The King of Fear: A Garrett Reilly Thriller

by Drew Chapman

  “Is that stoner logic? Because it’s idiotic.”

  “Chinese food,” Garrett said, ignoring Avery’s riposte. “That place on Tenth Avenue. We went every Sunday. You remember that? That was a nice ritual.”

  “Grief will not get it done. Move past it.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I have nobody.” Garrett’s voice cracked slightly. “You left me.”

  “Don’t be a drama queen. I didn’t leave anyone. I was murdered.”

  Garrett winced. Avery had been murdered—murdered, most probably, because he’d been connected to Garrett, and Garrett was connected to Ascendant. A direct line of guilt went from Garrett Reilly to Avery Bernstein’s death, a line that led right to Garrett’s broken heart. All his problems—all his pain and his confusion and his addiction—they could all be traced back to the day Avery died, to the gaping hole that his absence left in Garrett’s psyche.

  “Because of me,” Garrett said. “You were murdered because of what I was doing.”

  “Now the self-pity? Come on. I was murdered because there are evil people out there who don’t care about human costs or consequences. Those people need your full attention, and they need your attention now.”

  “There’s no such thing as evil. There’s just people doing what works best for them.”

  “You don’t really believe that.”

  “Maybe I do.” Garrett raised his voice. “Maybe I believe self-interest trumps morality every time. Maybe I just want to be left alone.”

  “Grow up. Grow up and do what is required of you to make the world better.”

  “Of all the places I expect some sympathy, my own fucking unconscious would be top of the list!” Garrett yelled.

  “Garrett?”

  Garrett snapped his head around. The door was cracked open. Bingo peeked into the office. His eyes scanned the room. “You okay?”

  Words failed Garrett. He stood there, silent.

  “Who you talking to?” Bingo’s eyes landed back on Garrett, arms still raised over his head, midgesture.

  He dropped his hands to his side. “No one.”

  “I thought I heard yelling.” Bingo checked his phone. “It’s three in the morning.”

  Garrett glanced to where Avery Bernstein had been standing. He was gone, no trace of him left, nothing but empty space in the office. Garrett’s heart sank. “Kind of hard to explain.”

  “Okay. Maybe you should get some sleep. Or at least keep your voice down.”

  Bingo left the room, closed the door, and Garrett sank to his knees in a corner. He cursed himself, his addiction, and his neediness, and hoped he could keep it together long enough to extract himself from the hole into which he seemed to be sinking. He closed his eyes and began sorting passwords in his head, hoping he’d find one that led to Ilya Markov.

  NEWARK, NEW JERSEY, JUNE 19, 5:12 A.M.

  Bingo woke the team at 5:00 a.m. They gathered groggily in the conference room, sitting on the floor, backs up against the white walls. Bingo closed the door and they kept their voices down. Garrett was still asleep two rooms over, and Bingo wanted him to stay asleep.

  “I heard him at three in the morning. He was having a conversation with himself. I think he was hallucinating.”

  “I talk to myself all the time,” Mitty said. “Don’t mean I’m hallucinating.”

  “He was talking to someone. And that someone was not talking back. I listened for like five minutes.”

  “When you went into the room, did he seem strange to you, Bingo?” Alexis asked.

  “He seemed . . .” Bingo considered his words for a moment. “He seemed scared. He seemed high.”

  “Do you know what kind of drugs he might have been taking?” Alexis asked.

  Bingo shook his head no, but then Patmore snapped out the answer: “Percodan.”

  Everyone in the conference room stared at the marine private, their faces suddenly alive with surprise and simmering anger.

  “He said his head hurt,” Patmore said. “He gave me money. So I went and bought them for him.”

  “When?” Celeste asked angrily. “When did you do this?”

  “Yesterday. I checked on Craigslist. There were a bunch of sellers. I walked. Not far. A guy at a corner market. Nice dude. Hindu. Or a Sikh or something. He sold me a bagful.”

  “How could you? You enabled a drug addict to get his fix,” Celeste said. “You’re as bad as the guy selling the drugs.”

  Patmore shrugged. “I don’t believe drugs should be illegal. Just my opinion. People are gonna do what they do. Who am I to stop them?”

  “Did I miss the sign on the door? Is this a fucking Ayn Rand convention?” Celeste said.

  “I just don’t see what the big deal is,” Patmore said. “And I have no idea who you are talking about.”

  “The big deal is that Garrett is high, and he may not be thinking straight,” Alexis said. “Especially if he’s hallucinating. We can’t have that. It’s too dangerous a situation.”

  “Look, Garrett’s always taken drugs,” Mitty said. “The whole time I’ve known him. He used to smoke more pot than anyone I know. Like every day, three, four times a day. Now he’s switched to scrips, which I admit isn’t like ideal or anything, but he’s still doing his job. I just think we should let it go.”

  “That’s nuts, Mitty,” Celeste said. “If you’re so high that you’re hallucinating, you’re not doing your job, and I don’t want to have anything to do with you. And I certainly don’t want you making life-or-death decisions for me or anyone I’m close to.”

  “Don’t be an uptight bitch,” Mitty said.

  “Fuck you. Don’t be a knee-jerk enabler of your drug-addict friend,” Celeste shot back.

  “Okay, okay.” Alexis put her hands out for calm. “Let’s take it down a notch.”

  The team sat quietly, then Alexis nodded to Mitty. “We get that you’re loyal to Garrett, and that’s fine, but we can’t have someone leading us who is completely wasted. I mean, he needs to be able to differentiate between imagination and reality—”

  “You really think he can’t tell the difference between—” Mitty started to say.

  “I’m just saying that we need to be able to trust him,” Alexis said. “This is a murder case. And a possible terror attack. Garrett needs to be clear about what is going on in the world around him. Without that, he’s useless to us.”

  “So what are you suggesting?” Mitty asked. “We abandon him? Walk away? Because listen, Garrett is wanted by the FBI, and I don’t think he did it. And neither do you, right, or you wouldn’t be here. We leave, then he’s on his own, he probably gets nabbed. And whatever we are trying to stop definitely happens.”

  “Valid point,” Alexis said.

  “Fuck yeah, valid,” Mitty said.

  “We should vote on it,” Bingo said just above a whisper. “We stick around or we go.”

  “No. That’s bullshit,” Mitty said. “This ain’t a democracy.”

  “I think it’s a good idea,” Celeste said. “We make a decision as a team. It’s binding. Stay or go. We all abide by the vote.”

  “I’m good with voting,” Patmore said.

  “Same,” said Alexis.

  Everyone looked to Mitty, who grimaced, then said, “Fine,” but she did not look happy about it. “If you bitches vote to leave, and then that Russian asshole does some nasty shit, well, it’s gonna be on your heads. I’m just saying.”

  Alexis looked at each member briefly. “Show of hands. Who thinks we should close up shop, quit Ascendant?”

  Celeste’s hand shot up. A moment later, Bingo raised his hand as well.

  Mitty stared at him, eyes narrowed to slits. “Really? Really?”

  “If you’d seen him yelling at nobody in that room,” Bingo said,
“you’d do the same.”

  Mitty made a hissing sound between her teeth and looked away.

  “Okay, who wants to stick around?” Alexis asked.

  Mitty raised her hand, as did Patmore. They held them up as Celeste turned to Alexis. “Two to two. It’s up to you, Captain.”

  Alexis frowned. The dawn outside the window was beginning to turn the sky light blue. She could see the silhouettes of the towers of Manhattan in the distance, tiny against the immense sky overhead.

  “The decision is yours,” Mitty said.

  Alexis let out a long breath, as if she had truly not made up her mind until this point. The sun shone a sliver of yellow over New York City. She nodded briefly to Mitty, raising her hand. “One more chance. He gets one more chance.” Then Alexis stood up and walked out of the conference room.

  CHARLOTTE, NORTH CAROLINA, JUNE 19, 9:42 A.M.

  Ilya Markov read his latest text message, then deleted it, pleased, as he ducked into a liquor mart on Wilkinson Boulevard, west of downtown Charlotte. The text had been from Rachel Brown, an update on her encounter in Atlanta, and so far, so good, at least as far as Ilya could tell. Rachel was enigmatic, saying she and Harris had made contact, and that the congressman had seemed intrigued, but she didn’t elaborate.

  Ilya was okay with that. He trusted Rachel, even if he couldn’t say why, exactly—something to do with the flat, almost detached quality of her personality. When you gave people like that a task, they just did it and didn’t ask too many questions. She was a bit of a sociopath, and that was fine with him. In his line of work, sociopaths made excellent coworkers.

  Inside the decrepit liquor mart—EDDIE’S JUNIOR MARKET, the broken plastic sign read—Ilya pulled an iced tea from the cooler and lingered over the newspaper rack, perusing the headlines of the Charlotte Observer and USA Today. The Steinkamp murder was all over the front page, but so were smaller articles on the state of the economy. The Dow had lost another three hundred points yesterday, making it a thousand for the week, and rumors were flying about phantom bank runs and looming credit shocks. Ilya took a moment to relish the news; he’d set a rock in motion down the side of a mountain, and that rock would soon gather company—and become an avalanche.

  Ilya passed on the papers—he got all his news online—and approached the register. He had the iced tea in one hand, and with the other he held a blue work shirt and a pair of blue work pants, both hung on metal coat hangers and slung over his shoulder. He’d bought them twenty minutes ago from a Goodwill down the block, and together they made a spot-on service uniform, which was exactly what Ilya needed. With a needle and thread, and an hour to do the work, he would have a new persona ready for tomorrow morning.

  He laid the iced tea on the counter and looked up at the large, unshaven clerk behind the register. He had muttonchop sideburns, his long hair pulled back in a ponytail, and he smelled of coffee and cigarettes. A small television played at his elbow, a morning news-talk show, and Ilya could hear the male and female hosts chatting in solemn voices about something heinous, or what they wanted their audience to believe was heinous, although he couldn’t see the picture on the screen, as it was turned away from the counter.

  “And a pack of Camel unfiltered,” Ilya said, pulling out his wallet. He laid a $20 bill on the counter.

  The clerk grabbed a pack of cigarettes from the rack, dropped them on the counter, looked up into Ilya’s face, and stared. And kept staring.

  His eyes shot back to the TV, and then to Ilya again.

  Ilya smiled, surprised at the intensity of the man’s gaze, then tapped the counter. “What do I owe you?”

  The clerk rang up the sale, slowly, methodically, then said, “Eight fifty.”

  Ilya nodded to the twenty on the counter, and as the man took the money, Ilya felt a hollowness in his stomach, an instinctive dropping-out in his gut that was telling him something was very wrong here. Ilya relied on his instincts to steer him clear of danger; they had saved his life—or at least kept him out of jail—on any number of occasions, and they were howling at him at the moment.

  “Passing through?” the man behind the counter said.

  Ilya shook his head. “No. I live down the block. Just moved in.” He smiled as he said the lie, trying to keep his voice affable. Friendliness got you what you wanted a lot faster than confrontation, Ilya had learned in his years in the game, and now he just wanted his change and to get the hell out of the store.

  “Really? Down the block? Not a lot of people live around here. Like, maybe no one.” The clerk shot a curious glance at Ilya, then pulled cash from the register and laid it on the counter. As Ilya reached for his money, the man slapped a beefy hand on top of Ilya’s, fingers wrapping around Ilya’s wrist, pinning his hand to the Formica.

  “AMBER Alert, asshole,” the clerk barked, all friendliness gone from his voice.

  Ilya tried to pull back his hand, but the man was remarkably strong. Ilya racked his brain, panic growing, trying to remember where he’d heard the term AMBER Alert before. Was that some sort of police warning? Ilya was not particularly powerful, and when brute force needed to be applied to a situation, he always found himself at a disadvantage. His left hand still held the uniform draped over his shoulder.

  “Where’s the kid?” the clerk growled.

  “What kid? What are you talking about?”

  “You know what the fuck I’m talking about. The boy you snatched. You’re not moving from this store until the police get here. Fucking child molester.”

  Ilya grimaced. He dropped the hangers with the pants and shirt and tried with his free hand to pry the clerk’s meaty paw off his wrist. But the clerk’s grip was like a vise. The clerk grabbed a phone and was about to dial with his left hand when Ilya decided: he had only seconds to fix the situation.

  He grunted hard and held his breath, forcing the blood to his head, then began to shake—all over his body. He went into spasms. Spit sprayed from his lips. He knew, from practice, that he looked terrifying, like a man having an epileptic seizure, face dark red, head bobbing back and forth. Sure enough, the clerk stared at Ilya, mouth sagging open. He released the pressure on Ilya’s hand for just a moment, gasping, “What the fuck”—and that was his last mistake. Ilya wasn’t about to give him another chance.

  With one fluid motion Ilya yanked his hand back from the clerk’s grip, grabbed the bottle of iced tea from the counter, and smashed it into the clerk’s temple, just above his eyes. The bottle shattered, sending glass and iced tea raining to the ground, and the jagged, broken end of the bottle that remained in Ilya’s hand raked across the clerk’s eyes and forehead. The clerk screamed, dropping the phone and bringing his hand to his bloodied face. Ilya reared back with that same jagged bottle end and rammed it into the clerk’s throat, twisting once, and slicing into his Adam’s apple and windpipe.

  The sound was gruesome, the snap of tearing flesh, and the clerk gurgled another cry of pain and terror, then fell back onto the floor behind the register, gasping for breath and trying to keep the blood from spouting from his neck. Ilya watched him, trying to determine if the man would die, and decided, without much data, that he would not. Not yet, at least.

  Ilya reached over the counter and hung up the phone, then grabbed the small TV and turned it toward him. On-screen, two anchors, a young woman and an older man, were sitting on stools and chatting in a carefully manicured broadcast studio, with the name Charlotte Today projected onto the lower third of the screen. Ilya didn’t pay attention to what they were talking about because behind them, on a screen in the back of the studio, was his own passport photo, enlarged halfway from the floor to the ceiling, his eyes staring into the camera. The name Ilya Markov was written below the photo in a faux Most Wanted typeface. The words AMBER Alert accompanied his name.

  “Sukin syn.” Ilya pressed his lips together and quickly wiped his fingerprints from the plastic of
the television and the phone. Son of a bitch. Rage shot through his body, a blinding-hot fury. He knew immediately who had done this, and he could even guess how it had been pulled off, and his first thought was of bloody retribution. But now was not the time to contemplate revenge. His situation was too perilous. Everything needed to be put right, and quickly, before payback could be planned.

  He looked back down at the clerk—rolling on the floor and struggling to get air into his lungs—and made a snap decision. He vaulted over the countertop, found a large, jagged piece of glass from the iced-tea bottle, and sawed powerfully at the clerk’s throat, finishing the job he had started a minute earlier.

  The clerk tried to howl, but the noise wouldn’t come, drowned out by the blood and the air rushing from his cut throat. Ilya watched him die, eyes glancing back at the liquor mart’s front door every few seconds. He remembered the first time he had watched someone die, as a child during the Chechen war. He and a band of friends had found a wounded Russian soldier hiding in a bombed-out basement, unarmed and begging for help. Instead of aiding him, Ilya had convinced his friends to cover the soldier in chunks of broken cement, piece by piece, the soldier pleading for his life, until the weight of it forced the air from his lungs. The Russian soldier had invaded Ilya’s homeland, killed innocent people, and so Ilya had in turn killed him for his crimes.

  He hadn’t enjoyed it, just as he wasn’t enjoying killing the clerk, but he found that he could turn off a part of his brain when he did horrible things, so that the nature of what he had done didn’t cause him consternation—or slow him down. That on/off switch in his thinking was a useful tool, and the switch was currently in the off position. He suspected it might have to stay that way for a while.

  When the clerk stopped breathing, Ilya leapt the counter again, locked the front door, and wiped any surfaces he thought he might have touched. That done, he spotted a closed-circuit video camera in a ceiling corner, found the camera’s DVR in the back room, and erased every image on it from the last hour. When he discovered that the machine wasn’t Net connected—and that no other images were stored anywhere in the liquor mart—he went a step further and opened the machine with a screwdriver he’d found beneath the cash register, removed the hard drive, and slipped it into his pocket for later destruction.