The King of Fear: A Garrett Reilly Thriller Read online

  “I like this watch very much.” Metternich pulled out his wallet and slid five $100 bills across the counter, making sure that the clerk saw them and that they were secured with the palm of his hand. He had seen a man who looked like the store’s owner standing in the back, talking loudly on the phone, in what Metternich thought was Armenian. The man was distracted, deep in conversation.

  Jan stared at the money.

  “I’d be willing to pay top price for the watch.”

  “What makes you think I know who you’re looking for?” the clerk asked.

  “You were recruited online. For a job. You and your sister. But you didn’t get it. You weren’t happy about this. There was a darknet bulletin board. You should be more studied in what you post online. Anyone can read those things.”

  Jan frowned. She shot a look across the store to her sister—a look of fear—but Metternich could see that her twin was busy pulling camera bags off a shelf. “I don’t think I can help you.”

  “His name is Markov.”

  “Don’t recognize it.”

  “But you were in contact with someone offering the job. I would pay more for the watch, by the way. If it were a good watch. Verifiably authentic.” He slipped two more $100 bills under his palm.

  Jan shrugged. “I guess I was in contact with him.”

  “How did you communicate?”

  “E-mail.”

  “No phone numbers?”

  Jan shook her head no. At the back of the store, the Armenian hung up the phone and looked out over his business. His eyes landed—and locked—on Metternich.

  “That’s what I know. You taking the watch or not?” Jan said. “My boss sees you.”

  “Yes, please.” Metternich pushed the $700 across the glass to Jan.

  She pocketed the money in a flash. “Enjoy.”

  “One more question. Did anyone you know actually get the job?”

  Jan’s boss was still staring at them and was clearly about to cross the store to them.

  “Would you like to look at some of our cell phones?” Jan asked.

  Metternich let out a low laugh. This was turning into an expensive conversation. But if it worked for him, it would be worth it.

  “Same price?” Metternich pointed to a flip phone under the glass.

  “Same.”

  “I’ll need more than a name. I’ll need a phone number.” He palmed another $500 and placed his hand—and the money—on the glass counter.

  The Armenian was striding toward them. He looked suspicious—and tense. Jan pulled a plastic flip phone from under the counter, opened it, and punched a number into its tiny keyboard. She handed Metternich the phone.

  “Name?”

  Jan hesitated. The owner was fifteen feet away. “Uni. Better coder than me. But I’m cuter.” She yanked the bills from under Metternich’s hand and stashed them in her pocket, just as her boss walked up.

  “Everything good?” The owner of the store stared at Metternich. “We can be helpful?”

  “You have a lovely store. And your employees are extremely helpful.” Metternich held up the watch and the phone. “I’ve just bought two items. And at a fair price.” He smiled at the owner, then nodded appreciatively to the young clerk. “I will recommend you on Yelp.”

  Metternich walked quickly out of the store, took a hard right on Fifth Avenue, and ducked down Thirty-Sixth Street. He checked the number Jan had punched into the cell phone, then entered it into his own phone with deep pleasure. The information had cost him $1,200, but that was cheap. Once he spoke to his contact at the phone company—and paid him as well—and then tracked the location of the owner of that phone number, those ten digits would earn him fifty times that amount of money.

  Satisfaction welled up inside of him. He might not have ever experienced bullets whizzing past his head or seen young men die in the trenches, but to his mind he had just engaged in a skirmish in a war of the future.

  And he had won.

  NEWARK, NEW JERSEY, JUNE 23, 10:15 P.M.

  Deep disappointment washed over Agent Chaudry as she stood in the dark of the concrete plaza in downtown Newark. She had failed to grab Garrett Reilly, yet again, and this time she had been so certain she would find him. Everything had lined up for her—she’d had the DIA on her side, links from Captain Truffant’s phone and from her e-mail, as well as receipts for plane tickets and rental cars over the last week. General Kline had ordered his subordinate to open all her books and records to the FBI, and the information had led them to the seventh floor of the half-finished office tower on Raymond and Market.

  Only they were gone.

  Garrett Reilly and Ascendant had fled before Chaudry and the Bureau got there. Another missed chance. And the pressure was mounting. The Bureau was on war footing: from the murder of a federal official to a domestic terror bombing, the case was now on the front page of every newspaper in the country. The director of the FBI himself had called her that morning, his voice brimming with impatience, explaining that the president’s chief of staff had called him only ten minutes earlier, wanting to know what the hell was going on. They had put three separate teams on the bombing in DC, with a liaison to coordinate their efforts with hers. They had given her two dozen extra agents in Manhattan, as well as a new forensics team from the NYPD.

  And still she wasn’t getting the job done. Standing at the base of the building where Reilly had recently hidden himself, she could only scrape her heels against the cement and wonder where he had gone. She was trying so goddamned hard.

  In order to think like Reilly, Chaudry had immersed herself in the world of patterns: for the last twenty-four hours, anywhere she could possibly find a pattern, she sought it out, wrote it down, studied and analyzed it.

  For instance, seventeen field agents worked in the Manhattan FBI office; thirteen were men, and four were women. But the men were, on average, seven years older than the women, and of the last four hires, two were female, and two male. When she looked up the average retirement age of an FBI agent—fifty-eight—she realized that at the current distribution of hiring, women would outnumber men in the Manhattan office in nine years.

  That revelation made her exceedingly happy. Score one for patterns.

  She categorized the last four digits of phone numbers in her contact list, but found nothing there, so she turned to spending data from the receipts she found at the bottom of her purse. A nice pattern emerged from those pieces of paper: she spent around seven bucks in the morning—on coffee and snacks—then averaged twenty-three in the afternoon, before dropping back down to eight-fifty when she stopped at the Korean deli near her house. She liked that information as well and made a note to be more careful with her credit card in the middle of the day.

  All in all, she enjoyed seeing the world through numbers; she’d always been good at math, and it felt right to her, even if that put her squarely in the cliché of the Indian girl who was a numbers geek. So be it.

  Yet it hadn’t paid off. Reilly’s friendship with Michaela Rodriguez had no pattern. His relationship to Ascendant had no pattern. His running to New Jersey had no pattern. And the part that killed her was that the Newark PD had raided that very same office three days earlier. They had been spoofed, had kicked down the door, guns at the ready, had seen every member of Ascendant—and had walked away. How could they have been so blind?

  She knew how. If you weren’t actively looking for a suspect, that person could be right in front of your face and you wouldn’t notice him or her. The Newark PD was not in the Garrett Reilly business, so he had escaped their grasp. And truth be told, when she read the report of the spoofing, nobody mentioned an office worker who bore any resemblance to Reilly. Perhaps he had fled the premises before they got there.

  But all of this raised another question: Who had spoofed those offices in the first place? Was it this Ilya Markov that
Captain Truffant had gone on about? There was no evidence that he had anything to do with the bombing at the Arlington Best Buy, or the shooting of the Fed president. Yet Truffant seemed convinced he was behind all of it. Was Truffant paranoid? She didn’t seem like the type, but she was an intelligence officer, and they were, by nature, afraid of their own shadows.

  It was all maddeningly complex, an opaque mystery, the veil of which Chaudry was not penetrating. How could this possibly be? She was a master criminal hunter. She did not fail. Ever.

  Agent Murray walked out of the lobby of the building shaking his head, followed by a phalanx of other agents. “Nothing in any of the other offices. We checked every one.” He stopped a few feet from Chaudry and eyed her expectantly. She was still the boss, but her position was becoming tenuous. The director of the Manhattan field office might decide to replace her at any moment; and if that happened, Murray might well step into her shoes. “So, what next?”

  Chaudry clenched her jaw, her eyes sweeping over the landscape of Newark and New Jersey beyond. A soccer stadium was lit up in the distance.

  “Head back to Manhattan. We’ll review what we’ve got.”

  Murray nodded faithfully, following orders, but Chaudry could see the beginning of a gleam in his eye. She was giving up for the day, stifled, and that meant he was one step closer to taking over the case. She didn’t blame him for his eagerness; he had every right to be as ambitious as she was.

  They got in the white Chevy Malibu and drove east, onto Route 9 toward New York, along the elevated highway, past the smokestacks and rotting swamp piers. Chaudry watched the passing scenery with disgust: she hated New Jersey, hated being there, hated being from there.

  “We’ll get ’em tomorrow,” Murray said, as they entered the Holland Tunnel. “Never give up, right?”

  She looked over at her partner, his hands gripping the wheel of the car, eyes forward. Would he do a better job than she would? Perhaps she had gotten too mired in the weeds of the case—maybe it needed a fresh set of eyes.

  “Yeah, tomorrow,” she said halfheartedly.

  They came out of the tunnel into the artificial night of Manhattan and inched through traffic on Canal Street. Murray turned right on Broadway and headed south toward the Federal Building and the FBI field offices.

  Chaudry’s phone chimed, a text coming in. She checked it.

  Where are you?

  She tapped out a reply. Who is this?

  Your bud Garrett.

  She glanced over at Murray to see if he was watching her, but his eyes were glued to the street. She typed, How did you get this number?

  You gave it to me. In an e-mail. Remember?

  Yes, she did remember. Of course. But why the hell was he texting her now?

  Where are you? he wrote again. I thought we had a thing.

  Chaudry tensed. Was he playing with her? Or actually reaching out to her, as she had predicted he would? She couldn’t let him slip away, not this time. Her heart raced as she tried to figure out how to play the situation. She needed to keep him on the line.

  Driving back to the office. Where are you?

  The response was immediate. What kind of car?

  White Chevy Malibu, she wrote. She paused, then typed, In the market for a new ride?

  She pressed her lips together, her body tense with expectation. Was that the right tone to take? She should tell Murray to call the office and dispatch agents to triangulate Reilly’s cell phone, but Reilly would be expecting that; he was smarter than that. She needed to move their relationship to the next level. She needed to—

  “Holy shit,” Murray screamed suddenly, slamming on the brakes. Chaudry’s head snapped forward, her seat belt locking, her chest and shoulders pressing hard against the strap.

  Thump. Someone had slammed their hands onto the hood of the car. Chaudry looked up in surprise, her hand instinctively going for the grip of the Glock in her holster.

  But there, staring through the front windshield of the Malibu, a trace of a smile on his lips, hands on the hood, was Garrett Reilly. The look on his face was one of utter casualness, as if this were all going according to plan, and he had a fun little bit of mischief in mind. Mischief that he couldn’t wait to share with Chaudry.

  “I surrender,” Garrett Reilly said. “Arrest me.”

  PART 3

  DOWNTOWN MANHATTAN, JUNE 24, 7:53 A.M.

  Anthony Marsh had been manager of the D’Agostino’s supermarket on Third Avenue and Twenty-Sixth Street for three years. Before that, he had been an assistant manager at the same store, and before that, produce manager for the D’Ag in Greenwich Village—the one all the way over on the West Side. Marsh, thirty-seven years old, with a closely cropped mustache and a taste for bow ties, liked the work. It was challenging, but not overly so, and required his organizational as well as his people skills. He liked the hours, his coworkers, even his bosses—the D’Agostino family—who dropped in to see how the store was being run every other week or so. But mostly he loved his customers: neighborhood types who came in to grab a six-pack of beer, a box of cinnamon-raisin cereal, or a package of trimmed pork chops.

  Shoppers loved coming to his store, and Marsh loved them for being happy. It was a mutually beneficial relationship.

  But today . . . today made him question everything. Today was a disaster, and rather than getting better, it was getting considerably worse by the minute.

  His shift started badly with the news that the store’s credit-card processing was off-line. That had happened, briefly, in the past, but this outage seemed to be more serious—and was taking longer to fix. Normally, the store’s backup plan was to shift all credit processing to another company, but that backup company seemed to have been knocked off-line as well.

  “Not a problem,” Marsh had told his cashiers. “We’ll do it the old-fashioned way. By hand. Write down the credit-card numbers for processing later in the day.”

  The cashiers weren’t happy about that, but they didn’t have a lot of choice, and pens and notebooks were brought to each checkout line. But it slowed checkout times considerably, and customers got cranky when they had to wait in line to pay and get their groceries. But as Marsh tried to calm nerves at the checkout counters, he learned that his customers had another reason to be cranky that morning.

  “Goddamned ATMs aren’t working,” a young man grumbled as he paid for his milk and ground coffee with his last $20 bill. “All over Manhattan. Nobody’s getting cash.”

  An older man on the same checkout line said he’d heard on the radio that ATMs in Brooklyn were spitting out other people’s money, and that some bank customers’ accounts had been zeroed out.

  Marsh had to scratch his head at that one. Credit-card processing was down at the same moment that ATMs were on the blink? What were the chances of that happening? That had to be like a meteor strike in its rarity. He told his cashiers to let some customers—ones the cashiers recognized—pay on credit, writing down their names, addresses, and phone numbers. He figured most of them would be good for the money, and at this moment of crisis the idea would probably buy the supermarket some goodwill. But he hadn’t planned on other customers, ones the cashiers didn’t know, demanding the same treatment, and getting testy when they were denied the opportunity to pay later as well.

  “You let white people pay later,” an elderly African-American woman hissed at him in the bread aisle. “But black folk gotta pay cash.”

  “No, no, no,” Marsh tried to explain. “That’s not it at all. It’s just that we know those people. They’re from the neighborhood. And a lot of them happen to be Anglo. No, what I mean is . . .” He stuttered to a stop, sensing that his words weren’t helping matters, and the elderly woman shoved past him with her grocery cart.

  He shelved the whole concept thirty minutes after he’d okayed it, but the damage had been done, and he heard a number of pe
ople in the aisles griping about the store’s discriminatory management. Then Marsh realized the bread shelves were only half-stocked, and he hurried to the cramped storeroom at the back of the store to find out why. Marsh found his three stock boys drinking coffee and talking about the dates they’d been on last night.

  “Guys? What the hell? Why is the bread aisle half-empty?” Marsh grabbed the stock list and scanned the room for delivery pallets.

  Juan, the oldest of the three, shook his head sadly. “No deliveries, boss. Nothing since yesterday.”

  “Not possible.” Marsh checked the delivery schedule. “We’ve got five different setups for this morning. Did you call?”

  “Nah, man,” Juan said. “Figured you would.”

  Marsh grunted in exasperation: the stockroom boys were the yawning abyss of his job. “You gotta tell me if we’re short so I can call. Otherwise, how am I supposed to know?”

  “It’s just—you been kinda busy this morning, boss.” Alberto and Michael, the other two stock boys, nodded rapidly in agreement. “What with the bank riots and all.”

  “Bank riots?”

  “That’s what I heard,” Juan said. “Maybe just a rumor. But—crazy out there.”

  Marsh suddenly felt as if he was having trouble breathing. “Just—clean up or something.”

  The stock boys scattered to opposite ends of the storage room.

  Marsh grabbed the landline and looked up the numbers for the delivery companies that were on today’s schedule. He tried the first, CR Logistics, but got a busy signal, which was strange. Their line was never busy. That was the whole point of being a shipping company—your customers could reach you 24-7. He tried the next shipper, but their line was busy as well, and the third, Brown & Franklin Freight Lines, was completely out of order. Baffled, he tried going online to contact the supply-chain management offices of each of the companies, but the D’Agostino Internet server was down.