The Ascendant: A Thriller

by Drew Chapman

  Lefebvre rolled in at midnight, looking wary. He gave the place a once-over and seemed ready to bolt out the door. But then Garrett grabbed his hand and shook it.

  “I really appreciate your coming, Lieutenant,” he said. “I know this is a risk for you. And way outside of what you’d normally do.”

  Lefebvre still looked dubious. Garrett leaned close, and Alexis heard him whisper: “It’s going to be a battle, Jimmy. And I need soldiers.”

  The lieutenant seemed to stiffen, and then relax. His shoulders dropped a bit. He let out a deep breath. He looked like he might stay.

  Alexis shook her head in mild wonderment: Did Garrett know about Lefebvre’s medical condition? How the hell had he found that out? And was he using the lure of combat to get Lefebvre’s commitment? If he was, it was brilliant. Garrett Reilly had learned how to lead. It seemed so unlikely, given the unformed clay that Garrett had been at the start of the process, and yet the proof was in front of her: Lefebvre was on board, and it had been Garrett’s words that had secured him.

  The group of them—six, including Garrett—assembled in the front room of the store, gathering by a dusty display case. Garrett smiled weakly at them, and Alexis thought she could see him wince in pain.

  “You’re all here, which means there’s no backing out now. We’re in this until the end. Together. A team. And I don’t have to remind any of you that we also have a team member in China, on her own. At risk. She’s our responsibility as well.”

  There were somber nods of acknowledgment from the group.

  “A friend of mine should arrive in a couple of hours with our equipment,” Garrett continued. “We’ll assemble it, load software, cable up and get online. After that, we’re going to be housebound for the next couple of days. No going in and out. No seeing friends. We can’t let anyone spot us. We are underground, off radar, and we need to stay that way. My friend’s gonna bring cell phones too. A dozen for each of you. You get to make three phone calls from each one, no personal calls, then you’ll have to pop out the battery and toss the phone. People will be looking for us, and they will be looking hard.” Garrett fixed them each with a hard stare. “If we get compromised, we’re finished, so”—he motioned to the darkened store—“I hope you guys like abandoned butcher shops.”

  There were chuckles from the group.

  “I think Bingo should be the only one of us who can leave and come back,” Garrett continued. “He’ll get food, whatever else we need. But nothing exotic. I don’t want him going farther than a couple of blocks. There’s old mattresses in the storage room. They’re nasty, but it wouldn’t be a terrible idea to grab a little sleep, because once we get started, it’s going to be pretty much nonstop.”

  Alexis watched as the others nodded in the gloom. Bingo pointed a flashlight around the room, and she could barely make out their faces. Maybe it was her own tension ratcheting up, but Alexis thought she saw a few of them stand a little straighter, their bodies ready for action.

  “Any questions?”

  After a moment, Patmore, the Marine, raised his hand and stepped forward with a grin. “Yeah, just one. Is this gonna work?”

  “I have no idea,” Garrett said, shrugging and walking out of the room.

  Well, he hasn’t gotten that polished at leading, Alexis thought, because he sure hasn’t learned how to lie yet.

  She found him, twenty minutes later, curled up on a mattress in the back corner of the dimly lit freezer. She sat down next to him, tucked her knees up to her chest, and watched him silently in the semidarkness. His breathing was ragged. He rolled over after a few minutes and peered at her.

  “Can’t sleep when I’m being watched,” he said.

  “Sorry. I’ll go.” She started to stand.

  “No. Stay,” he said. “I wasn’t sleeping anyway.”

  Alexis sat back down. “How’re you feeling?”

  “I’ll survive. I think.” He flashed her a faint smile, still lying sideways on the mattress. “I always wondered what it would be like to be tortured. Now I know.”

  “And can you recommend the experience?”

  “Absolutely. Big stress reliever. All your other troubles pale in comparison.”

  Alexis laughed. Garrett pushed himself to an upright position. Alexis gathered up her courage, then said, “Garrett, I wanted to say that—”

  Garrett cut her off sharply: “No.”

  She stared at him, surprised, and slightly hurt.

  “It’s too complicated,” he said, his voice softening. He stared at her, his blue eyes shimmering in the darkness. “You and me. We need simple. Right now, we need to focus on the task at hand. We need to get through this.”

  “Okay,” she said, nodding and staring off into the darkness. “Sure.”

  “And we will get through this.”

  68

  QUEENS, NEW YORK, APRIL 17, 11:31 PM

  Mitty Rodriguez got the phone call from Garrett at seven-thirty on Tuesday morning and immediately went to work. First, she dropped off the grid. She had an alias from her hacker days—Sarah Beaumont, which Mitty thought was a pretty hilarious white-girl name—and a bunch of fake IDs, including a driver’s license and a debit card under her Beaumont name that she could fill up with cash. She swapped out the SIM card on her cell phone, checked around her block for surveillance—she didn’t see any—then bought herself a pair of movie-star sunglasses, just for stylin’, and was ready for action.

  Next she hit the regular computer stores in New York City—Best Buy, J&R, Radio Shack—then ransacked the spare-parts bins in the electronics specialty joints on Flushing Boulevard. All the while, she was on the phone with her underground suppliers—the geeks, tech heads, hackers, and miscreants who built their own machines, souped up their own hard drives, and soldered their own motherboards. It was with them that she spent the big bucks. Garrett had transferred two hundred grand into her debit account, so money was not much of an issue. She visited her underground suppliers only after the sun went down. It was safer that way.

  By eleven-thirty that night she had filled up her rented half-ton van with a hacker’s vision of paradise: monitors, keyboards, internal hard drives, external hard drives, work station shells, server boxes, routers, HDMI and SATA cables, coax cables, webcams, color printers, laser printers, digital projectors, fans, heat sinks, flash memory, card readers, phone jacks, landlines, cell phones, digital relay boxes. And then there were the chips she had bought, almost all from her black-market sources: boxes full of dual-core processors, quad-core processors, hacked military parallel processors, stolen Intel chips, experimental AMD chips, underground Chinese chips that Mitty was pretty sure were fake but that she bought anyway because, well, what the fuck, she had the money. Plus enough video cards to power every gamer’s computer from Boston to Virginia.

  While she was running around the city, collecting hardware, she logged her personal machine onto a hijacked server in Florida. From the Florida zombie server she downloaded every possible hacking tool she could think of: Nmap network mapping software for security auditing; a turbo-charged update of John the Ripper for password hacking; TCP port scanning software for finding network entry vulnerabilities; Kismet electronic network sniffers for sussing out intrusion bugs; Wireshark for browsing network mainframes; pOf for fingerprinting the operating software on a target network; Yersinia for hunting down weaknesses in IP protocols. All part of the basic toolkit of a network hacker. Some of these programs she knew from working with them herself, others had come recommended to her, others still she had heard rumors of but had never dared put on her own machine for fear they would prove uncontrollable, turning her own hacking fortress into a corrupted machine in thrall to some other hacker, in some other godforsaken part of the world. That scenario was to be avoided at all costs—to be hacked by a hacker was a mark of deep shame.

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

  She made her last purchase just after midnight, meet
ing 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.

  69

  BAODING, CHINA, APRIL 18, 11:48 AM

  Hu 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 r
ider 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.