The King of Fear: A Garrett Reilly Thriller

by Drew Chapman

  The engineer seemed baffled by the questions. “Well, no, not political, exactly. But kind of like, maybe, I don’t know—a nihilist. I think his family was pretty fucked-up. The system is gonna screw you over, so you’d better get over on the system first. He only said that once, when he was drunk, but I definitely got the feeling that he’d be happy to see it all come apart. Watch everything go down the toilet. Like maybe that’s what happened to him when he was a kid.”

  Garrett thought about his own feelings about “the system,” and how, on many occasions, he too would have been happy to see the whole thing come crashing to the ground: the government, the military, the banks, and the bankers. Was there overlap between Markov’s vision of the world and his own? Or was overlap too mild—was there synchronicity? He walled that idea off from the rest of his thoughts. It was not a possibility he wanted to investigate now. Or ever.

  “No blogs, no websites?” Garrett asked.

  “None,” Bingo answered. “No digital trail.”

  “Hobbies? Perversions? What’d he do with his spare time?”

  “The guy said Markov liked to play games. Chess mostly. But other games too. Board games, word games, number games. He won the company chess tournament. But everyone said he was a ringer because he was Russian.”

  Garrett told Bingo to keep widening the web of Markov’s acquaintances: anyone who knew anyone who might have known him or had contact with him or even seen him on the bus one day.

  “No piece of information is too small,” Garrett said. “It all matters.”

  “Got it.” Garrett thought he detected a trace of boyish excitement in Bingo’s voice, as if he was having the time of his life.

  Weary, and in pain, Garrett took his last two meperidine and moved on to Mitty, who was building a nonrelational database. The database was a digital bucket into which they could load seemingly unrelated bits of information, then test whether those bits were actually connected to each other. What Garrett wanted to know was how Ilya Markov conned people. When he did it. How he did it. Whom he used to help him.

  Mitty had the database give all its answers as histograms and clustered dendrograms—graphical representations of data—and this made Garrett woozy with joy. For Garrett, data visualization was numbers porn. It activated some primitive pleasure center in his brain; he fell into the data, no longer an observer of it. He became the numbers.

  Mitty chuckled as Garrett pored over the data. His pupils dilated, his breathing slowed. She didn’t even have enough intel on Markov to make a genuine chart—most of what the computer was giving them was simply coding noise, but it didn’t matter to Garrett; noise was one step below facts, and many steps above real life.

  “You can be a little creepy—you know that, right?” Mitty said.

  Garrett gave her the finger and moved on to another part of their large, empty offices. He found Patmore in a far room with a view to downtown Newark, monitoring an Internet feed of four different cable news networks.

  Patmore stood and snapped to attention when Garrett walked into the room. “Low boil out there, sir.”

  “How so?”

  “A mountain of chatter about Steinkamp, sir. Who killed him? Was that a terror attack on the US economy? And why would a Wall Streeter like you have anything to do with it? A lot of conspiracy theories. Also about Russia. Like maybe they’re going to invade Belarus. And what a shitstorm that would turn out to be.”

  Every mention of Russia sent a pulse of electricity down Garrett’s spine. “Anyone say the two are connected? Steinkamp and Russia?”

  Patmore scratched at his chin. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Well, I think they are. So keep an eye out for any intersections.”

  “Will do, sir.”

  “Don’t call me sir.” Garrett nodded to Patmore and then to the chair. “And you can be at ease—or whatever people say.”

  Patmore sat back down.

  Garrett closed the door to the office and dug a $100 bill out of his wallet. “Listen, I have a different job for you. If you could just . . . well, look on Craigslist.” Garrett circled the topic. “And maybe find something. My head. You know, I had this fracture. And it hurts like . . .”

  “On it.” Patmore snatched the bill from Garrett’s hand. “Painkillers. A black-market seller. No digital trace.”

  Garrett nodded in surprise, then relief. He’d figured the request would take a certain amount of explaining. “I probably won’t take them. I just need them around in case—”

  “I got blown out of a Humvee in Kandahar. Went over an IED, Humvee flipped, next thing I knew I was in a field hospital. Not a day goes by my back doesn’t feel like it’s gonna split in two. Consider it taken care of.”

  A wave of gratitude washed over Garrett, and he felt as if he were about to burst into tears, and then Celeste walked into the room.

  “I found something.” She glanced at Patmore, then studied the odd look on Garrett’s face. “Am I interrupting? Were you two about to kiss?”

  Garrett shook his head in wonder. “You’re such an asshole. You’ve become more like me than me.”

  “I thought you’d enjoy that,” Celeste said.

  “It gets old.”

  “Imagine how the rest of us feel.”

  Garrett turned to Patmore. “Thank you, Private.”

  Garrett and Celeste left the room and moved to the empty reception area. Celeste’s laptop was open on a desk.

  “I checked up on Leone’s background. Nothing extraordinary. Grew up outside of London, midlevel colleges. Did some HR work in the city. Then he landed the job in Malta. Been there three years, rented an apartment, medium salary. Ordinary guy. Ordinary life.”

  “Okay.”

  “Then I thought about what you said—think like a con man—so I looked up his social media. Tumblr, Instagram, Facebook. Check this out.”

  She tapped on the mouse pad and a browser appeared on the computer screen. She clicked through each of the three tabs. All three social media sites were filled with pictures of women—pretty and young—with one thing in common.

  “He’s got a thing for redheads,” Garrett said.

  “A pretty obvious thing. A shout-it-from-the-rooftops thing.”

  “Do we know if he—”

  “I checked back with the IT guy, asked if Leone had any fetishes, but the IT guy didn’t know him that well. He said Leone had one friend at the company, an Italian guy named Luigi Abela from the legal department. He still lives on Malta. I talked to him. He said Leone liked redheads a lot and, in fact, had met one at the bar the night before the collapse.”

  “Son of a bitch.”

  “I’m guessing that Markov scouted this Leone guy, figured out that he had a ginger fetish, then brought one to Malta and had her seduce him. In espionage they call it a honey trap.”

  Garrett scrolled through the pictures on Leone’s Instagram account. Leone’s obsession was right there, out in the open; all Markov had to do was look for it. “He finds people’s weaknesses, and then he exploits them.”

  “So I hope to God you don’t have too many of them.” Celeste smiled darkly at Garrett. “Because if you do, he’ll find them and screw you to the wall.” She snapped shut her laptop and walked to the front door. “I’m going to lie down in a corner and nap.” With that she left the office.

  Garrett considered this new information. The picture that was forming of Markov was crude, but helpful: he was careful, obsessive, smart, and so far a moral blank slate. Garrett thought about Celeste’s parting blast at him as well. He did have weaknesses, although he was doing his best to cover them up, and he wasn’t in any hurry to let anyone else see them. He shook those thoughts from his brain and went to find Alexis. He’d given her the oddest of the team’s tasks—a speculative long shot that might help move things along.

  “Done,” she
said the moment he walked into her room. She swiveled her chair so Garrett could see the screen in front of her. On it was a carefully worded document, with a mug shot and a logo from the New York State Department of Justice.

  Garrett read it twice. “I like it. I mean, I’ve never read an AMBER Alert before, but it seems real to me.” He tapped the screen at a paragraph of text just below Ilya Markov’s picture. “I especially like the part about him abducting a five-year-old boy. You don’t come right out and say he’s a child molester, but it’s pretty obvious that he is.”

  Garrett knew that a fake AMBER Alert was a nasty piece of media manipulation, but he wanted to force Markov to the surface in the same way that the FBI had tried to make Garrett show his own face, and he didn’t care if he broke the rules doing it. The more rules broken, the better, as far as he was concerned.

  “The right person hears that, they’ll tear Markov to pieces,” Garrett said.

  Disapproval flashed across Alexis’s face.

  “What? It’ll save us the trouble.” Garrett knew Alexis wasn’t always crazy about his morals, but then—he wasn’t crazy about hers either. They were a pair that way.

  “How are we going to get outlets to broadcast it? AMBER Alerts have to be verified by the police.”

  “It’s news. Sensational news,” Garrett said. “We send it to every TV station from here to Miami. And every newspaper and news website. If only a quarter of them go live with it, it might force Markov to change his plans. That’s what we want. We want him feeling hunted. We want him off-balance, changing his mind on the fly.”

  “Okay.” She turned back to her computer. “You’re the boss.”

  Garrett watched her for a moment.

  “Something else?” Alexis said, not looking up from the chair.

  “They need you back in DC?”

  “I’ll have to go in the next day or so. There are only so many excuses I can make for not showing up in the office.”

  “We’re going to need more help. Institutional help.”

  Alexis swiveled in her chair back toward Garrett. “Given that the FBI would like to see you in handcuffs, I’m not really sure who we could ask.”

  “The DIA could get us what we need. Passenger manifests, credit-card tracking, a secure data sweep.”

  Alexis narrowed her eyes. “Kline wants nothing to do with you.”

  “You can convince him I’m right. That we’re right. You have the proof.”

  “I have conjecture. I have probability. And I have a lone Russian student wandering around the US. But I don’t have proof. Not proof that Kline will accept. He’s stubborn, and he doesn’t like to be wrong. Ever.”

  “You could use other methods. To get him to do what we need.”

  The air seemed to go out of the room. Alexis cocked her head, her face a sudden blank. She examined Garrett’s eyes, his mouth. It looked, to Garrett, as if she were sizing up his character for the first time, as if they’d just met—as if he were a stranger to her.

  “What are you suggesting?”

  “My name is linked with Ascendant. Ascendant is linked with him. And linked with you. If you threatened—”

  “Blackmail? If I threatened to drag him down with me? Is that what you’re saying?”

  Garrett hunched up his shoulders, as if to say, Well, now that you mention it, I suppose that is a possibility.

  “You’re asking for a lot. A fuck of a lot.”

  Garrett was, and he knew it. But she was already in deep, so why not go all the way?

  Her eyes burned into his, cold and searching, and he had to steady himself to match her gaze. He couldn’t read her, but he rarely could—she had been a mystery to him and continued to be one. Was she furious with him? Had she finally had enough? Had she caught a glimpse of his true nature and found it woefully lacking? Did it even matter?

  Alexis blinked once, slowly, then swiveled to her computer and went back to work. Garrett watched her back, her black hair splaying out across her shoulders, but she didn’t turn around and didn’t say another word, and Garrett got the distinct impression that their relationship had just entered a new—and perhaps not as benevolent—phase.

  ATLANTA, GEORGIA, JUNE 18, 11:01 A.M.

  A hum of financial anxiety was in the air. Leonard Harris (R-Marietta, GA) could hear it in the hushed whispers of his aides in Washington, DC, yesterday, when Congress closed up session, and he could see it in the vacant stares of the businessmen at the airport when he got off the plane in Atlanta this morning. It was as if the entire country had gone off its antianxiety meds, and every crank rumor that you could think of was beginning to seep out of the swamp of public opinion: the end was near; buy gold. There was no more oil; ditch your car. The dollar would be worthless tomorrow; get a shotgun and run for the hills.

  Good Lord, Harris thought to himself as he maneuvered his gray Lincoln MKZ through the hideous Atlanta traffic, people do love to work themselves into a state.

  He checked his watch and decided he had just enough time to stuff some food in his face. He pulled off the freeway and made his way east to Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward toward a vacant lot behind a Piggly Wiggly. Because there, he knew, lay a culinary gold mine, a collection of food trucks from all over Atlanta—barbecue food trucks, Vietnamese food trucks, burger trucks, fish-and-chips trucks, even a vegan truck.

  Harris loved to eat: Chinese, Italian, French, Thai chicken satay, Korean kimchi, Ethiopian flatbread slathered in doro wot. All good, to his mind. He’d eat in restaurants seven days a week if his doctor hadn’t told him it would kill him; so he kept it to four lunches and three dinners. He was fifty-seven, after all, an eight-term incumbent who could probably see his way to fourteen or fifteen terms, if he kept his health up.

  Harris parked his car a block from the Piggly Wiggly and walked to the caravan of food trucks. The Georgia sun was beating down, and the air was thick and damp. He’d kept an extra white shirt hung in the back of his car for the interview, which was a damn good thing, because the blue one he was wearing was already soaked through.

  Harris was handsome, and telegenic. He had most of his hair and didn’t need glasses, which was part of why he had landed the chairmanship of the House Banking Subcommittee, one of the most powerful committees in all of Washington, DC. He had fought long and hard to get the post—put up with the myriad slights of his party bosses, done all the dirty work of a good political foot soldier—and now he was the boss. A great victory. But the job was not without duties, and interviews were top of the list: he was headed downtown to the CNN tower to a one-thirty Q&A with Wolf Blitzer. After that he had a PBS segment at four from a live remote, then a recorded talker with a radio station in San Antonio, Texas, at four thirty. And they were all going to want to discuss one thing, and one thing alone: the murder of Phillip Steinkamp.

  Harris knew Steinkamp—had met him a couple of times, even had lunch with him once—and thought he was a nice guy. Terrible shame what happened. But Harris didn’t have any new theories on why he’d been shot, or who had done it. The FBI had given him a briefing two days ago, but from there on it had been silence. Not that it mattered: the cable news outlets were relentless in their search for gossip—any whiff of drama was reason for a new interview, more breathless analysis, another round of inane predictions.

  Harris entered the food-truck lot and thought about what to eat. He came there so often that all the drivers and cooks knew him. Today, Harris decided on Jose’s Bandito Wagon. Jose was old and stooped, and he sat in the back of the truck while his wife—Sofia—cooked most of the food. And sweet Jesus, Sofia was a genius. Her chicken mole burrito was to die for, and her steak carnitas sprinkled with fresh cilantro made Harris’s heart skip a beat.

  Harris ordered two shrimp tacos, a side of guacamole with homemade pepper chips, and a Diet Pepsi to wash it all down. He chatted briefly with Jose, waiting patiently for h
is order, but even Jose wanted to talk about the state of the country.

  “Yesterday, I take my money, send it to Mexico,” he told Harris. “Safer there. I was in Mexico when the peso went poof. Disappear just like that. One day you got lots of money, the next day you got nothing. Maybe that happens here.”

  Harris started to tell Jose that the US dollar was perfectly stable, and a heck of a lot safer than the Mexican peso, but found that he just didn’t have the energy, and anyway, his order came up in all its aroma-laden splendor, so he grabbed some napkins and a small container of pico de gallo and sat himself on a wooden picnic bench in the middle of the parking lot. Eating those tacos was like sex. Better than sex, in truth, because, well, he rarely had sex anymore. He rarely saw his wife, as she lived in Marietta, working as a doctor, and he was mostly in the capital, sharing a crappy little apartment with three other congressmen. Even when Congress was on recess, he and his wife didn’t sleep together. They just couldn’t seem to find the time. Or the passion. Which perhaps explained why he loved to eat so much. He was no amateur psychologist, but even he suspected he was filling unmet erotic desires with food.

  He looked out across the half dozen other diners eating at separate tables in the parking lot. The sun slipped behind a cloud, and Harris dabbed at his sweating face. Thirty minutes until the CNN interview. What would he say? Was there really some sort of conspiracy afoot? Harris was having trouble wrapping his head around that, but he had to admit that things were looking squirrelly all over the place: the shooting of a Fed president, a bank run in southern Europe, targeted cyberattacks, the burgeoning civil war in Belarus, with the Russians moving their tanks up and down the borders of former Eastern Bloc countries as if it were the Cold War all over again.

  A wall of worry. That’s what they called it on Wall Street. And the worry was spreading. The market had taken a major dump yesterday. The Dow had dropped 500 points and was down another 350 this morning. Rumors were flying. Were American banks in trouble? Had brokerage houses made bad bets again? Harris had seen some blowhard on Fox yesterday saying a derivative was out there that was going to take down a major trading house. What kind of irresponsible idiot would go on the air and say that? The entire edifice that was the American economy rested on the public’s believing that the structure was sound. If people didn’t buy into that idea, everything would go up in flames. Even Harris knew that.