The King of Fear: Part Two: A Garrett Reilly Thriller Read online

  “Hey!” he shouted. “What the fuck is going on?”

  He listened and could hear someone walking up a flight of stairs, not particularly fast, then waiting just outside the door to the room.

  “Hello?” he said. “Someone there?”

  The doorknob turned, the door opened, and Mitty walked into the room. Garrett stared in surprise. She squinted at him in the dim light, then shook her head. “You wanna shut the fuck up please? People are sleeping.”

  “Who’s sleeping? Where am I? And why is my hand tied to the fucking radiator?”

  “You’re in a house in New Jersey, doesn’t matter where. The people who are asleep are the rest of the team, although by now they’re probably awake. And you know why you’re tied to the radiator. You know exactly why.”

  “What are you talking about?” Garrett yanked hard at the flexi-tie, but his wrist wouldn’t move. The radiator didn’t budge either—it was planted solidly into the floor.

  “How’s your head?”

  “It hurts like a bitch.”

  “You want some water?”

  “What I want is for you to cut this twist tie off my fucking wrist.”

  Mitty bent over Garrett, putting her face just above his. “No.” Then she walked out of the room, closing the door and locking it from the outside.

  “Hey! What the . . . ? Mitty! Get back in here! Mitty! You hear me. Get back in here and tell me what the fuck is going on!” He shouted like that for a few more minutes, then his throat felt raw again, and his stomach started to do flips as if he might throw up, so he fell silent. He breathed steadily through his nose, sorry that he hadn’t taken Mitty up on the offer of a glass of water.

  He craned his head again and looked up at the red plastic that was keeping his hand to the radiator. He reached over with his left hand and tried to unlock it, but he knew from experience that was impossible. The only way that thing was coming off was with a pair of pliers or a very sharp knife.

  He mumbled curses under his breath because he knew, the moment Mitty had said it, why he was tied to a bed in a house that seemed to be a million miles from any signs of human habitation. He knew and he hated it. Hated them for doing it and hated himself for being trapped like this.

  He yelled again at the locked door. “If this is your idea of some half-assed intervention, it’s not going to work! You’re not going to change me. I’m not going to become a different person just because you’re draining the drugs from my bloodstream. You can go fuck yourself! All of you can go fuck yourselves, you hear me? I’ll do whatever the hell I want!”

  His stomach roiled. He groaned once, turned on his side, and threw up off the bed onto the floor. The vomit burned his throat on the way up, and the burn lingered as he lay there, gasping for breath.

  That done, he turned back onto the bed, closed his eyes, and immediately fell asleep again.

  • • •

  He woke to full daylight. The sun shone through the room’s only window, illuminating a bare, depressing wall and a beat-to-crap dresser. Garrett felt chills run up and down his body. He was sick and exhausted, and he could still smell the puke in his nostrils, although when he looked down to the floor, he could see that someone had been in the room as he slept and cleaned up his vomit. He had no idea how long he had been out.

  Without warning, a sadness washed over him and made him want to weep. He was alone. All alone in this godforsaken room, miles from anywhere he knew or cared about. The sadness was one of grief. Of missing. He missed Alexis and he missed his mother, but they were alive, and he had some hope that he could see them again. More painfully, he missed his father, whom he had never known; he missed his bright shining marine of a brother; but most of all he missed Avery Bernstein, who would never laugh with him again or tease him about his obnoxious personality or comfort him when the world turned sour. Avery had been Garrett’s surrogate father—and now Avery was gone, and that was life’s most horrific trick. How could it even be? Gone, gone, gone.

  Garrett howled in pain, howled with loss, howled with the black reality of another day without the men in his life whom he had loved. How could he go on without them? And now he was tied to a fucking bed in some shithole without any drugs to make that pain better. Who would do that to him? How could they do that to him?

  He howled for as long as his body would let him, then passed out once again.

  • • •

  He woke, and it was afternoon, and Celeste Chen was sitting on the edge of the bed.

  “Hey,” she said.

  He grimaced and sat up and realized, after a moment, that his hand was free. He felt at it—a red line went all around his wrist, with peeled skin and dried blood.

  He looked at Celeste. “Yeah. Hey.”

  “Get you anything?”

  His brain was sludgy and slow, but the drugs were gone, and his stomach, while raw, didn’t feel quite so horrible. “Coffee?” He continued to feel at his wrist.

  “I can do that.” She got up, went to the door, and paused there. “You can jump out the window if you really want to, but we took your wallet, and I don’t think you’ll get very far. Plus, it’s a long drop. You’d probably break your ankle.”

  “Thanks for the warning. Really nice of you.”

  She shrugged and left the room. He got up shakily. He was still wearing his blue jeans, but he didn’t recognize the T-shirt he had on, a gray New Jersey Devils shirt. He looked out the window and had to agree with Celeste: there wasn’t much around to run to. He could see a warehouse in the distance, and some kind of smoke-belching factory on the other side of a weedy field, but that was about it.

  Celeste came back in with a cup of coffee and a plate with a piece of untoasted bread on it. “No toaster. So you’ll have to eat it plain.”

  She gave him the bread and coffee, then went back to the door. “We’re downstairs, when you’re ready to talk.” She left again, this time leaving the door unlocked.

  Rage flared inside Garrett’s brain. Talk?

  They wanted to fucking talk? As if he were some misbehaving teen and they were his collective parents? As if he had stayed out past curfew or had had a kegger in their living room, and now they had to talk about what kind of adult he would grow up to become? They could all go to hell, with their holier-than-thou bullshit. They had no idea what it was to be Garrett Reilly, and how he handled the ups and downs of his existence was his own damned business.

  And yet . . .

  He knew they were right. And that killed him, just frigging killed him. He drained the coffee, then staggered downstairs. Mitty, Bingo, Celeste, and Patmore were sitting in a dusty living room, on a ripped couch and a pair of teetering chairs. The windows were curtained, and the room was mostly dark, except for a floor lamp in a corner. A reproduction of Washington crossing the Delaware hung on the wall.

  Garrett pulled up a chair and sat in it. “Where I am?”

  “Irvington, New Jersey,” Mitty said. “Crossroads of the world.”

  Where was that? He had no idea, but then again, he didn’t really care. “How did you find me?”

  “Homeless guy,” Mitty said. “After you passed out, he took your phone and texted us.”

  Garrett remembered giving the old man money Had that been a smart move? Maybe he owed the guy his life.

  “Alexis is fine, by the way,” Celeste said. “She’s back at the DIA. We haven’t spoken to her, but we got e-mails from Kline. The FBI is all over them, but she’s not in jail, and she’s not in the hospital.”

  “There’ve been no more sightings of Ilya Markov,” Bingo said. “TV news is all over the bombing. National terror attack. There was surveillance videotape of the bomber coming into the store. The guy had a girl with him. But the guy wasn’t Markov.”

  Garrett blinked in surprise. He started to object, to ask if they were absolutely positive it wasn’t
Markov, but then realized that this made sense. Markov had gathered a team, and he wouldn’t endanger his own safety by planting a bomb himself. He had gotten someone else to plant the bomb—but who would do that? Who would risk their own freedom for Ilya Markov?

  “Have they identified the man in the video?” he asked.

  “Yep,” Bingo said. “Thad White, twenty-four years old, from Baltimore, Maryland. Wannabe terrorist and explosives enthusiast.”

  “That’s great. He can lead us to Markov,” Garrett said quickly.

  “They found him in a motel in DC,” Celeste said. “Self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Garrett muttered. Another killer, another suicide. What hold did Markov have on these people? Garrett stared at the faces of the Ascendant team. They weren’t looking at him with anything resembling compassion. They seemed angry, their faces set and hard, as if they were about to tear him to pieces. He tried not to take it personally, to look away from their stares, but it wasn’t easy.

  “He’s smart, don’t you think?” Patmore asked.

  “Markov?” Garrett said.

  “He knows what’s going on. He has a plan. He’s one or two steps ahead of us at every turn. That’s what I think,” Patmore said.

  Garrett nodded. That seemed reasonable. “Yeah, sure.”

  “Smarter than you,” Celeste said.

  Garrett shrugged, tilting his head to one side. “Maybe.”

  “A lot smarter than you when you’re high,” she said.

  Garrett exhaled. Right. Okay. “If this is where you tell me to straighten up and fly right, be a good little boy, you can just save it, because I don’t take to lectures well—”

  “You made a mistake,” Celeste said.

  Garrett stopped talking, the words catching in his throat.

  “You made a mistake with the Amber Alert. You showed him your hand too early. You tried to outclever Ilya Markov, but that was a mistake, and it almost cost Alexis her life,” Celeste said.

  “Bullshit,” Garrett said.

  “You provoked him. You did it because you weren’t thinking clearly. You had a false sense of security. You thought he couldn’t find us, couldn’t find you. But you didn’t think long and hard enough. Because Alexis wasn’t safe, was she? She wasn’t in hiding,” Celeste said. “You made a mistake and you put her life at risk.”

  Celeste stopped talking and the room fell silent. Garrett started to answer, then stopped. He thought about this. Had he made a mistake? Setting out an Amber Alert had seemed like a good way to smoke out Markov, just as the FBI’s telling the media that Garrett was a person of interest seemed like a good way to get Garrett as well. They were equally good strategies, Garrett thought, but then he realized that neither of them had worked.

  “You need to stop taking pills,” Celeste said.

  Garrett felt another surge of anger shoot up through his blood. He started to respond, but Celeste cut him off.

  “You stop or we walk. All of us. We’ll just get up and take the train home, fly back to the West Coast, whatever. We go home. If the FBI comes to question us, we’ll tell them the truth. Because you endanger people’s lives. Our lives.”

  Garrett said nothing. He couldn’t believe that they were pulling this. It was juvenile. Who the hell cared if he took drugs? He took them for his own reasons, and those reasons were private, and none of their business. He looked to Mitty. “You too?”

  She nodded. “Sorry, Gare. I love you and all, and I want to help. But I want to live too.”

  He scowled at her. Mitty avoided his gaze.

  “That’s the deal. Take it or leave it,” Celeste said. “So what’s it going to be?”

  He grunted wordlessly and sank lower in his ratty chair. He could smell the mold wafting up from the floorboards. His mind was raging, the anger and the hurt swirling around in an electric storm. Celeste got up off the couch and exchanged looks with the other three members of the team. They all rose with her. She shot a last look at Garrett, then opened the front door. Garrett caught a brief glimpse of a yard cluttered with garbage bags and old clothing. One by one, the Ascendant team left the house.

  Garrett’s stomach suddenly clenched in pain. Was this really happening? He had brought them together. They were a team. They weren’t perfect, but they meshed, each complementing the other; they couldn’t leave. Why not? Because they were . . . He searched for the word. They were . . .

  . . . a family.

  And suddenly he realized why he was doing everything he’d done over the past two weeks: why he had notified Alexis, asked for the team to be brought back together, worked to keep them involved and motivated. He realized why he was trying so hard to save the country. He was doing it because he wanted a family around him. And Ascendant was the only family he had left.

  “Okay,” he yelled.

  Bingo, the last to leave, stopped in the doorway. Mitty, Patmore, and Celeste looked back in.

  Garrett felt all the pride leave his body; all the defenses, all the ego, all the arrogance. He was, at that moment, a child, desperate not to be left alone.

  “I’ll do whatever you want,” Garrett said. “Just don’t leave.”

  LYADY, BELARUS, JUNE 23, 8:17 A.M. (GMT +3)

  Gennady Bazanov hurried through the stand of birch trees, trying to listen to the morning breeze rustling the leaves. Summer sunlight cut through the tree branches and dappled the ground around his feet. Bazanov could even hear the call of songbirds above him; that is, he could hear them when the grind and roar of tank engines less than half a kilometer away died down.

  The tanks were supposed to belong to Belarusian separatists, fighting against the fascists in Minsk who were bringing tyranny to their country, although Bazanov knew full well that they were Russian-owned T-90s, from the Twenty-Fifth Motorized Rifle Brigade stationed just west of Moscow. The separatist ploy was a convenient fiction, a smoke screen that the Kremlin could hide behind as it tried to undo what was left of the Belarusian democracy movement, and the tanks were an efficient way to batter the Belarusian Army—or what was left of that as well.

  Bazanov checked his watch and lit a cigarette. He had parked a few hundred meters to the south, in Lyady, a miserable junction town in eastern Belarus, whose geographic curse it was to lie on the border with Russia. He had parked near an abandoned school—no one dared live in Lyady since the separatists had arrived—and walked through the empty town north into the birch trees, just as he’d been told.

  The man from the SVR had called late last night, identifying himself only as Luka. He wasn’t Bazanov’s normal handler, which meant that whatever he had to say was important. Extremely important. He sounded young, and completely without a sense of humor—or compassion. “Eight thirty, two hundred meters north from the old church.” His voice was cold and precise—the voice of exactly the type of vicious functionary that the SVR seemed to favor these days. Bazanov shivered with the memory, even though the June day was hot, and getting hotter. The smoke from the intermittent shelling and the fires that it caused didn’t help blot out the sunshine or the heat—it only seemed to make matters worse.

  Bazanov drew hard on his cigarette and kept walking. He was nervous, and he hated himself for that. He was a colonel in the glorious Russian intelligence service after all, a decorated officer in the Russian Army, and a longtime patriot. He had nothing to worry about. But when they called from Yasenevo, you worried, even if you felt there was no cause; they were getting their orders from the Kremlin, and the Kremlin could bury anybody.

  “Polkovnik Bazanov.” Colonel Bazanov. The voice seemed to come from nowhere, and Bazanov jumped in surprise. He spun around, and a black-haired man in a shiny suit appeared from behind a tree. He had sucked-in cheeks, and black eyes that matched his suit. He was tall, and thin, like some sort of badly drawn cartoon character that was all arms and legs. Bazan
ov blinked in surprise: How the hell had he missed him standing there? Bazanov had walked right past him.

  The thin man in the suit stepped forward and nodded without offering his hand. “Good morning.” The briefest of smiles appeared on his lips.

  “Luka?” Bazanov figured the name was some form of greeting code. Bazanov had little chance of ever knowing Luka’s real name.

  The thin man shrugged, half yes, half no. Bazanov took a deep breath. Luka was a classic SVR message boy: say no more than absolutely necessary, spread fear through ambiguity. He was young, no more than thirty, and he had the presumption to try to intimidate Gennady Bazanov? Bazanov scowled, trying to mask his fury.

  “We have been following events in the United States,” Luka said. “And you as well? You are in contact with your man?”

  Bazanov took a deep draw from his cigarette and pondered how to deal with this errand boy. Of course he was following events in the United States. He had coordinated the entire thing. How could he not be following events there? It was his fucking job. Yet, truth be told, he was not in constant contact with Ilya Markov. Markov had broken off with him a few days ago and had not resurfaced, nor would he. This was not unexpected; he had put Markov on the job because of Markov’s reputation as a man who could appear anywhere, at any time, without warning—even if you spotted him in one place, a week later he’d have you so turned around that you would be convinced you’d seen him somewhere else entirely. He was that good.

  But Bazanov could not necessarily say this. The Kremlin wanted control above all else—and they were sending this SVR boy to regain it. If Bazanov admitted he’d lost control—well, it might be a quick end to Gennady Bazanov, and he knew it.

  Bazanov tossed his cigarette to the ground and rubbed the burning ember into the dirt. “Yes, I am following events,” he said, opting for feigned omniscience. “And in contact.”