The Ascendant: A Thriller (51 page)

“You’re kidding me, right?” Garrett said, laughing dryly.

“Reilly, Garrett?” Cannel asked again, in exactly the same tone of voice—flat, lifeless, fighting to withhold all emotion.

“Yeah, that’s me,” Garrett said, already tired of the joke. “Reilly, Garrett.”

“You are being released from federal custody. All charges against you have been dropped, by order of the U.S. Attorney’s office, District of Columbia. You can pick up your belongings from the watch supervisor on the main floor. You will be given twenty-two dollars for transportation from this facility to your home or temporary place of residence.”

Garrett let out a surprised grunt. Agent Cannel shoved the electronic clipboard at Garrett. “By signing here, and here, you will be allowed to collect all personal items taken from you at the initiation of your custody. By signing here you release the government from any and all compensation for your time spent in this detention center. Read and sign.”

Garrett scanned the clipboard, giving the dense paragraphs of legalese a cursory glance, then signed in all three places. Cannel snatched back the clipboard and walked out of the cell. He waited in the hallway.

Garrett took his time gathering himself, his mind racing to sort through what was going on. And then he realized. He walked into the hallway as Agent Cannel strode ahead of him, leading the way. The two detention-center guards trailed behind them.

“They made you do it, didn’t they?” Garrett said to Cannel’s back. “They made you release me yourself. As punishment. To humiliate you. And it pisses you off beyond all belief.”

Garrett could see the agent’s shoulders twitch beneath his suit.

“But you’ve got it easy, don’t you?” Garrett continued as they passed through a set of electronic doors. “Your partner, Stoddard, he’s totally fucked. He’s sitting in a federal jail, just like this one. Facing murder charges.” Garrett smiled, but he knew no one was watching. “I wonder if he’s getting ass-raped right now.”

Cannel stopped abruptly and spun around to face Garrett. He stuck his face up next to Garrett’s, and Garrett could smell the tobacco on his breath.

“This is not over, fuckface. Not by a long way. You step wrong, just once, and I’ll take down your whole goddamn family.”

Garrett waited until the last of Cannel’s rage seemed to have been expelled, then said, “Actually, it is over for me. Completely, totally over.”

Garrett said these words without bitterness. They were simply fact. He was done with the government, with secrets, with the Ascendant project. For good.

Cannel wheeled around and stomped off down the hall, no longer interested in keeping up a façade of bureaucratic reserve. Garrett signed for his belongings and the $22 in cash with the watch supervisor on the main floor, then stepped out of the William G. Truesdale Adult Detention Center and into a sunny Alexandria afternoon. He let the warm Virginia sunshine wash over him; the Capital Beltway was humming above him, lousy with cars. He crossed the street and read the thirty-six-point headline of the
Washington Post
in a newspaper box:

Massive Protests Continue Across China

Rioters Clash with Police in Beijing

Most Coastal Cities Under Curfew

The body of the story was hidden beneath the fold, and he had no change to buy the paper. The paper box didn’t accept dollar bills. It didn’t matter; there was nothing Garrett could do about it anyway. He was officially powerless, one man without even an Internet connection. And he was sick and tired. Of everything. He needed a rest. He needed his own bed in New York City.

He started walking north, to find a bus, to get him there.

The first week back went by in a haze. Mostly, Garrett slept: in his own bed, in movie theaters, sometimes in the park, in the sun, by himself, on a bench. His exhaustion was bone deep, but he healed considerably in that time. The headaches still came daily, but their severity lessened, as did their duration. The neurologist at Roosevelt Hospital said they might never go away entirely, but the downward trend was encouraging. He also told Garrett to stop doing whatever the hell he’d been doing to himself since his original skull fracture. “Because whatever it is, eventually it’ll kill you.”

Garrett thanked him for the advice and said he’d try his best to comply.

He checked his e-mail every once in a while, but didn’t go to news websites; he kept away from newspapers and the TV. He knew the protests were continuing in China, because everyone, everywhere was talking about it: on the subway, in stores, restaurants. It was news you simply couldn’t avoid.

Garrett tried not to think about it. He waited for word from Celeste Chen, but it never came. He tried calling her, but the number was no longer in service, and his e-mails bounced back. One of the pieces of news he’d picked up was that the government had regained control of the Golden Shield, and they were clamping down hard, shutting off all incoming and outgoing e-mails. All social media in the country had been banned. Garrett wondered if he would ever see Celeste Chen again. He hoped that he hadn’t sent her to prison. Or worse. He lay awake at night fretting about her.

At the end of the week he called Jenkins & Altshuler to ask Avery for his old job back, only to have his call transferred to an on-staff psychologist. A throaty-sounding woman carefully sussed out Garrett’s relationship to Avery, and then informed him, with well-practiced compassion, that Avery was dead. He had died in a tragic auto accident two weeks earlier.

Garrett practically fell out of his chair.

“What happened to him?”

“He was hit by a car. As he was walking home from work.”

Garrett’s mind reeled. “Did they catch who did it?”

“Not yet. The police have a number of leads. They’re saying it is a very active investigation.”

Garrett thanked her and hung up. He spent the rest of the day staring at the wall, unbelieving. When he got up the next morning he searched the Web for obituaries and found a few dozen. There was a large one in the
New York Times
, calling Avery a much-loved Yale mathematics professor, financial entrepreneur, and presidential advisor. They called his death an unsolved tragedy. The
Daily News
ran a gory crime piece, full of details of Avery’s last moments, the rush to the hospital, the frantic search for the driver. And then a follow-up a few days later saying the crime remained unsolved.

And then nothing else.

It was as if Avery had never lived. Nobody seemed to care. Garrett called the Sixth Police Precinct five separate times. Each time, the watch commander transferred him to a detective on the case, and each time Garrett was sent to voice mail. Garrett left messages, but the detective never called back. Garrett even went to the scene of the accident, a block from the Jenkins & Altshuler offices, but there was no marker on the street, no flowers resting on the curb; nothing to remember Avery or what had happened to him.

As he stood at the scene, a wrenching thought occurred to Garrett through his grief: Who would watch over him now that Avery was gone?

No one. He was alone.

Fifteen minutes later, Garrett found himself standing in the lobby of Jenkins & Altshuler. He hadn’t even realized he’d walked there. He decided to visit his offices, and the moment he showed up on the twenty-second floor he was surrounded by his old coworkers. They asked where he’d been, how he was feeling, what he was going to do now. Garrett deflected most of the questions, and no one seemed to have any inkling of what he had been doing during the last two months. Everyone expressed their condolences about Avery; they knew he and Garrett had been close.

Then a manager came down from the twenty-third floor and offered Garrett his old job back. The manager—her name was Thomason—said they needed Garrett’s quant skills on the bond-trading desk. The firm had been on a losing streak since he left, and could he start the next day.

Garrett came in early the following morning, but in his first hour back at
Jenkins & Altshuler he knew it was no longer his white-hot, burning center of the universe. It was just a place to make money. The pointlessness was palpable to him, as if he’d taken off blinders and could see the bond-trading room for what it truly was—a collection of entitled boys shouting into their phones. The day left him restless and agitated, and after the exchanges closed down he went for a walk along the river, crushing empty soda cans with his shoes, then kicking them into the darkness. The sun had long ago set, and the Hudson seemed thick and slow-moving in the night air. He felt empty.

He called Mitty and they met for a beer in the back of McSorley’s later that night. They rehashed all that had happened; how she had been briefly detained, and then, like Garrett, released without further comment; how she had searched for notice of Jimmy Lefebvre’s funeral, but there was no mention of one anywhere. She gossiped about Bingo and Patmore: they’d been jailed too, and then released. Patmore had disappeared back into the Corps.

“And Bingo, we spoke once, but then he never called me back,” Mitty growled between shots of Jack Daniels. “After what happened. What a little bitch.”

Garrett gave her a curious look. “
After what happened?
What did happen?”

Mitty made a rasping sound, halfway between a grunt and a spit. “Maah, nothing special. I hate him.”

Garrett thought he saw genuine hurt in her eyes, so he let the subject drop. Later, Mitty tried to egg Garrett into a fight with a drunken derivatives trader, but Garrett wasn’t interested—he was taking the doctor’s warning seriously—so Mitty got to call him a pussy.

He didn’t mind. It actually cheered him up.

He couldn’t sleep that night. He obsessed about Avery, and how he had died—his final moments, if he’d seen it coming, was it murder? It seemed too convenient to have been an accident, especially given the bombing a block away the month before. The later he stayed up, and the longer he thought about it, the more he was convinced that the mysterious Hans Metternich was connected to both events. Garrett knew nothing about Metternich, and the only person in his life who did was gone. He typed out an e-mail to the warbyothermeans address.
Where are you? What happened to Avery?
He encrypted it, sent it, then stayed up two more hours, waiting for a reply, but none came.

The next morning, walking to work, Garrett thought he glimpsed someone following him: a middle-aged man, wrapped in a navy pea coat, half a block behind
him. When Garrett turned to face him, the man reversed course and walked down a side street. Garrett ran after him, but by the time he reached the side street the man was gone. Garrett felt, instinctively, that it had been Metternich—the timing made sense—but he had no proof. Garrett had never even seen Metternich’s face.

When he returned home from work that evening there was a package sitting on his kitchen table. The package was wrapped in a brown paper grocery bag. “FOR GARRETT” was written in neat black Magic Marker on the front.

Garrett’s blood froze. His door had been locked, and no one else—not even the building manager—had the key to his apartment. He circled the bag without touching it, then checked the windows, which were also locked, and the other rooms and closets, which were empty. He knocked on his neighbors’ doors, but they hadn’t seen or heard anything. He returned to his kitchen with his heart pounding and willed himself to open the package.

Inside was a paperback book:
On War
by Carl von Clausewitz. Slotted between the pages was a drugstore condolence card, with a pair of sad-eyed bears hugging each other on the cover, and “Deepest Sympathy” printed inside. The card had been placed at the first page of book one, chapter III. The chapter heading read: “The Genius For War.”

Garrett scanned the first two sentences:
“EVERY special calling in life, if it is to be followed with success, requires peculiar qualifications of understanding and soul. Where these are of a high order, and manifest themselves by extraordinary achievements, the mind to which they belong is termed
GENIUS.”

He tore the chapter out of the book, ripped the card into pieces, then threw the whole thing in the trash. He paced his apartment, enraged, jamming a baseball bat in the window by the fire escape, and a chair against the front door. He locked himself in the bathroom and tried to calm his breathing. His head throbbed. He thought about calling the police, but he knew that would be a dead end. What could he possibly tell them? That someone had given him a book and that it spooked him? At that moment it became clear to Garrett that he was boxed in. He was trapped in this new life, whether he wanted to be or not. He pounded the tiled wall in frustration. He vowed that one day, when he had his strength back, he would track Metternich down. Garrett didn’t care how dangerous or all-knowing he was, or that he could seemingly break into Garrett’s apartment at will. If Metternich turned out to be responsible for Avery’s death, Garrett would kill him. Without hesitation.

•  •  •

Three weeks and a day after he had been released from federal detention, Garrett was again at the Greek diner on Tenth and Avenue C, sipping coffee at one in the morning, picking at a plate of scrambled eggs, when Alexis Truffant walked into the restaurant in her full Army service blues and sat down opposite him at his table. Her hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail; she wore a touch of makeup and light-red lipstick. Garrett smelled a whiff of perfume.

He was surprised at how natural it seemed for Alexis to simply show up in his life unannounced and take a seat at his table. It couldn’t have been more normal.

“Hello, Garrett,” she said.

“Long time no see.”

“How’s your head?” A waitress poured her a coffee.

“Better. Not perfect.”

“I’m sorry about Avery Bernstein.”

Garrett nodded. “Yeah. Thanks.”

“He was hit by a car?”

Garrett studied her face. “Hit-and-run driver. That’s what they say. But you don’t believe that, do you?”

Alexis glanced around the diner. The place was mostly empty.