come she spoke such flawless Mandarin? Why did she want to meet the Tiger? Had she ever worked for the Communist Party?