The King of Fear: A Garrett Reilly Thriller

by Drew Chapman

  He bought a sweatshirt and jeans at a discount store, using only cash, then changed out of his business suit in the bathroom. He bought a pork sandwich and a soda at a bodega on Ninth and wolfed them both down. He was nervous, and that made him hungry; his whole body was on overdrive. He walked up to Fourteenth Street, watched the street for a few moments, then dashed into the subway and took the Q train into Queens. A few transit cops were lingering at some of the stations, so Garrett bought a Daily News and buried his face in it for most of the trip. That seemed to work; no one paid him any attention. He got off at Queensboro Plaza and killed time by walking the streets and then sitting in a park.

  Through it all, his heart pounded like a drum machine and his skull ached. He felt as if he might jump out of his skin. The tramadols were wearing off. He’d grabbed his stash before he’d fled his office, but he didn’t want to take any more pills; he needed to think, and to think clearly.

  He tried to reason out who was behind what had happened, but he didn’t have enough information. He was cut off, adrift. He was an information junkie in withdrawal, longing for a fix in the form of a blast of digital intelligence. But he knew that a fix, right then, would alert the police to his whereabouts and get him arrested.

  Why the fuck were all his thoughts coming back to addiction?

  He toyed with turning himself in. Just walk into a police precinct, blurt out his name, and let the FBI come get him. But he had no idea what they had on him—fabricated evidence, some kind of bullshit eyewitness testimony. If he did surrender, he would be at the mercy of law enforcement, a cog in the bureaucratic machine, and he might not get out of that machine again for days. Or months even. That was a nightmare scenario for Garrett. He trusted no authority, anywhere, ever. Police, military, government—they were all, to his mind, self-serving and corrupt. His paranoia about those in power verged on the pathological, born of a lifetime of being on the outside looking in.

  Anyway, he couldn’t afford to be locked up, for any amount of time. He saw clearly that what had happened to the Federal Reserve president was the start of something else—the dense, complicated thing of his nightmares. A thing that was unfurling immediately, in real time. He had seen it, and now he was a part of it.

  At four thirty in the afternoon he wedged himself in an alley between two small apartment buildings on Thirty-Sixth Avenue in Queens and watched the comings and goings in front of a Brazilian restaurant. He scanned the street for any sign of surveillance cars, cops, or undercover agents. Anyone who might have deciphered his cell phone conversation with Mitty. But all he saw were old Brazilian men tottering into the restaurant for an afternoon beer and some salgados.

  At five, a beat-up Ford Explorer pulled up at the fire hydrant in front of the restaurant. Garrett didn’t recognize the SUV, but he could see Mitty in the driver’s seat, her mop of frizzy black hair draped over her shoulders. Also, he could hear a Kesha song blasting from the radio. Mitty loved Kesha.

  He ran across traffic and threw himself into the backseat.

  “What the fuck is going on?” she barked as soon as he had closed the door. “Did you hit that guy in mergers, like you said you would? Is he pressing charges? You gotta cut that shit out, because—”

  “Just drive.” He lay flat on a bed of old beef-jerky wrappers and empty Mountain Dew cans. “I’ll tell you everything. But first I need someplace to hide.”

  • • •

  She put him in a spare bedroom above a tire-repair shop that her uncle Jose owned on Northern Boulevard. Mitty said her uncle used the room to catch up on sleep when he worked late, but also, she suspected, to meet with his mistress on Wednesday nights. The room was tiny, with a single window looking out onto an alley littered with trash, and it smelled like sweat and old cigars, but Garrett didn’t care—he would take what he could get. He told Mitty to take the battery out of her phone; the FBI would start tracking his friends and family soon, and she was just about the only friend he had these days. She did as he asked, but grudgingly, and Garrett finally felt he was safe, at least for a while.

  He told Mitty about what he’d found, the dark pool, the hacking attacks, and then about the anonymous phone call, and what the woman on the other end had said, and Mitty responded right away with theories. She had been a member of Ascendant; she knew the players, and their history.

  “That bitch Alexis is trying to set you up. She’s trying to frame your ass.”

  Garrett threw his hands in the air. “Why would she want to do that?”

  “She’s pissed at you for quitting Ascendant. And because the two of you were a thing, and now you’re not.”

  Garrett knew Mitty was taking his side against Alexis more out of friendship and loyalty than any well-considered opinion, but still, he needed to streamline his thought process, not go off on tangents. “So she had a banker shot just to blame me? A theory has to make sense for me to consider it.”

  “It makes plenty of sense.” Mitty frowned. “Sorta. She’s always been high-and-mighty, and I don’t trust her.”

  “Thanks, that’s really helpful.”

  “Whatever.”

  Mitty had turned on a small television when they first got into the room and switched it to CNN. There’d been ten minutes of coverage of the shooting in the last hour, but a reporter on the scene—and another at a police press conference—had said the shooter was an obsessed female stalker, but they hadn’t released her name. Nobody had mentioned Garrett or Ascendant or even the possibility of its being anything other than a random killing. Garrett had a flash of intense paranoia: Had he imagined the entire phone conversation? But how would that be possible? He had known nothing about the shooting until he answered his work phone.

  No, he told himself. Do not think that way. Simple logic was still his friend. A to B to C. Do not deviate from known facts and hard data: categorize, test, analyze.

  “Whoever called you made a mistake,” Mitty said. “The shooter was some crazy bitch with a gun, and she capped this dude, and no one on TV has mentioned anything about you, or a pattern, or anything like that.”

  “So you’re saying that I’m imagining all this?” Garrett booted up the laptop that Mitty had brought from her home. “I might take that personally.”

  “No, no way,” Mitty said a little too quickly. “I’m just—you know—examining it from all angles.”

  Garrett glared at her briefly, then connected to the tire shop’s Wi-Fi—Mitty said her uncle paid for high speeds to watch Venezuelan porn when business was slow. Garrett logged on to his virtual private network to search the Web for information on the shooting. His VPN let him go online without being tracked. He let the digital data wash over him and felt intense relief. He was back in the global information flow, where he belonged, moving from website to website, news feed to opinion piece. He checked the markets and interest rates, going from graph to chart to an endless scroll of numbers. The Dow had sunk on news of Steinkamp’s death, and the VIX—the Volatility Index—had skyrocketed. He ran videos and read interviews and blog posts. A veil of anxiety had descended on Wall Street. The smart money was on edge. Everyone was on edge.

  All the while, Mitty kept up a running stream of commentary at his ear, complaining about Alexis Truffant, bitching about the Dominican whore her uncle brought to the bedroom, and spending a good twenty minutes on her new diet. “Just Coke Zero and cottage cheese. It’s a cleanse.”

  “That’s not a cleanse. A cleanse is—forget it.” Garrett found a news item from Agence France-Presse. “There’s been a bank run in Malta.” Garrett scanned the news update. “Started just after the Italian stock drop. It lines up perfectly.”

  “What’s Malta? A coffee drink?”

  Garrett ignored her. He pushed back from the laptop and massaged his temples.

  Mitty watched him, concern softening her face. “Head hurting again?”

  Garrett nodded imperce
ptibly. Yes.

  “You got meds?”

  He shrugged. Yes, but he needed to stay off them for a while—not that Mitty needed to know that.

  She watched him for a moment. “I’ll run to the corner, get us some beers. Maybe some snacks. That’ll help, right?”

  “Sure,” Garrett managed to mutter. “But be careful.”

  She returned fifteen minutes later with a six-pack of Schlitz, a bag of potato chips, and a plastic bottle of Motrin.

  Garrett drank a beer and swallowed six pills. “See anyone out there? Watching you?”

  “Chill. I got it covered. I’m the Puerto Rican James Bond.” She rubbed his neck and shoulders silently for a few minutes, and the pain in his head lessened. He was grateful for Mitty. She was excitable, opinionated, and bitchy, but she was also smart and intensely loyal. She would walk through fire for him.

  “You should get some sleep,” she said. “Make sense of this in the morning.”

  He nodded, but kept working, broadening his search. He researched the bank run in Malta. No one was saying exactly how the run had started; no one seemed to know. News clips showed angry depositors throwing stones in the streets. Mitty drank a second beer, then a third, then passed out on the bed, a laptop open on her stomach. Garrett must have drifted off as well, because he woke with a start at 2:00 a.m. to the sound of a window breaking. He sat bolt upright in his chair. Mitty was snoring peacefully on the bed.

  Garrett went to the bedroom door, cracking it open to listen. There was movement below, in the tire-repair shop: someone, or something, padding around amid the equipment. Garrett slid into the hallway, then stepped slowly down the cramped stairway that led to the machine shop. The smell of rubber and grease was overwhelming. A bank of windows on the far side allowed a streak of orange halogen light to wash across the piles of tires and the empty car bays.

  Garrett stepped into the room and listened. There was only silence. He tried to slow his heart rate—the blood was pumping in his ears. A flash of a thought occurred to him: he had quit Ascendant to get away from the exact things that were happening to him at this moment. And yet his past had caught up with him. With a vengeance. He wanted to scream, but stifled the impulse.

  He moved past the car bays and machinery to the entranceway—and froze. The door to the street was open, its window smashed. Garrett crouched low, expecting a blow from behind, but none came. He turned to scout out the rest of the waiting room, but it was empty.

  Garrett straightened and took a deep breath. What the hell was going on? Then he heard it—footsteps from above, up the stairs, in the bedroom. Without thinking, he raced back across the work bays, yelling as he ran. “Mitty!”

  He sprinted up the stairs, fists clenched, and stumbled into the spare bedroom. The light was on; Mitty was sitting up in bed, rubbing at her eyes.

  “Dude, what are you yelling about?” She winced in the light. “I was asleep.”

  Garrett searched the room. Other than for Mitty, it was empty. The window was open, but Mitty had opened it when they first came in. Everything else seemed untouched.

  “Someone broke into the shop. Front door is open. Window is smashed.”

  “Nobody steals used tires. Trust me. You can’t give ’em away.”

  “They weren’t looking for tires. They came up here. To this bedroom.”

  Mitty shook her head. “You’re high. Go back to sleep.”

  Garrett sat in the chair at the desk in the corner of the room. CNN was still playing, muted, in the corner. Maybe Mitty was right. Maybe he was high, the mixture of Motrin and Schlitz jumbling his brain.

  He glanced at his computer. A word program had been opened. He hadn’t been writing anything—and he never used Word. Someone had typed three short sentences onto the screen. Garrett read them and grunted in surprise.

  One man.

  A Russian.

  He is en route.

  HM

  LOWER MANHATTAN, JUNE 15, 2:15 A.M.

  In the New York field office of the FBI, Special Agent Jayanti Chaudry was considered straight talking and intensely ambitious. She was usually in the running for the best, and most high-profile, homicide cases, and if she got one, she almost always closed it. An intuitive crime fighter, meticulous, and frighteningly persistent, she saw her relentlessness as an outgrowth of her life story: daughter of immigrant shopkeepers who spent their life savings to start a business, the first one in her family to go to college, and the first female Indian special agent in the Manhattan office. Actually, now that she thought of it, since Agent Hawani had been transferred to Denver, she was the only female Indian special agent in the Manhattan office. Or the entire Northeast.

  Not that it mattered. To Chaudry, there were two types of people in her world: those who helped her solve crimes, and those who got in the way. She knew she had a chip on her shoulder; she was, after all, dark skinned and female in a white man’s world—but she refused to let those issues derail her. Race, gender, and birthplace were simply distractions, and distractions only slowed you down. Chaudry never slowed down.

  She checked the clock above her desk—it was nearly two thirty in the morning—and considered the case before her. New York Federal Reserve president Phillip Steinkamp had been shot and killed while walking to work yesterday morning at approximately 8:25 a.m. The shooter, Anna Bachev, thirty-eight, a Bulgarian immigrant who had lived in the States for the last fifteen years, had a history of mental illness and drug abuse. She’d had multiple stints at Bellevue, in the psych lockup, as well as two arrests for possession of cocaine. She’d already been granted citizenship at the time of her arrests, so no deportation proceedings were set. Her work record was spotty, almost nonexistent, and Chaudry guessed Bachev had spent time hooking to support herself.

  Two agents had searched her apartment in the Hunts Point neighborhood of the Bronx, a filthy studio in a rotting building on Bryant Avenue, and had found multiple articles about Steinkamp. Bachev had clearly been stalking the Fed president, but something—according to the agents’ report—was slightly off about the evidence: “Agent in charge should consider the possibility of fabrication. Motivation of suspect unclear and unusual. Source of newspaper clippings is indeterminate, seems beyond suspect’s capabilities to accumulate.”

  To Chaudry, Steinkamp was an odd choice for a stalking target. He was older, quiet, and did not have a high-visibility job. He was neither rich nor, outside of a small subset of finance geeks, particularly famous. Chaudry knew that stalkers were, by definition, irrational, but when they picked targets, they weren’t usually bureaucrats—balding, married bureaucrats at that.

  None of Bachev’s neighbors knew much about her; she’d only moved into the apartment two months ago. Before that, her name didn’t show up on a lease, rental agreement, or bank account in the New York City area going back four years. She’d essentially been homeless. And broke. Which raised the question of how she had obtained the murder weapon, a nine-millimeter SIG Sauer P226. SIGs were expensive weapons. This one had been bought at a gun shop in Vermont three years ago by a collector, who reported it stolen six months later. It hadn’t shown up in any robberies or crimes since. That made it black market, but even black-market guns were pricey.

  And then there were Bachev’s reported last words before she turned the gun on herself: Garrett Reilly made me do it.

  Chaudry sipped at her coffee and puzzled over this.

  Garrett Reilly?

  Chaudry flipped through the stack of reports on Reilly. He was a fascinating character. Born in Long Beach, California, the son of a Mexican immigrant mother and a dad who worked as a janitor for the LA Unified School District, Reilly had shown an early aptitude for numbers. A genius for them, actually. He had been recruited to Yale by a mathematics professor named Avery Bernstein and had earned nothing but As at the school before he dropped out. He’d dropped out the day after his brother
, a marine lance corporal, was reported KIA in Afghanistan. Reilly appeared to have moved back in with his mother in Long Beach and spent the next six months pestering the Army Bureau of Records for information about his brother’s death. He’d made more than 120 phone calls to their DC offices. Later that year, he’d gone back to school at Long Beach State, but his grades had been indifferent, and he was cited twice by the administration for disrupting class and then getting into a fistfight with a fellow student.

  Bernstein, his Yale math prof, seemed to have tracked Reilly’s progress and brought him back to New York to work on the bond desk at Jenkins & Altshuler, a Wall Street trading house that Bernstein had taken over. There, Reilly had thrived. Thrived until a day in late March, a year ago, when a car bomb exploded in front of the Jenkins & Altshuler offices.

  Chaudry remembered the day well. It had been a sensational terror attack, but no one was killed, and then no one was charged in the bombing. The FBI hadn’t worked on that case—it had gone straight to Homeland Security, which was odd in its own right—and it was still an active investigation, unsolved and very much open. Conspiracy theories still swirled around it.

  To compound the strangeness, Garrett Reilly had disappeared that very day. He seemed to have enlisted in the army for a while and been under the supervision of the Defense Intelligence Agency, but he quit two months later, honorably discharged, and then went back to his old job at Jenkins & Altshuler, which he kept even when his mentor, Bernstein, died in a car accident soon thereafter.

  The threads of Reilly’s life were odd and disparate, and none of them quite meshed.

  When Chaudry had called the DIA right after the shooting, a general named Kline had seemed reluctant to answer her questions, citing national security concerns. It had clearly been a mistake to alert him. Twenty minutes later, someone called Reilly from a phone booth in DC, and Reilly immediately fled his office. The DIA must have circled the wagons.