The King of Fear: A Garrett Reilly Thriller Read online

  Garrett considered what she was faking, what she would hide from him, and then it hit him, and he knew for certain why he liked her so much.

  She didn’t actually believe he was guilty.

  She was pretending, trying to fit Garrett Reilly’s supposed guilt into her view of the world, but she knew that the fit wasn’t right.

  The moment that realization came clear to him, the interrogation-room door opened, and Chaudry reentered, followed by the older agent, Murray, and a pair of younger agents, who stood by the far wall. Chaudry walked wordlessly to Garrett. Her face showed a strain that Garrett hadn’t seen before.

  She pulled out a small key and abruptly unlocked his handcuffs. “Your story checked out. All of it.”

  “It did?”

  “You’re surprised? After all that?”

  “No, I’m . . . I’m pleased.”

  “How nice for you. Here’s the thing, Reilly—as of about twenty minutes ago, the world started falling apart.” She motioned for him to get out of his chair, and quickly. “So stand the fuck up, because you work for me now.”

  WASHINGTON, DC, JUNE 24, 9:08 A.M.

  The call came in to Alexis’s cell phone as she was walking out the door of her condo, to-go coffee cup, as usual, in hand. The person on the other end of the line requested her presence at the New York City FBI field office that day. The caller, a male secretary—Alexis couldn’t remember his name—didn’t leave any room for negotiation.

  “You are expected by noon.” He hung up.

  She called Kline, and he okayed the travel. He told her to do whatever they asked of her. He said he would check to see what they wanted and try to update her before she left. She went back to her apartment, packed an overnight bag, then called a cab to take her to Reagan National. She looked at her face again in the mirror: her makeup covered most of the bruising on her left side, and the scrapes on her chin and cheek. Her body still ached from the blast; her shoulder felt as if it might just pop out of its socket at any time, and the muscles in her hip and leg were raw and painful. She took two Motrin, thought of Garrett and his prescription medications with a bit more compassion, and hoped the plane ride wouldn’t be too cramped or too turbulent.

  In the cab she bought a shuttle ticket from her cell phone, but it took her seven tries before the purchase was finally approved. She thought that was odd. Then, waiting for the ten-thirty departure to LaGuardia, she stopped at a gate for a flight to Phoenix and watched, along with a group of about a dozen weary-looking business travelers, the television hung above a row of seats. The lead stories were all connected, all about the panic that was beginning to grip the East Coast of the United States. The first was about a breakdown in credit-card processing across the Eastern Seaboard. Someone had hacked four financial-services processors and basically stopped all their transactions. Some stores were writing down credit-card numbers to be charged later, but others were accepting only cash. Lines had begun to form outside supermarkets.

  Suddenly, her trouble buying a shuttle ticket on her cell phone made sense.

  But that was just the beginning. The follow-up story was that ATMs belonging to some of the nation’s biggest banks had started malfunctioning overnight. A few were spitting out cash that didn’t belong to the users, thousands upon thousands of dollars in twenties and fifties. But most of the ATMs—especially the ones in Manhattan—had stopped dispensing cash at all. Some bank customers were forcing their way inside branches and demanding their money. No one at any of the affected banks had commented publicly.

  Finally, three separate trucking companies that delivered food and fuel to New York City had all mysteriously gone bankrupt over the past twenty-four hours—or at least they had seemed to have gone bankrupt. Company officers were denying it, saying their books had been altered, but subcontractors had stopped working with the companies until the mess was sorted out, and drivers were refusing to get into their rigs until they were paid—in cash. The companies’ bank accounts were suddenly empty, and their credit ratings had plunged. In consequence, all deliveries from the affected trucking companies had stopped cold, and given that those three companies shipped 60 percent of all the meat and produce coming into New York, little new food was arriving in the city.

  Manhattan, one news anchor commented, was an island that made or grew essentially nothing for itself. If cut off from the rest of the country, it would wither and die, and it would do so quickly.

  A pit formed at the bottom of Alexis’s stomach. A few of the businessmen watching immediately got on their cell phones. Alexis overheard one calling his wife, telling her to get as much cash as she could out of the bank, while another called his office and told them he was canceling his trip to New York. He hung up and stalked out of the terminal. A third, a worried-looking paunchy man in a gray suit, turned to Alexis with saucer-wide eyes.

  “What the fuck is this all about?” he asked, not to Alexis in particular, but to the world at large. He wandered off to make a phone call before Alexis could answer, but she felt that even with what she knew, she couldn’t help him.

  They called her flight, and as she was standing in line to board, Kline rang her cell phone. From what he could gather, Garrett Reilly had surrendered to the FBI in New York and was being held at their headquarters in lower Manhattan.

  “Surrendered himself?” Alexis asked, not fully taking in the words. “Why?”

  “Don’t know. They’re interrogating him.”

  She approached the flight attendant collecting boarding passes. Her mind raced. What had prompted Garrett to give himself up? And what about the other members of the team? Where were they?

  “Whatever he’s done, he did on his own,” Kline said over the phone. “Just cooperate and try to make the best of it. I’ll back you up.”

  “Okay.” Her thoughts jumped from the TV news to Garrett to what the hell they could want from her at the FBI. “Have you seen the news?”

  “No. I just got into the office.”

  “Financial hacks in New York. ATMs, credit-card processing. People are freaking out.”

  “Shit,” he said quietly, and Alexis could hear him rise out of his squeaking desk chair, most probably to turn on his television. “Call me when you land.”

  She hung up, boarded the plane, and took a seat on the aisle in case she needed to stretch. The flight wasn’t long, but she still got up and shook out the kinks in her muscles every few minutes. When she walked through the terminal at LaGuardia, she thought she sensed a stillness among the passengers waiting to board their flights. A quiet anxiety. Or maybe she was imagining it; she couldn’t be sure. She caught thirty seconds of a live TV report from a bank branch in Columbus Circle, something about a window being broken by an angry customer, but she thought she’d better move on and get to the FBI field office.

  She took a cab into Manhattan, and the thickset Slavic driver raced down FDR Drive. The cabbie barked into his cell phone nonstop as he drove, in a language she didn’t recognize, until, head aching, she asked him to stop. He glared at her in the rearview mirror, but hung up, and then a few minutes later asked, “You air-force lady?”

  “No. Army.” She was wearing her fatigues.

  “Sorry about noise. Talking to my uncle. He buys gold for me.”

  “Gold?”

  “In case . . . you know . . .” The driver shaped his finger into an imaginary gun and pulled the trigger. “The shooting comes.”

  “There’s not going to be any shooting,” Alexis said adamantly.

  “Okay, army lady. You say so.”

  When they got off the East River Drive, the cab passed a bank branch with a crowd milling about outside, as well as a supermarket with a line snaking out the front door. Those scenes made Alexis’s heart race.

  The taxi driver smiled. “You see? I tell you. Buy gold, buy gun, stay inside.”

  They arrived at the low
er-Manhattan Federal Building just before noon, where she passed through a metal detector and submitted to a brief patdown, then took the elevator to the twenty-third floor. She presented her ID to a secretary at the front desk.

  “Take a seat, please.” The secretary typed Alexis’s credentials into a computer. “Someone will be with you.”

  Alexis noticed that the secretary didn’t say someone would be with Alexis soon and settled in for a long wait. But she was surprised when Agent Chaudry appeared a few minutes later. Alexis had met her before, in Alexis’s room at George Washington University Medical Center. Chaudry had asked questions, almost all of which Alexis declined to answer, citing national-security grounds. That had seemed to make Chaudry exceedingly angry, and Alexis got the sense that the FBI agent was used to having her way—in all things.

  “We meet again,” Chaudry said, without offering her hand to shake.

  Alexis rose painfully and stood at attention, as rigid and straight as her aching body would allow. “Ma’am, your office asked that I come.”

  “You know Garrett Reilly turned himself in?”

  “I do.” Alexis kept her eyes focused on a back wall, to the right of Chaudry.

  “And he’s cooperating with us?”

  “I did not know that.”

  “As much as he cooperates with anyone, I suppose.” Alexis turned slightly to look at the female FBI agent. Chaudry looked pensive, eyes half-closed. She folded her arms across her chest. “He asked for you.”

  “He did?” Alexis hadn’t meant to sound surprised, but she did.

  “Said you were crucial to the enterprise.”

  Alexis started to answer, then held her tongue.

  “You believe him? All this stuff about Ilya Markov? Attacking the economy?”

  Alexis let her shoulders slump slightly—it hurt her hips to stand at attention. “I do. That’s why I backed him. Because I believe him. And events this morning . . .” She didn’t quite know how to finish the sentence.

  Chaudry moved a step closer to Alexis and whispered in her ear, “He’s working for me now. Not you. He does what I say, or I throw him back in jail. I’ll make up charges: conspiracy, murder, flight from justice. I don’t give a shit. Even if they don’t stick, he’ll sit two years in a federal prison awaiting trial. Same goes for you. I know you called him from DC the day of the murder. There are tapes sitting at the NSA—aiding a fugitive in a capital murder case. Life in prison. So, just like him, you belong to me. You do whatever the hell I say. Understood?”

  Chaudry was standing only a few inches from Alexis’s face. The two women were about the same height, and Alexis could feel the agent’s breath on her cheek and ear. She could smell coffee as well as a hint of perfume—not expensive, but not garish either. Alexis wasn’t afraid of Chaudry, but she didn’t take to being threatened either.

  “What would you like me to do?” Alexis’s voice was cold and hard.

  “I have to solve the Steinkamp case. And keep the economy from going down in flames.”

  “I don’t know that I can help you with either of those.”

  “What you can do is keep Garrett Reilly in line.”

  CITY HALL, NEW YORK CITY, JUNE 24, 12:06 P.M.

  Deputy Mayor for Public Affairs John Sankey pushed open the door to Room 9 and was met with the overwhelming scent of two dozen middle-aged men and women all crammed in a room together: body odor and perfume, coffee and egg-salad sandwiches, breath mints and cheap aftershave. The smells mixed with the din of banter and telephone calls; the result was a place Sankey equated with an unnumbered circle of hell. He let out a disgusted grunt, then held a stack of press releases above his head.

  “Statement from the mayor, press conference in the Blue Room in an hour,” Sankey bellowed above the chatter.

  A few reporters snagged copies of the press release, while most of the others ignored Sankey. They knew canned statements from the mayor were worthless as breaking news; they wanted to fire questions at him. They wanted flesh and blood. Mostly, Sankey knew from experience, they just wanted the blood.

  “His Honor asks that you keep the reporting on the current situation calm and rational.” Sankey was shouting slightly, but trying not to seem desperate. “That you stick to the facts, and not report rumor.”

  The press crew laughed derisively.

  “Have you seen Twitter lately, John?” asked Stan O’Keefe from Channel 7 news.

  “I have a Twitter account, yes, and I check it periodically.” In truth, Sankey checked Twitter obsessively, had scanned it only three minutes ago, and knew he had a public relations nightmare on his hands. #NYCmeltdown was the fastest-trending topic, with thousands—maybe tens or hundreds of thousands—of tweets and pictures from supermarkets and banks all across the five boroughs: lines, broken windows, empty shelves.

  Scarcity, unease, panic.

  “His Honor can ask for all the calm he wants, but social media says otherwise. Twitter says run for your fucking life,” O’Keefe said.

  The room roared with laughter.

  Cripes, Sankey thought. Reporters were cynical bastards. “We do not run this city on the whims of Twitter. Come on, guys, you’re professionals. You report the news, not innuendo and rumor. Do me, the mayor, and the people of this city a favor and do your jobs.”

  DiMatteo, from the New York Post, tossed a Coke Zero into a garbage can. “Our job is to report what the hell is going on, and your job seems to be to deny it.”

  “That’s unfair.”

  “Really? The Dow dropped two thousand points this morning. Had to stop trading. Started again and it went down another thousand. And counting.”

  Sankey wiped the sweat from his face on the back of his suit-jacket sleeve.

  Lorraine Chu, from the New York Times, held up the press release and read aloud from it: “ ‘There is plenty of cash on hand in banks and food in the stores.’ ” She looked from the paper. “Has the mayor been outside lately?”

  A mix of affirmative grunts and low laughter came from the room.

  “He plans to tour a supermarket directly after the press conference,” Sankey said.

  “Tell him to bring his boxing gloves,” DiMatteo shouted.

  “That’s exactly the type of joke that becomes a rumor, and the type of rumor that people take as fact,” Sankey said, growing irritated. “It fuels the mood of chaos and fear, and it becomes self-fulfilling.”

  “Thanks for the lecture,” O’Keefe said. “Very educational.”

  Sankey let out a disgusted groan and headed for the door. Leigh Anderson, from National Public Radio, one of the few reporters that Sankey both liked and trusted, was waiting for him there. She was younger than the rest of the media crew, and considerably less cynical.

  “John.” Her voice was just above a whisper. “A word?”

  Sankey nodded, pausing by the door.

  She stepped closer to him. “We’re working on a story. The gist is, this is a planned attack on the economy. A form of terrorism.”

  “That’s just rumors. And anyway, I can’t comment on that.”

  “Because you don’t know? Or because you’ve been told not to comment?”

  “I can’t comment on that.”

  Anderson nodded, scribbling in her reporter’s notebook. “Got it. You’ve been told not to comment.”

  “That is not what I sa—”

  “Here’s the real thing, John. The terror attack, we’re working on an angle that says this is just the beginning. That there’s something bigger in the works. Like spectacularly scary and disaster-producing big. That’s aimed at bringing the entire country to its knees. We have deep intelligence sources. Do you know anything about this?”

  Sankey pressed his lips together in displeasure, then shook a finger angrily in Anderson’s face. “That is exactly the kind of irresponsible news story that I’m
talking about. That is speculative and rumormongering—”

  Again, Anderson cut the deputy mayor off, with a slashing motion of her hand. “No, John. We’re talking about a terror attack. The point of terror is to instill fear. That’s what a terror attack is all about—it’s baked into the name. Terror. Now, you can deny everything, but it won’t stop us from going to air at four o’clock with the story. So I’ll ask you again. Do you know anything about a coming terror attack against the city?”

  Sankey shook out a kink in his leg, tapping his foot repeatedly against the base of a desk. He let out a hot breath. “Anonymously?”

  “If that’s the only way you’ll talk.”

  “We have heard the same thing.”

  “Muslim extremists?”

  “Don’t know. Possibly.”

  Anderson scribbled in her book. “What is the city doing to prevent it?”

  “Everything it can. No holds barred.”

  “And the city hall reaction?”

  Sankey looked out at the mob of reporters, most of whom had gone back to talking on their phones or filing updates on their stories. The room was loud again, and frenetic. Sankey wanted out of there, fast. He turned to face the NPR reporter. “Off the record?”

  Anderson nodded yes.

  “We are very fucking scared.”

  FBI FIELD OFFICE, LOWER MANHATTAN, JUNE 24, 12:15 P.M.

  As far as Garrett could tell, mass hysteria had been around as long as there had been people congregating in groups. In ancient Rome, mobs of citizens would spontaneously gather in the dead of night, driven by rumors or fear, convinced that Jupiter himself had been spotted on the Capitoline Hill, or that hordes of exotic, savage animals were at the gates of the city, about to overrun it. In the 1500s in France, nunneries were overwhelmed with nuns who could only meow like cats, never speaking actual words. In Milan in 1630, the entire population of that city became convinced that someone had poisoned the food and water supply. The mob dragged a pharmacist from his workshop, and he confessed—on the rack—that he was responsible for the poisoning, and that he had been in league with the devil and unnamed foreigners.