The King of Fear: A Garrett Reilly Thriller Read online

  He looked out into the darkness and listened to the sounds of the night. He tried to think back on his subway ride downtown, then the ferry across the bay, and the train and his walk to this isolated marsh. He had sensed a pattern, something just beyond his seeing, waiting out there for him to grasp it. But was it real? Could he trust himself to know for sure? If he stalled just a while longer, perhaps it would all come clear to him. Or perhaps nothing in his life would ever become clearer than it was at this very moment, and that was his fate—to want certainty, and to never get it. Life was entropy and then chaos.

  Garrett took a breath and nodded. “Okay. Kill her.”

  Alexis let out a shriek, a howl of abandonment, and Garrett had to squeeze his hands into fists to keep from jumping out of his skin. He clenched his teeth, then waved an arm in the air, pointing back toward the houses and the lights. “Over there.” He put on a show of not wanting the thing done where he could see it. “Do it over there.”

  “Don’t worry.” Markov put a hand on Garrett’s shoulder and ushered him down the cracked pavement of the abandoned road. Garrett shot a look back over his shoulder and caught a glimpse of the young woman shoving Alexis in the other direction, toward the city, but sideways, into the marsh grass.

  Good Lord he hoped he was right—that all those drugs and all that pain hadn’t permanently clouded his abilities.

  “Is she coming with us? The girl?” Garrett asked Markov, trying to make conversation.

  “Do you want her to? She’s quite smart. And good in bed. I think you would like her.”

  “Seems like we’ll have the pick of the litter, so why bother?”

  “Then she stays here, and we go off on our own. Whatever you want, Garrett. However you want it.”

  Garrett looked over at Markov. He was a shadow in the night, nothing more. Garrett still could not see his face. Perhaps he wasn’t real at all, Garrett thought. Perhaps he was an eternal shadow, an ethereal presence in the night, appearing and disappearing at will. A ghost, a hallucination like Avery Bernstein, a dead man who was fucking with Garrett’s unsteady sense of reality. If so, then he had made a mistake, and Alexis would die. And he would want to die soon thereafter.

  “You still don’t trust me; I see it,” Markov said.

  “Why should I?”

  “Exactly. Why should you? I wouldn’t expect it. We need time. And shared experiences to bond us. I mean, really, isn’t that the anchor of all relationships?”

  Was Markov teasing him? Garrett could no longer tell. A scream pierced the stillness, followed by the sharp crack of two gunshots, one after the other. The sound echoed for a moment, then was carried away on the wind. Garrett shivered, listening for some aftermath of the violence, but there was none.

  Markov slapped him on the back. “Pozdravlyaem! Congratulations. Welcome to the team.”

  Garrett swallowed hard to keep from throwing up. He listened as the wind died for a moment, and the sounds of the marsh and the city rose to his ears. He heard . . .

  Nothing. No birds, no animals in the grass. Nothing.

  He smiled.

  He turned to Markov. “You’re finished.”

  Markov tilted his head to one side, the way dogs do when they can’t quite make out the source of a sound.

  “It’s over. Put the gun away. Or maybe take your own life. Quickly. Before you’re arrested.”

  Markov stepped at Garrett, gun held high. “What are you talking about?”

  “Listen.” Markov stopped and listened. Again there was silence. “Where’s the girl? Why isn’t she coming?”

  Markov craned his head to look back at the marsh. Garrett could just begin to make out his face in the glow of the city across the bay. He was plain looking, much like his passport photograph, but with a hint of emotion as well. Perhaps it was just the moment, the rush of trying to figure out exactly what Garrett was talking about. Or perhaps Garrett was projecting his own feelings.

  “Your girl is dead. Think about it. Two shots. Why would she shoot twice? She wouldn’t. She’d fire once to the head. Doesn’t fit the pattern. The FBI got her. They shoot twice, a double tap. The silence. Doesn’t fit either. The birds, the crickets—they’re spooked. The police are all around us. In the weeds. Hiding. Waiting to take you down. They followed me here, right from the very beginning. They were on the train, on the ferry, behind me on the street. You never had anyone following me, but they did. Too clever on your part. You made a mistake. A blunder. A big one.”

  Markov let out a grunt. Just as when a chess player accepts a gambit—only to realize he’s been tricked by his opponent—the full weight of the situation was dawning on Markov with ineluctable force.

  “I’ll kill you.” Markov pointed the gun’s barrel right at Garrett’s face.

  “Okay,” Garrett said, a calm settling on him. He was ready to die. He didn’t want to die, but if he had to, this was as good a time as any. Alexis was safe, the city would not burn to the ground, and his paranoid theories had been proven right. At least he wouldn’t have to suffer through the headaches anymore. “Just get it over with.”

  And with those words, four gunshots exploded in the night.

  OAKWOOD BEACH, STATEN ISLAND, JUNE 25, 8:47 P.M.

  Pain. Numbness and then weakness. And more pain.

  Ilya Markov knew he’d been shot. He was probably dying.

  He tried to squeeze off a shot at Garrett Reilly, but his arm felt horrifically heavy. It drooped toward the ground, and he heard another shot and felt his shoulder twist.

  He fell to his knees. Shit, he thought, I am certainly dying.

  He heard shouting all around him and saw the sudden glare of flashlights. Men running, women too, coming from everywhere out of the marsh grass.

  God, how had he missed it? How could he not have realized? The gambit, he understood now, had been too great. The risk too large. Once the con at Vandy failed, he should simply have fled the city. But he had wanted to make contact with Reilly. He had wanted to bring the man onto his side. He honestly wanted that, and in wanting that—in wanting Reilly—he had made a mistake. A terrible mistake. Emotion was weakness. And most people—even Garrett Reilly—were just not ready to see the world as it truly was, full up with corruption and treachery and betrayal. The universe was a blank slate onto which only the most disciplined and powerful could imprint their desires. Only he could see what was real.

  Someone shoved him to the ground, then kicked the gun from his hand and pinned his arms behind his back. He suspected that he was being handcuffed, but he didn’t know why. He was dying, after all—didn’t they see that?

  A pang of loss filled his brain, as well as the panic that he, Ilya Markov, man of many names and no country—no home—was about to be no more. He would cease to exist, the horror of all horrors, and would then embrace the void. And with his passing, no legacy would be left behind. He had seen to it that he was invisible, and now in death he would remain so—a ghost passing quietly to the other side. He felt horrible sadness in that, but also a strange feeling of completion. As an end point to his life path, that made sense.

  He turned his head slightly, but the effort was enormous. He felt terribly weak. His thoughts were growing confused. There were memories. Chechnya. Grozny. Palo Alto, for some reason. A moment of tenderness with Uni. A kiss. Closeness. And then words. A blanket of calm. He looked up from the ground and could see Reilly kneeling at his side, looking into his eyes. Was this the last person he would see?

  He supposed it was.

  OAKWOOD BEACH, STATEN ISLAND, JUNE 25, 8:52 P.M.

  Are you okay?” Agent Chaudry jogged up to Garrett and shone a flashlight in his face.

  “I’m fine.” Garrett squinted in the light. He looked down at Markov’s body, handcuffed, lifeless, lying in the dirt. “Is he dead?”

  Chaudry knelt at Markov’s body and checked the puls
e at his neck. “Yes.”

  Garrett tried to sort through his feelings. Was he glad Markov was dead? Absolutely. But did some part of him feel remorse?

  “Where’s Alexis?”

  “Back toward the street.” Chaudry pointed down the road. “But I don’t think she wants to talk to you.”

  Garrett stood up and rushed past Chaudry. A dozen FBI agents were combing through the marsh grass, and Garrett ran quickly past them, toward a clearing at the end of the road, where cop cars, ambulances, and unmarked vans were pulling up and unloading officers, EMTs, and crime techs. The darkened wilderness had blossomed into a melee of law enforcement activity.

  Garrett stopped a beefy cop in a blue Windbreaker. “There was a woman. In an army uniform.”

  The cop pointed back toward the street. “In the last cruiser.”

  Garrett ran past the first four cop cars and stopped at the last one parked in the roadway. Alexis was sitting up front, in the passenger seat. A female cop was behind the wheel. The engine was idling.

  Garrett reached out to tap on the window, but Alexis rolled it down without looking at him. Her eyes were ringed with black. Garrett guessed it was from running mascara. She was clutching a plastic water bottle to her chest as if it were a teddy bear.

  “Tell me you knew,” she said, still not looking at him. “Tell me you were certain there were cops all around us, listening, waiting to save me.”

  Garrett hesitated. Had he known? Had he known for certain? He’d asked himself these same questions before he’d given the order to Ilya Markov—the order to shoot Alexis. Can anyone ever know anything for certain?

  He took a long breath, the cooler air from the bay blowing against his sweat-soaked T-shirt. “I didn’t know. Not for sure. But there was a pattern. Probabilities. I felt them building. . . . But was I certain?”

  She turned to look at him, hurt in her eyes. There was truth, and then there were lies. There was reality, and then there was the veil that everyone knowingly pulled down around their eyes to make life more bearable. Once upon a time, Garrett believed you could believe in all of those things simultaneously. But not now.

  “No,” he said. “I wasn’t certain.”

  Alexis rolled up the window without another word and the police car drove off.

  MINSK, BELARUS, JUNE 26, 9:02 A.M. (GMT +3)

  Belarus State Security officer Nagi Ulyanin waited patiently in line behind the two old women chattering at each other in Russian. Older people still spoke Russian; the youth of his country, they spoke their true native language—Belarusian—every day, all the time. Ulyanin was proud of that, and scornful of the babushkas in front of him. Yet, he thought to himself, he was glad they were voting. That was the point, after all—everyone casts his or her ballot in a democracy.

  Ulyanin was filled with an almost inexpressible joy. Belarus was on the verge of becoming a Western-style country now. Election Day had come at last, the people were voting, and maybe, just maybe, new leadership would emerge from the carnage. And Ulyanin had helped in the transformation. He had worked from the inside of the state police apparatus, a subversive chipping away at the forces of oppression.

  Ulyanin smiled. That old bastard Bazanov had never suspected a thing. Every time he’d called in troops, or more firepower or riot police, Ulyanin had seen to it that the worst companies, under the most incompetent officers, were brought to the scene. And if, God forbid, trained soldiers with true expertise made it to the front lines of the protests, Ulyanin and his fellow fifth columnists inside the secret police made sure they were badly equipped—the worst rifles, old ammunition, tanks with no fuel. He’d even mixed up orders and schedules, guaranteeing that the police arrived too late to make a dent in the protests or, worse, that their arrival time was well-known to the radicals on the other side of the barricades. A hail of bullets was always in store for the government forces.

  Ulyanin glowed with a quiet satisfaction. The process had not been easy, or without personal danger, but it had been worth it. He wondered about Bazanov, that growling, bald Russian son of a bitch. He had chafed under Bazanov’s rule, every single day, the humorless prick scolding Ulyanin for his incompetence or his lack of courage, cursing the backward Belarusian people and their miserable capital, Minsk. He had heard rumors, through the intelligence grapevine, that Bazanov had gone to New York City. That seemed too far-fetched to be believed, yet the gossip had been persistent. There was even a report that he’d been murdered, but Ulyanin discounted that as preposterous.

  What in the world was Bazanov doing in New York City? Ulyanin had seen him in Independence Square, in Minsk, only a few days ago. Had he just picked up and moved his operation to the United States? And why? Spelnikov, a fellow subversive in the state police, had said he’d heard that Bazanov had something to do with the financial craziness in America. That it had been one of his dirty tricks, like hijacking a TV station or busing in gangsters to intimidate voters.

  “On a slightly bigger scale,” Ulyanin had told Spelnikov, laughing. “Hijacking the American economy is harder than paying a busload of thugs to vote in local elections.”

  “I hear what I hear,” Spelnikov had said, and gone back to obsessively rolling his stinking clove cigarettes.

  Maybe Bazanov had been behind that thing in America. Ulyanin wouldn’t put it past him, or the SVR. The Russian president and his Kremlin mobsters were a crazy bunch. They would do anything if they thought it would make them money—or rid them of enemies. But what would the connection be between Belarus and New York City? Ulyanin didn’t think there was any, although he had seen newspaper articles yesterday admonishing voters not to choose the uncertainty of Western free-market capitalism over the solidity of Mother Russia.

  The two babushkas picked up their ballots, grabbed pens, and walked to the table where you marked your selections. That everyone else could see whom you voted for was disturbing to Ulyanin, but at least it was actual voting. Progress was being made.

  Ulyanin gave his name to the pretty young election official. She looked it up, checked it off on her roll book, then gave him a ballot and a pen. “Please return the pen when you are done.”

  “Of course.” Ulyanin moved to the table to fill in the ballot. He made his marks quickly, voting for Anna Shushkevich, the young reform candidate, and the other National Reform Party candidates on her slate. He peeked up when he was done, checking to see whom everyone else at his table had voted for. The two babushkas had marked down Lukashenko, their disgraced dictator of a leader. Ulyanin’s stomach dropped slightly, but then he reminded himself that change rarely came from the older generation. Lukashenko would not win—Ulyanin was sure of this: the past could not hold back the future.

  He dropped his ballot into the sealed ballot box, then gave his pen back to the pretty election official. “Thank you for all your hard work,” he told her, and she smiled happily at him.

  He stepped outside the union hall where the voting was taking place, breathing in deep of the summer’s morning. Rain clouds were moving off to the east, revealing a glorious morning sun. The day was warm and clean and new. He walked down Vawpshasava Avenue, as cars and trucks rumbled past, and Ulyanin decided that he would take the rest of the day off. He would walk to the park, Aziarysca, and sit under a tree and enjoy life.

  As he strolled along, he passed a strange-looking man, thin, very thin, with a hard, pinched face. He wore a slick black suit, even in the heat, a bit like the mobsters of Moscow used to favor. Ulyanin thought nothing of him, smiled, and kept walking, but the man’s face stuck in his memory. Had he seen him before? Did he have something to do with Bazanov?

  “Comrade Ulyanin,” someone called out to him in Russian.

  Ulyanin stopped, surprised, then turned to see who was hailing him. The thin man in the slick suit had changed direction and was striding quickly toward him, only now he was trailed by two enormous men in black T-shirts,
their muscles bulging under their tight sleeves. A shock wave of fear ran the entire length of Ulyanin’s body, and in a flash of insight he saw his future laid out before him: a trip in a car to a deserted forest, a beating, a lecture, more beatings, and then a bullet to the head.

  “We need to talk.” The thin man waved his bony hand at Ulyanin. “Come take a ride with us.”

  Ulyanin jerked backward, away from this ghastly creature, but the goons following him were too quick. They surrounded Ulyanin and held him by the shoulder. Suddenly a car was pulling up at the curb, a black Mercedes, and the back door was popping open. Ulyanin grimaced. There was nothing for it now. He was doomed. Damn it. The day had been so glorious. He struggled to free himself from the grip of the musclemen, but they were too strong. Ulyanin wanted to cry. But, no, he would not. He craned his head toward the bone-thin Russian man in a suit.

  “You cannot hold back the future!” Ulyanin shouted.

  The thin man shrugged, uncaring. “Perhaps not. But we can try.”

  LOWER MANHATTAN, JULY 8, 3:31 P.M.

  Garrett watched the city below through the wide bank of windows at Jenkins & Altshuler and marveled at how rapidly life had gone back to normal; stores were open, banks were solvent, the stock market hadn’t crashed. The American dollar had stabilized. The press had taken to calling it the Midsummer Madness, and only two weeks after it had happened, people seemed to have already forgotten the entire event. The panic and chaos seemed like a distant fever dream: no one was sure it had actually taken place. Perhaps it had been imaginary—a mass hallucination.

  Garrett wasn’t sure himself. At times the memory of it seemed like a nightmare, a drug-fueled episode stoked by his own raging paranoia. Perhaps Ilya Markov was a figment of his imagination—a tale he told himself to feel important. To feel needed. To feel loved.

  Or maybe not.

  Garrett had gone back to work a few days after the incident in the marshes of Staten Island. The other traders at J&A had given him a few odd glances, but only one had had the nerve to ask him what had happened, and where he’d been. Garrett explained that he’d been wrongly accused of the murder of Phillip Steinkamp, and that everything had been sorted out with law enforcement, but more than that he couldn’t really say: “Classified.”