The King of Fear: A Garrett Reilly Thriller

by Drew Chapman

  “Not guesses, observations. And I don’t give a shit about your past. It’s your future that I’m trying to keep from becoming a disaster.”

  Garrett saw Alexis stiffen. He walked to a wall near the hallway to her bedroom and studied a framed photo. A knot of army officers were hoisting beers at a backyard barbecue.

  “You called me from a pay phone, but not from a secure line at the DIA. They’re not going to track calls out of the DIA, but you didn’t want anyone to overhear you. You were acting without orders from Kline. You’ve grown apart. He doesn’t trust you anymore. Ascendant crashed, and he took the fall. He thinks you’re responsible for what happened. He’s pissed. At me, I’m sure. But at you too. At his disciple, his wonder child. For getting too close to me. That’s a body blow for Alexis Truffant.”

  Garrett glanced quickly at Alexis. She sat frozen in her chair. He tapped on the glass frame of the photo. “How old is Kline now? Fifty-four? Fifty-five? When is mandatory retirement in the army? Sixty-two? He’s not going to make it. He’ll quit in a year, maybe less. Everyone else is smiling, drinking beer. He’s standing apart from the gang, staring in the other direction. Look at his face. He’s worn-out. Finished.”

  He turned back to face Alexis. “And when he goes, you’ll be left all alone. No mentor. No coattails to ride on. Just you and the old-boy bureaucracy of the intelligence services. You can work as hard as you want, but you won’t get anywhere, and you know it. That’s how a career fizzles out into nothing. And your career means everything to you. It’s your reason for living.”

  He let his words sink in. “You need me to be right. So you can fix it. So you can move on. And keep moving up.”

  She sat there, saying nothing, just looking at Garrett, her breathing slow and steady. Garrett could almost see the gears in her head grinding; she was processing what he had just said, trying to come to a decision. And she was not happy about it.

  “You have to give me something specific,” she said, finally breaking the silence. “I can’t just go tell DIA brass that there’s an economic assassin entering the country without knowing who it is, what he or she would look like—and why they’re doing it in the first place.”

  Garrett nodded briefly, then strode toward her front door. “Done,” he said, and left the apartment.

  FALLS CHURCH CITY, VIRGINIA, JUNE 15, 9:52 A.M.

  Mitty booked them a room in a motel north of Alexandria. The Happy Inn was broken-down, with a few tourist rental cars in the parking lot, but Mitty guessed that most of the rooms were used by prostitutes and their johns. That seemed to suit Garrett fine. They didn’t need to use a credit card, and they registered as husband and wife, under fake names, like everyone else in the place. Mitty had fun with that part: DeAndre and Shirlee Horowitz, she told the uninterested clerk.

  The motel had Internet, but it was slow and cost $19.95 per day extra, which Garrett bitched about but paid for nonetheless. He was beginning to run out of cash.

  “If we use my ATM card,” he said, “the FBI will be here in minutes.”

  She brewed some instant coffee, then walked across the street to get sandwiches from a Subway store. When she returned to the room, Garrett already had his computer sitting on his lap.

  “I want to build a profile,” he said. “A profile of the guy coming to the country.”

  “How?” Mitty said. “You don’t know shit about him. In fact, you’re not even sure he really exists.”

  “Let’s start with the assumption that he does exist. Take it as a given. Maybe that’s crazy, but let’s run with it.”

  “Okay.”

  “So we need to figure out what he would look like. Not physically, but his background. What country he comes from, where he worked, went to school. All that kind of stuff.”

  “Not possible,” Mitty said. “I mean, seriously, Gare, how the fuck you going to do that?”

  “Probability.”

  Mitty stared at him, then lay on one of the twin beds and used the remote to flick on the television. “Remind me why we’re doing this again? I thought you quit Ascendant. I thought you hated those people.”

  “I’m doing it because someone is trying to frame me for murder. The sooner I catch them, the sooner I don’t have to sit around motel rooms. With you.”

  “Love you too. Kisses.”

  “We’ll start with age, gender, country of origin.” Garrett typed. “Native language. Education.”

  “You know why I think you’re doing this? Because you’re still in love with her. She burned your ass, and you’re going to spend the rest of your life trying to prove to her that you’re worthy.”

  “Wait, I’m confused. Earlier, you said she’s angry at me because I screwed her. Now you’re saying I’m obsessed with her because she screwed me. Which is it?”

  “Haven’t decided yet. Maybe both. I’ll know better after I eat.”

  Garrett ignored Mitty, and she switched the channel to a house-hunting reality show. Mitty loved reality shows. They could be about anything—she didn’t care: redecorating, building motorcycles, clearing out storage lockers. She couldn’t get enough of them, and if that defined her as a mouth-breathing dumbass, well, so be it. She ate her sandwich as she watched, listening as Garrett’s fingers click-clacked on the keyboard next to her. After a few minutes her curiosity got the better of her. She rolled over on the bed to sneak a peek at what he was doing.

  “Once you’ve got the questions, how you gonna define them?” she asked, despite her better judgment.

  Garrett smiled. “Like I said, evidential probability. Work our way backward to an optimal personality. What would be the prime characteristic of a person coming into the country to do economic hacking? Would they be twenty years old? Twenty-five? Thirty? Forty? Assign a value to each age. Ninety percent, eighty percent, et cetera.”

  “Yeah, but how do we assign values? Our percentage assignments are guesses.” She’d done just as much programming in her life as Garrett had, maybe more. She might not have had the statistical background that he did, but she was a quick study and loved numbers almost as much as Garrett did. That was part of why they remained friends. That, and beer. And video games.

  “We do as much research as we can, right now, online. What’s the average age of arrested hackers? In the US? Abroad? We can find those numbers. Anything we don’t know, you and I discuss, and then guess. Guesses are assigned a lower value than researched answers. Bayesian statistical analysis.”

  Mitty lay back on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. “And the discussion between us—how are we gonna resolve disputes?”

  “Occam’s razor. Simplest answer wins. If there is no obvious simplest answer, then split the results into two questions and give them equal weight in the profile.”

  Mitty thought about this. She’d gone to Fordham University on a free ride, the first person in her family to graduate from college. She’d studied social work when she first got there, figuring she would go back to her old neighborhood in the South Bronx to help immigrant families looking for their version of the American dream, but then she took her first computer-programming class and never considered social work again. Coding was like writing a story, only you were doing it in this language that was both made-up and yet made perfect sense. And the coolest thing about it was that when the story was finished, it came out the other side—on a computer screen—as an entirely different beast. What started as a series of if/then propositions transformed itself into a living, breathing program. Mitty loved that.

  “Could work,” she said. “But you might come up with nonsense. I mean—you build a hypothetical profile, but the real person, the flesh and blood, they’re totally different. Because real people never fit a profile exactly.”

  “Agreed.” Garrett continued to enter queries into his database. “But it’s better than nothing.”

  Mitty shrugged, then flipped thr
ough the channels on the motel TV. She skipped over Fox News, then quickly cycled back to it. She stared at the screen. “Oh shit, big guy. We got trouble.”

  Garrett looked up from his computer to the television and saw his own face staring back at him.

  • • •

  Alexis saw the news reports as well. She watched them from her office at the DIA. They were short, obviously cribbed from an FBI press release, and to the point: Garrett Reilly was now an official “person of interest” in the killing of Phillip Steinkamp. He was on the run, unknown location, possibly armed. Anyone with information leading to his capture should call the Federal Bureau of Investigation at the following number. Cable news flashed a passport photo of Garrett on-screen, then spent a few minutes speculating on what this all meant. A twisted love affair? A crazed loner? Or—speculated on with more relish—a broader conspiracy?

  General Kline walked into her office in the middle of the CNN broadcast and watched it with her. He shook his head slowly, muttering, “Bad, very bad,” under his breath. Then, louder: “We need to get as far away from this as possible.”

  “They’re trying to force him out of hiding,” Alexis said.

  “We need to start scrubbing Reilly from our records.” Kline sat opposite Alexis. “Anything you want to tell me?”

  Alexis considered her options. She was considerably less certain of Garrett’s innocence now than she had been before seeing him—he had been erratic, strung out, and raging, but he’d also been spot-on, as usual, and she wasn’t ready to turn him over to the police. Not yet. Her instincts told her to wait.

  She studied General Kline, the age lines etched into his face, the streaks of gray in his hair. Was Garrett right? Was Kline burned-out, about to retire? Would he leave her in the lurch to find her own destiny at the DIA? Possibly. No, probably. But she still couldn’t involve him. He was her boss, and her mentor; he had helped her rise through the ranks, and she would protect him for it, no matter what the future brought. And protection for Kline, at this point, meant ignorance.

  “No,” she said. “Nothing.”

  He stared at her, as if waiting for her façade to crack, then left her office without saying anything else.

  Ten minutes later an e-mail showed up in her in-box from a Gmail account. The sender’s name was Profiler. She read it once, briefly, then printed it out. She considered deleting the e-mail, but she knew all e-mails, deleted or otherwise, sat on government servers for what amounted to eternity. She folded up the printout, jammed it in her pocket, then walked out of the building to a small wooded area on the south end of the base. The day was warm and lovely, as opposed to her mood, which was like a battered ship crashing against the rocks. Alone, unwatched, and in the shadow of a spreading elm tree, she unfolded the printout and read it carefully.

  A profile. Of what he should look like. We made assumptions and tried to match the assumptions to what we already know. Inference from facts. Then calculated probability.

  • He will be male. 99% certainty. Professional hackers almost always are. And only a pro could do what he’s done so far.

  • Young. Again, 99% sure. 20s, early 30s.

  • Probably from Eastern Europe. 85%. Ukraine. Russia. Most non-state criminal hackers are. Attacks in Europe have seemed random, but avoided eastern countries. Ergo, that’s where he’s from.

  • Will have degree from University. Math/Science. Probably Moscow. There have been a steady stream of cyberattacks from Russian technical colleges. 75%.

  • May have worked/lived in west/US. 75% chance. Fits pattern of hackers who work here, return to native country. Maybe software development. Check Silicon Valley employment records. Chinese techs turned hackers are classic example.

  Following items skew more random. Thought you should have them anyway.

  • On surface, no connection to organized crime. He will be clean. But higher probability that deeper in his BG will be ties to criminal activity. 60%. Friends, girlfriends, parents even. Check weak ties to mafia.

  • Will enter country on student visa. 60%. Easiest to obtain, draws little attention.

  • Passport should be legit. Arouse less suspicion. Again, 60% chance.

  • Travel itinerary should match attacks in Europe. Munich, Lyon, Liverpool, Malta. All in last month. He will have overseen these personally. Correlate man to his travels. 60%.

  Following are more than two standard deviations from median on Gaussian bell curve. In other words, guesses.

  Alexis stopped reading for a moment and marveled at the way Garrett’s mind worked. There was nothing, no bit of human behavior, that he could not reduce to a number, or a pattern. In her mind’s eye, she could see him typing the e-mail, a snarl on his face, as he used probability to bolster his argument. She couldn’t help but smile—he always stayed true to form. She realized now that this was why she hadn’t turned him in: he was who he was, capable of some things, but not others. Not murder.

  She kept reading.

  • Once in US, he will go off radar. Disappear. Use myriad stolen identities. This is his core competency. You must catch him at the border, before he goes underground.

  • He will have a network of people in place here to help him. US citizens, probably. More efficient, less dangerous than bringing foreign nationals into US. There are plenty of black hats for sale here. He is a social engineer, con man—this is what he does best. Will find others to work for him. Probably already has.

  • Finally—whatever he is doing has a political aspect. It is theater. For a larger cause. Find the cause, you get closer to uncovering the act. He is a hired hand. Someone else wants this done.

  That was the end of the list, but not the end of the e-mail. Garrett had typed a few last sentences. They were abbreviated and rushed, like the list, but they were pure Garrett as well.

  Am not crazy. I am right. You know it. You have to move fast.

  That was it. She read the list two more times, considering the numbers involved, and what it might—or might not—tell her about someone entering the United States. US Customs could not arrest every young Russian male entering the country on a student visa. They would fill up the holding cells on the East Coast within days. And even if they did spot him, what could they charge him with? Planning economic terror? It wasn’t as if he would be carrying explosives or the schematics for a skyscraper. Without Garrett in front of her, without his twisted confidence, it all seemed like a paranoid theory. Tinfoil-hat stuff. And yet . . .

  He was rarely wrong. Perhaps that in itself was enough of a thread to go on. She grimaced, slipped the printout back into her jacket, and thought about how she could alert the country’s ports of entry without seeming like a crazy person herself.

  • • •

  “Feel better now?” Mitty asked as she drove through the Maryland countryside, rolling farms on both sides of the car. They’d already been driving for two hours, and they had many more to go, keeping off highways and sticking to less monitored back roads. “You saw your honey again, in the flesh. The two of you didn’t jump into bed, but you proved that you still got it—you still got a statistical swinging dick—so everything’s right with the world.”

  “I’ll feel better when you stop talking.” Garrett was lying on the backseat and trying to ignore the smell of old ham-and-Swiss-cheese sandwiches. “And when they find the guy.”

  “If he exists.”

  “He exists,” Garrett said. “It’s just a question of when he shows up.”

  THIRTY-TWO THOUSAND FEET OVER THE ATLANTIC, JUNE 15, 4:42 P.M.

  The young man in seat 34J opened his eyes and tried to stretch his cramped legs. They’d been flying seven and a half hours since Frankfurt, and he’d only gotten up once to use the bathroom. The scent of airplane food wafted up from the galley four rows back—boiled vegetables and dried-out rosemary chicken. The drone of the engines no longer registered
in his brain—it had become white noise.

  He glanced at his neighbor in 34H, an overweight American named James Delacourt, passed out in his seat, his stomach spilling over his seat belt. The young man in 34J thought to himself, I am going to kill Mr. James Delacourt. Not in the physical sense, but I will kill him nonetheless—destroy him, utterly and completely.

  And that process has already begun.

  Delacourt lived in Bethesda, Maryland. He was flying home by way of Miami, where he was meeting a potential client. The young man in 34J had learned this by buying Delacourt a series of drinks—beers at first, then a martini, then three vodkas poured straight from the airplane minibottles into a cup—until the flight attendant, realizing how much she’d served the two of them, cut them off. But by that time it was too late; Delacourt was plastered.

  The American had boasted to the young man that he could hold his liquor, but, of course, he didn’t really have any sense of what holding one’s liquor meant. An average Russian could drink an average American under the table, and the young man in 34J was Russian, although he now considered himself a citizen of the world—a citizen who was well practiced at alcohol consumption. In fact, he could drink most Russians under the table. He wasn’t particularly proud of this ability; it was simply an asset he employed when going about his business. So James Delacourt never stood a chance.

  Over the four hours of conversation they’d had, the Russian had extracted a series of crucial pieces of information from Delacourt. The young man could be charming, if needed. He could be anything. He was a chameleon—another of his abilities—able to mold the surface of his personality to match any occasion. He could laugh at a lame joke, tell a story of his own humiliation, or spin a discourse on political corruption in third-world countries; he could flirt with women and argue sports with men; he could be loud and aggressive, or wallflower passive. He could do all of this in English, with barely an accent, in his native Russian, and in passable Chechen as well.