The King of Fear: A Garrett Reilly Thriller Read online

  “Thanks,” Garrett said, slightly ashamed of himself for taking advantage of the old man and his crap job status, and hurried upstairs.

  • • •

  Back in the office, Garrett considered what facts he knew about Steinkamp’s murder, and what he wished he knew. He had tried to research Anna Bachev, but she was a virtual nonentity: no digital footprint, no search references, no social media presence. She had no financial records or court documents, either. Bachev’s ghostlike history was probably why they’d hired her to do the job in the first place. It occurred to him that hired was the wrong term. He guessed that Bachev had been blackmailed into shooting the Fed president. She had killed herself, after all—nothing else made any sense.

  But who had done it? Ilya Markov? And what was the geopolitical line of connection between Markov, a Chechen-born Russian, and Bachev, a Bulgarian? The whole thing was beginning to take on a distinctly East European flavor.

  Garrett researched events in Eastern Europe. He blew right through the usual assortment of corruption stories and threats of ruble devaluations, and came immediately to Belarus. While he knew that Belarus was a country, he didn’t know much more than that. It had been a part of the Soviet Union and lay between Moscow and the bulk of the nations of Western Europe; it was a bleak, flat Russian vassal state—at least, it had been until a few months ago. That was when the citizens of Belarus somehow gave a plurality of their votes to a young reform candidate for president, forcing a runoff election. Most analysts assumed elections in that country were always rigged in favor of their longtime dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, but the government had grown complacent. They thought they would never be voted out of office, but they were disastrously wrong.

  Of course, those in power weren’t leaving without a fight. Civil war had erupted in the country—a civil war stoked by Russia and its vast security and intelligence agencies. The runoff election was scheduled for eleven days from today, and both sides—pro-Russia and pro-reform—were campaigning, and killing each other, at breakneck speed.

  Garrett pondered this. Could civil war in Belarus be related to the death of Phillip Steinkamp in Manhattan? That seemed like a stretch, yet Garrett could feel trails of connection between the two. Patterns didn’t always jump out at him—sometimes they needed to be coaxed gently out into the open.

  He checked one last thing while he had the time: stock and bond ripples from the buying and selling in the black pool he’d found. Nothing certain jumped out at him, but he saw some unusual oscillations in the behavior of recent tech IPOs on the NASDAQ, specifically a Brooklyn-based company called Crowd Analytics. The company website said it harnessed the power of crowdsourcing to help solve corporate planning issues. Garrett found a splashy feature article about Crowd Analytics’ CEO, a bearded, twentysomething Harvard grad named Kenny Levinson. The company was his brainchild and was valued at $30 billion. Garrett had to keep his revulsion—and envy—in check as he stared at the picture of Levinson on the steps of his Brooklyn brownstone, his startlingly pretty wife and perfect child at his side. Garrett didn’t want what Levinson had—but he kind of hated him for having it nonetheless.

  He pushed that from his mind. He couldn’t quite see the pattern that surrounded the company, but one was out there, for sure, and when it became fully visible, he would spot it.

  The furniture arrived at four in the afternoon. He signed the purchase order as Earl Erglittry—his favorite anagram of Garrett Reilly—and the movers didn’t give him, or his signature, a second look. The old security guard came up to peek into the offices as well, and Garrett handed him a Diet Coke for his troubles. Garrett took another Percocet and stared out the window toward the Jersey sprawl and Manhattan beyond it. The summer light was hazy and thick, and white explosions of clouds drifted overhead.

  Where was Ilya Markov, and what pattern was he weaving in his travels? Garrett didn’t know, and the drugs were beginning to take hold. The instincts that he relied on to discern order out of the white noise of everyday life faded from his mind. He sat on one of the new black couches and stared out at the vast country that was the United States. There were so many places to hide: so many apartments to hole up in, so many parks to disappear into, so many back roads to use for escape.

  The pain in his head lessened, Garrett lay down on the couch, and for a blissful few moments, he let the world’s troubles slip away and caught up on some sleep.

  ORLANDO, FLORIDA, JUNE 17, 1:09 P.M.

  Ilya Markov’s driver took him from Fort Lauderdale to Orlando. Ilya had found the guy on Craigslist, a student at UF named Jim who needed extra cash. The cost was $25, plus gas. Ilya had Jim drop him at a motel just south of Orlando, where Ilya spent the night sending encrypted e-mails and texting his American contacts on burner phones he’d picked up in Miami.

  Ilya needed more money wired to him in the States. He had carried $1,000 through customs, just to have cash on hand, and had been planning on using his own ID to collect more at Western Union offices in Florida and Atlanta, but the raid on his motel room had rendered that impractical. A blanket digital sweep would be on his name; anywhere he went with his current identification would trigger alarms, so he needed a new identity. He could have used James Delacourt’s name, but he wanted to save that for later. He had already sent Delacourt’s vitals to a colleague in Moscow. That colleague would do the rest and send the results back to the States when Ilya asked for it.

  He took a cab to a Starbucks in downtown Orlando, amid the cookie-cutter office towers and generic parks, bought a coffee, and sat near a young man with a goatee, who was working on his laptop. Ilya waited ten minutes, then asked the young man if he would watch Ilya’s own laptop while he went to the bathroom. The young man agreed, and Ilya took his time in the men’s room. He wanted the young man with the goatee to see how much Ilya trusted him; how willing Ilya was to put a valuable possession in this young man’s hands. Compassionate reciprocity was a key weapon in the social engineer’s tool kit. Ilya sat down five minutes later and thanked the young man, then opened the computer and surfed the Web for a while.

  Sure enough, ten minutes later, the young man with the goatee got up and asked Ilya if he’d return the favor. Ilya said sure and even offered to keep the young man’s backpack under his chair for safekeeping. The young man hurried off to the bathroom. Ilya made sure no one was watching, then rifled through the man’s backpack. He found a Florida driver’s license, a Bank of America debit card, a loyalty card from Winn-Dixie, a community college ID, and an overdue utility bill. From those, he had everything he needed: a name, date of birth, address, college ID number, and even the beginnings of a bank account number. He didn’t steal any of those cards—that would alert the young man and defeat Ilya’s purpose. Instead, he took cell phone pictures of each piece of ID, then put everything back in the wallet exactly as he had found it.

  When the young man returned—his name was Robert Jacob Mullins—he thanked Ilya, retrieved his backpack, and went back to working on his laptop. Ilya sent all of Mullins’s information to a storage folder on the darknet. His associate in Moscow would download the information from the folder, then overnight the finished product to an agreed-upon address in Atlanta. Ilya packed up and left without saying another word.

  Plenty of IDs were to be had on the black market, but Ilya didn’t trust them. Every city in the United States had backroom counterfeiters ready to print out driver’s licenses and passports by the dozen, with varying degrees of quality, for the right amount of money, and Ilya knew that in the next ten days he might need to avail himself of the services of one of those back-alley print shops. But for the time being, he preferred to capture the necessary information himself, and to have known craftsmen transform that information into high-quality, usable pieces of identification.

  He had $700 cash left in his wallet, which was plenty for the next twenty-four hours. He paid $20 for a cab that took him to Valencia College, a
sprawling campus west of downtown that looked more like a business park than a school; then he sauntered into the student union, logged on to the online bulletin board, and hunted for anyone needing passengers to Atlanta.

  Within five minutes he’d found a pair of women leaving in half an hour. Eliza and Sarah agreed to carry him if he paid for half of the gas, probably around twenty bucks, and if they retained veto power over the music choices. No rap, no Phish. He agreed instantly. For the first part of the trip north, Eliza and Sarah chatted happily in the front of the car, and Ilya sat mutely in back. By the Florida-Georgia border, however, Ilya sensed that his silence was making the women nervous—Eliza kept flashing him looks in the rearview mirror—so he started a conversation about college football, then fast food, then dating, all things he cared not a whit about.

  By Macon, Georgia, they were best friends. By nine that evening, he was lying on a bed in a dim motel room in East Point, Georgia, just south of Atlanta. Two hours later, she knocked on the door.

  • • •

  She was a true believer, or at least she claimed to be, but that was not enough for Ilya. She had to come recommended by people he trusted, and she did: three separate sources, one in Europe, two in California. They said she was smart, discreet, and good at her job. She stood about five foot five, with shoulder-length brown hair that curled in tight ringlets.

  “Can you make it blond?” Ilya asked, pointing to her hair.

  “I can make it any color you want.”

  She had a thin face, more sexy than pretty. You looked at her lips before you looked at anything else; they were rounded and full, and she highlighted them with bright red lipstick.

  “The lipstick is too red,” Ilya said. “Too obvious. You’re not looking for attention.”

  “The lipstick is too red,” she repeated, as if taking notes.

  She was curvy, and she wore a gauzy white top, with denim shorts and sandals. The clothes clung to her body in the heat, accentuating her breasts and hips. She seemed to glide more than walk, and slink more than move. While they talked, her eyes never left Ilya’s.

  “You’re good in bed?”

  She started to undo the buttons on her blouse. “Pull down your pants and I’ll show you.”

  “I don’t want to have sex with you.”

  “Why not? Are you gay?” she asked, seemingly without an opinion on the matter.

  “What difference would it make? No sex.”

  “Okay.” She buttoned her blouse back up. “But the answer is, I’ve never had anyone complain afterward.”

  Ilya guessed her age at about twenty-five. “You will be reluctant at first. You’re not accustomed to casual encounters. But once things get under way, you become a tiger. You lose yourself in the moment.”

  She nodded. “I can do that.”

  “Rachel Brown? You’re Jewish?”

  “I can be Jewish. Or half. Or not at all.”

  Ilya realized he could ask about Rachel Brown’s ethnicity and her real name all he wanted, but he would never get an answer that he believed. Or at least fully believed. She lived—as he did—in that gray netherworld where the truth was what you made it. Whatever they decided was real, was real, just for tonight, in a motel room in an Atlanta suburb.

  “You are Christian,” he said. “Born-again. There’s a Bible in the bedside drawer. Memorize a few useful verses. We’ll find you a suitable church. We’ll drive by it tomorrow, so you know what it looks like. The clothes will have to change too. More modest. But not too modest. We’ll go to the mall and buy you some new things.”

  “I should have a crucifix. Born-agains wear them. And they draw the eye here.” She ran her index finger down her cleavage. “That always works.”

  Ilya watched her finger plunge slowly down her neckline and then back up again, and he had to agree—that would work well.

  “You’ve been to college?”

  “Two years,” Rachel Brown said. “Didn’t love it.”

  “What did you study?”

  “Communications. A little business. Mostly English lit. Chaucer and Melville and is Moby-Dick a metaphor for the discontents of capitalism. I didn’t think it was. I just thought it was about a big fish. My professor disagreed.”

  Ilya blinked and took another look at Rachel Brown, or the woman who called herself that. Perhaps he had underestimated her. Perhaps she was considerably brighter than he had imagined. She had a sense of humor, and that spoke to psychological flexibility, and psychological flexibility was key for Ilya’s plans.

  “You’ve done this before?” Ilya asked.

  “Well, you haven’t told me what this is yet, so I can’t be entirely sure.” She spread herself out on the twin bed that was closest to the motel window. She kicked off her sandals and stretched her arms over her head like a cat about to curl up into a ball and sleep. “But if you’re asking me if I’ve ever made someone believe something that wasn’t true, I’d say every single day of my life.”

  Ilya watched her and felt an involuntary stirring. She was extraordinarily sexy, so at ease in her body, so comfortable with its secret places. To Ilya’s thinking, she could hook a man and reel him in before he even knew he was on the line.

  Yes, Ilya thought, but did not say, Rachel Brown will work out quite well.

  NEWARK, NEW JERSEY, JUNE 17, 9:55 P.M.

  As her plane hurtled eastward across the country and into the night, Celeste Chen felt a deep sense of foreboding. Foreboding mixed with a toxic whiff of fury. To make matters worse, Bingo, sitting next to her in the back of the plane, let his own anxiety out in sporadic, disjointed comments about Garrett or Ascendant or his mother. Celeste had managed to keep things mostly in check, by drinking white wine and watching reruns of Parks and Rec on the seat-back televisions, but as they descended into Newark’s Liberty Airport, floating over black countryside spotted with highways and factories, she could feel her rage overtaking her.

  Why the hell had she agreed to come? She was not ready to be back in the game. Nowhere near ready. She wanted out. Immediately.

  She’d never been to Newark before, but once on the ground, she didn’t like what she saw: limo drivers hustling for fares at the airport, bus drivers smoking cigarettes while their passengers waited on the sidewalk. From the SuperShuttle window, the city looked dark, gloomy, broken-down, and it smelled bad as well, like a muddy low tide mixed with old garbage. They took the shuttle to a Hilton downtown, then caught a cab back out to the Valley Mall Plaza, which was pretty much empty. From the mall they hired an Uber driver back toward downtown—all on Garrett’s instructions.

  “Make sure no one is following you,” he had said. “Travel until you are completely alone. You cannot be too safe.”

  Safe? She laughed at that idea. As if Garrett had any idea of what it was like to be hunted—truly hunted.

  She obsessed over what she would say to him when they met. Her anger at him lay just below the surface, blistering and ragged. She had lived six months on the run in China, on his say-so, surviving by crawling from one hiding place to another, begging rotting bowls of rice, terrified every hour of every day that the Chinese government would find her, jail her, and have her executed. The memory of her experience haunted her, flashing into her thoughts again and again: in cries of surprise when a Palo Alto police siren blared or a neighbor’s dog barked; in crying jags that came on her while she stood alone, naked, in her own bathroom; in sleepless nights, when visions of Hu Mei, the woman she had gone to China to help, tormented her if she dared close her eyes. An army VA psychiatrist had told her it was PTSD, and that she needed to treat it, but Celeste had told him to go to hell. She would deal with her psychic pain the way she dealt with all her setbacks: gin, death metal, and online porn.

  When the Uber driver dropped them at the half-finished office tower in downtown Newark, she and Bingo scanned the empty plaza, then dragged t
heir carry-on bags around back to the loading dock, where Alexis Truffant rolled open a steel door and met them. Amid all Celeste’s gloom, she was glad to see Alexis. She liked Alexis; Alexis wouldn’t lie or lead her down the garden path, and she was pretty sure Alexis was the person who coordinated her extraction from southern China, so she guessed she owed the woman her life—as much as she owed it to anyone associated with Ascendant.

  But Alexis was efficient and all business, hugging Celeste and Bingo briefly, then hustling them inside and to the elevators with hardly a word. Bingo ambled along behind them, eyes wide with suspicion and with what Celeste suspected was plain old fear. She knew Bingo was not the world’s most courageous human, and that coming here, to rejoin the Ascendant team, was stretching the heroic part of his personality almost to the breaking point. As the service elevator shot upward, she took Bingo by the hand and squeezed hard, as much to reassure herself as to put him at ease.

  “Is this a working office building?” Celeste asked Alexis. She hadn’t seen a soul in the place yet. But then again, it was almost eleven at night.

  “Half-occupied. The owners are in bankruptcy. If security stops you or asks what you are doing, just say you’re part of the tech start-up on seven. Our name is AltaTech Partners. That should give us cover for a while.”

  Celeste thought that sounded makeshift, at best, but makeshift seemed to be part of Ascendant’s DNA, so she said nothing more. But it didn’t fill her with confidence. None of this filled her with confidence.

  She shut her eyes and pictured the Chinese countryside: the lush, tropical hills outside Guangzhou, the squalls that blew in off the South China Sea, the children splashing in the muddy Xi River. She didn’t hate China, as hard as her time there had been, and visions of its green forests still calmed her nerves. In moments she would be facing Garrett Reilly again, and she needed all the composure she could muster.