The King of Fear: A Garrett Reilly Thriller

by Drew Chapman

  He kept buying and selling bonds, and he found that he did it with better results than before Ilya Markov had showed up in his life. He attributed this to quitting his painkiller habit, but he also suspected that the incident had given him a new perspective on his life. Maybe he didn’t have it so bad after all. He was one of the lucky ones. And yet . . .

  Markov’s words popped into his head at odd moments: just before he fell asleep, or when he was trying to calculate the discounted present value of a corporate junk bond. Was he, Garrett Reilly, going to be happy doing this for the rest of his life, working inside the great capitalist finance machine? Would he forever be an outsider, face pressed up against the glass, no matter how much money he made? Perhaps he was supposed to live a different life—a life of rebellion, outside the rules, bringing change, forcing governments and the privileged to account for their actions and their crimes.

  Perhaps he was wasting his time at J&A. Perhaps he had missed his true calling. The possibility haunted him.

  No matter how hard he had looked in the past two weeks, he’d found nothing online or in the news about bad trades or highly leveraged derivatives coming from Vanderbilt Frink’s trading desk. Nothing. Wells had been right that day on the roof—it would all get covered up, and no one would be the wiser.

  Garrett had found a few news items that intrigued him, though. The day after Markov had been shot, a financial blogger wrote about a rumor that Robert Andrew Wells Jr. and four other banking CEOs had been seen dining together in the back room at the restaurant Daniel on Sixty-Fifth Street. They’d been joined by Caroline Hummels, the chairwoman of the Federal Reserve. No pictures were taken, and no official word had been released on any such meeting, but Garrett thought it made sense: all the counterparties to Vandy’s bad bets had sat down over an ’86 Château Margaux and filet mignon and agreed to let them slide. As if all those transactions, all those bets, had never happened. It was just as Wells said: the wealthy protected their own interests, and the government aided that enterprise. The wheel went round and round.

  The other news item—and this one had broken big—was the suicide of Leonard Harris, congressman from suburban Georgia. Harris was the chairman of the House Banking Subcommittee, and he’d been humiliated by a sex video that had gone viral. No one could identify the woman on the video—her face had been carefully angled away from the camera—but the man was clearly Harris. And what they did was explicit. Police theorized that Harris had gone to meet the woman at a cabin in rural Virginia, potentially to have sex with her. Or maybe to kill her. But either way, the woman never showed up. Alone and broken, Harris scribbled a rambling suicide note, then turned his gun on himself.

  The press posited it as an isolated case of adultery and regret, but Garrett thought otherwise. Garrett thought Harris had been taken out of the picture at the exact moment when he was most needed, when the American economy had teetered on the brink of ruin. Harris was another Ilya Markov dupe, and he had paid the price for his gullibility.

  Garrett left work early, and Mitty met him at their favorite bar, McSorley’s, in the East Village. The two of them drank beer and tequila shots. He told Mitty all about the night in Staten Island, and what had happened with Alexis.

  Mitty, as always, was sympathetic to Garrett’s side of the story. “You did what you had to do. You made the calculated decision, and it was the right one. If Alexis can’t handle that, then fuck her.”

  “You think Markov was telling the truth about her working for Homeland Security?”

  “Does it matter? She either works for military intelligence or Homeland Security. What’s the difference?”

  Garrett thought she had a point.

  He called Oakland a few times that week and spoke to Bingo, who said he was moving out of his mother’s house. He sounded excited to be looking for a new apartment. Garrett was happy for him and tried to say so without sounding patronizing.

  “If you need me again,” Bingo said, “you can just, you know, call.”

  “Will do. Stay safe.” Then Garrett thought about that. “Actually, don’t stay safe. Get into boatloads of trouble.”

  Garrett exchanged e-mails with Celeste as well. She said she was toying with leaving the Bay Area and moving to New York, maybe to get work as a translator at the United Nations. The thought of Celeste living in the same city made him exceedingly nervous, but he supposed there were enough people in New York to act as a buffer between the two of them. In a moment of weakness he offered her a place on his couch, but she declined.

  Gonna stay with Mitty, she wrote. We’re sympático.

  Garrett laughed for the first time in days when he read that. Maybe running into Celeste in New York wouldn’t be so terrible after all. The next evening, when he stepped out of the lobby of J&A, a black SUV pulled up to the curb. Garrett flinched when he saw it, but the passenger door popped open and Agent Chaudry climbed out.

  She was smiling and looked much happier than when they had worked together. “Can I buy you dinner?”

  Garrett chuckled, half at the idea that he would go to dinner with an FBI agent, and half that he had been so ready to bolt at the sight of an unmarked SUV.

  Agent Murray drove, and Garrett noticed that he didn’t look any happier than before. Garrett figured Chaudry must have come out of this case looking good, and Murray not so much. Murray dropped them at an Indian place on Hudson Street in Tribeca.

  Agent Chaudry seemed to know the waitstaff. “Want me to order for you?”

  “Always in charge.” Garrett nodded.

  “Life is just easier that way.”

  They made small talk for a few minutes, then Chaudry cut to the chase. “I want to know everything Markov offered you that night. I’d like you to try to give me the conversation you had, verbatim.”

  Garrett told her. He could remember every word they had said. That was one of Garrett’s gifts, and he didn’t hold back; he felt he had no reason to keep anything from anyone.

  “Were you tempted? To go with him?” she asked when he was done, pouring Garrett another glass of wine.

  “That night? No. Now? I think about it.”

  Chaudry looked surprised. “Go join a bunch of hacker criminals? Living in shitholes all around the world. That sounds appealing to you?”

  Garrett dipped a samosa in a spicy green sauce and tasted it. The food was good, and he was hungry. “Maybe I didn’t agree with how Markov did things. But his goals weren’t so crazy. The power structure in this country needs a bullet to the head. You think an Indian woman from New Jersey is ever going to run the FBI?”

  Chaudry gulped down a mouthful of wine and smiled. “I do, actually. And I’ll give you a call when I get there.”

  Garrett laughed.

  “Look, Markov was a con man, plain and simple,” Chaudry said. “He didn’t have real goals, other than money. We finally got some responses back from the Russian internal security service, and they said he’d been running computer scams for years. Just making money. He was a petty criminal. This was all part of a scheme.”

  “They’re lying to cover up their motives. They paid him to attack the American economy and swing an election,” Garrett said.

  “Maybe they did. But that doesn’t change the fact that Markov’s goals were ambiguous at best. He was an amoral thug for hire.”

  Garrett considered this. “Maybe I’m amoral.”

  “Don’t think that I haven’t wondered about that.”

  Agent Murray picked them up and drove Garrett home, and he and Chaudry got out of the SUV at his apartment.

  “One question,” Garrett said, as they lingered by his front door. “Staten Island. How’d you know to follow me?”

  “I didn’t at first. But when both you and Alexis disappeared, that seemed strange. Not your normal pattern.” She grinned at him. “You taught me well.”

  Garrett didn’t kno
w what to say. Why anyone would want to look at the world the way he did was a mystery.

  “I put both your pictures out on the wire. Because the streets were empty, it was easy to spot you. We sent people to South Ferry. They watched you from there on in.”

  “Huh,” Garrett grunted. That explained his uneasiness on the train, and later in the marshes. “Well, thanks.”

  She shook his hand, said good-bye, and drove off. Garrett went back up to his apartment and smoked a bowl of Fighting Buddha. He’d decided that he needed some kind of chemical mood enhancers to keep the demons—and the pain—away, and pot seemed harmless enough.

  Still awake two hours later, he called Mitty. “Something’s not right.”

  “Are you still obsessing about Alexis?” Mitty sounded groggy.

  “Yes.” He thought about this. “But more than that.”

  “If there’s a problem, go do something about it. But stop calling me at three in the fucking morning.”

  WASHINGTON, DC, JULY 11, 11:25 A.M.

  Garrett caught the 11:30 a.m. shuttle to Washington, DC. At the airport, he called Alexis on her cell, but got no answer. Then he tried her office at Joint Base Anacostia–Bolling. A secretary said there was no record of Captain Alexis Truffant working for the DIA and hung up on him.

  He called again, asking for General Kline, but was put on hold and the call was never answered. But he knew where Kline lived—he’d been there before—and so he rented a car and drove to a quiet neighborhood in Bethesda, Maryland, and parked in front of Kline’s house and waited. Kline drove up around 6:00 p.m., saw Garrett, and walked up to his car.

  “We don’t speak anymore,” Kline said without a hello or even an acknowledgment that Garrett was parked in front of his house. “And I can’t tell you where she is. It’s classified.”

  Garrett thought about this.

  “She went out on a limb for you, Reilly. Many times. You should know that and appreciate that.” A warm rain had begun to fall. Kline hiked a Windbreaker up around his collar. “I gotta get inside. Late for dinner.”

  “Was she working for Homeland Security the entire time?”

  Kline shrugged. “We all work for Homeland Security. Whether we know it or not.” He gave a half wave and disappeared into his house.

  Garrett took a hotel room at a Best Western and spent half the night staring up at the mottled stucco ceiling. He sorted passwords in his head and thought about the last month of his life. He tried to replay the events of each day, the phone calls and the conversations, the drugs and the cat and mouse between himself and Markov. At four in the morning he realized what he’d been missing, and at eight he sent an e-mail to General Kline asking for a favor.

  When the sun rose, Garrett drove south to Triangle, Virginia, and Marine Corps Base Quantico. He checked in with the security detail at the front entrance and was given a map of the base.

  He walked into a modern, two-story brick building on the south end of the complex, found Room 207, a matériel and requisitions center, and sat down at a desk, unannounced, across from marine corporal John Patmore. Patmore was tapping on a computer, a stack of documents at his elbow. A dozen other marines, men and women, were doing much the same thing at different desks across the room.

  Patmore looked up and did a double take at Garrett. “Sir. Good morning. This is a surprise.”

  Garrett said nothing. He just stared at Patmore. He’d thought about it for a while, but he still wasn’t sure how to start the conversation.

  “Is there a problem, sir?”

  “You got promoted to corporal?”

  “For services rendered,” Patmore said, pleased. “Cool, huh?”

  “I know it was you.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m confused. What are you talking about?”

  “Markov’s inside man. How he knew exactly where we were, and what we were doing. How he always stayed a step ahead of us. Our location, the credit-card name. You tipped him off. I can’t believe I didn’t see it earlier. I guess I was blind.”

  Patmore laughed quietly, then made a face somewhere between disbelief and anger. “You’re barking up the wrong tree, sir. I didn’t tip anybody off.”

  “The drugs were the tell. Only you knew I needed them. The others were just guessing. But somehow Markov knew as well. That’s a coincidence, huh?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Why’d you do it? Was it money? Did he transfer a chunk into some offshore account? Or did he give you a song and dance about revolution and changing the world? Look, I’m sympathetic. Honestly, I am. I considered joining him as well. I still think about it.”

  “Sir, I really think you’re making a mistake. I didn’t tip off anybody, anytime. And I need to get back to work.”

  Garrett watched the young marine. He was pretty good, his face sunny, his voice friendly, no matter what Garrett said. But Garrett had more. “I had General Kline pull your service record. You weren’t blown up in any Humvee. You never needed prescription meds to dull the pain. You didn’t even serve in Afghanistan. You told me that tale to get me to trust you. Social Engineering 101. So I’d take too many drugs. And it worked. You’re a fucking con man, just like Markov, only you have a uniform.”

  In a flash, the genial, happy-go-lucky marine disappeared, and a dead-eyed, manipulative criminal sat in his place. Patmore’s face was full of fury, tempered only by instant calculation. A second later, it was gone. But that was all Garrett needed. That was proof enough. He pushed the chair back and stood up, satisfied.

  “Don’t expect to go any further in the service, Corporal. Kline will put your record up for review. You’re done.”

  “Son of a bitch.”

  “I wouldn’t have guessed it. You, betraying us, and yet . . .” Garrett’s voice softened. “You never really know people.”

  Garrett walked out without another word, although he half expected to have Patmore race after him and pummel him to the ground. But that didn’t happen. He felt a little better as he drove north back toward Reagan National Airport. Not altogether better, but a bit. The betrayal hurt—he had put so much faith in Ascendant, in his new family, but at least he knew some truths now. At least he still had instincts left.

  As the US Airways shuttle lifted off from Reagan National, and Washington, DC, receded into the distance, Garrett finally felt that he had put Ilya Markov—and that dark, dense onrushing chaos of Garrett’s nightmares—in the past. He closed his eyes and slept until the plane touched the ground again in New York.

  LOWER MANHATTAN, JULY 17, 10:56 A.M.

  A week later, at work on a Tuesday morning, Garrett got a phone call from the office of Robert Andrew Wells Jr. at Vanderbilt Frink Trust and Guaranty. They were requesting that Mr. Reilly come to their building for a job interview. Garrett laughed and hung up on them.

  Five minutes later Wells himself called. “I just want to talk. Ten minutes is all. I’ll send a car for you.”

  A black Mercedes sedan was waiting for Garrett on the street, and he climbed in and made it to Forty-Seventh Street and Madison in twenty minutes. The guard told him to go straight to the executive offices on the thirty-first floor. Garrett rode the elevator wondering what the hell this was all about. He had to admit he was mildly intrigued. Even flattered. But he also knew that a lot of job offers were out there for him if he wanted them. He was a known commodity on the Street, and other firms had tried to poach him from J&A many times.

  Wells’s office was immense, with ceiling-to-floor windows that looked out onto midtown Manhattan. Wells was sitting behind a large, modern desk. No computer was on the desk, nor was any to be seen in the room. His assistant, Jessica Bortles, sat on a couch with an iPad in her hands. Garrett supposed that passed for a computer.

  “Jess, give us a minute, please.” Wells stood and crossed the office to greet Garrett.

 
Bortles gave Garrett a quick smile and left the room, closing the door behind her.

  Wells reached out and offered his hand to shake. “Thanks for coming.” Garrett shook his hand, even though he didn’t feel like it. “Have a seat.” Wells motioned to the dual leather couches.

  “That’s okay; I’ll stand,” Garrett said.

  “You don’t like me, do you?”

  “You’re an arrogant prick and you make too much money.”

  Wells laughed. “You’re one to talk.”

  “I don’t run the world for my own amusement.”

  “You think that’s what I do? I don’t, let me tell you. I run a bank that facilitates commerce around the globe. We grow businesses so everyday citizens can have jobs. And I work fucking hard every single day.”

  “So do coal miners. Get over yourself.”

  “You a leftist-radical bond trader now? That’s a first.”

  Garrett moved to the window to get a better look. He loved high-altitude views of the city and took them in whenever he had the chance. Airplanes danced overhead. “What do you want?”

  “To offer you a job.”

  “Pass.”

  “You don’t even know what it is yet.”

  “Doesn’t matter.” Below, Garrett could see crowds moving east and west on Forty-Seventh Street. His mind began to sort the number of people moving in each direction: 38 percent going east, 60 percent going west, 2 percent idling and blocking traffic. Why did some people always have to clog the works? he thought to himself.

  “Everything you said about this bank—about the people attacking it, what they wanted, and how they were going to do it—was right. Everything. I was wrong, you were right.”