The Ascendant: A Thriller by Drew Chapman Read Free Book Online Page A

course through his body. Were they watching him? Or just watching the street, as Garrett himself was doing? Was he being paranoid? Had Avery thrown off his delicate sense of what was normal, and what was a ripple in the normal?
    He kept walking, cursing under his breath. The idiots in the military, spreading fear and paranoia. They played their stupid games and now he was playing along with them. But he wouldn’t. Men in sweatshirts were men in sweatshirts, and New York City was full of them, whether they watched him or the pretty girls going the opposite way. He marched east another twenty steps, and then he stopped abruptly, for no reason that he could clearly state, except that every nerve in his body seemed to be telling him to do just that: stop.
    A young woman carrying a salad bumped into him, muttered an “Excuse me,” and walked past. Garrett’s eyes flickered back and forth between the two men he had noticed, one ahead of him, the other moving parallel to him. Looking closer, he could see that one of them was Asian, but the other had turnedaway from him. Garrett pivoted 180 degrees, as if on an internal autopilot, and started to walk back toward his office. His mind was suddenly, inexplicably blank. He seemed to know one thing, and one thing alone: Get back to your building.
    Behind him, he heard a sharp, staccato shout, and then an engine revving. He shot a look back over his shoulder and saw the slouching man running in the opposite direction down the street, away from Garrett, while the white van he had been leaning against pulled into the street and raced toward him. Garrett watched as the van picked up speed, and then suddenly, the driver’s-side door opened and a small, dark man in a T-shirt and jeans leapt out, hitting the pavement at a sprint in the opposite direction, leaving the van to drift down the street, unguided, by itself. The small dark man ran east on John Street as Garrett watched, frozen. The van ricocheted off the side of a parked Hyundai, then barreled down the street, out of control. A taxicab honked angrily. The other pedestrians on the street—businessmen and delivery boys, secretaries and tourists—began to run. Everyone now seemed to have sensed the impending trouble that Garrett had felt in his bones. He shook himself from his frozen reverie, pivoted on his left foot, and broke into a run. He managed five steps down the street before he was suddenly tackled by someone emerging from a doorway and thrown to the ground. He landed hard on his shoulder, slamming into the pavement, then rolled, and caught a quick glimpse of the face of Captain Alexis Truffant.
    She was yelling at him: “Head down! Head down!”
    Those were the last words he heard, because a millisecond later there was a flash of white light, a wave of sound that battered his ears, and a cloud of dust and debris that rocketed across his field of vision. Garrett could feel the pulse of an explosion. It thrust his body across the pavement, into Alexis’s, and rolled them over each other twice, maybe three or four times—he lost count—then deposited them both at the marble base of a building.
    Garrett lay there for a moment. He blinked. He felt for his arms and chest, and then his face. He seemed to be all in one piece. Around him there was smoke and chaos. People staggered past, covered in dirt, one older lady with blood smeared across her face. Garrett got to his knees, but he was dizzy. He put his hand out for support, and it hit the shoulder of Alexis, squatting next to him. She seemed to be talking to him, her lips moving, but Garrett could hear nothing, and he realized the explosion had deafened him. Alexis grabbed hishand. She was yelling at him, but he could make out the words only by reading her lips—“Are you okay?”
    He nodded his head yes, and then tried to speak the words “I can’t hear you,” but he had the strange sensation of speaking without hearing himself, as if he were wearing noise-canceling