The King of Fear: A Garrett Reilly Thriller Read online

  Garrett found that tidbit intriguing: foreigners were often blamed, but few of them were ever actually found.

  In 1835, Londoners became deliriously happy with the news that newly invented, high-power telescopes had allowed astronomers to see zebras and monkeys on the moon. The news spread around the globe, to mass celebrations, before it was extinguished in the face of absolutely no verifiable facts. On an October night in 1938, much of the Eastern Seaboard of the United States become convinced that aliens had landed in New Jersey and would soon be taking over the planet. Orson Welles’s radio broadcast became a classic example of media-fed mass panic. But it was hardly the last. There would be World War II Japanese-citizen internments, 1950s Red scares, 1980s satanic day-care scandals, and on and on and on.

  The pattern, to Garrett, was plain to see. Certain ingredients were needed. A period of true danger: war or famine or unemployment or civil unrest. A group of outsiders who had been responsible for problems in the past: foreigners, savages, criminals. A population crowded together in tight spaces where rumor and gossip could freely circulate. Big cities were often the starting point of the hysteria, but sometimes it was teens jammed together in schools, or religious devotees hidden away in monasteries. That last part seemed to be important: populations were most susceptible to panic and delusions when the surrounding culture was strict and controlling, with specific rules about what people could believe. When the society had rigid ideas of what was considered normal, and anything outside of normal was frowned upon—that bred hysteria. It was almost as if mass delusions were a form of rebellion against the existing order.

  Garrett pondered that. What were the restrictive conditions in the United States that bred hysteria? Political correctness? Fear of terror attacks? Or was it the opposite, a vast shift in what was considered normal: the acceptance of gay marriage maybe, or the rapid legalization of drugs? Sitting in a small room in the back of the FBI field office in lower Manhattan, a trio of laptops open on a desk in front of him, he read article after article on the madness of crowds. Once a fire was set under a mass delusion, it took on a life of its own, resistant to facts or rationality. It spread like a virus. It some ways, Garrett thought, it was a virus—it infected a host, burned through its immune system, then moved on to the next victim.

  He read one theory that said fear, and our panicked reactions to fear, was cooked into our DNA. If you were an early human, living on the plains of Africa, and you heard a mysterious rustling in the night, you were best served by reacting to that sound, quickly and decisively. Nine out of ten times, it might have been an overreaction, but overreacting to any possible danger kept you alive. The humans who didn’t overreact were eventually eaten. Therefore, only the most paranoid of our species passed their genes on to the next generation.

  That meant humans were genetically programmed to panic. Ilya Markov seemed to have figured this out long ago. How he had learned it, Garrett had no idea, but the man had become a student of delusion, a master of hysteria. All around Garrett, on the streets of New York City, was evidence of Markov’s genius.

  It occurred to Garrett that mass hysteria was the opposite of a pattern. Popular delusions occurred when people attributed causality to events and things that didn’t actually exist, whereas Garrett sought patterns—or in his case, meaning—out of that same chaos. In a way, mass hysteria was his life counterpart; it was why he sought out patterns. Hysteria created fear; patterns subdued it—they were two sides of the same coin. Suddenly he understood that mass hysteria was that dark thing he had felt coming, that he had been terrified of the night before Phillip Steinkamp was shot. He also knew that it wasn’t out there, a storm he could see raging over the horizon. No, delusion and hysteria lived inside Garrett Reilly and always had. He reveled in them; they gave him power. The thought astounded him, but he knew it was true.

  The dark thing was not coming. It was already here.

  He was the dark thing.

  • • •

  Celeste and Mitty were the first to show up at the FBI field office. They had spent the night in Mitty’s apartment in Queens, and Celeste, instead of complaining about it—which Garrett had fully expected—said it had been comfortable, even fun, that they’d drunk wine and talked until three in the morning, and that the shower she’d taken in Mitty’s bathroom this morning was the best thing she’d experienced in days. Garrett was amused that they’d become friends, but it made sense—they were both outsiders to the core.

  Alexis arrived next, having flown up from DC that morning. Garrett was surprised at how unscathed she looked, given that she’d been in a bomb attack, but when he got a closer look at her under the bright fluorescent office lights, he could see the dark bruises under her makeup, and the red scratches and cuts on her chin.

  “Was it scary?” He reached out to touch her face, but stopped inches away.

  “No. I didn’t have time to think.”

  “When I heard, I . . .” He couldn’t finish. What he’d felt when he thought Alexis might have been killed was a mixture of dread and rage that seemed beyond his ability to articulate to another person, particularly to Alexis. “I’m just glad you’re okay.”

  She nodded, saying nothing, and that was all the time they had for personal conversation.

  Agent Chaudry stepped between them, grabbing Garrett by the arm. “She lived. Enough small talk. We have work to do.”

  Garrett understood then that something was going on between the agent and Alexis, some tug-of-war involving governmental politics and police power. He guessed that Chaudry was simply asserting her alpha-dog status, and that Alexis had no choice but to be submissive, but still—their relationship would be interesting to watch.

  Bingo and Patmore arrived a few minutes after Alexis. They had grabbed a motel room in downtown Newark, bunking out together in a Comfort Inn, but seemed no closer than they had before they’d spent the night together.

  “So what’s next?” Agent Chaudry said, once they were all gathered in the back room of the field offices. “What’s the brilliant idea?”

  All eyes turned to Garrett.

  “He’s setting fires. All over the place. You can’t see the fires, but you can see the smoke, and psychologically that’s worse than the actual fire.” Garrett fingered a remote control, and a TV in the corner played a cable news channel. A breathless talking head was going on about shocks to the economy, and what it meant, why it was happening, and what the future held for the citizenry of the United States. “The fear is worse than the actual thing. The fear sets everyone on edge. The fear sets us up for the next shock.”

  “But what is that shock?” Chaudry asked. “What’s he getting at?”

  Garrett thumbed the remote control again, switching to a local channel, where a reporter was doing a live report from an eerily deserted Times Square. A smattering of riot police could be seen behind the reporter, cutting off access to Forty-Second Street.

  “People are going nuts,” Mitty said. “Everybody’s going completely wacko.”

  “And ‘everybody’ is the answer,” Garrett said.

  “How so?” Chaudry asked.

  “Large numbers. Crowds. Mobs. Viral concepts. We turn them around. Make them our allies.”

  “Crowdsource it.” Mitty let out a noise that was halfway between a disgusted grunt and a shout of joy. “Can’t believe I didn’t think of that.”

  “Reddit?” Bingo said. “Twitter?”

  “For sure,” Garrett said. “Maybe start our own site.”

  “All three,” Mitty said. “Fuck it. As many places as possible.”

  “I’m not sure I understand,” Chaudry said.

  Garrett turned to face Chaudry. “People are watching what’s happening, but they’re in the dark, so they’re letting their imaginations run wild. The consequence is, we get hysteria. That’s how Markov operates—from the shadows. That’s how he fans the fl
ames. But if we’re transparent with people—if we tell them what we know—then they’ll see the bigger picture. They’ll come up with their own ideas about what’s happening and why.”

  Chaudry shook her head. “But they won’t be any more right than we are. Or any smarter.”

  “Individually, they’re not any smarter. But collectively, they’re brilliant. If we ask enough people a question, some of them will get the answer right. They’ll predict what Markov is going to do next. And if enough of them guess one way or another, then we’ll have a crowdsourced answer.”

  “A massive predictive algorithm, made up of millions of people,” Alexis said, pleased.

  Chaudry scanned the faces in the room, ending with Garrett. “Well? What the hell are you waiting for?”

  BEACH HAVEN PARK, NEW JERSEY, JUNE 24, 1:28 P.M.

  The first warning came from ClarKent, the young blond hacker.

  “There’s something going on,” he told Ilya, who was smoking a cigarette on the porch. The day had progressed even better than expected, with New York City—and even much of the northeast coast of the country—tumbling into turmoil. Ilya hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours, but that was mostly because he was enjoying every moment of being awake. Awake was alive now, and the prize was out there, just out of reach, but he was closing on it.

  “There are plenty of things going on,” Ilya said. “Which is how it should be.”

  “No, your name. Us. What we’re doing.” ClarKent opened his laptop and set it on a small table. “Crowdsourcing.”

  Ilya looked at the screen. It was open to a Reddit thread titled “What would you do?”—which had more than seventy thousand comments. The thread was the number one topic on the entire site and was trending far above any other question. Ilya’s picture, his passport photo, was at the top of the thread, and underneath was the bulk of the question:

  “Imagine this: Ilya Markov is an economic terrorist trying to disrupt the American economy. He’s killed a Federal Reserve president, hacked credit-card-processing and ATM machines, sent three trucking companies into bankruptcy, and now he is closing in on New York City. If you were Markov, and you wanted to take down the financial heart of this country, what would you do next?”

  Ilya stiffened as he read the paragraph, then scrolled down to look at the huge number of answers. They diverged out into discrete subcategories, with corollary answers spreading out like the branches of an enormous tree. He clicked quickly through them, reading some, skimming some, ignoring a whole swath of others. Some answers were obvious and broad: shoot the president. Rob the Federal Reserve Bank. Bomb the New York Stock Exchange. The spelling was bad and the logic often nonexistent. Other answers were slightly more specific, but equally as implausible: Short Citibank stock. Corner the market in gold. Destroy an oil refinery. But as Ilya scrolled through the replies, targeted ideas began to pop out of the lists, and those ideas were good. Not just good: some touched on what Ilya was actually planning, and others hit the nail exactly on the head. He pushed the laptop away in a burst of angry energy.

  “Are there more threads like this? On other sites?”

  “A bunch,” ClarKent said. “A site dedicated just to that question. As far as I can tell, it went up an hour ago. A lot of activity. Also a Facebook page. A couple of darknet threads as well. There’s probably more—I just haven’t found them all. But your picture is all over the place. You’re fucking famous.”

  Ilya stepped away from the laptop and sat for a moment on a deck chair. He stared out over the beach and the ocean beyond, listening to the waves crash on the sand.

  This was a setback. More than a setback; this was a full-blown counterattack. Reilly was harnessing the power of the Internet against Ilya, just as Ilya had harnessed the power of hacking against Reilly. It was a smart move, and if he went through every single response, Reilly was sure to find one that described exactly what Ilya was planning. But that didn’t mean that he was boxed in. With seventy-five thousand responses on Reddit alone, and more pouring in by the second, Reilly wouldn’t be able to read them all, or to sort and rank them in a reasonable amount of time—certainly not fast enough to stop what Ilya now had in mind.

  But that was the issue. With enough time, Reilly would narrow down the options and figure out exactly what Ilya’s goal was. Without time, all he had were unexamined hypotheses.

  “We carry on,” Ilya said, popping out of the deck chair. “But we double our speed. Tell everyone to keep pushing. More hacks. More companies. Faster. Much faster.”

  “Okay. I’ll tell ’em.” ClarKent hurried back inside the house.

  Ilya found Uni dozing on a couch. He woke her gently, told her to get ready, then pulled aside one of the East European hackers, Yuri S. Ilya had met Yuri S., briefly, two years ago in a club in Kiev. He had a reputation for flawless programming as well as for having a borderline personality. He’d been angry when Uni had snagged the first suitcase of money, but had doubled his efforts and won the second cash prize handily, overwhelming the servers of a pair of smaller credit-card-processing companies, which seemed to have kept him from exploding in an uncontrollable rage.

  “We’re leaving,” Ilya told him. “Now is the time.”

  “I thought it was tomorrow. I thought everything was set for tomorrow.”

  “Change of plans. The timeline has been moved forward.”

  Yuri S. said nothing. He stared down at his computer screen, which was full of hysterical, panicked tweets and doctored pictures of ransacked grocery-store shelves. Ilya could already guess what Yuri S. was contemplating. He and Yuri S. were on the same side, but they were only partners for this exact moment in time. Ilya knew the world of freelance hackers well enough to understand that in a few seconds Yuri S. could shift his allegiance 180 degrees, and Ilya would be staring at a hardened adversary.

  “Perhaps that will cost more money,” Yuri S. said. “Being in a rush. What do the shippers say? You must pay to expedite.”

  Ilya scanned the billiards room: a pair of hackers were working quietly in a far corner, just out of earshot; a third was smoking a cigarette in an easy chair. “Da,” Ilya said, switching to Russian. “No ya ne hochu eto seichas obsujdat’ .” Yes, but I don’t want to discuss it now.

  Yuri S. considered this deeply, and Ilya was again astonished by how brazen hackers could be about their self-interest. They were unashamed of weighing the pros and cons of an offer, right in front of you, as they tried to plot how to get the most out of any employer, legitimate or otherwise. They were little more than con men and criminals, but then again, the rest of the world thought Ilya Markov was little more than that as well. But the rest of the world was wrong: Ilya Markov had something far grander in mind than some paltry amount of cash. Markov had plans for change. Plans and ambitions. Markov could see into the future.

  Yuri S. sighed, as if to signal his desire to keep negotiating. Ilya pressed his lips together in frustration.

  “Trust me,” Ilya said, again in Russian. “I will give you more than we discussed. You will get what you deserve for your service.”

  “Okay. We are good.”

  Ilya let out a quiet sigh of relief. He needed Yuri S., and Yuri S. knew it, so Ilya didn’t have much choice. But three steps further, and Ilya was already planning how to get rid of this selfish prick. Ilya waited for Uni to pull herself together; then the three of them piled into Uni’s Hyundai and headed north, toward the city.

  They drove for an hour, then exited the New Jersey Turnpike near Edison, pulling up at a truck yard just off the Lincoln Highway, across the road from an Exxon chemical-processing plant. Plumes of smoke rose up from cylindrical smokestacks. A side gate to the truck yard lay unlocked, as paid for, and Ilya, Yuri S., and Uni walked through it, Ilya checking the license plates of the enormous eighteen-wheelers parked in the truck yard. He found the truck that he had arranged for and pulled the keys out from under th
e stanchion just behind the left rear-wheel quad.

  While Yuri S. and Uni climbed into the cab, Ilya pulled out of his backpack the second pipe bomb that Thad White had made for him and slotted it carefully into a metal hinge between the cab and the cargo trailer, just above one of the truck’s gas tanks. The bomb had an internal fuse attached to a cell phone, and only Ilya knew the phone’s number.

  Ilya got into the cab. Yuri S. sat in the driver’s seat, with Uni behind him, in the sleeping area.

  Ilya pulled the seat belt down across his chest. “To the George Washington Bridge, please.”

  Yuri S. started the truck engine, and it growled ferociously, as if in direct response.

  WASHINGTON, DC, JUNE 24, 3:05 P.M.

  Congressman Harris had not slept in thirty-six hours. All night he had paced his tiny bedroom in the cramped fifth-floor apartment he shared with three other congressmen, pausing occasionally to look out the window at R Street below, and trying to catch a glimpse of the sky to the east, to see whether the sun showed any signs of rising. He had prayed for the sun to appear quickly, so the day would start, so he could occupy his mind with business or politics or just phone calls. Anything to keep from thinking about her. And what they had done.

  Every time the memory flooded his mind, he felt his face flush with shame. But also with excitement. Sexual excitement. God, she was lovely. And young. And willing. He could barely stand to think of it. Yet the images flashed back into his mind, over and over, on an endless, unceasing loop.

  But now that he was in Washington, DC, far from Rachel Brown, he would be able to resist. He had stumbled, fallen even, but he could overcome the transgression. He would fly back to Atlanta this evening, admit all to his wife, and try to rebuild his life. But first he had to get a grip on himself; he had to shower, shave, put on some clothes. It was midafternoon, and he was still in his pajamas, for goodness’ sake.