The King of Fear: A Garrett Reilly Thriller

by Drew Chapman

  At two minutes before six, Uni appeared on the porch with her laptop under her arm. “Done,” she said.

  Ilya was surprised: that had been accomplished faster than he would have thought possible. She sat next to him on a deck chair, opened her laptop, and showed him her work. They scrolled through hacked databases, emptied bank accounts, altered tax returns, a series of forged letters—including half a dozen demanding immediate repayment of outstanding loans—and a press release stating that the company was filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

  “And the result?”

  She showed Ilya a memo released by a corporate-credit-rating agency. The time stamp on the memo was 5:52 p.m. CR Logistics had been downgraded to an extreme credit risk.

  Ilya smiled. He looked at the girl who called herself Uni. She was prettier than he originally thought—or perhaps that was just her competency.

  “Wait here.” He went back down to the billiards room, scooped all the money back into the suitcase, and pulled it off the billiards table. “You all lose,” he said to the remaining hackers. They spit out curses and grunts of disappointment. Ilya wrote the name of another company on the wall, and underneath it a series of usernames and passwords.

  “Here is the next target. A credit-card-processing company. Here are usernames and passwords to their servers. A backdoor portal. Attack the company. Disable all its servers. That is your next chance to win. I will be back with more money in a few hours. Again, winner takes all.”

  With that, he hauled the suitcase back upstairs and gave it to Uni. She beamed with pleasure.

  “Do you have a car?” he asked.

  She nodded yes.

  “I want you to drive me someplace.”

  She agreed, and they went out to her beat-up green Hyundai, which sat parked by a cyclone fence. She put the suitcase in the trunk, then drove him north on the Garden State Parkway. They said little as they drove, and they made good time, as traffic was light. Ilya watched the scenery and wondered briefly where Garrett Reilly was; he could have been in any of the towns they passed, in any number of buildings or houses. It didn’t really matter; wherever he had run since Ilya had unleashed Newark’s finest on him, Ilya would find him.

  He had Uni drive away from the Jersey Shore and onto the Jersey Turnpike. When they got close to New York City and the sun had set, he had her take surface streets into Hoboken. She parked near the water, on Frank Sinatra Drive, and they got out to look at the Manhattan skyline across the river. The Battery, to the south, gleamed with enormous towers, as did midtown to the north. The Hudson River was slow moving, and black, as tugs and Circle Line ferries fought against its endless current.

  “Can it be done?” Ilya asked, gesturing to the city across the water.

  “The entire city?” Uni asked.

  He nodded yes.

  “Why all of it?”

  “Why not?”

  “There are innocent people.”

  He let out a short hiss of disgust. “Doesn’t it bother you?”

  “What?”

  “The money, the power, the waste. All those people protecting their own interests. Hoarding and then forcing the rest of us to beg for scraps. To serve them. And you and me, we are on the outside looking in. Always on the outside.”

  “I suppose it bothers me.”

  “So we send a message. I exist. Outside of your kingdom. I am important. Outside of your view. And I do not consent to your rules. I do not consent to being fingerprinted, photographed, tracked, my conversations monitored. I won’t support a system that feeds the wealthy, not the poor. That only looks after its own. Where most people on the planet live in shacks, on pennies, and a few live in penthouses with maids and butlers and views of the ocean. We send a message: We can bring it down. See how easily we can bring it down.”

  She looked at him. “Is that what we’re saying?”

  “Yes. That is what we are saying.”

  Uni seemed to think about this. “I thought you were from Russia.”

  “In Russia it is even worse. There are people with power, and then there is everybody else. The problem is across the planet. But it starts right here. In this city. In this country.” Ilya looked at her. “So, again—can it be done?”

  “Maybe. With help.”

  “The help is all around you. I’ve made sure of that.”

  She smiled. “Then, yeah, why not? It can be done.”

  He looked over at her and reached out and stroked her face with his hand. He could see, in the soft dusk, that the makeup she was wearing hid pockmarks and acne scars as well as exhaustion. He didn’t mind; it made her even more attractive. To Ilya, the ruin of her face was alluring and hinted at a life of struggle and isolation. Struggle gave life meaning.

  He kissed her, and she kissed him back. Then they climbed into the backseat of her Hyundai and had sex under an old blanket, with the lights of Manhattan shimmering in the background, and Ilya felt, as his body was intertwined with hers, that he was a medieval crusader having a last night of pleasure just outside the gates of the castle that he would storm in the morning.

  IRVINGTON, NEW JERSEY, JUNE 23, 7:01 P.M.

  Sobriety did not feel good. Not to Garrett, at least. Sobriety felt hot and constricting; it felt like a thin layer of normalcy encasing his body, but underneath that normalcy was a jittery, crackling pulse of need. Desire threatened to break through the skin of normal, to smash everything, to go wild. He tried to shake it off and focus on the task at hand.

  “If he knew where we were,” Garrett said, wiping the sweat from his face with the bottom of his T-shirt, “why did he send the Newark PD to raid our offices instead of the FBI?”

  They sat on the front porch of the abandoned house, as rays of sunlight streaked across the grass and onto the oil depot in the distance. The day had been hot, and the evening wasn’t any cooler. Thick, humid air had settled over the East Coast, blanketing it in a layer of summer misery. “The FBI would have arrested all of you. They would have found me. But he spoofed us instead.”

  Garrett looked at the team, sitting on the porch with him, Patmore standing in the grass a few feet away. None of them seemed to be fully back on board yet; none of them seemed to trust Garrett. But he couldn’t do much about that. He simply had to keep trying.

  “Why?” he asked the team. “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “He was fucking with us,” Mitty said. “Yanking our chain.”

  “But he doesn’t do that,” Garrett said. “He doesn’t joke around.”

  “How do you know he doesn’t joke around? You know him so well now?” Mitty asked.

  “He tried to kill Alexis. That’s not yanking anybody’s chain,” Garrett said. “And, yes, I do know him so well.”

  “You wanna explain how?” Mitty said.

  “I know him because we’re alike.”

  They stared at him, surprise in their eyes. Garrett shrugged. While he would be the first to admit that he wasn’t particularly self-aware—that much had been proven over the last twenty-four hours while he was tied to a fucking radiator—he still thought that he and Markov were remarkably similar. Similar life stories, similar talents, maybe even similar goals. That was the beginning of a worrisome pattern, and Garrett was reluctant to follow that pattern to its logical conclusion. But at some point he knew he would have to do exactly that: he would have to explore their likenesses and explain it to himself.

  Patmore turned away from the lowering sun. “He wasn’t sure it was you in the offices. He had some information, but not all the information, so he hedged his bets. A shot in the dark.”

  Garrett swigged a mouthful of water from a plastic bottle. His head was alive with pain, but he wasn’t going to tell anybody, and he wasn’t going to let anybody know how he felt, either. He’d made up his mind to bear his burden without complaint. He would sacrifice everything to keep A
scendant together and at his side. He was ashamed of that need—of that vulnerability—but his need outweighed his shame, and he had made peace with that.

  “How did he know where we were?” Garrett said out loud. “How could he have possibly known?”

  “Maybe one of us told him.” Celeste scanned the faces of the team. “Maybe one of us is a traitor.”

  Mitty let out a laugh, but no one else did. “A double agent? Cool.”

  “Does that pass the plausibility test?” Garrett asked. “Why wait until that moment to turn us in? And anyway, how would he have gotten to any of us to make us traitors? When would he have done that?”

  “Maybe one of us contacted him instead,” Celeste said. “That’s plausible.”

  Garrett paced. The floorboards of the abandoned house were rotted and streaked with black. They groaned under his weight. “Which of us would do that, and why?”

  “Money,” Bingo said. “He offered money. You said he had a lot. Maybe one of us wanted in on it.”

  Garrett looked from face to face—Mitty, Bingo, Patmore, Celeste—and considered the possibility. Mitty was out; she wouldn’t betray Garrett, no matter how much money was involved. Anyway, she didn’t give a shit about money and never had.

  Bingo was a possibility, but a remote one. Betraying people took a level of willpower and courage that Bingo just didn’t possess.

  Patmore was inscrutable, but he’d also had any number of chances to walk out of the offices, hail a cop car, and turn them all in. And if he were caught, he’d be court-martialed, and he knew it. Which left . . .

  Garrett studied Celeste’s face. She wasn’t crazy about Garrett—he knew that. She blamed him for her time in China. She had nothing particularly to lose by being arrested, and Bingo had told Garrett that he’d seen overdue notices littering her Palo Alto apartment, so she conceivably needed the money.

  “Don’t go there,” Celeste said dismissively. “If I’d wanted to screw you over, Garrett, I would have done it a long time ago. And the truth is, I don’t want to screw you over anymore. I don’t hold grudges—I just sink into despair.”

  Garrett smiled at the self-deprecating joke. He felt, instinctively, that she was telling the truth.

  “I know it was me who brought up the possibility, but I don’t think one of us contacted him,” Celeste said. “I think he found out some other way.”

  It gave Garrett no small amount of relief to know that the family he had chosen had not betrayed him. “Probably right. But we’ll need to know what that other way is, or he’ll keep finding us, and keep coming after us. And eventually, he’ll get us.”

  Bingo raised his hand, as he always did when asking a question. “But that brings us back to—why didn’t he tell the FBI where we were? If the FBI arrests us, then we’re out of the way, and Markov doesn’t have to bother with us anymore.”

  A silence settled on the team. The sun had slipped into a pink haze in the west, and the darkness began to grow behind the house, east over New York City and the Atlantic.

  “There’s a reason,” Garrett said. “We’re just not seeing it. But it’s right there. In front of our faces.”

  “We’re missing it because it’s not about him,” Celeste said, walking down the steps and kicking at the brown weeds in front of the house. “It’s about us.”

  “How so?” Garrett asked.

  “You called him a social engineer.”

  “Yeah?”

  “A con man. And what do con men do?”

  “Trick people,” Bingo said.

  “And how do they do it?” Celeste asked.

  “Sleight of hand, misdirection,” Garrett said.

  “Right, but to misdirect you, they have to get your attention in the first place. They have to talk to you. Engage you in a relationship.”

  Garrett blinked in the gathering gloom. Celeste was driving at a point, and it was becoming clearer. “You’re saying he’s talking to us.”

  “No. I’m saying he’s talking to you,” Celeste said. “He’s engaging you in a relationship. Because he’s a con man—and you’re part of the con.”

  • • •

  Garrett retreated into the house after that revelation. The truth of it startled him so badly that he needed time to process the idea. He was part of the con. Seen through the lens of that idea, what had happened over the last few days began to make sense. He flicked on a light—a bare bulb on the living-room ceiling—and padded back and forth on the dirty floor. The rest of the team loitered on the porch and the grass. The sun had gone down. Night was thickening all around them.

  Garrett went back to his first principles. A to B to C. Logic was his friend. What did he know?

  Markov was highly intelligent.

  Markov had a plan, but it was unknown to Garrett.

  Markov had stayed a step ahead of Garrett this entire time.

  Markov was establishing a relationship with Garrett, long distance, through proxies. It was a dangerous, scary relationship, but it was one nonetheless.

  Ilya Markov did not want him arrested. A jailed Garrett Reilly was somehow at odds with his plan.

  Garrett paused in the middle of the room and closed his eyes, trying to find the pattern in all of this. He waited, hoping he had not killed so many brain cells that his one true talent—his ability to cut through the white noise of everyday life—had deserted him. He tried to still the incessant buzz in his mind, the rattle of thoughts and opinions, banging this way and that, from neuron to sparking neuron.

  Markov was playing with Garrett. That’s what Markov did. He thought one step ahead of his opponent. If Alexis and the DIA could track Garrett’s prescriptions online, then why couldn’t a talented hacker such as Markov do the same? He had found Garrett’s vulnerability—addiction—and used it to make Garrett run. Which meant that . . .

  Garrett knew in a flash what to do. He walked from the living room to the porch. The team, in the middle of conversation, fell silent.

  “He’s playing a game. He’s guessing our next move by forcing our hand. He expects us to do one thing”—Garrett shook his head, amazed that he hadn’t come to this conclusion sooner—“so we have to do the opposite.”

  MIDTOWN MANHATTAN, JUNE 23, 7:41 P.M.

  Hans Metternich considered himself a war theorist. Admittedly, he was an amateur theorist, certainly no PhD on the subject, but most of his adult life had been spent in the trenches of modern warfare, so he felt this gave him insight that most academics did not have. And while Metternich had never been in a firefight, parachuted behind enemy lines, or seen a laser-guided missile explode, he did not believe that the future of warfare depended on any of those things.

  The future of modern warfare, Metternich mused as he picked his way through the crowd of tourists walking Fifth Avenue, would hinge on information: who had it, who lacked it, how you acquired it, and what you did with it once you possessed it. Information was not just power; it was a weapon—a razor-sharp weapon that could be used to disarm, confuse, and terrorize your enemies. Information, or the lack thereof, could bring down an army. It could, he thought—maybe a bit melodramatically, he had to admit—even bring down a country.

  All of which was why Garrett Reilly and his ongoing combat with Ilya Markov were so fascinating to Metternich. Both men were information soldiers. They were the warriors of the future, fighting invisible battles while the rest of the world watched sports on television or drank itself to death. Metternich wasn’t particularly rooting for either man, Reilly or Markov—although he felt more emotional connection to Reilly—but he understood that their battle was a harbinger of things to come. Also, it was a good way to make money.

  Metternich was not an information soldier—he was more of an information merchant. He bought data cheap and sold it dear, which was why he stopped on the corner of Thirty-Sixth Street and Fifth Avenue and stared in the
window of NYC Gifts, a small trinket shop squeezed between a lingerie store and a Burger King. Brightly colored luggage was stacked in one window, and T-shirts, baseball caps, and disposable cell phones were scattered across the other.

  He stepped inside and felt the blast of air-conditioning cool the sweat on his neck and forehead. An Italian family crowded around a counter, pointing at digital cameras and jabbering in broken English. A middle-aged couple browsed T-shirts toward the back. Separate clerks were helping them, while a third clerk—a woman, young, with short, platinum-blond hair and a skull earring—smiled at Metternich. “Welcome to New York City Gifts. Would you like to see some of our watches? They’re all authentic, straight from the factory. Starting at twenty-five dollars.”

  Metternich glanced at the watches in the counter and tapped his finger over one. “Yes. That one perhaps. The gold. It’s a Rolex?”

  The young woman opened the counter and pulled out the gold watch, speaking quickly the whole time. “Absolutely, a Rolex, straight from Switzerland, fifty dollars. We have the box as well, waterproof, with a lifetime guarantee . . .”

  As she spoke, Metternich scanned the store. His eyes landed on the young clerk helping the Italian family. She was also a platinum blonde, also with her hair cut short and a skull earring in her left ear. She was, as far as Metternich could tell, the first clerk’s identical twin.

  The first clerk handed him the watch, and he put it carefully around his wrist. He noted that she had a long, thin tattoo running along her forearm, a string of 1s and 0s. Binary code. Now he was certain: this was the person for whom he was looking. “Twins?”

  The first clerk nodded cheerfully. “I’m Jan. She’s Jen.”

  Metternich nodded. The names were another hit. “Actually, I was hoping you could help me. I’m looking for someone. Maybe you know him.”

  Jan stared at Metternich, the wide smile disappearing from her face. “This is a gift store. Maybe you need to go someplace else.”