The Ascendant: A Thriller (48 page)

He regretted everything about his involvement with Hans Metternich. On the same day that he’d called a security company to sweep his offices, Avery had hired a private detective to track the mysterious Metternich down. The detective had found one match—he was seventy-eight and lived outside of Munich—and nothing else. The man who had approached Avery on a lower Manhattan street corner was a ghost.

Avery tapped his foot impatiently as he stood on the sidewalk. He’d called the car service a little late, and would probably have to wait for them to show
up. The night was warm, and the streets looked less intimidating than they had for the past few days. Avery wasn’t sure why, but for a moment his paranoia subsided; whatever Garrett was doing was Garrett’s own affair. Avery was a minor player in this drama—all the juicy stuff was happening far above his pay grade.

That thought gave him confidence. He decided to skip the car service. He called the company on his cell phone, canceled the ride, and started off west down John Street. The sun had dipped below the horizon, and Avery breathed deep of the spring air. It was good to be alive. He waited at the traffic light, then turned north and crossed the street on Broadway.

He heard an engine being gunned, and thought for a moment that it was a cabbie racing to get a fare, but then a woman yelled behind him. Avery thought she was saying “Luka!” like in that song from the eighties, but as he turned and saw the car racing toward him down John Street he realized she had said “Look out!”

The car was aiming for him.

The last thought Avery had, as the front end of the Chrysler hit him, full speed, in the midsection, was that he hoped they hadn’t gotten to Garrett as well.

He hoped Garrett would be okay.

Then blackness overtook Avery Bernstein.

S
tanding in the back of the crowded train station on the outskirts of Shanghai, Celeste could tell that the engineer was having second thoughts. His name was Li Chan; he was a small, balding man with sad eyes and fidgety hands. He was a cousin of Hu Mei—she seemed to have thousands of cousins, scattered across the country—and had been, at first, eager to hand over information. But not now.

“How do I know you are not the police?” Li Chan asked in Mandarin.

“If I were the police, I would have had you arrested already,” Celeste said.

Li Chan nodded. That seemed to make sense to him. Around them, travelers hurried from one train platform to another, or out the door to waiting buses that would whisk them away to the center of Shanghai. Noise was everywhere; a thousand voices, chatter, official announcements about trains leaving and arriving, the grind of engines and the metal-to-metal squeal of wheels on tracks. The two of them were standing in the back of the cavernous station, unnoticed by passengers and workers alike, two locals in the middle of an intense discussion.

“They will kill me if they find out,” Li Chan said, rubbing his hands together. Celeste thought he looked like he was trying to start a fire with his fingers.

“They will not find out,” Celeste countered quickly, quietly. “We are very careful.” She knew time was running out. She had been monitoring the Internet all day, stunned at first that she could access any content, uncensored, then alarmed as reports of chaos and political tension raced across news sites and blogs. Garrett was spinning his storm of chaos, but they needed Li Chan. They needed him right away.

This was the test that Celeste had known was coming.

“Master Li,” Celeste said, trying to get the older man to look her in the eye. “This is a moment of extreme importance. You have a part to play in history. Isn’t that important to you?”

“What do you know of history?” Li Chan said. “You are American. Americans have no history. A hundred years. Two hundred years. Nothing.” He swung his hand out in a grand, sweeping motion. “Chinese people know history. Thousands of years. Whatever you Americans are planning, it means nothing. I am done with this. I am leaving.”

Li Chan started away from Celeste, his fear clearly overwhelming him, but she jumped to block his path. “No, you are wrong. It means something very important. And not just to Americans. To Chinese people. Isn’t what Hu Mei is doing important? Doesn’t she understand history?”

Celeste could hear the pitch of her own voice rising, the tension straining her vocal chords. She knew she had to calm herself.

“You cannot force me!” Li Chan said. “I can turn you in to the police right now. You know that? You are a conspirator. An enemy of the state. They will take you to jail. Interrogate you. Beat you. Then put you against a wall and shoot you. I can go to that soldier right there and turn you in. I can!”

Li Chan pointed to a young soldier in a green uniform rolling his own cigarette and lazily eyeing the commuters. He didn’t seem dangerous, but Celeste knew that he could summon backup in mere seconds, and then everything Li Chan had predicted they would do to her would absolutely come to pass. Because she was no longer an American student looking to research a social movement in central China. She was a member of that very movement. She was a budding revolutionary. She closed her eyes and breathed deep. If she had learned anything from watching Hu Mei in their brief time together, it was the power of humility. This was a test, and she needed to pass it.

Celeste bowed her head, stepping out of Li Chan’s way, allowing him a free path to the soldier, who was now smoking his cigarette. “Of course,” she said. “You are right. And you must do what you must do. I was wrong to try to stop you. I have been overbearing and foolish. So American of me. Please forgive me.”

Again she bowed, eyes directed only at the floor. Celeste could not see if the engineer was standing in front of her, or if he had stalked off to inform the
soldier, but it did not matter to her. Humility was not something to be faked, and acceptance of one’s fate had to be real, and fully understood.

And Celeste was glad for it. She would take what came. She took a last calming breath, then looked up. To her surprise, Li Chan was still standing there, only now he had a scrap of paper in his hand.

“There,” Li Chan said, thrusting the paper into her fingers, “now you have it.”

He turned and walked quickly into the crowd. Celeste watched him go, then looked at the paper: on it was written a username and a password.

Celeste smiled, not with relief or triumph, but with fulfillment.

G
arrett read the text message on his phone three times, then wrote the Pinyin—phonetic Mandarin—onto a legal pad. He turned off the cell phone and dislodged its battery. His team gathered around him.

“Know what it means?” Lefebvre asked.

“Doesn’t matter,” Garrett said, swiveling his chair to face his computer monitor. “As long as it gets us in.”

“But won’t the control panel user interface be in Chinese too?” Bingo asked.

“It’s from a Finnish company. They make all the cell tower master controller programs. It’ll be in English,” Garrett said. He paused for a second. “I hope.”

He typed a URL into his browser. A black page loaded with a query for a username and password. Garrett carefully typed in the Pinyin he had copied from the cell phone and pressed enter.

The team waited, holding their collective breath. A page began to load. It read: Welcome Li Chan China Mobile Tibet Region Administrator.

Garrett beamed. “We’re in.”

“W
e got a hit,” Agent Stoddard said as he watched the software program on his laptop triangulate the distances between local cell phone towers. “A text message. Definitely from China. To a local number.”

“Can you give me more?” Agent Cannel asked from the driver’s seat.

“Working on it.” Stoddard watched the map roll slightly east, then north, as it tried to pin down the recipient of the text. He knew the software was calculating the distance between cell towers, then trying to estimate the position of the receiving device, in this case a cell phone with a local area code prefix.

“Can we read it?”

“Encrypted. It would take hours.” Agent Stoddard mumbled his encouragement to the software, whispering, “Come on, come on, come on,” under his breath. The map settled, and a large red dot blinked on and off. “Looks like Sixteenth and C.”

Agent Cannel threw the van into drive and tore down the tiny side street. Sixteenth and C was only five minutes away. “Any clearer?” he asked.

The red dot blinked one last time, then disappeared.

“Turned off his cell phone,” Stoddard said. “Probably yanked the battery. But it looked like two buildings. Maybe three. We can raid two buildings at the same time. Three might be a bit much.”

Cannel steered the van down Massachusetts Avenue. Night had settled upon the capital, the streets were flooded in orange halogen light.

Stoddard checked the safety on his Heckler & Koch 9mm pistol. Cannel
steered the van right on Sixteenth and slowed as C Street appeared down the block. There were small, two-story row houses up and down the block, most in need of repair and a new coat of paint. On the corner sat an abandoned storefront and warehouse; a faded sign hung over the boarded-up windows.

“Murray’s Meats and Cuts,” Cannel read slowly, squinting in the darkness. “That can’t be the place, can it?”

Stoddard crawled to the front of the van and peered through the windshield. He stared at the sign, the boarded-up front door, the warehouse that stretched out behind the building and fronted the alley.

“Call back up,” Stoddard said, “and let’s find out.”

T
he chairman of the Central Military Commission laced his fingers together. “It is the considered opinion of my department that war with the United States is now inevitable. The events of the last twenty-four hours have made this very clear to us.”

The six other members of the Politburo Standing Committee of the Communist Party of China reacted with visible agitation to this statement. They were the seven most powerful people in China. They were all male, over fifty years old, cautious and conservative, and, right now, extremely unhappy. The general secretary—
the single most powerful man in China
—removed his glasses, wiped them clean with a handkerchief laid on the table for just that purpose, then replaced them gently on the bridge of his nose.

“You propose that we strike first?” the general secretary asked.

“If we are to win this war, then yes, striking first would be most advantageous,” the military commissioner said. “If we wait for our enemies to land the first blow, then we allow them to choose the place and time of the battle. But if we strike first, then they must fight on our terms, and that is to our benefit.” His voice rang out in the deadening silence of the bland conference room in the bowels of a government building near the Great Hall in Tiananmen Square. The vice secretary of the Communist Party sipped his water, while the deputy director of the Central Guidance Commission for the Building of Spiritual Civilization shook his head in disgust.

“This is the exact opposite of what we had planned for, is it not?” the deputy
director for the building of spiritual civilization said. He glanced quickly across the table, where Xu Jin, the director for state security, sat silently in shame. All eyes in the room turned to him. “They were supposed to strike at us, no?”

It had been a disastrous twenty-four hours for Director Xu. First the breaching of the Golden Shield, then the faked videos of riots in ten cities across China, and finally the devastation of the nation’s businesses on the world stock markets. Everyone on the Standing Committee blamed Xu Jin for these calamities; this much was very clear to him. It was he who had first proposed the stealth attacks on American infrastructure. He had laid out the timing, the severity, even the methods. And the attacks had worked excellently. They had pushed the Americans to the brink of war, which was exactly what the Politburo had wanted. Let them shoot first, Xu Jin had said, and let us be the aggrieved victim. The Tiger’s rebellion will pale in comparison, and then we will have stability once again.

It was Director Xu Jin’s shining moment. He was brilliant, a visionary planner. There was talk that in four more years
he
would be party chairman.

And then the last twenty-four hours happened. The Americans had struck back with their own form of deviousness. How it had caught his people off guard he could not say—all these things technological were beyond him. All he knew was that they had been fast and effective, and that his time on the Politburo might be coming to a crashing end. Xu Jin was about to be stripped of everything and sent to live in a wretched apartment building in Mongolia. The shame of it made him sweat through the stiff collar of his white shirt.

And yet, he thought, all was not yet lost. He could still fight his way back into the good graces of the committee. He simply had to find someone else to be more wrong.

“Comrade General Secretary,” Xu Jin said, straining to keep his voice muted. “We at the Ministry of State Security believe this would be a rash proposition. We believe the chairman of the Military Commission is moving too quickly. We believe the situation is now under control.”

“Director Xu,” the general secretary said. “How did you come to this opinion?”

“Our teams are minutes away from restoring the Golden Shield,” Xu Jin said, bluffing—but it was all he had. “The stock markets will right themselves when we produce accurate information, which we have at the ready. And our security teams have flooded the cities where the riots—real or imagined—took
place. No one is allowed on the streets there. At any time. We have achieved stability. A harmonious society.”

“And you are secure in these opinions, Director Xu? We have seen the worst of it?”

“We at the Ministry of State Security acknowledge that the Americans have inflicted some damage, but there will be no more.” Xu Jin fixed each of the other members of the Standing Committee with a quick look. He was gaining traction with them. He could feel it. “They do not have a long-term strategy. These are random attacks. Haphazard and not well thought out. They do not understand the larger situation. They remain unaware of the Tiger, of the uprising, and of our efforts to combat her. We have monitored no news of this in their press, no word of it from their diplomats or conversations. If we hold steady to our course we will get what we want. The Americans are undisciplined and lazy. Like children, soon they will lash out foolishly with real force and we will have what we need.”