The King of Fear

by Drew Chapman

  She sipped her coffee and watched the sun come up over suburban Florida, a spectacular orange dawn above the palm trees and sprawl between the airport and the ocean. She ordered a breakfast of eggs and toast and wished that she had packed a change of clothes. At 7:30 a.m., she called the Dade County offices of the FBI and told them what she was doing and requested help. They were skeptical, but said they might be able to lend her one agent, maybe two, at some point during the day.

  She turned on the room TV, watched the morning news talk shows, and waited for the credit-card companies to reply. The person of interest APB for Garrett was still a topic of intense discussion—all four networks led with his picture and followed up with theories on why he wanted to kill a Fed president. Alexis listened intently for a while, but when one commentator mentioned a possible homosexual love triangle, she shut off the TV in disgust.

  MasterCard e-mailed first, at 8:00 a.m., with nothing. Visa and Discover replied twenty minutes later. No one by any of those names—Ilya Markov, Ilya Markarov, or Marko Ilyanovich—had used his credit card in the Miami area in the last twelve hours. Then, at 9:14 a.m., American Express reported a single transaction: Markov, Ilya, June 15, 8:23 p.m., Motel 6, Marina Mile Boulevard, Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

  Sixty seconds later, Captain Alexis Truffant was sprinting across the hotel parking lot, cursing herself for not bringing a weapon as well as a change of clothes.

  PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA, JUNE 16, 9:30 A.M.

  Garrett waited until they were deep into the Walnut Hill neighborhood of west Philly before slotting the battery back into his phone. He and Mitty had slept in the back of the Ford Explorer—or at least tried to sleep—parked on a dirt road outside Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The night had been long and uncomfortable, but Garrett figured it was better than getting arrested. Or maybe not. Maybe arrested was better. He was exhausted from being on the run and, from his point of view, for being on the run for no good reason. He’d bolted his offices at Jenkins & Altshuler out of fear and panic, but now, forty-eight hours after doing so, he needed to reconsider.

  He was innocent, and people—the FBI in particular—needed to understand that. Also, and this he kept completely to himself—because Mitty could not see or hear a word of it—his hands had begun to tremble. Garrett suspected that was a symptom of withdrawal. He was a goddamned addict, just like some scumbag meth head wandering the South Bronx. Worse still, his brain was cycling through periods of quiet, and then frenzied, chaotic explosions of pain. He’d almost blacked out yesterday in the motel room. Sticking his face under the shower was the only thing that had kept him conscious.

  He had a handful of meds left in a plastic bag, and they were burning a hole in his pocket, but he tried to push that from his mind. He wanted narcotics more than he’d wanted almost anything else in his entire life, and a voice in his head was whispering that no matter how much he tried to rationalize that desire—it was his head pain, it was his grief—the truth was that Garrett liked being high and always had. Drugs separated him from the real world; they gave him distance from his troubles; and right now he was in a world of trouble.

  He dialed the central switchboard at his office and asked for Maria Dunlap, the office manager, on the twenty-fourth floor. He waited as she was connected, watching the Philadelphia row houses that lined Market Street. Kids were hanging out on the corners in the early-morning heat. A cluster of young boys smoked cigarettes on the stoop of a liquor mart. A few college students, in Bermuda shorts and flip-flops, were making their way east, toward Penn.

  “This is Maria,” chirped the voice on other end of the line. Garrett didn’t know Dunlap particularly well, but he wasn’t crazy about her nonetheless. She was middle-aged and officious, always checking his hours worked—as if the time he spent in front of his Bloomberg terminal had anything to do with how much money he made the firm.

  “Maria, Garrett Reilly here.” He heard a sharp intake of breath.

  “Garrett, oh, hey, where have you been?” Dunlap asked with a forced casualness.

  “Let’s skip the bullshit. You tell the FBI guys who are listening on the line that I need to talk to them.”

  “Garrett, I don’t know what you’re—”

  “I’m going to hang up in about a minute. I really can’t have them tracking me.”

  A brief silence settled over the phone line. Garrett sank low in the backseat of the Explorer, but he could still see the street around him. They passed an old, brick public library. A mom pushed a carriage up the access ramp.

  A quick beep sounded on his cell phone. “Hello, Garrett, this is Special Agent Chaudry.”

  “Look, I’ll just tell you up front that I’m in Philadelphia, but I’m going to hang up and pull the cell battery pretty fast, so please don’t bother sending a million cop cars all running around with their sirens blaring.” The Explorer Mitty was driving belonged to a friend of a distant cousin in the Rodriguez family, an accountant from Tampa. Some law enforcement agency somewhere might make the connection between the SUV and Mitty, and then Garrett, but he was pretty sure they couldn’t do it in real time, on the fly. Not on the streets of Walnut Hill.

  “Okay, Garrett, how about this? How about you just walk into one of the police precincts there, turn yourself in, and we have this conversation face-to-face?” Her voice had a pleasing, mellifluous quality.

  “Chaudry? You’re Indian? And a woman? In the FBI. That’s gotta be rare. You sound young too.”

  “A good reason for us to meet each other in person. You could see how young I really am.”

  Garrett laughed. He liked her already. “When I look you up online in five minutes, I’ll know exactly how young or old you are. And where you were born, your grades in high school, and what you bought last weekend at the mall. I’ve never dated an Indian girl before. You single?”

  “Is that why you called? To ask me out?”

  “I had nothing to do with the shooting of Phillip Steinkamp. I have nothing against the Fed, and I’ve never met Steinkamp. I’m a frigging bond trader.”

  “If you are so innocent, why did you run from your office before our agents could question you?”

  “I have a deep-seated suspicion of law enforcement, with multiple bad experiences with people in authority, and a pathological hatred of government power.”

  “But you worked for the Defense Department, the ultimate in government power. Something called the Ascendant program. That seems like a contradiction.”

  “I’m complicated.”

  “Tell me about Ascendant,” Chaudry said.

  “No. Find out for yourself. Look, here’s what I know. Steinkamp’s murder is part of a pattern. A pattern of economic destabilization. Someone is aiming to attack the American economy. They want me out of the way, so they’re trying to blame me for the killing.”

  “And who is behind it, Garrett?”

  “I don’t know. I’m out here on my own. But you better believe I’m trying to find out. Who shoots someone and then tells the world who made them do it? Makes no sense, Agent Chaudry, and you know it as well as I do. ”

  “Good point. But I still need you to come in to one of our field offices and make a statement. We’ll treat you right. VIP, all the way. Just answer some questions. You and I can start a relationship.”

  Again, Garrett laughed. Chaudry was his kind of FBI agent. “With you? Awesome. But if we go out on a date, it’ll have to be your treat, because I’ll be in handcuffs, stripped of all constitutional rights.”

  This time Chaudry laughed. In the sudden silence on the line, Garrett could hear police sirens in the distance. Growing louder.

  “Aw, you sent the cops, and I told you not to. Way to make a bad first impression. I’m going to go now, but I just want to say, for the record—I didn’t know the woman who killed Steinkamp. Never met her. Never met Steinkamp, or anyone who works at the Fed. I had nothing to
do with any of it. And if you’re smart, you’ll begin to understand that something much larger is happening. You’re hunting for the wrong person. And when the shit start’s flying, you’ll understand why.”

  Garrett didn’t wait for a response. He hit end on his cell phone, then quickly popped the battery out of the back. Mitty chuckled as she drove. “She really say she wanted to date you? An FBI agent?”

  “I have animal magnetism.”

  “I bet guy FBI agents are hot,” Mitty said with a wistful sigh. “With the guns and the suits. If I robbed a bank, you think they’d strip-search me?”

  “Turn left here. The street’s going to be swarming with cops in a minute.” With that, Garrett lay down in the back of the Explorer and waited until they got out of Philadelphia.

  • • •

  At the FBI field office on the twenty-third floor of the Federal Building in lower Manhattan, Agent Chaudry pulled the headset from her ears and let out a long, angry breath.

  “Philly PD are going to cut off the arterial streets,” an older agent—Murray, a transfer from DC—said, hanging up a phone.

  “He knows that. They’re not going to catch him.”

  Murray parked himself at a desk. “So why’d he call?”

  Chaudry thought about this. Why did he call? To figure out who was heading up the case on the federal side? What difference would that make? No, there had to be a reason.

  “Maybe he’s just an arrogant idiot,” Murray said. “He kinda sounded like one.”

  Chaudry walked to the window and looked out over lower Manhattan. Yes, Garrett Reilly was arrogant. And he appeared to have reasons to be so. He was also careful, yet he exposed himself to call the FBI. That contradiction demanded examination. But he was no idiot.

  “Paul”—she nodded to Special Agent Murray—“will you play the call back for me?” Even though Murray was considerably older than she was, Chaudry knew he had to do as she asked. She was lead on the case, and he was, at least for the moment, her junior partner. She knew it infuriated a lot of the older men in the Manhattan field office, but so be it. She had few friends in the Bureau and wasn’t particularly interested in accumulating more. Omelets required cracked eggs.

  Agent Murray put the recording of the call on a speaker in the communications room. Chaudry listened to it twice, then backed it up one last time, starting in the middle of the conversation. Then it hit her. She played the sentence again.

  “And who is behind it, Garrett?” Chaudry asked on the recording.

  “I don’t know. I’m out here on my own. But you better believe I’m trying to find out.”

  Chaudry smiled. “That’s it.”

  Murray looked up from his computer. “That’s what?”

  “He says he’s out there on his own. And he’s going to figure it out. He’s signaling us. That the DIA’s not behind him. They’re leaving him out in the cold. He’s making us an offer.”

  “An offer to what?”

  “Solve the case,” she said with conviction, the thought now crystallized in her mind. “He wants to work for us.”

  FORT LAUDERDALE, FLORIDA, JUNE 16, 9:45 A.M.

  The young man whose passport read Ilya Markov was genuinely surprised when he saw the two unmarked cars pull into the parking lot of the motel he’d stayed in the night before. A young woman in an army uniform had climbed out of the first car, and two bulky men in suits had gotten out of the follow vehicle. The men were most probably FBI, the young man thought, or perhaps Homeland Security. They made no effort to conceal themselves—they just swaggered into the lobby.

  The young man sipped his coffee and carefully unwrapped the wax paper covering his barbecue breakfast sandwich. The smell of freshly baked rolls and bacon fat mixed with the scent of coffee as he sat in the window seat of the restaurant across the street from his motel. L’il Red’s BBQ was the name, and he had to admit that the food was delicious. Americans could do some things right, better than almost anyone else, and breakfast was one of them.

  He peeked at the motel again. No need to rush. They wouldn’t come over here, he thought. But still, best perhaps not to take chances. He took a few bites from the sandwich, snapped the cover back onto his coffee, grabbed the backpack at his feet, and headed out to Marina Mile Boulevard.

  The young man—and most people who knew him called him Ilya, because that was, in fact, his real first name, although he often used Ilia, Elie, Elijah, Marko (because of his last name), and sometimes, when in the Islamic parts of the Caucasus, Ali—hadn’t expected to be discovered quite so quickly. He had figured on a week of walking around in the open, using his Russian passport and name, before the American authorities caught on. When they did catch on, he was prepared to discard that identity and go underground. He had planned for this eventuality. But not quite so fast.

  No matter. He would simply advance the timetable of his identity switch. That was easy. And would remain easy. Everyday citizens had yet to catch up with the realities of modern information theft.

  Still, he thought as he hitched his backpack over his shoulder and headed north on Marina Mile, tapping out a text on his newly acquired cell phone as he walked, somebody out there was paying attention. More than paying attention—someone had figured out that he was a threat and had done so from a minimum of clues.

  That was impressive.

  He reviewed in his mind what information they could have gleaned from the passport he presented at US Customs. Had they linked it to another of his passports? Or visa applications? If so, they were ahead of the game, and he would have to consider what changes to make in his itinerary. From his calculations they would be able to identify him as twenty-eight; a software engineer with American high school and work experience; from Grozny, Chechnya; and a graduate from a Russian technical university.

  Other than that, he couldn’t think of anything particular that they knew about him. Who his parents were, perhaps, not that it mattered. His father was dead, dragged off in the middle of the night by Chechen rebels, never to be seen again, and Ilya did not grieve the loss. His father had been a drunk, abusive, and rarely at home. When he had been at home, Ilya had come to loathe him. Ilya’s mother was still alive, but she was a pensioner living in a retirement home in Tolyatti, in central Russia—a truly godforsaken bit of the motherland—and knew next to nothing about her son’s whereabouts or profession, and Ilya preferred it that way. He had long ago given up on any relationship with his biological family. And anyway, her last name bore no resemblance to his, and he doubted she was listed on many official documents. The war in Chechnya had made a mockery of accurate record keeping. That was one of the main reasons he had so many passports, and they were each, in their way, perfectly legitimate. Ilya was all of those people listed on his various documents: Markov, Markarov, Ilyanovich. And also none of them. Everyman and ghost at the same time.

  He was nobody and he was everybody.

  Ilya glanced at his watch and scanned the cars blasting down the avenue. Traffic was picking up. He shot a look over his shoulder back at the Motel 6. The army woman would be knocking on his door right about now. He hadn’t checked out; he’d simply left and figured the credit card would be charged. That reminded him. He pulled the offending American Express card out of his wallet and dropped it in a garbage can. The card was useless to him now. Worse than useless—dangerous.

  Once the army woman busted down the hotel room door, they would find next to nothing inside. A roller bag he’d bought in Moscow, with some pants, T-shirts, and underwear, a dog-eared copy of Cryptonomicon. Nothing he couldn’t replace in the States, but he would miss the Stephenson novel. The book was dense, and complicated, and its plot gave Ilya’s mind a place of refuge and calm.

  All his technology and cash—just under $1,000—and all his documents were on his shoulder now, in his backpack. That never left his sight. They were his tools of the trade, his weapons.
He supposed they could pull his fingerprints from the hotel room desk and bathroom, but what good would that do them? He’d already given his fingerprints at passport control at the airport.

  So what else could they know? As far as he could tell, nothing. Ilya had made it his life’s work to remain nearly invisible, keeping his name off documents, keeping his money in accounts spread across multiple countries, paying cash when possible, changing identities randomly and as the mood struck him. The ability to blend in was part and parcel of who he was, and it was integral to how he made a living. But that in itself begged the larger question—how had they spotted him so fast? And who was responsible?

  He doubted very much that standard FBI alerts could have been triggered by his arrival. That had never happened before, and he had been in and out of the country four times in the last ten years. Homeland Security might have caught on, but that seemed like a stretch, given their mediocre record of identifying potential terrorist threats. They looked for ties to terror groups, and he had none. He hadn’t done anything wrong. At least, he’d never been caught at it. He was completely clean.

  No, the person who figured out that Ilya was a person of interest was smart. And sophisticated. The person must have guessed at the existence of someone like Ilya, then stood by and watched until a real Ilya showed up. They were using a forecasting algorithm, a data sweep that allowed them to guess at the statistical chances someone matching his background would show up.