The King of Fear: A Garrett Reilly Thriller Page 22

  He knew what was coming next, and he wanted it, possibly more than he had wanted anything else in his entire life. It reminded him of the old joke he’d once heard from a fellow sci-fi geek—vagina was the fifth fundamental force of the universe. You could not fight it.

  She lived on the second floor, in a one-bedroom apartment with hardly anything on the walls. Harris thought that was odd, but he was too preoccupied to say anything, and plus, he didn’t want to offend her. There was some furniture, a cheap couch and a dining-room table, and a bookcase for sure, packed end to end with paperback science-fiction novels. She showed him her favorite titles—a few Asimovs, a classic Bradbury, two Zelaznys, more Orson Scott Card books, and a whole shelf full of Neil Gaiman. And then, as she was showing him a dog-eared copy of Frank Herbert’s Dune, their hands touched. It was electric. He stared at her, a deer in headlights, and she dropped the book and held his fingers in hers.

  Without another word, she led him into her bedroom. There was a futon in the corner, jammed right under a window and covered with a single sheet. She kissed him once, briefly, then again, and he kissed her back, passionately. Before he knew it, she’d taken his clothes off and was on her knees, and he was in her mouth. The sensation was exquisite. They fell onto the bed and made love for an hour, and every minute of it was ecstasy for Harris.

  When they were done, he lay there on the futon in the tiny, empty bedroom, stroking her young skin, like a puppy dog licking the hand of its master. That was a bit how he felt—like he was a dog and Rachel Brown was his master. How else could he explain his behavior?

  She didn’t say much, just looked at him with adoring eyes, and then his cell phone rang, his office calling, but he didn’t answer, and the reality of the world came crashing back on him. It was three in the afternoon, and he’d just had extramarital sex with a girl almost half his age. He popped off the bed, breathing hard. He had a staff meeting in an hour and couldn’t show up sweaty and reeking of sex. He excused himself, almost tripping over his feet, and asked if he could use her shower.

  “Of course,” she said, and he rushed into the bathroom, but found no soap and no towels either. He rinsed himself quickly, shook himself dry, and threw on his clothes. Rachel Brown was still lying on the bed, curled up in a sexy ball, naked, watching his every move. She seemed oddly amused.

  “I have to run,” he said. “People are waiting for me.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be.” She got up from the bed, still naked from head to toe, and wrapped her arms around him, breasts pressing up against his chest. She kissed him long and slow, and he could feel himself getting hard again, his brain seizing up with passion. She let out a low groan of pleasure, and he thought that he might have another orgasm right there, just from the sound of it, but he pushed himself away from her, finally regaining control of his body, and staggered to the door.

  She followed, catlike, and watched as he unlatched the locks and started for the hallway.

  He stopped, midway, and looked back at her. “That was—”

  “Amazing. I thought so too.”

  He smiled, again involuntarily, and rushed out the door. As he was hurrying down the steps, running as fast as he could back to his old life, he thought he heard a woman’s laughter behind him, and a sudden chill cooled all the sweat on his wildly overheated body.

  IRVINGTON, NEW JERSEY, JUNE 21, 7:19 P.M.

  Garrett woke on a bed he didn’t know, in a room he didn’t recognize. He wasn’t even entirely sure he was awake. The room was dark mostly, but a Mickey Mouse night-light in a far corner threw yellowish light on the walls. The room didn’t seem to be a child’s room, despite the night-light—there were no toys or blankets or posters of boy bands. The room was depressingly brown, and the striped wallpaper was peeling near the door.

  Garrett’s head hurt, severely, as did his shoulder and chin. He felt as if he’d been punched in the mouth, and that somebody had wrenched his arm backward, which maybe they had—he wasn’t sure. He was also thirsty and disoriented and sick to his stomach. His throat was raw, as if he had thrown up numerous times, but he didn’t remember doing that either. He didn’t remember much. Just a dark space under some train tracks, and an old homeless man. Garrett tried to feel for his wallet—maybe the homeless guy had tried to take it—but found that he couldn’t move his right hand to reach down to his pants.

  He squinted into the darkness. His hand was somehow fixed to a radiator grill that stood next to the bed, just under a closed window.

  “What the fuck?” he muttered. He tried to pull his hand away, but couldn’t. When he turned over on his side to get a better look, he could see that his wrist was pinned to a pipe with a length of red flexi-tie. He tugged hard on the flexi-tie, but it wouldn’t budge, and the plastic dug deeper into his flesh. He wanted to yell more loudly, but a weariness washed over him instead. His brain was still fogged in, and that dreamlike feeling began to race through his thoughts.

  Perhaps he wasn’t in a strange room, tied to a bed. Perhaps he was someplace else entirely. But where? He wasn’t sure. He didn’t have the strength to reason it out. His eyes slipped shut and he fell back to sleep.

  • • •

  He woke again, and time had definitely passed. The makings of dawn glowed outside the window: a wash of pink light, a hint of blue in the sky. He was on the second floor, that much he could discern, with a long stretch of grass and fencing beyond the window. More than that, he couldn’t see.

  Garrett’s head still hurt, but in a different way—a less generalized hurt now, and more a sharp pain in his skull. He recognized that pain—it was the pain of drugs leaving his system. It was the pain of real life settling back on his shoulders. He tried to move his hand again, but found that it was still attached to the radiator, and it occurred to him that it had been attached that way for a purpose. To immobilize him. But why? Had he been captured? Had Ilya Markov tracked him down? Was he a prisoner?

  “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 w
as 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 like this.”

  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.