The Ascendant: A Thriller

by Drew Chapman

  “Can you hear?” he asked.

  She nodded. “A little. You?”

  “It’s coming back,” he said.

  “Are you hurt?”

  Garrett rolled his right shoulder. It was stiff, but not too bad. Nothing worse than he’d experienced playing high school football. “I’m okay. You?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “What happened?”

  “Car bomb.”

  “Who did it?”

  “Don’t know.”

  The SUV pulled under the East River Drive and onto the side street that bordered the water. They stopped at the edge of a dock that jutted out into the river. The whole drive had taken less than five minutes.

  Alexis opened the door. “Come on. Let’s go.”

  Garrett scanned the dock, the street around it. “This is the helipad.”

  “Yes. We need to go. You need to see a doctor.”

  “There are doctors in New York. Quite a few.”

  “Someone just tried to blow you up. Do you really want to stay here?”

  The stocky man who had held the door open was standing next to Alexis now, and Garrett could see a black pistol showing under the vents of his suit jacket.

  “How do you know it was meant for me?”

  “If it wasn’t meant for you, why did you run? You knew they were after you, so you ran.”

  “You were watching me?”

  “We had you under surveillance.”

  “Why?”

  “This is not the time. You’re in danger.”

  Garrett shook his head, settling his body back into the seat. “I’m not moving until you tell me what the fuck is going on.”

  Alexis wiped the dust and blood from her face. She took a deep breath. “There are people who would like to talk to you. They’ve been watching you. And they’re impressed. If you come with me now, I will introduce them to you. And they will explain everything.”

  Garrett stared at her. Alexis nodded over her shoulder. “That helicopter is waiting to take us to Washington.”

  11

  IN TRANSIT—DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, MARCH 25, 1:15 PM

  The powder-blue Sikorsky Executive helicopter lifted vertically off the South Street helipad, dipped left briefly, then climbed to a thousand feet under a southwest compass heading. Within minutes, they were flying low and fast over the coastline of New Jersey.

  Garrett lay back in the plush leather seat. Alexis made a series of cell-phone calls, talking quietly but forcefully into a Bluetooth headset. She seemed to alternate between anger and surprise. Garrett tried to hear her over the rotor and engine noise, trying all the time to regain control of his hearing, but gave up after a few minutes. He pulled out his own cell phone and tried to call Avery Bernstein, just to tell him he was okay, but Garrett couldn’t get any reception—Alexis Truffant’s military technology was clearly better than his. He closed his eyes, exhausted, the shock of the explosion having worn off, leaving him drained. His hands were trembling slightly. Just as he was on the verge of sleep, Alexis tapped him on the shoulder.

  “You shouldn’t sleep. You might have a concussion.”

  Garrett kept his eyes open after that. He watched the coastline rush past, then the inland scrub of South Jersey, then the yawning blue of the Delaware Bay. It was beautiful, whitecaps and sailboats and rusting freighters, all splayed out just below him. He had never flown in a helicopter before. As they sped over the Delaware peninsula, then across Chesapeake Bay and over the suburban sprawl that clustered between Baltimore and Washington, he ran over what had happened on the street in his head. He tried to focus on the face of the slouching man, and then the second man on his cell phone. Was that bomb meant to kill him? His memory told Garrett that they had been watching him. Okay, he thought, if so, then Captain Truffant was correct, and the bomb was aimed at him. But why blow him up? Was this about the Treasury bonds? And Avery’s warning? But Garrett had already passed on what he knew. It made no sense. Given that it was a singular occurrence, it fit no pattern, and Garrett was not good at one-offs. His head still hurt from the explosion, so he decided to stop thinking about it.

  He turned to Alexis when she was between calls.

  “Where are we going? Exactly?” he asked.

  “Bolling Air Force Base. It’s where my agency is headquartered. The Defense Intelligence Agency.” She smiled at him. “So now you know who I work for.”

  “Woo-hoo,” Garrett answered, wagging his finger in the air.

  The Sikorsky swung south to avoid the restricted air space over D.C., then approached Bolling by going up along the Potomac. From the air, the base seemed not unlike any other corporate mall or planned community, with tract homes, baseball fields, and a small marina on the river. It didn’t even have a runway. The Sikorsky set down on a helipad near a parking lot, and Garrett and Alexis climbed into a waiting black sedan. They were driven to the east edge of the base, where there was a small hospital.

  Garrett was waved through an admitting room, past a triage nurse and into a green examination room. A young doctor was waiting for him. She cleaned the cuts on his face and shoulder, then ran him through a series of concussion tests, all of which he passed. The doctor handed him a card and asked him to call if he felt dizzy or nauseous. Alexis seemed to have disappeared—the doctor said she was going to examine her next—and in her stead a pair of military policemen escorted Garrett out of the hospital to a single-story, windowless office-park building. They brought him to a fluorescent-lit conference room, asked him if he’d like a sandwich—he asked for a turkey and Swiss—and then returned with the food and a soda ten minutes later.

  Garrett ate hurriedly, and considered whom he might call. The truth was, there were only a few people who cared about his welfare, Mitty and Avery being top of the list. It occurred to Garrett that he might finally have managed to alienate everyone else he’d ever known. That thought made him grimace involuntarily, and he quickly put his phone away.

  The moment he finished eating, a pair of black-suited men entered the conference room, and Garrett realized they had been watching him the entire time. He spotted the surveillance camera in the ceiling corner, and reminded himself to check for that kind of thing from now on. The men introduced themselves as Agents Cannel and Stoddard. They said they worked for Homeland Security. Garrett asked for ID, and they dutifully let him inspect their badges.

  “We just want to ask you a few questions,” Stoddard, the older and larger of the two, said. Garrett assumed they would ask about the explosion, and what he’d seen, but instead they launched into questions about his family. How long had his father worked for the Long Beach Unified School District? How old had Garrett been when his father died? Had his mother ever held a job? What did she do now? Had Garrett ever been arrested? Within two minutes Garrett was growing angry.

  “What do you care if I’ve ever been arrested?”

  “These are just standard questions, Mr. Reilly.”

  “Have you ever been arrested?” Garrett asked them.

  “I have not,” Agent Stoddard said.

  “Well, why not? You don’t party? You never have any fun?”

  “I do have fun. Just law-abiding fun.”

  Garrett grunted. “I just remembered. I did get arrested once. For multiple homicides. But I got a good lawyer and was acquitted.”

  The Homeland Security agents simply pressed on with their questions. “How about your mother—”

  “How about your mother?”

  “—was she ever arrested?”

  Somewhere into the fifth minute Garrett simply stopped talking. The agents asked a few more questions, then asked if Garrett would be answering any of them, and when he said nothing, they thanked him, folded up their notebooks, and left.

  • • •

  In a small observation room adjacent to the conference room, the two agents ducked their heads in and nodded to Alexis Truffant and General Kline, who were watching Garrett on a color monitor.

  �
��One thing we could ascertain, General,” Agent Stoddard said, pointing to the video feed of Garrett. “He is definitely an asshole.”

  Alexis smirked. “He’s off the charts on that.”

  General Kline scowled as the Homeland Security agents walked away. He was no fan of that organization; they had no real jurisdiction on an Air Force base, and yet they strutted through the place like they owned it. Theirs was an ever-growing bureaucracy, and its steady encroachment made him uneasy. He took a deep breath and turned to Alexis. “Captain, if I bring him in front of who I’d like to bring him in front of . . .”

  “. . . would he make you look like a fool?” Alexis finished his sentence.

  “A terrible, stupid fool?”

  “From what I’ve seen, sir, if there is even a slight possibility of his causing a disruption, then he almost certainly will.”

  Kline studied Garrett on the closed-circuit feed. The young man was handsome, there was no denying that, but Kline thought he had a dangerous, almost feral look about him, as if he were a man-child raised by wolves and they’d just rescued him from the wilds of some vast northern forest. He was tapping his fingers repeatedly on the desk. He seemed impatient, twitchy, angry.

  Kline rubbed his temples softly, fighting off a growing tension migraine. “I’ll make the phone calls. You find him some clothes and get him ready for dinner.”

  12

  BOLLING AIR FORCE BASE, WASHINGTON, D.C., MARCH 25, 4:49 PM

  The one-bedroom condo sat in the center of Bolling Air Force Base. MPs patrolled the front and back of the condo building. Inside, a pair of dark slacks and a clean button-down shirt, in Garrett’s size, were laid out on a bed; a blue blazer hung from the door.

  “You pick these out?” Garrett asked Alexis.

  “If I say yes, are you going to refuse to wear them?” she answered.

  Garrett laughed. “I’m getting predictable.” He pulled off his shirt in front of her. She walked out of the bedroom and closed the door, but he nudged it back open so she could hear him. And see him. He wanted her to see him naked. Anything to make her uncomfortable. He pulled off his pants as well.

  “Why didn’t the Homeland guys ask me about the bomb?”

  “I don’t know,” Alexis said, studiously avoiding looking at the open door. “Look. We’re going to a dinner tonight. There will be important people there. People who are responsible for the future of this country.”

  “I mean, I was a witness. And maybe even the target. It’s got to be the biggest news story in the country right now. That’s just weird.”

  “If you could simply listen to what they have to say to you, that would be much appreciated. What they have to say is far more important than the bombing.”

  “More important than whether I live or die?”

  “Considerably more important than that.”

  “To me, whether I live or die is surprisingly important.”

  “I’m sure it is,” Alexis countered with undisguised disdain.

  Garrett shoved the bedroom door closed and took a shower. When he came out, Alexis was gone and the front door was locked from the outside. He kicked the door once, and was pretty sure he could bust open its thin plywood frame with a little more effort, but he decided against it—what was the point? He didn’t have anywhere particular to go. He looked for a TV in the condo, but there was none, so he checked the news feed on his cell phone. CNN and The New York Times were reporting it as a terror attack, a car bomb, with multiple injuries but no fatalities; no group or person had claimed responsibility, and the city authorities had no suspects. Garrett was not mentioned in any of the news stories, but on thinking about this, he didn’t see why he would be. No one knew he had been downstairs or anywhere near the explosion. But then he realized that Avery Bernstein hadn’t called him. No one from Jenkins & Altshuler had, which was strange, given that he had essentially become a missing person. Perhaps Alexis Truffant had called his boss? She seemed like the type—no loose ends.

  He called Avery’s office, but it went right to voice mail. They were closed for the day. He didn’t really have anything to tell Avery, except maybe that he was okay, had survived the bombing, but something told him that Avery already knew this. Avery was more connected to this whole thing than Garrett had realized. He was the nexus from which all subsequent actions had radiated out. Avery, Garrett decided, was up to speed.

  Next he called Mitty Rodriguez, but she didn’t answer either. He left her a message, in case she was worried, but Garrett doubted she was; she was probably deep in the bowels of an online game and hadn’t even noticed the bombing. Mitty often gamed for days on end without coming up for air. Or for news of the world. It was understood that either of them could disappear for long stretches of time and the other wouldn’t freak out.

  Alexis returned at six-thirty, as the sun was setting over eastern Virginia. She knocked on the condo door, unlocked it, and let herself in. Garrett did a double take as she stood there in the foyer in a short black dress and sheer nylons, with her hair flowing down around her shoulders and her lips bright red with lipstick. She looked stunning.

  “We must be meeting some really, really important people,” Garrett said, nodding to her. “Because you look fantastic.”

  “We are. And thank you for the compliment.”

  Garrett followed her down the steps of the condo and into a waiting unmarked Ford. A uniformed Air Force lieutenant drove, and Alexis and Garrett sat in back. Garrett felt a little like he was going to his high school prom—which he had not gone to, opting instead to get stoned on the beach and night-surf—and enjoyed the sensation. At least his prom date was pretty. They crossed the Frederick Douglass Bridge into Washington, D.C., proper. It was the first time Garrett had ever been in the nation’s capital. He stared out the window, and it seemed to him, even though he didn’t know the geography of the city, that the driver was taking them past every patriotic sight he could find. They circled the Capitol, lit up by spotlights, crossed the Mall, where he eyed the Smithsonian and the National Archives, then took a series of roundabout turns that brought them directly past the White House. It may have been a ploy, but Garrett enjoyed it nonetheless.

  They drove past Foggy Bottom and the State Department, then crossed into Georgetown and maneuvered down a series of narrow, tree-lined streets filled with upscale town houses. They double-parked in front of a three-story brick brownstone on Dumbarton Street. Pairs of uniformed D.C. policemen stood guard halfway down the block on both sides, and a pair of dark-suited men that Garrett assumed were Secret Service agents blocked the door to the building. The agents stepped aside for Alexis, and Garrett trailed in her path.

  The foyer of the town house was bathed in soft yellow light. Colonial-era furniture lined the hallway, and a pair of lush Hudson River School oil paintings hung opposite each other on the walls. The floors were veined slats of polished wood, topped with intricately woven rugs. To Garrett, the place reeked of money. And power.

  “Nice,” Garrett laughed, examining an antique pewter teapot on a mahogany table.

  A young, well-dressed African-American woman entered the hallway and smiled pleasantly at Alexis. “Captain Truffant. Good to see you.” The young woman turned to Garrett and took him in for a moment. “And you must be Garrett Reilly.”

  “Yeah. That’s me.”

  “A pleasure. I’ve heard a lot about you. I’m Mackenzie Fox. Assistant to the secretary. Come this way. Everyone’s here. They’re all waiting for you.” She opened a door at the end of the hallway and held it for them. Alexis entered, disappearing from Garrett’s view, but Garrett paused a moment by Ms. Fox.

  “Secretary of what?” he whispered to her.

  “Defense.”

  “Holy fuck,” Garrett gasped, before he could stop himself.

  “Yes, holy fuck,” she said with a smile.

  13

  GEORGETOWN, WASHINGTON, D.C., MARCH 25, 8:02 PM

  Secretary of Defense Duke Frye, Jr., spoke first
, and Garrett recognized him immediately. He was a large man, with a head of thick, bright-white hair, broad shoulders, and blue eyes. His Texas accent was barely noticeable; he’d clearly worked to rid himself of it and now spoke more like the polished global businessman that he had been before being named secretary.

  “Something to drink, Mr. Reilly? We’re pouring scotch tonight. Eighteen-year-old Highland Park. You know it?”

  “Sure,” Garrett answered, tongue-tied, leaving his host uncertain as to whether he meant “sure” he knew the scotch or “sure” he’d have some.

  Secretary Frye poured him a glass anyway. He handed it to Garrett, then shook his hand. “Duke Frye. I am the secretary of defense.” He fixed his eyes on Garrett, and Garrett felt a rare flash of fear and anxiety race through him. Frye was the first truly powerful man Garrett had ever met in person, and he scared Garrett. Not a lot, but just enough to throw him slightly off balance.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Garrett said, and then quickly added “sir,” but hated himself immediately for doing it. He glanced at the dozen or so other people gathered in the large, sumptuous living room. A few were standing, two of them in front of a dark, windswept oil painting of George Washington on horseback that Garrett swore he’d seen before in an art history book. The rest of the guests were seated. Garrett quickly made out five or six men and women in uniform—generals by the looks of them. He thought he saw four actual stars on the lapel of the oldest of them, a lean, wiry African-American man in his sixties. The other men and women were a mixed bunch, most in their forties, all wearing dark suits. Garrett could feel the buzz of power in the room. And they were all staring at him.

  “I’m sure you are wondering why you are here, Mr. Reilly,” the secretary said. “So I think I’ll let this gentleman start things off. General Kline, would you do the honors?”