The King of Fear: A Garrett Reilly Thriller

by Drew Chapman

  However, there were no references, anywhere in Reilly’s apartment, to Steinkamp or Anna Bachev or the New York Fed. Not a link, not a newspaper clipping, not a Web-browser history reference. Nothing. The FBI tech said Reilly might have erased them all, but Chaudry somehow doubted it. You could scrub your life of most evidence of your crime, but eventually, somewhere, somehow, the FBI would find a trace of it: a fingerprint, an e-mail, a thrice-removed connection to a handgun, a killer, or a payment to that killer.

  Chaudry walked into the kitchen and tapped her fingernails on the cheap, faux-Formica counter. She poured herself a glass of water from the kitchen faucet and surveyed the living space. It was like any other New York living room, and yet—what was it? It was different. Reilly was different. She still believed that he wanted to reach out to her and would continue to want to, but maybe she had missed his overtures. They could be right in front of her face, and she was simply blind to them. She moved to the window and admired the gradations in the colors of the sign of the nail salon—Pinkie’s—across the street: glowing red melted into a deep orange, which tapered into the softest pink.

  Then it hit her. Patterns.

  The nail-salon sign was patterned. Reilly’s apartment was a series of patterns. Why hadn’t she seen it before? She snapped away from the window and reexamined the room. Nothing was haphazard. The furniture, beat-up as it was, started black in one corner, and tall, and then the pieces got lighter in color and shorter as you crossed the room. The books that looked scattered along the wall were actually perfectly alphabetized by author, A to Z. She rushed into the kitchen to inspect the glasses: they were each stacked according to height and width, high and skinny to low and fat. She jumped back to the living room: the brokerage accounts were arranged according to the amount of money they contained, lowest to highest. The closer she looked, the more the patterns jumped out at her. The locks on the front door: one bolt to five, top to bottom; the suits: by country of origin, US to Europe to Asia; the drugs: strongest dosage by his bed, midlevel in the kitchen, weakest by the door.

  The apartment wasn’t orderly—it was a mess—but everywhere you looked, if you tried, you could discern a pattern. Reilly was compelled to arrange his life so that it made sense, but the only thing that made sense to him were patterns. They were how he saw absolutely everything.

  Chaudry dropped back onto the couch, bathed in waves of satisfaction. She’d cracked him, not completely, but some, and every piece helped. But now, how to apply that knowledge? She was about to start in on that task when her phone rang. It was the Manhattan field office.

  “Agent Chaudry here.”

  “We got a hit on the Rodriguez woman.” Agent Murray’s gruff voice crackled on the line. “PATH cameras got her entering the train at World Trade Center. Film is from two days ago.”

  “Any exit video?”

  “Not yet. Still checking.”

  “Send someone to check all the exit stations.”

  “On it.” Murray hung up.

  So Mitty Rodriguez took the PATH train? Chaudry knew the train well—she’d grown up south of Newark—and there weren’t a lot of stops, just a handful in Hoboken, Jersey City, and Newark. Was Garrett Reilly near one of them, somewhere in New Jersey? And if so, why there? Her eyes tracked across the mostly empty room, and she smiled because she already knew the answer.

  Wherever he was, however he reached out to her, she would use the patterns that he created to find him. Because Reilly seemed incapable of leading his life in any other way.

  NEWARK, NEW JERSEY, JUNE 19, 4:42 P.M.

  His burner cell phone rang, and Garrett checked the caller ID. It was a pay phone, 202 area code, Washington, DC.

  He answered immediately. “Tell me.”

  “We’re in,” Alexis said quickly, and hung up.

  • • •

  Garrett gathered the team—three of them, at least; Celeste hadn’t returned from the Bronx yet—and told them the plan. They would be pulling the passenger manifest for Lufthansa flight number 462 on June 15. They were to pose as airline-employed telemarketers, phoning to ask recent passengers about their experience on Lufthansa’s transatlantic coach service.

  “It’s a customer-satisfaction survey,” Garrett said. “If they don’t want to talk to you, tell them we’re offering flight vouchers for their time.”

  Patmore looked up warily. “We have flight vouchers to give them?”

  “We’re lying, Patmore,” Garrett said. “We’re not telemarketers either.”

  Patmore nodded, as if that thought hadn’t yet occurred to him.

  “Ask about the flight, the service, then ask about their seating companions. Did they like them? Talk to them? Explain that we’re thinking of instituting a new protocol—you can choose your seatmate from a master list. Would you chose that person again? Get them to open up, describe their seatmate—what was he or she like?”

  The manifest came in ten minutes later, and Garrett broke the passenger list into sections, with each Ascendant team member getting a handful of names. No one had any luck. None of the passengers who’d been seated around Ilya Markov’s seat—27H in coach—had any recollection of a young man seated near them, Russian or otherwise. Patmore and Bingo carefully modulated their voices to sound like poorly paid call-center employees, and people were cooperative, for the most part—one man cursed them and hung up, but he was the exception. Garrett felt a twinge of guilt promising them flight vouchers that would never materialize, but he wasn’t robbing them of anything more than a few minutes. Anyway, it was for a good cause. That’s what he kept telling himself: everything in his life was for a good cause now. That was a load of shit, but it kept him going.

  Celeste showed up a few minutes later, looking hot and tired; she gave him the rundown on the old woman at the Chinese restaurant and the clinic in Hunts Point. She had asked the nurse behind the desk about Anna Bachev, but the nurse said she’d never heard the name before. From the look of surprise on her face and the way she fled to the back of the offices, Celeste didn’t believe her, but Celeste didn’t have any way of forcing the truth out of her either.

  “We’ll probe their computer systems later,” Garrett said. “At the very least, this is another link between Steinkamp, Markov, and Russia. Good work and thanks.”

  Celeste stared at him blankly, but she didn’t swear or take a swing at his jaw, and Garrett decided that this was progress in their relationship. Quite a bit of progress, actually.

  At nine that night, Garrett shut down the effort; he figured no customer-satisfaction survey would call people past then, and the team seemed beat. Patmore brought in take-out Mexican food and beer, and Garrett got the distinct sense that Mitty was counting how many he drank. He tried to break into the servers of the Hunts Point Medicaid clinic, but he couldn’t find any worth hacking. He suspected they were mostly a pen-and-paper business—easier to defraud people that way. He checked trades in the black pool that he had noticed a week ago and thought he saw another ripple of buying movement around Crowd Analytics. The name had come up twice now—that was a foundation for a pattern, and he knew it.

  At midnight he slipped into the bathroom and took a few more Percodans, then staggered into a corner and fell asleep on a pile of old towels. He tossed and turned all night.

  At six the next morning, Mitty woke him by kicking him in the ankle. The sun was streaming in the window, and it took Garrett fifteen minutes just to get his eyes accustomed to the light. They ate a breakfast of stale bagels and got back to work. After about a dozen calls, Celeste got a hit: a woman from Fort Lauderdale remembered seeing a young man start to set his backpack down on seat 27H, but then he changed his mind and kept walking. As if he’d read his boarding pass wrong.

  “He switched seats,” Garrett said when Celeste told him the news. “He knew the manifest would tell us who he sat next to but that if he switched seats, it would be h
arder to figure out who he scammed. And he must have scammed someone.”

  “He could have gone anywhere. It would take days to contact everyone on the entire flight,” Celeste said.

  “No. We don’t have to.” Garrett closed his eyes to imagine the inside of the plane five days ago: crowded, grumpy passengers, patient flight attendants. Noise, crying children, people trying to jam roll-on bags into the overhead bins. He searched his imagination for some hint of a trail that Markov might have left.

  “He went to his assigned seat. There were women on both sides of him. That doesn’t help him with identity theft,” Garrett said, eyes still closed. “He can’t use a woman’s name. So he moved. But it was boarding time. Chaos. People shoving bags in the overhead compartments. He wouldn’t have fought traffic to go toward the front of the plane—too hard. And he probably wouldn’t have switched aisles. It was an Airbus A340.”

  Bingo pulled up seatguru.com, a plane-seating website, for the layout of the Lufthansa flights to Florida. Bingo ran his fingers in a line down the map of the plane. “We could call people in rows twenty-eight through forty-five, seats D, E, H, and F. That’s a lot of people, but not impossible.”

  “No, not necessary,” Garrett said. “Just the passengers with empty seats next to them.”

  Ten minutes later, Bingo called out from a corner of the office, “Got him!”

  The team gathered around Bingo’s desk.

  “Thirty-four H and J,” Bingo said. “James Delacourt, from Bethesda, Maryland, was in H, and he sat next to a young guy named Ilya.”

  Garrett broke into a wide grin.

  “Delacourt didn’t come right out and admit it, but I think they got drunk together. They talked for a long time, and then he fell asleep. He said he ‘passed out.’ He woke up just before they landed. He said he thought Ilya had mentioned that he was from Russia.”

  “Markov liquored him up,” Celeste said, “and then took advantage of him. Identity date rape.”

  “Ten to one Delacourt has a drinking problem. Markov found the weakness and targeted it.” Garrett turned to Bingo. “Anything else?”

  “Yeah, his cell phone wouldn’t work once he left the plane. He took it to the Verizon store a few days later and they said his SIM card was missing. They gave him a new one, but charged him, and he was pissed.”

  “Good,” Garrett said. “We can track that number.”

  “There’s more,” Bingo said. “Delacourt said he’s been having a weird time with his credit card. That’s what he thought I was calling about. There were a few minor charges—to political campaigns—that he didn’t make. He couldn’t figure out how they got there.”

  “What’s that about?” Patmore asked. “Why political campaigns?”

  “It’s a credit-card-fraud trick,” Garrett said. “You test the waters. Markov’s seeing if Delacourt is paying attention. Make a small purchase, see if the card gets canceled. Then make a bigger one. If the card stays clean, then you buy the thing you’re really interested in.”

  “So we should call Delacourt, tell him to cancel the card,” Celeste said.

  “No. We do the opposite. We encourage him to keep the card active, and we track where Markov uses it,” Garrett said. “We want to see what he’s up to.”

  Celeste shook her head vigorously. “Delacourt’s just some schlep on a business trip. We’re hanging him out to dry. All he could afford was coach, and he sat next to the wrong guy. Markov is going to screw him. We can stop that.”

  Garrett shrugged. “He’s doing it for the good of the country.”

  “That’s a rationalization,” Celeste said.

  “So what?”

  “I had almost forgotten your true nature.”

  Garrett smiled. He told Mitty to run a credit-card watch under DIA auspices. Half an hour later they got a forwarded e-mail alert from the government’s HotWatch program: James Delacourt had bought $10,000 worth of computer equipment at a Best Buy in Arlington, Virginia.

  The purchase had occurred seventeen minutes ago.

  • • •

  Alexis arrived at the Best Buy at 11:10 a.m., twenty-seven minutes after Markov’s purchase. The sprint from her office to her car had taken two minutes, and the drive from DIA headquarters, across the river, to Pentagon City had taken another eight. She slid her Honda into a parking spot in the mall lot and scanned the cars and shoppers. A mother and her three kids squabbled outside a parked Volvo. A middle-aged man tossed a plastic bag into the trunk of his Hyundai and drove off. A pair of women in fatigues strolled across the street to the mall. There was no sign of Markov.

  Alexis found it hard to believe Markov would buy his computer equipment so close to the home of the US military—the Pentagon was a ten-minute walk away, five if you hurried—but then she wasn’t entirely sure the Delacourt credit-card hit was actually Markov’s. Maybe Delacourt himself had gone into the store. Perhaps he had been the middle-aged man with the Hyundai. Something was wrong with the whole setup. A faint alarm bell began to sound in her head.

  The two salesmen in the computer department told her the only people buying laptops in the last hour had been a young couple, a man and a woman—clearly an attractive young woman, from the sly smiles on both the salesmen’s faces—and they had bought a cartload of stuff: four laptops, two printers, a dozen memory cards, ten cell phones, extra cable, Wi-Fi routers, and a host of smaller items that they couldn’t remember. Chris, the older of the salesmen, seemed to have focused most of his attention on the woman, because when Alexis showed him a printout of Markov’s passport photo, he admitted that he hadn’t looked too closely at the man.

  Alexis sighed silently. Men were such idiots when it came to members of the opposite sex, and so easily distracted. The pretty-girl ruse seemed to be standard in Markov’s arsenal of scams, and Alexis could understand why: it worked.

  “Anything else you can remember about him? Or her?”

  Chris nodded quickly, as if eager to make up for the blank he’d drawn on the man’s face. “He was carrying a metal lunch box. Like, you know, the kind that construction guys use. Red, about that big.”

  The blood drained from Alexis’s face. She pointed. “Like that one?” The alarm bell in her head was now shrieking.

  Chris glanced over his shoulder. Sitting on the floor, tucked under the laptop display rack, was a red metal lunch box. Chris nodded and started for it. “Yeah. He must have forgotten it—”

  Alexis grabbed the salesman by the arm and yanked him backward. “Leave it.”

  “It’s a lunch box.”

  “You have no idea what it is.” Just as Alexis said it, one of the display computers began to beep at her side. An incoming Skype call on the screen was asking to be answered. Alexis stared at it. Everything was happening at once. “Do you install Skype on your display models?”

  “Not really.” Chris looked confused. “Never.”

  The Skype call was from HappyToSeeYou. “The man who bought the computers—did he touch this machine?”

  “Now that you mention it, yeah, he did. He played with it for a few minutes.” Chris stared warily at the beeping machine. “But that’s kinda weird. I’m not even sure how that’s actually happening.”

  Alexis clicked the connect button on the Skype app. The image was grainy for a moment; then a face appeared on-screen.

  Ilya Markov’s face.

  Alexis didn’t hesitate. Three years in Iraq, surrounded by IEDs and hounded by sniper fire, had conditioned her: when there was a threat, you protected yourself and those around you, and you did it without thinking. Every millisecond of reaction time mattered. Those who hesitated, died.

  She raced at Chris, the salesman, lowering her shoulder into his chest, and driving him ten yards backward, away from the red metal lunch box. He stumbled, trying to keep his balance, grunting in surprise as he did, and Alexis kept her fe
et churning, left, right, left, right, pushing him as far from the lunch box as possible.

  “What the fu—” he yelled.

  She gave him a last shove, throwing her full weight into him, and she could feel his legs go out from under him. Together, they hit the floor with a thud, and just before they did, white light filled her field of vision, and she felt herself carried away by a wall of pure explosive force.

  SOUTHEAST, WASHINGTON, DC, JUNE 20, 12:42 P.M.

  Ilya sat quietly in the corner of the motel room while Thad had sex with the young woman Ilya had procured for him. Ilya guessed, from Thad’s energy and enthusiasm, that he hadn’t slept with a woman in quite a while. Ilya also guessed this because Thad was pale, with long, stringy, unwashed hair, bad skin, and a nasty case of body odor. But Thad, while unattractive, had three qualities that Ilya found useful.

  First, he was readily available; Ilya had contacted him only last night, and Thad had agreed to help right away. Ilya had met Thad on a previous trip to the States, at a gaming convention, and had kept his name and number on file as a person to call in a pinch. Yesterday had been that pinch.

  Second, he was easily manipulated. Thad wanted desperately to be part of a group, what he considered the in-crowd, and was willing to do almost anything to get there. Alienated people who were anxious to be socially accepted were perfect targets for Ilya, and he had long ago learned to read that part of their characters at a glance: the too-eager response, the submissive posture, the obsession with other people’s opinions. In Thad’s case, Ilya had dangled participation in a circle of underground hackers—a coterie of hip, anarchic troublemakers, whose Internet mischief was a form of performance art. Thad considered himself a budding revolutionary, but a lonely one, and the romance of marching arm in arm with comrades seemed to loom large in his fantasies.