The King of Fear: A Garrett Reilly Thriller Read online

  “Yes, he is,” Garrett said.

  “Is what?” Celeste.

  “All-knowing.”

  • • •

  They had sixty seconds to get ready. Sixty seconds to delete e-mails, wipe hard drives, shred anything that looked remotely suspicious. Mitty led the charge, being the most tech savvy, and also having the most illegal programs on her laptop. Patmore stashed his Glock in a closet, Celeste sat at a desk, gripping the laminated wood with her fingernails.

  Bingo put his hands over his head, just to make sure there were no accidental shootings. “Where I come from, sometimes they just shoot you. For the hell of it.”

  Celeste thought that was tragic, but her heart was beating too hard for her to say anything. She was scared—terrified, actually—but was trying to keep it together. She had no idea if they would be arrested, beat up, shot. All she knew was that a SWAT team was on its way into the building, and everyone in the office was guessing they were coming to the seventh floor.

  Sixty seconds elapsed, and nothing happened. Celeste strained to listen for anything out of the ordinary. The ding of the elevator. A muffled shout. Footsteps. But there was nothing, and then, all of sudden, there was everything. A wall of noise.

  Celeste wasn’t sure how they had done it—managed to get to their floor and gather outside the office door without making any noise whatsoever—but they had. The door flew open with the pop of a boot on shattered wood, and in moments the offices were filled with SWAT officers, barking orders, waving their rifles around, racing from the central meeting area into each of the side offices.

  “Newark Tactical! Down! Down!” the first officers yelled. A pair of them grabbed Patmore and put him onto the floor with a twist of his arm. Celeste, Mitty, and Bingo got an officer apiece, and they also were laid on the ground with astounding rapidity. The room was alive with the thumping of boots and the screams of the officers.

  “Where’s the shooter? Where’s the shooter?”

  “What shooter?” Celeste managed to squeak out as her face was pressed to the floor by a leather glove. “What shooter?” she said again, but she wasn’t sure anyone was listening. She craned her head to watch, but all she could see were black boots and the business end of a few rifles. She heard the thud of shoes on wood, and more cracking of hollow-core doors.

  “Room one, clear!”

  “Room two, clear!”

  “Kitchen, clear!”

  An officer slammed his foot next to Celeste’s head and barked at her, “Where the hell is the shooter? Where is he?”

  “What shooter are you talking about?” Celeste said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “We got a call from this office,” the SWAT officer yelled, his face leering down into Celeste’s field of vision. “White male shooter, armed, holding hostages, threatening to kill them. Where is the shooter?”

  Celeste blinked, trying to clear her head. Hostages? Threatening to kill them? She let out a short laugh and said, almost quietly, “There is no shooter.” And then loudly, laughing harder: “The only shooter here is you.”

  • • •

  The SWAT team took forty-five minutes to clear out of Ascendant’s seventh-floor offices. They spent most of the time talking with each other, complaining, as far as Celeste could hear, about their commanding officer and something about new protocols that they all hated. They didn’t seem overly concerned about Mitty, Patmore, Bingo, or Celeste, although they did do a cursory patdown of each of them, and one officer checked the desk drawers for anything out of the ordinary. No one looked at the top shelf of the back closet, where Patmore had shoved his pistol, and none of the officers seemed particularly surprised by the whole thing.

  “You’ve been spoofed,” an officer told Celeste. “Happens a lot lately.” He was older, with a sun-weathered face, and with all his battle gear and his helmet he seemed even bigger than he actually was, and he was no small man. He towered over Celeste. “Two separate phone calls. One male, one female; both said there was a man with a gun in your offices, and he was going to kill people.”

  Celeste tried to make light of the idea. “Well, I guess we survived.” But her mind was racing. Whoever had spoofed them knew exactly which office to target, in which building, in which city. They knew where Ascendant was hiding. They knew everything.

  “We get about one a month. There’s a robbery, there’s a rape, an assault. We show up, but there’s nothing going on. Teenagers. Stoners. People with a gripe. One day, someone’s going to get shot by accident, and then the shit will really hit the fan,” the officer said. “Excuse my French.”

  Celeste shrugged, as if it were all a big joke, but her hands were shaking.

  “Can you think of someone who would want to play a trick like that on you? Someone with an ax to grind with your company?”

  Celeste looked across the room to Bingo and Mitty, who were listening carefully to the conversation. Mitty shook her head ever so slightly.

  “No, not really,” Celeste said. “We’re a big, happy family.”

  The officer peered around the offices. “Technology firm?”

  “Start-up,” Celeste said. “Brand-new.”

  The officer pointed to a couch in the corner with a blanket draped over it. “You sleep here?”

  “Tech is brutal business. We can’t get behind.”

  He seemed to accept that as a reasonable answer, and the officers packed up to go. He gave Celeste his card as the SWAT team tromped out the door. “I just want to thank you for bringing your business to Newark. The city needs it.”

  “Sure.” Celeste tried to close the door after him. It was hanging on one hinge, and the lock and doorknob were completely shattered. She stood there a moment, to catch her breath, when there was another knock. She opened the door. “Yeah?”

  It was the older SWAT officer again. “One of my guys noticed that you have five desks, five machines, but there’s only four of you here. Is anyone missing?”

  “No. Just an extra desk. We’re hoping to start hiring soon.” Celeste smiled broadly at the officer. “If you know anyone with programming skills, send them our way.”

  “Okay, sure.” He gave the place one last look. “Will do.”

  NEWARK, NEW JERSEY, JUNE 20, 3:15 P.M.

  Garrett ran.

  He ran down the back stairs as the SWAT team came up the elevators. He ran out the loading-dock door as they came in through the front lobby. He ran east on Raymond Boulevard until, when he stopped, he could no longer see the top of the office building they’d been hiding in.

  He hadn’t wanted to run, but the team told him he had to. They had only seconds to decide, and Celeste had been adamant: if the police were coming for anyone, they were coming for him. They had no grounds to arrest anyone else—so the rest of them would be safe. They literally pushed him out the door.

  He didn’t think about any of this as he ran. He simply ran until he was too exhausted to run anymore. Then he walked, turning right on Chapel, a street full of brick warehouses and empty storefronts. He was sweating and thirsty, and the pounding of his heart matched the pounding in his head. He stopped at a corner store and bought a bottle of water, downed it in a few gulps, then walked until he came to another corner store. There he bought a pint of cheap, blended whiskey—just to calm his nerves, he told himself—and kept walking, the bottle of booze in a brown paper bag in his back pocket. He took another right and came to the trestles of an elevated railway. No one else was around; only a few rusting cars kept him company. He sat underneath the railway bridge and tried to collect his thoughts.

  But first he swallowed a handful of the black-market Percodan that Patmore had bought him. He hadn’t planned on taking them with him, but as he’d been rushing out the door, he remembered that he’d stashed them in a desk drawer and swiped them as he left. Now he was glad, because they were the only t
hing standing between himself and paralyzing head pain. He didn’t count how many he took; he just gobbled them down and chased them with a mouthful of whiskey.

  A homeless man appeared from the shadows, pushing an old shopping cart piled high with bags and clothing. The man looked emaciated, a greasy jacket slung over his thin shoulders. He stared at Garrett, but Garrett ignored him and tried to think.

  Who had alerted the cops? Had it been Ilya Markov? And if so, how the hell did he know where Garrett was hiding? It didn’t seem possible, yet the timing lined up with the AMBER Alert and then the bombing in DC. Somehow, Ilya had discovered Garrett’s hiding place, discovered the makeshift headquarters for the entire Ascendant team, and attacked it. When Garrett thought about it, he realized that Markov had attacked two separate branches of Ascendant—DC and Newark—at the same time. And he hadn’t exposed himself while doing it. Markov was hitting at Garrett, and Garrett wasn’t anywhere nearer catching the man.

  Markov was a master at spreading fear, yet he remained a shadow.

  That struck a line of panic directly into Garrett’s chest. He tried to reason back as to why he had taken on this task in the first place, banging down another mouthful of whiskey. The booze tasted horrible, rough and cheap, and settled uneasily in his stomach. He had seen a problem on the horizon—a pattern building that spoke of economic terror—and he had alerted Alexis to that problem. When she had scoffed at the idea, that seemed to push Garrett harder to take action. But why had he done it?

  Mitty had accused him of wanting to impress Alexis, and there was truth in that, but something deeper was going on. Yes, he was trying to save the country, in his own twisted way, but Garrett didn’t believe in altruism; everybody had a motive for their selfless acts, even if they didn’t understand it. Garrett had a motive for what he was doing as well—but he was a long way from grasping what the hell it was.

  A voice interrupted his reverie. “Can you help a brother get something to eat?” The homeless man had shuffled over to Garrett, hand open and outstretched.

  Garrett’s first reaction was to tell him to fuck off. But then he stared up at the man’s face, his smashed-in nose, missing teeth, the scabs that dotted his cheeks and neck, and revulsion and sympathy flooded his mind in equal measure. Life had devastated this old bastard so badly that Garrett could no longer tell his age, or even his race. He reminded Garrett of the old security guard at the Raymond Boulevard building, only more hollowed out, more tragic. Garrett pulled out his wallet and tossed him a $20 bill.

  “God bless you.”

  “Whatever,” Garrett said quickly, turning away from the man’s ravaged face. He drank again from the whiskey and found that it was almost all gone. Had he really drunk that much, that fast? And what about the painkillers—how many had he taken? Mixing the two probably hadn’t been such a great idea.

  He pushed all of this from his mind and tried to focus on Ilya Markov. Garrett had struck first. He had identified Markov as a threat, had tracked him through his credit cards, then flushed him out of hiding with an AMBER Alert. He had provoked Markov, and Markov had struck back, and struck back hard.

  But how had he done it? How? How? How? And why was he spending his time and energy going at Garrett instead of focusing on what Garrett assumed was Markov’s larger purpose—attacking the US economy?

  Garrett closed his eyes, and when he opened them, rays of sunlight were streaking through the girders of the train trestle, illuminating heaps of black dirt littered with bottles and boxes and discarded clothing. It was, in its own decaying way, a beautiful sight, and Garrett marveled at it—the lushness of the ruin, the craggy shapes laid out by the old shirts and pants. He realized then that the drugs had taken hold.

  Suddenly, Garrett couldn’t quite remember what he’d been so anxious about. Yes, Ilya Markov was mysterious and smart, but was he really a threat to Garrett’s existence? Maybe. Or maybe he was somebody else’s problem. Garrett grinned. That was the beauty of Percodan and whiskey: after you mixed the two, everything was somebody else’s problem.

  He drained the last of the alcohol from the bottle, then stood up, his head spinning slightly, brushed the dirt from his pants, and realized that his phone was chiming. He’d stuck a disposable cell in his pocket, and now a text was waiting for him. He glanced at it.

  Police gone. We were spoofed. All clear.

  Garrett read the text again and laughed. Spoofed? So those weren’t FBI agents raiding his offices? They were regular old Newark cops?

  He typed out a quick response: Not looking for me?

  The answer was immediate: No. Crazed shooter.

  “Holy fucking shit,” Garrett muttered under his breath. Markov had sent the police to his office—had known exactly where to send them—but hadn’t wanted Garrett arrested. The edges of his vision had suddenly become blurry. He blinked twice to clear his sight, but that didn’t help. He turned to his phone again.

  They arrest anyone? Garrett wrote. Had he spelled that right? Arrest with two r’s or one? He was having trouble remembering things, which was odd, because Garrett remembered pretty much everything.

  No. And then: Where are you?

  Garrett looked around the neighborhood. A vacant lot was to his left, and farther under the train trestle lay a rail yard, idle now, with lines of boxcars and flatbeds stretching off into the distance. But he wasn’t sure where he actually was. Somewhere in Newark. And not a nice part of town either. He hadn’t paid attention when he ran. His cell phone had no maps app, and while a street sign was down the block, Garrett found that he was having trouble focusing on the letters.

  Better explore, then text back, he thought. He took a tentative step forward, but his foot couldn’t find solid ground, and all of a sudden he realized he was falling, toward the soft, lovely dirt, and falling fast. The world around him was twisting, up suddenly becoming down, and down, up. He tried to put his hands out to break the fall, but the earth was rising toward his face too quickly, and the next thing he knew, he was awash in blackness.

  WASHINGTON, DC, JUNE 20, 8:30 P.M.

  No matter how much he argued, the FBI—with the help of two DC Metro policemen—would not let General Kline into Alexis Truffant’s hospital room. He’d managed to get to the third-floor trauma unit of George Washington University Hospital by showing his DIA ID and blustering to the nurses, but getting through that final locked door was, for now at least, an impossibility: no family allowed, no coworkers, no media.

  After his third attempt at talking his way into her room, one of the Metro cops asked him to leave the floor and, when he wouldn’t, escorted him politely, but firmly, to the elevator, then down to the cafeteria in the basement.

  “Please wait here, sir,” the cop said. “Someone will come talk to you. Eventually.”

  Kline paced among the weary residents and anxious visitors, muttering to himself, then bought a cup of coffee and an apple and sat in the corner. He didn’t touch the apple, or the coffee. Instead, he cursed his own stupidity.

  How could he have let Alexis steer events, acceding to her using DIA resources to help Reilly in his insane quest? He should have said, right at the start, that domestic terror was always to be handled by domestic police, that this entire concept—an economic terrorist entering the United States to sow anarchy—fell squarely in the provenance of the FBI, not the DIA.

  “We’re a frigging analysis group,” he whispered to the air. “We analyze. That’s what we do.” He noticed an elderly couple staring at him from another table. He scowled at them, and they looked away hurriedly.

  “Damn it, damn it, damn it,” he said, and got up to pace some more.

  “General Kline?”

  Kline spun and found himself face-to-face with a pair of FBI agents. The first was a man, older, with gray hair and a paunch that protruded from his unbuttoned suit jacket. His face was fleshy, and he looked slightly distracted—maybe
not too happy to be here. The other was a woman, younger, dark skinned—Indian or Pakistani, Kline guessed—and sharp looking, as if she had already sized up the situation and knew all the answers.

  She extended a hand. “Special Agent Jayanti Chaudry. This is Special Agent Murray. We’d like to ask you a few questions if you don’t mind, General.”

  “Yeah, sure, of course.” Kline pointed to the table where his coffee, now cold, and his apple sat.

  Chaudry and Kline sat down, while Murray went to grab a pair of coffees.

  “We just flew in from New York,” the female agent said.

  “New York?”

  “We’re on the Steinkamp case.”

  Kline gave her a sharp look, then nodded vigorously. “I already spoke to two sets of your agents about it last week. And about Garrett Reilly.”

  “I know you did. And thank you for that. But now I’m wondering, in the light of what happened to your captain—”

  “Is she okay?”

  Chaudry stared at Kline, examining his eyes. “She’s fine, sir. They’re going to release her in an hour or so. Some cuts, some bruises. They’re monitoring for concussion symptoms.”

  “Good. Okay. Good.”

  Agent Murray sat down next to Chaudry, slid her a coffee, and sipped at his own.

  “Sorry I interrupted,” Kline said, and immediately he was angry at himself for apologizing. These assholes had kept him waiting for hours; he had every right to know about Alexis’s condition. But he was nervous. Nervous because he had a secret now, and the FBI would undoubtedly want to pick at that secret. But how much had Alexis told them?

  “General, do you know why Captain Truffant was at that Best Buy this morning?” Chaudry asked.

  “No idea.”

  “She doesn’t report to you?”

  “She does. But not her hour-to-hour movements. Not even day-to-day, sometimes. What did she tell you?”

  “Let’s not worry about that quite yet. What projects was she working on?”