The King of Fear: A Garrett Reilly Thriller

by Drew Chapman

Steinkamp froze. His eyes locked on the weapon, a nasty, streamlined piece of gray metal. He could not look away. The woman raised the gun with one hand and aimed it at Steinkamp’s chest.

  “No, lady, don’t. I don’t know you. This is a mistake.”

  Someone screamed from across the street. A taxi horn blew. The woman in the trench coat pulled the trigger three times in quick succession.

  The first bullet winged Steinkamp in the shoulder. The next, coming a fraction of a second later, hit him in the right arm. But the third bullet ripped open his blue Brooks Brothers shirt and plunged into Steinkamp’s heart, stopping it instantly. The president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York let out a weak gasp, then crumpled to the ground as pedestrians up and down the street dove for cover, screaming in terror. Only Sal, at the open service-counter window of his diner, didn’t duck or flinch. He stared at the woman, stunned, as she prodded the lifeless body on the pavement with her scuffed high-heeled shoe.

  “Is he dead?” Her voice was flat, emotionless.

  “I—I think so,” Sal said, not really knowing why he said it. “You killed him.”

  She turned to face Sal. She spoke calmly and clearly, as if to make sure that anyone listening would understand every word. “Garrett Reilly made me do this.”

  Then the woman in the green trench coat stuck the pistol in her mouth and pulled the trigger one last time.

  JENKINS & ALTSHULER, NEW YORK CITY, JUNE 14, 8:52 A.M.

  The ringing phone was getting on Garrett Reilly’s last nerve.

  He checked the incoming number on his work phone, but didn’t recognize it. Someone was calling his direct line, not the front desk, and his caller ID said it was from a pay phone without an area code attached. Nobody called him from pay phones, and certainly not clients. Garrett remembered pretty much every phone number he’d ever dialed, and the number on the caller ID wasn’t one of them.

  So he ignored it.

  Anyway, he was busy. He’d found the thing he’d been looking for—that dark, tangled pattern—and there was no chance he was going to let it slip away now.

  This particular pattern wasn’t easy to pick out—in fact, it had been incredibly hard. Garrett likened finding it to how astronomers had spotted the first planets outside our solar system. The exoplanets, as they were called—he had read about this in a Discover magazine in the waiting room of a doctor who Garrett had heard played fast and loose with Roxicodone scrips—were too far away and too small to be seen by regular telescopes, but astronomers had been pretty sure they existed. They just had to find another way to see them. So the astronomers looked for the effect the planets had on the things that they could see, which in this case were bigger, brighter stars. Every planet orbiting its own sun makes that star move, or wobble; the gravitational pull of the planet tugs at the star, distorting its orbit in specific, detectable ways. So astronomers studied stars—the visible—to find proof of the invisible.

  Which was what Garrett was doing as well, only in Garrett’s case he was watching money, not stars. Somewhere out there in the vast swirl of international finance, Garrett believed he’d found evidence of an enormous accumulation of money—sitting in a dark pool—that someone, somewhere, wanted to remain hidden. Dark pools were common enough—private exchanges that countries or investors used to trade equities away from the gaze of journalists or regulators or governments. This particular pool of money was buying and selling stocks in coordination with real-world events, and Garrett could see the ripples of that buying and selling as they radiated out through the global economy.

  Gather up enough money in one place, Avery Bernstein had once told Garrett, and it begins to create its own gravity. Words to live by, Garrett thought.

  Garrett pushed back from his desk and looked across the trading bull pen of the sleek Jenkins & Altshuler offices. Young men and women were busily tapping on their keyboards, buying and selling Treasuries and corporate-debt issues, derivatives and credit default swaps, none of them paying Garrett any notice. Garrett didn’t feel particularly close to any of them anymore; over the last year he’d begun to drift away from his Wall Street friends. He’d begun to drift away from everyone. And he no longer had that burning desire to make as much money as possible, to conquer the world. Where had it gone? He wasn’t sure. He was no longer sure of anything.

  A few traders had their faces pressed up against the windows that looked out onto lower Manhattan and the Hudson River beyond. Police sirens had begun to howl about ten minutes ago, and Garrett’s coworkers were speculating on what had happened. A fire? A terror attack? Whatever it was, the NYPD was taking it seriously. Garrett didn’t care. He was discerning order out of the chaos of the global information flow, hunting for a narrative in the random noise of the modern, interconnected world. What could be more important than that?

  His phone rang. That same number, a pay phone, with no area code listed. Garrett thought about answering, then ignored it once again. He went back to his screens, and the pattern that was unfolding there.

  On June 4, at 7:30 a.m., GMT, Sedman Logistics had moved down 5 percent on the Nordic exchange, a smaller European stock market based out of Stockholm. Within five minutes an intrusion hack was made against a corporate network in Munich. In the sixth, Hunca Cosmetics dropped 7 percent on the Borsa Istanbul. Two minutes later, an IT system went down in Lyon, France. Two days ago, Navibulgar, a Bulgarian shipping company, tumbled 10 percent in after-hours trading on the Bulgarian Stock Exchange, and within thirty seconds twenty thousand customer passwords disappeared off a department-store server in Liverpool. Then this morning, about half an hour ago, two auto-parts manufacturers were hit hard on the Borsa Italiana, Italy’s small stock exchange, each dropping more than 20 percent in minutes.

  Garrett scanned the international news ticker on his Bloomberg terminal, looking for a correlated real-world event. But none came. Not yet. But he was sure that there would be one. The tug and warp of invisible money created gravitational ripples, and next would come the visible criminal strike. This was a surefire pattern; Garrett could feel it in his bones. Complicated. Dense. Dark. And coming this way.

  Whoever had done this—and he was pretty certain one person, or one group, was behind it—was good at the job. They were criminals, but talented ones, able to hack and steal across a number of platforms, in a number of countries, all with relative ease. The attacks had started small, but they were growing.

  Clearly, they had financial backing. You needed a lot of cash to short stocks and move markets, and you needed to be willing to lose that money if things didn’t go your way. A sovereign wealth fund was probably the source, or perhaps a fabulously wealthy investor. But having that much money to back a criminal enterprise seemed extraordinary to Garrett. Why spend so much just for a few thousand passwords? You could buy them on the darknet for a fraction of the price.

  They also had people on their payroll. A large number of people, who were able to move in and out of the defenses of department stores and sophisticated IT companies without being found out. In the world of hackers, those people were called social engineers. They were illusionists, performers, conjurers—people who lured the innocent, or not so innocent, into doing things they wouldn’t normally consider doing. They dangled money, or sex, or sometimes they just pulled the wool over your eyes. Outside the world of hacking, social engineers were simply called con men. And these guys were exceedingly good con men.

  Garrett stretched his legs and rubbed at the edges of his forehead. His head was beginning to hurt again. He’d managed a few hours of sleep after his long night with Avery Bernstein’s persistent ghost, but now he wished he’d managed a few more. He fished a pair of tramadols out of his pocket and dry-swallowed them. The more medication he took, the harder it was for him to see patterns; the narcotics dulled his senses. But he’d already done the heavy lifting for the day. He felt he could coast through the afternoon.

&n
bsp; He checked the prescription stash he kept in his work desk. He was good for another week or so. His anxiety slacked off noticeably. He knew that was a bad sign: only addicts cared how much product they had on hand. But he just needed to get through the day.

  His phone rang again. The same number. Outside, the sirens kept screaming. They were not helping his head. Frustrated, he grabbed the handset.

  “Garrett Reilly, bonds. Who is this, and what the fuck do you want?”

  There was a moment’s silence on the other end of the line. Garrett thought he could hear traffic, an engine rumbling, a car horn. A pay phone, for sure.

  Then a voice cracked the silence—a muffled voice, as if the caller was trying to disguise his or her identity, maybe talking through a piece of thick fabric. “The president of the New York Fed has been shot. Assassinated on Nassau Street thirty minutes ago. The news is about to break.” The voice clearly belonged to a woman. She was tense, nervous. On the edge of true fear. “It’ll be everywhere.”

  “What?” Garrett asked, half-listening. The words didn’t quite sink in. “Who is this?” He blinked rapidly to concentrate. The president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York? Killed? Who the hell would want to . . . ?

  Suddenly the thought occurred to him. The dark pool. A stock sell-off. A correlated real-world event. Could it be? A pulse of excitement—and fear—ran from his heart, out to his fingers, then back to his brain.

  “Holy shit.” His voice was a whisper.

  “But Garrett, you have to listen carefully. The woman who did it, she mentioned you. By name. She said you told her to shoot him.”

  Garrett’s mouth went dry. The pulse of fear became a wave of dread. He knew, immediately, who was calling him, why she was using a pay phone, and why she was trying to disguise her voice. Garrett tried to form the words for a response, but he could barely manage “I had nothing to do with—how could—” The words came out in a strangled grunt. His thoughts flashed to Avery’s ghost, to his own subconscious warning. How could he have known so clearly, and yet . . . “I never told anyone to shoot anybody in my life.”

  “That doesn’t matter now. She killed herself. At the scene. She’s dead.”

  “Why would I want the New York Fed president killed? It makes no sense.”

  “It gets worse. The FBI. They’re coming to your office. They’re going to arrest you. They’ll be arriving in a matter of minutes.”

  “Ale—” Garrett started to say the caller’s name, but caught himself. What if the call was being recorded? What if the NSA—or the police—were listening? His head was swimming. There was a moment’s silence on the line. Outside, the sirens suddenly stopped. Garrett closed his eyes to gather his thoughts. To concentrate. To think. Think hard, and push the pain and drugs from his mind.

  The FBI were coming. They were coming for him.

  “Garrett,” the voice on the phone said. “Run.”

  WASHINGTON, DC, JUNE 14, 10:05 A.M.

  When she returned to her office, the first thing Captain Alexis Truffant saw was a message scribbled on a Post-it note and pasted square in the middle of her computer screen: See me. Now. Kline.

  Alexis tried to calm herself, then hurried up the two flights of stairs toward her boss’s office on the fourth floor of the Defense Intelligence Agency building. She stopped at a bank of windows that looked out over the shimmering Potomac and suburban Virginia beyond the river. The DIA was located on Joint Base Anacostia–Bolling, just south of downtown Washington, DC, and the Potomac bordered the base’s western edge. She took in the brilliant June morning, patted down her green-and-brown US Army combat jacket, then marched into General Kline’s office.

  He starting talking before she had a chance to salute. “Reilly bolted from his office before the FBI got there. They’re saying somebody tipped him off.” General Kline was standing behind his desk, and his face was flushed and red. “You know anything about that?”

  “Sir.” Alexis stood at attention. “It’s Washington. Information travels fast. Rumor faster.”

  “That is not what I asked you, Captain.” Kline charged out from behind his desk in a rush of motion. Barrel-chested, he had a head of thick gray hair and a booming voice. He had been head of the DIA’s Directorate of Analysis, responsible for understanding all the threads of intelligence that came into the military daily, but he’d been transferred to a bureaucratic pencil-pushing job six months ago. Now he was reorganizing how analysts disseminated reports to junior field officers—and he hated it. He vented that anger at everyone within shouting distance.

  Kline stood toe-to-toe with Alexis. “Answer the question.”

  “Sir. Why would Garrett Reilly have anything to do with the shooting of a Federal Reserve president? He’s a bond trader. He works for us—”

  “Worked for us. He quit Ascendant. Or have you forgotten that bit of his history?”

  “I haven’t forgotten.” Alexis knew that no incident in Kline’s career was more painful than the collapse of the Ascendant project. Ascendant had been his brainchild, an attempt to assemble a team of out-of-the-mainstream thinkers to help America fight the next generation of wars. Cyber wars, economic wars, psychological wars—outside-of-the-box wars. Garrett Reilly had been the lynchpin of that team, a master of pattern recognition, an aggressive, no-holds-barred street brawler who would take the fight to the enemy in ways that they would never see coming. And Garrett had done exactly that to China, throwing the country into a brief turmoil—and perhaps even averting World War III.

  But then Garrett had quit, a broken man, damaged emotionally as well as physically. Ascendant had fallen apart. Kline’s career, as well as Alexis’s, had stalled; the brief hint of her promotion up the ranks had disappeared. They’d both been reassigned, transferred, then neglected. The close bond between the two of them had frayed. And Kline still hadn’t forgiven Garrett Reilly. He hadn’t even come close.

  “You have no idea if Reilly had anything to do with this morning’s shooting. He’s a subversive, willful, obnoxious son of a bitch, and I wouldn’t put it past him to do absolutely anything he pleased, including having someone assassinated,” Kline said.

  “But why would he do it, sir? For the money? He has plenty. For notoriety? There are hundreds—maybe thousands—of people trying to track him down every day. He’s desperate to avoid recognition.”

  “We are not in the business of guessing Garrett Reilly’s motivations.”

  “I can guarantee you he did not have—”

  “You cannot guarantee me anything!” Kline exploded.

  The two of them fell silent as the room echoed with his words. Kline stalked back behind his desk and slumped into his chair. Alexis stood motionless in the middle of the room. She kept her eyes focused on the back wall. She was tall and lean, with an athlete’s spare body. She had olive skin and blue eyes and she kept her fine, black hair tucked up in a bun. She was generally acknowledged to be beautiful, and men often reinforced this idea by lying down at her feet and promising her the world, something she had been trying to dissuade them from doing for her entire life. She was serious, hardworking, and above all, ambitious—but the last eight months had blown a ragged hole through all of that.

  Still, Kline was being willfully blind, and Alexis knew it. There was no way Garrett Reilly could have had someone shot.

  Kline looked up at Alexis, his voice quieter. “All we really know about Reilly is that he walked away from Ascendant, has been erratic at his job, and that he’s been taking way too many painkillers. Are you still tracking his medical records?”

  Alexis shot a glance at the office’s open door.

  “No one can hear you. No one is listening.”

  “I am.” She’d been pulling Garrett’s online prescriptions for months now—illegal as that was—and had been growing alarmed at the quantities of drugs he’d somehow persuaded doctors to order for him.
She’d shared her concerns with Kline. Now she was sorry she had.

  “And is he still taking them?”

  “He’s still getting the prescriptions, so I can only assume that he is.”

  “Then he is a drug addict and we both know it. Now if you have hard evidence that Garrett had nothing to do with what happened this morning, tell me.”

  Alexis hesitated. “I do not.”

  “Do you know where he is now?”

  “No, sir.”

  Kline grimaced and sucked a breath in through his teeth. “Do you still have feelings for him?” Kline hesitated for a moment, as if searching for the appropriate phrasing. “Do you love him?”

  Alexis shot a look at Kline. A year ago, she’d had a brief affair with Garrett. The affair had ended almost as soon as it started, but the emotions involved had been intense. In a sense, she and Garrett had fought a war together. They’d saved the world, and that was a bond not easily broken. But still—love?

  “No, sir. I do not love Garrett Reilly.” She wasn’t entirely sure that her answer was true, or that Kline had any right to ask, but at this point that seemed of little importance.

  Kline stared up at her iridescent blue eyes. “Then I just don’t get it. Here’s a guy who completely screwed us over. Walked away from the program after a great triumph. Left us in the lurch when we needed him to build Ascendant and continue to protect this country. Left us with no one to fall back on. Funding cut. Made us look like fools. If he did all of these things—and you know he did—then why in God’s name would you help him? He has no loyalty. You cannot trust Garrett Reilly.”

  Alexis waited before answering, letting the heat of her boss’s emotions leak out of the room. Then she spoke quietly, trying to sound as rational as the moment would permit. “Somebody shot and killed the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York this morning. And they went to the trouble of trying to pin the blame on a member of Ascendant—”