The King of Fear: Part Two: A Garrett Reilly Thriller

by Drew Chapman

  It was the older SWAT officer again. “One of my guys noticed that you have five desks, five machines, but there’s only four of you here. Is anyone missing?”

  “No. Just an extra desk. We’re hoping to start hiring soon.” Celeste smiled broadly at the officer. “If you know anyone with programming skills, send them our way.”

  “Okay, sure.” He gave the place one last look. “Will do.”

  NEWARK, NEW JERSEY, JUNE 20, 3:15 P.M.

  Garrett ran.

  He ran down the back stairs as the SWAT team came up the elevators. He ran out the loading-dock door as they came in through the front lobby. He ran east on Raymond Boulevard until, when he stopped, he could no longer see the top of the office building they’d been hiding in.

  He hadn’t wanted to run, but the team told him he had to. They had only seconds to decide, and Celeste had been adamant: if the police were coming for anyone, they were coming for him. They had no grounds to arrest anyone else—so the rest of them would be safe. They literally pushed him out the door.

  He didn’t think about any of this as he ran. He simply ran until he was too exhausted to run anymore. Then he walked, turning right on Chapel, a street full of brick warehouses and empty storefronts. He was sweating and thirsty, and the pounding of his heart matched the pounding in his head. He stopped at a corner store and bought a bottle of water, downed it in a few gulps, then walked until he came to another corner store. There he bought a pint of cheap, blended whiskey—just to calm his nerves, he told himself—and kept walking, the bottle of booze in a brown paper bag in his back pocket. He took another right and came to the trestles of an elevated railway. No one else was around; only a few rusting cars kept him company. He sat underneath the railway bridge and tried to collect his thoughts.

  But first he swallowed a handful of the black-market Percodan that Patmore had bought him. He hadn’t planned on taking them with him, but as he’d been rushing out the door, he remembered that he’d stashed them in a desk drawer and swiped them as he left. Now he was glad, because they were the only thing standing between himself and paralyzing head pain. He didn’t count how many he took; he just gobbled them down and chased them with a mouthful of whiskey.

  A homeless man appeared from the shadows, pushing an old shopping cart piled high with bags and clothing. The man looked emaciated, a greasy jacket slung over his thin shoulders. He stared at Garrett, but Garrett ignored him and tried to think.

  Who had alerted the cops? Had it been Ilya Markov? And if so, how the hell did he know where Garrett was hiding? It didn’t seem possible, yet the timing lined up with the Amber Alert and then the bombing in DC. Somehow, Ilya had discovered Garrett’s hiding place, discovered the makeshift headquarters for the entire Ascendant team, and attacked it. When Garrett thought about it, he realized that Markov had attacked two separate branches of Ascendant—DC and Newark—at the same time. And he hadn’t exposed himself while doing it. Markov was hitting at Garrett, and Garrett wasn’t anywhere nearer catching the man.

  Markov was a master at spreading fear, yet he remained a shadow.

  That struck a line of panic directly into Garrett’s chest. He tried to reason back as to why he had taken on this task in the first place, banging down another mouthful of whiskey. The booze tasted horrible, rough and cheap, and settled uneasily in his stomach. He had seen a problem on the horizon—a pattern building that spoke of economic terror—and he had alerted Alexis to that problem. When she had scoffed at the idea, that seemed to push Garrett harder to take action. But why had he done it?

  Mitty had accused him of wanting to impress Alexis, and there was truth in that, but something deeper was going on. Yes, he was trying to save the country, in his own twisted way, but Garrett didn’t believe in altruism; everybody had a motive for their selfless acts, even if they didn’t understand it. Garrett had a motive for what he was doing as well—but he was a long way from grasping what the hell it was.

  A voice interrupted his reverie. “Can you help a brother get something to eat?” The homeless man had shuffled over to Garrett, hand open and outstretched.

  Garrett’s first reaction was to tell him to fuck off. But then he stared up at the man’s face, his smashed-in nose, missing teeth, the scabs that dotted his cheeks and neck, and revulsion and sympathy flooded his mind in equal measure. Life had devastated this old bastard so badly that Garrett could no longer tell his age, or even his race. He reminded Garrett of the old security guard at the Raymond Boulevard building, only more hollowed out, more tragic. Garrett pulled out his wallet and tossed him a $20 bill.

  “God bless you.”

  “Whatever,” Garrett said quickly, turning away from the man’s ravaged face. He drank again from the whiskey and found that it was almost all gone. Had he really drunk that much, that fast? And what about the painkillers—how many had he taken? Mixing the two probably hadn’t been such a great idea.

  He pushed all of this from his mind and tried to focus on Ilya Markov. Garrett had struck first. He had identified Markov as a threat, had tracked him through his credit cards, then flushed him out of hiding with an Amber Alert. He had provoked Markov, and Markov had struck back, and struck back hard.

  But how had he done it? How? How? How? And why was he spending his time and energy going at Garrett instead of focusing on what Garrett assumed was Markov’s larger purpose—attacking the US economy?

  Garrett closed his eyes, and when he opened them, rays of sunlight were streaking through the girders of the train trestle, illuminating heaps of black dirt littered with bottles and boxes and discarded clothing. It was, in its own decaying way, a beautiful sight, and Garrett marveled at it—the lushness of the ruin, the craggy shapes laid out by the old shirts and pants. He realized then that the drugs had taken hold.

  Suddenly, Garrett couldn’t quite remember what he’d been so anxious about. Yes, Ilya Markov was mysterious and smart, but was he really a threat to Garrett’s existence? Maybe. Or maybe he was somebody else’s problem. Garrett grinned. That was the beauty of Percodan and whiskey: after you mixed the two, everything was somebody else’s problem.

  He drained the last of the alcohol from the bottle, then stood up, his head spinning slightly, brushed the dirt from his pants, and realized that his phone was chiming. He’d stuck a disposable cell in his pocket, and now a text was waiting for him. He glanced at it.

  Police gone. We were spoofed. All clear.

  Garrett read the text again and laughed. Spoofed? So those weren’t FBI agents raiding his offices? They were regular old Newark cops?

  He typed out a quick response: Not looking for me?

  The answer was immediate: No. Crazed shooter.

  Holy fucking shit, Garrett muttered under his breath. Markov had sent the police to his office—had known exactly where to send them—but hadn’t wanted Garrett arrested. The edges of his vision had suddenly become blurry. He blinked twice to clear his sight, but that didn’t help. He turned to his phone again.

  They arrest anyone? Garrett wrote. Had he spelled that right? Arrest with two r’s or one? He was having trouble remembering things, which was odd, because Garrett remembered pretty much everything.

  No. And then: Where are you?

  Garrett looked around the neighborhood. A vacant lot was to his left, and farther under the train trestle lay a rail yard, idle now, with lines of boxcars and flatbeds stretching off into the distance. But he wasn’t sure where he actually was. Somewhere in Newark. And not a nice part of town either. He hadn’t paid attention when he ran. His cell phone had no maps app, and while a street sign was down the block, Garrett found that he was having trouble focusing on the letters.

  Better explore, then text back, he thought. He took a tentative step forward, but his foot couldn’t find solid ground, and all of a sudden he realized he was falling, toward the soft, lovely dirt, and falling fast. The world around him was twistin
g, up suddenly becoming down, and down, up. He tried to put his hands out to break the fall, but the earth was rising toward his face too quickly, and the next thing he knew, he was awash in blackness.

  WASHINGTON, DC, JUNE 20, 8:30 P.M.

  No matter how much he argued, the FBI—with the help of two DC Metro policemen—would not let General Kline into Alexis Truffant’s hospital room. He’d managed to get to the third-floor trauma unit of George Washington University Hospital by showing his DIA ID and blustering to the nurses, but getting through that final locked door was, for now at least, an impossibility: no family allowed, no coworkers, no media.

  After his third attempt at talking his way into her room, one of the Metro cops asked him to leave the floor and, when he wouldn’t, escorted him politely, but firmly, to the elevator, then down to the cafeteria in the basement.

  “Please wait here, sir,” the cop said. “Someone will come talk to you. Eventually.”

  Kline paced among the weary residents and anxious visitors, muttering to himself, then bought a cup of coffee and an apple and sat in the corner. He didn’t touch the apple, or the coffee. Instead, he cursed his own stupidity.

  How could he have let Alexis steer events, acceding to her using DIA resources to help Reilly in his insane quest? He should have said, right at the start, that domestic terror was always to be handled by domestic police; that this entire concept—an economic terrorist entering the United States to sow anarchy—fell squarely in the provenance of the FBI, not the DIA.

  “We’re a frigging analysis group,” he whispered to the air. “We analyze. That’s what we do.” He noticed an elderly couple staring at him from another table. He scowled at them, and they looked away hurriedly.

  “Damn it, damn it, damn it,” he said, and got up to pace some more.

  “General Kline?”

  Kline spun and found himself face-to-face with a pair of FBI agents. The first was a man, older, with gray hair and a paunch that protruded from his unbuttoned suit jacket. His face was fleshy, and he looked slightly distracted—maybe not too happy to be here. The other was a woman, younger, dark skinned—Indian or Pakistani, Kline guessed—and sharp looking, as if she had already sized up the situation and knew all the answers.

  She extended a hand. “Special Agent Jayanti Chaudry. This is Special Agent Murray. We’d like to ask you a few questions if you don’t mind, General.”

  “Yeah, sure, of course.” Kline pointed to the table where his coffee, now cold, and his apple sat.

  Chaudry and Kline sat down, while Murray went to grab a pair of coffees.

  “We just flew in from New York,” the female agent said.

  “New York?”

  “We’re on the Steinkamp case.”

  Kline gave her a sharp look, then nodded vigorously. “I already spoke to two sets of your agents about it last week. And about Garrett Reilly.”

  “I know you did. And thank you for that. But now I’m wondering, in the light of what happened to your Captain—”

  “Is she okay?”

  Chaudry stared at Kline, examining his eyes. “She’s fine, sir. They’re going to release her in an hour or so. Some cuts, some bruises. They’re monitoring for concussion symptoms.”

  “Good. Okay. Good.”

  Agent Murray sat down next to Chaudry, slid her a coffee, and sipped at his own.

  “Sorry I interrupted,” Kline said, and immediately he was angry at himself for apologizing. These assholes had kept him waiting for hours; he had every right to know about Alexis’s condition. But he was nervous. Nervous because he had a secret now, and the FBI would undoubtedly want to pick at that secret. But how much had Alexis told them?

  “General, do you know why Captain Truffant was at that Best Buy this morning?” Chaudry asked.

  “No idea.”

  “She doesn’t report to you?”

  “She does. But not her hour-to-hour movements. Not even day-to-day, sometimes. What did she tell you?”

  “Let’s not worry about that quite yet. What projects was she working on?”

  “That’s classified,” Kline said with as much finality as he could muster.

  “So you won’t tell us?” the older agent said, surprise in his voice.

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “We could bring you down to FBI headquarters and keep you there for a couple of days. Ask the DA to file obstruction-of-justice charges, and then ask you the same question,” Chaudry said. “Would that make it easier for you to answer?”

  Kline said nothing, thinking about this threat. He was pretty sure national security would trump an obstruction-of-justice charge if they faced off in front of a judge, but he was also pretty sure that a court battle over this would mean the end of his career—not that he had much of a career left.

  “An internal reporting project,” Kline said. “How information gets disseminated throughout the organization.”

  “That’s it?”

  “She was working on something else. But I don’t know the details.”

  “Something having to do with Garrett Reilly?”

  Kline stared down at the coffee sitting in front of him, at the ripples on the surface shimmying back and forth in the cup. He thought of the prisoner’s dilemma, the problem in game theory where criminals are pitted against each other by the police, prompted to rat each other out and get the best deal for themselves. If both prisoners squealed, they would get equally bad, but not terrible, sentences. If both prisoners kept their mouths shut, then the day would be saved. But if only one prisoner ratted out the other, then he or she would get a light sentence, and the other prisoner would spend the rest of his life in jail.

  Had Alexis told them everything she knew? Had she turned Kline in, offered him up as the ringleader of this disaster?

  It was possible, but Kline didn’t think it was probable. Alexis was stubborn—stubborn and loyal—which was why her attempt at blackmailing Kline had been so heartrending for him. No, he thought, maybe this is the moment for something else entirely.

  “General Kline?” the female agent said. “Was she working with Garrett Reilly?”

  Maybe this was the moment to start acting like a general again, not some sulky child who had had his favorite toy taken away.

  “She was.” Kline watched as Chaudry’s eyes widened. “But she was doing it on my say-so. Everything that happened is my responsibility.”

  • • •

  When they let him see Alexis, she was sitting on the edge of her bed, sipping a glass of water, dressed in a white hospital gown, closed up in back, and she had a series of purple bruises and jagged cuts on her cheeks and forehead. She looked awful, but Kline tried not to let that show on his face. She brightened at the sight of him, and he nodded to the space on the bed beside her, silently asking if he could sit there. She nodded yes, and he sat on the edge of the hospital bed, his left leg grazing her right. She put her glass of water down on a steel tray at the side of the bed and turned to him, her face full of emotion.

  “What did you tell the FBI?” Kline asked.

  “Nothing.” Alexis swallowed. “You?”

  “Everything. The truth.” Kline thought about this. “Well, I told them it was all my idea.”

  Alexis winced. She let out a long breath. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  “Yeah, I am too.” Kline reached for her hand and held it tightly in his. “But we are in this together now. We are in it deep. And somebody out there is trying to bring us all to our knees.”

  SILVER SPRINGS, MARYLAND, JUNE 21, 9:15 A.M.

  AmeriCool Environmental Services prided itself on being a computer-savvy company. They had their own in-house IT team, and when they installed HVAC systems—giant air-conditioning units that could cool entire buildings in the middle of a Virginia summer, or heat pumps that could keep South Boston warehouses warm d
uring a brutal New England January—they guaranteed their clients that 90 percent of the problems they encountered could be fixed remotely, through online monitoring systems in the company’s Maryland headquarters. This promise of modern technological solutions had allowed AmeriCool to nab new customers up and down the East Coast at an astonishing rate. AmeriCool was poised to be the number one HVAC company in the United States. They were growing by leaps and bounds.

  Except for when their Internet went down.

  When the Internet failed, groans went up from IT, curses from scheduling, and window-rattling rage from the executive suite on the second floor of their ever-expanding offices in a business park in suburban Silver Springs. AmeriCool had its own warranty contract with the local cable company, for immediate technical response and ASAP repair service, but in reality, no matter how much attentiveness their Internet provider promised, most days it took hours for service to come back online. And hours meant lost revenue and pissed-off customers.

  But not today.

  Today, a miracle happened. At 9:05 a.m., AmeriCool’s Internet service went dark. Completely, absolutely dark: no e-mail, no websites, no Skype, no cloud connection, no backup, no IMs with clients, no remote monitoring of HVAC units in New York or Philadelphia. At 9:06, the IT department scrambled to check the source of the problem. At 9:11, IT told Todd Michaels, the VP in charge of technology, that the problem was most probably outside their offices. At 9:12, Michaels called down to the receptionist and told her to get their cable-company service rep on the line to start getting service back. At 9:13 a.m., eight minutes after the initial disruption, Jenny, the receptionist, looked up the direct line to Infinity Cable Service and was even dialing their number when the repairman walked into the lobby.

  She’d never seen him before, and she knew most of the Infinity repairmen. But he was wearing the usual blue work uniform, with the plastic laminated company badge, and he was carrying a banged-up toolbox in his right hand, and a laptop bag in his left. The name on the badge was Robert Jacob Mullins, and the repairman introduced himself as Bobby. He was young, and Jenny thought he looked handsome—kind of shy, with a wide grin and thick black hair. He asked about her necklace—her dad had given it to her as a college-graduation present—and she blushed. She wasn’t sure why.