The Ascendant: A Thriller

by Drew Chapman

  And then suddenly they set him free. The crowd parted and Xi Ling stumbled to his feet. The women had fallen silent, even as their screams echoed in Xi Ling’s ears. He wiped the blood from his eyes, expecting to see a giant jungle cat prowling his beloved factory floor, ready to pounce.

  What he saw instead was a woman.

  She was young, plain-looking, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, her black hair cut in a mop top, like a farmer or a country bumpkin. She was surrounded by more of his workers, and some men too—men Xi Ling did not recognize. The young woman was clearly in charge, but she did not radiate force or hostility. She smiled pleasantly, as if this were a chat among friends about how to plan a birthday party. She was gesturing calmly to the machinery that crowded the factory floor. Around her, scores of other men and women—of all ages, and in all types of clothing—were methodically dismantling his sewing and stitching machines. There didn’t seem to be anger in what they were doing, but they were destroying his beloved machines nonetheless, unscrewing phalanges, tearing out cranks and gears, piling yards of unsewn leather and plastic into heaps and then pouring some kind of acid on the materials. The materials hissed and steamed under the corrosive effects of the acid.

  Xi Ling gathered himself and marched toward the woman. “Who are you? What are you doing!” he barked. “Are you the Tiger?”

  The young woman nodded, casting her eyes downward, in a sign of humility and respect. “I am Hu Mei. They call me the Tiger. But I do not encourage that name.”

  “Well, Tiger,” Xi Ling raged, “this is my factory! You’re breaking the law! I will have the police in here in five minutes if you don’t stop immediately!”

  Hu Mei smiled again, very politely, and pointed to the catwalks that surrounded the floor. “Those police?” she asked.

  Standing above them, on the metal walkways that stretched the length and breadth of the factory, were scores of policemen, all dressed neatly in their blue-and-white uniforms, silently watching the proceedings below them.

  Xi Ling gasped. “How much did you pay them?”

  Hu Mei laughed quietly, shaking her head. “I don’t pay anyone. Not policemen, not factory workers, not big bosses like you, either. I talk to people. I show them what is wrong in China today, and I suggest ways we might fix things. Together.”

  “By destroying my factory? How is that fixing anything?” Xi Ling shouted. He started to move toward the young woman, but a line of young men stepped between them, protecting her.

  “I am very sorry about your factory. But I have been told by people in town, by your workers and your managers alike, that you force people to work twenty-four hours at a stretch. Without breaks. For weeks on end. That you withhold wages. That you lie about hours worked, and deduct salary for food that is never eaten. They pointed out to me closed rooms where fumes accumulate and make people sick, but you do not vent those rooms. You treat your workers like slaves. Like they have no rights. But they are not slaves. And everybody has rights.”

  Xi Ling sputtered in anger. Who was this woman to lecture him about rights? Was she like the Italians, full of righteous indignation? Was all of China going soft around the edges? Xi Ling tried to control his temper—his doctor had also warned him about his rising blood pressure—and spoke calmly to Hu Mei. “These women here, before they came to me, they had nothing. They were peasants. Farmers. Scraping food from the dirt. I gave them jobs. I gave them work. They can live in the city. With their friends, not on farms with disgusting pigs and chickens. What more do they want?”

  The young woman, this Tiger woman, took her time in answering, as if gathering her thoughts. She looked around the thrashed factory floor, at the women and men who had stopped dismantling the machines to listen to their conversation, and nodded serenely, proudly, at all of them, as if she were their mother, and they were playing on the nursery floor, and she was amused by her children’s growing abilities with blocks and toys. Then she turned her gaze back to Xi Ling, smiled warmly at him, bowing her head again in respect.

  She said: “What we want is fairness.”

  32

  CAMP PENDLETON, APRIL 5, 6:30 AM

  When Alexis Truffant walked into their barracks offices early the next morning—day five of their time at Camp Pendleton—she found Garrett already planted at the largest of the work stations. He had cabled three monitors to his computer, and all three were alive with charts and graphs and scrolling numbers. She watched over his shoulder, trying to focus on the waves of information that seemed to be cascading across the screens, but it only came across as blurred lines of figures and letters. Coffee cups were scattered at Garrett’s feet.

  He spoke without looking at her. “Something’s up with the markets.”

  “The stock market?”

  “The major exchanges. All of them, but mostly New York. There’s selective selling of blue chips. Synchronized with sneaky selling in short-term bonds.”

  Alexis looked at the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The markets had just opened, but it was up ten points for the day. “But the Dow is up.”

  “Now. It’s up now. But there’s tension building. The indexes are fragile. Everything’s trading to the downside of its Bollinger Band. The stochastic oscillator on my core equities is batshit crazy. Signs of a reversal. The high-speed traders are having a field day. Their spreads are insane.”

  “So what does it all mean?”

  Garrett looked at the three synched monitors. “It’s the next attack,” he said. “Been building in the last few hours. Started in Asia. Spreading.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I can feel it.”

  “You can feel a pattern forming?”

  “It’s why you hired me, remember?” he snapped.

  Alexis flinched. Only last night she had convinced herself that the asshole act was just that—an act. She took a breath, remembered whom she was dealing with, and tried again. “So what does it mean?”

  “It means something’s going to break.”

  “I’ll call the Treasury Department . . .”

  “Too late. Wouldn’t matter. This one’s bigger than them. Really big. But maybe not permanent. Another shock to the system.”

  Alexis leaned over his shoulder and caught a glimpse of his face. He was unshaven, his eyes were ringed and bloodshot. His head snapped back and forth between the three computer screens.

  “Have you slept?” she asked him.

  “In my life? Yes. Last night? No.”

  His fingers danced across the keyboard, and all three screens began to change, graphs flipping, readouts blinking on and off.

  Alexis went into the other room and dialed Bolling AFB on a secure line. General Kline picked up on the first ring.

  “Captain Truffant,” he said. “You have news?”

  “Sir. Reilly thinks something big is going to happen in the stock market today.”

  “Hold on.” Alexis could hear General Kline fumbling for something, then the low-level chatter of television talking heads on the other end of the line. Kline muttered into the receiver: “CNBC says nothing unusual. A little trading on the downside. Fox Business is SOP. Reilly give you any facts or figures? Examples?”

  “No sir. He said he could just feel it. He was up all night. I think he might be manic.”

  “Maybe he should take a pill,” Kline said, and then stuttered: “W-whoa. The Dow is dropping. A hundred points. No, two hundred, three hundred . . . holy shit!”

  Alexis blinked her eyes. “In twenty seconds?”

  “Hold on. They’re talking about it on CNBC. Five hundred points down. No, wait. Seven hundred!” Alexis could hear the instant strain in her boss’s voice. “Did Reilly say he thought there was anything we could do?”

  She flicked on a television in the corner of the room and cycled through channels until she found CNN. The anchors on-screen were just cutting away to the breaking news on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. She turned the sound up to a low murmur. “No,” she said. �
�He said it was too big. I guess we’re just along for the ride.”

  On CNN the DJIA ticker was off 1,000 points. Then 1,500. Trading curbs were triggered, and the NYSE shut down for a sixty-minute cooling-off period, but the live feed from the floor showed brokers looking shell-shocked. And scared.

  “Crap. There’s going to be mass panic,” Kline said over the phone.

  “Reilly said it might be temporary. A shock to the system.”

  “I hope to God he’s right,” Kline said.

  Alexis pursed her lips. She watched the incredulity grow on the faces of the two CNN anchors. One of them was comparing it to the Flash Crash of May 2010, when the Dow lost 600 points in seven minutes. But this was worse. The Industrial Average was down nearly 1,600 points. It had taken five minutes.

  “Fucked up, huh?” Alexis turned to see Garrett standing in the doorway. He was smiling from ear to ear, pointing at the television. “Sometimes I’m so good I even freak myself out.”

  Kline hissed through the telephone: “Is that him? Is he with you?”

  “Yes. On both counts.”

  “Ask him if it’ll turn around.”

  “Garrett. General Kline wants to know if the stock market will—”

  “Come back up?” he said, cutting her off. “Sure. First, it’ll drop another two thousand points when trading curbs are lifted. Maybe more. Then it’ll swing back. Not all the way, though. There’s going to be blood in the streets.” He shook his head ruefully. “I could have made serious coin off this one.”

  Kline said, “Ask him how they did it.”

  “He wants to know how they did it.”

  Garrett shrugged. “Probably hyperleveraged a crapload of market shorts. Massive bets that trigger panicked computer selling. If you can make prices fall fast enough, then buyers will flee the market, and then there’s no floor for stocks. If you’re willing to lose enough cash—and we’re talking billions—then anyone could conceivably do it. Anyone who had billions in the first place. The SEC will sort it out in a week or two. But it won’t stick. The fundamentals aren’t there. That’s why I think it will come back.” Garrett stared at the TV. “I don’t think they want it to stick. They have something else in mind.” With that, he walked out of the room.

  “Captain Truffant?” Kline snapped.

  “Yes sir?”

  “He’s good, isn’t he?”

  “He is. Very.”

  “Is he ready?”

  “He has no idea of the plan, sir. Absolutely none. He is completely in the dark.”

  There was silence on the line, interrupted only by the alarmed squawks of the TV newscasters.

  “We’ve run out of time,” General Kline said. “All hell is breaking loose. We need Garrett. And we need him now.”

  33

  CAMP PENDLETON, APRIL 5, 7:03 PM

  Two hours later the Dow bottomed out at 9,682, which was a hair more than 4,000 points off the day’s high. It came back up 2,500 points, but that still left a 1,500-point drop for the day; and that meant nearly two trillion dollars in capital had been wiped out, fifteen percent of the United States’s gross domestic product, in a single morning. The markets remained skittish all day, despite the secretary of the treasury’s reassuring press conference and the chairman of the Federal Reserve’s news release claiming that this was all part of the normal course of a free market economy. When the exchanges closed at 4:00 p.m., two smaller, specialty Wall Street brokerage houses couldn’t cover their margin calls and went under. Their losses had been spectacular. The air of rising panic on Wall Street was palpable.

  It was palpable 2,500 miles away, on the coast of California, where Alexis lay in her bunk, wrung out. She had pushed the team hard that afternoon; they had spent the rest of the day digging into the motives of the Chinese, following Garrett’s lead.

  “We’re looking for hints of Chinese desperation,” she had said. “Anything at all. A weakness in their military preparedness. A drought. A decline in productivity. A rise in unemployment. A battle for control of the party leadership. Potential famine. Environmental disaster. A corruption epidemic. Even if it’s just a whiff of fear—flag it, and let’s discuss.”

  Alexis had them cast a wide net: CIA briefings, NSA intercepts, State Department briefings, embassy wires, think-tank papers, blogs from inside China, blogs from outside China, blogs from Japan on China, blogs from Vietnam about how the Japanese felt about China. Everything and anything. Most of it was translated, first by Celeste, or if she was busy—and they were desperate—by Google Translate, but that was still running at half speed. The trouble at The Dalles had hit Google hard—the news was all over the cable networks—but still no one from inside the company had commented.

  As backup, Alexis had Celeste call in two trusted friends from the Chinese Studies Department at UCLA; they translated on the fly, helping the rest of them get the gist of any documents in Mandarin. By seven that evening they had still found nothing of significance—they had plowed through mountains of data, but no answers had revealed themselves, and they were worn out. She thought she saw Bingo start to cry, but he ran off to the bathroom before she could ask him if he was okay.

  Alexis told them to take two hours off, and she retreated to her room with a mountain of intelligence briefs. Most theorized on why the sell-off had occurred, what had started it, and why the market had bounced back. Intellectually, they all seemed sound to Alexis, but none of them had hard-and-fast answers—and none of them had blamed the Chinese. She felt Garrett had a firmer hold on what was going on than all the economic analysts in Washington combined. He was a pain in the ass, arrogant, and hard to deal with, but when he plugged into a problem, he seemed to understand it on a root level; he grasped issues at their core. She hated to admit it, but his abilities, at times, were jaw-dropping. It reminded her of when she had gone to an NBA basketball game and seen Kobe Bryant slice effortlessly past three defenders and then dunk the basketball—ferociously—over a fourth. You could only marvel at an ability that you would never possess.

  The other thing that impressed Alexis about Garrett was that he seemed to have courage. It often came across as arrogance or narcissism, but she thought it was actually bravery; a willingness to put forward seemingly insane ideas and then stick to them. And more often than not, he had been right. That, more than anything else, made her forgive him his flaws.

  Which, it had to be said, were equally spectacular. When they had watched the Dow rebound later in the day, a look of true regret seemed etched onto Garrett’s face. When Alexis asked him what was wrong, he shook his head and muttered about “money left on the table.” Celeste whispered to Alexis later that she thought he must be a sociopath, and Alexis couldn’t entirely disagree. However, from the interviews she’d seen on TV, she suspected that Kobe Bryant was something of a sociopath as well. Maybe when you possessed that much talent, it was hard to take the troubles of those around you seriously.

  A knock on the door interrupted her train of thought. She was lying on her bunk, wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt. She was hungry, distracted, unkempt.

  “Come in.”

  The door swung open, and Garrett stepped into her room. It amused Alexis that she had been thinking of him, at that very moment, and now here he was. He carried two trays: one loaded with white, takeout Chinese food cartons, the other holding two bottles of Corona, glasses, and a pair of lit candles. He was smiling from ear to ear.

  “I thought you might be hungry.”

  “Wow,” Alexis said, sitting up on the bed. “Candles. And beer.”

  “Chinese from Oceanside. Recommended by a staff sergeant. Beer from the officers’ lounge. The candles I stole from an earthquake kit.”

  She laughed. Garrett set the food on a desk, scooping out garlic beef and white rice onto paper plates from the cafeteria. “You’re not a vegetarian, are you?”

  “I’m from the South. There are no vegetarians in the South.”

  “And Corona will do, yes?”

>   “Any alcohol will do.” She pulled two chairs up to the desk and sat in front of the meal. “It’s lovely. And very thoughtful.”

  “Nobody ate all afternoon.”

  “We were running on fumes.”

  “So I took it upon myself . . .”

  He poured the beers and gave one to her.

  “Cheers,” she said.

  “To the end of the world,” he said.

  “That’s quite a toast. You think it’s imminent?”

  “Unless we stop it.”

  They drank, then ate hungrily, and wordlessly, for a few minutes.

  “God, I was starving,” he said.

  “You’re doing a good job,” she said.

  “Wolfing down my food?”

  “Stopping the end of the world.”

  Garrett looked at her. She nodded. “I mean it. You’re the right person for the job. Maybe the only person. And I’m impressed.”

  “Thanks. You’re not so bad yourself.”

  “I facilitate. Group leader. Not anyone can do it, but a lot of people can. Only a couple of people can do what you do. A couple of people in the whole damn world. Maybe not even a couple. Maybe only you.”

  Garrett stopped eating. He seemed, for the first time that she had noticed, off balance. He smiled crookedly, as if hiding something, covering some uncomfortable emotion. “So,” he said, still smiling. “If the world is ending, what are your plans?”

  “Post-apocalypse? I’m going to roam the planet like Mad Max. In my Ford Falcon GT. Lots of leather.”

  “One of my favorite movies.”

  “Back when Mel Gibson was cute. And sane.”

  “Thunderdome sucked.”