The King of Fear: Part Two: A Garrett Reilly Thriller Read online

  “Fuck you. Don’t be a knee-jerk enabler of your drug-addict friend,” Celeste shot back.

  “Okay, okay.” Alexis put her hands out for calm. “Let’s take it down a notch.”

  The team sat quietly, then Alexis nodded to Mitty. “We get that you’re loyal to Garrett, and that’s fine, but we can’t have someone leading us who is completely wasted. I mean, he needs to be able to differentiate between imagination and reality—”

  “You really think he can’t tell the difference between—” Mitty started to say.

  “I’m just saying that we need to be able to trust him,” Alexis said. “This is a murder case. And a possible terror attack. Garrett needs to be clear about what is going on in the world around him. Without that, he’s useless to us.”

  “So what are you suggesting?” Mitty asked. “We abandon him? Walk away? Because listen, Garrett is wanted by the FBI, and I don’t think he did it. And neither do you, right, or you wouldn’t be here. We leave, then he’s on his own, he probably gets nabbed. And whatever we are trying to stop definitely happens.”

  “Valid point,” Alexis said.

  “Fuck yeah, valid,” Mitty said.

  “We should vote on it,” Bingo said just above a whisper. “We stick around or we go.”

  “No. That’s bullshit,” Mitty said. “This ain’t a democracy.”

  “I think it’s a good idea,” Celeste said. “We make a decision as a team. It’s binding. Stay or go. We all abide by the vote.”

  “I’m good with voting,” Patmore said.

  “Same,” said Alexis.

  Everyone looked to Mitty, who grimaced, then said, “Fine,” but she did not look happy about it. “If you bitches vote to leave, and then that Russian asshole does some nasty shit, well, it’s gonna be on your heads. I’m just saying.”

  Alexis looked at each member briefly. “Show of hands. Who thinks we should close up shop, quit Ascendant?”

  Celeste’s hand shot up. A moment later, Bingo raised his hand as well.

  Mitty stared at him, eyes narrowed to slits. “Really? Really?”

  “If you’d seen him yelling at nobody in that room,” Bingo said, “you’d do the same.”

  Mitty made a hissing sound between her teeth and looked away.

  “Okay, who wants to stick around?” Alexis asked.

  Mitty raised her hand, as did Patmore. They held them up as Celeste turned to Alexis. “Two to two. It’s up to you, Captain.”

  Alexis frowned. The dawn outside the window was beginning to turn the sky light blue. She could see the silhouettes of the towers of Manhattan in the distance, tiny against the immense sky overhead.

  “The decision is yours,” Mitty said.

  Alexis let out a long breath, as if she had truly not made up her mind until this point. The sun shone a sliver of yellow over New York City. She nodded briefly to Mitty, raising her hand. “One more chance. He gets one more chance.” Then Alexis stood up and walked out of the conference room.

  CHARLOTTE, NORTH CAROLINA, JUNE 19, 9:42 A.M.

  Ilya Markov read his latest text message, then deleted it, pleased, as he ducked into a liquor mart on Wilkinson Boulevard, west of downtown Charlotte. The text had been from Rachel Brown, an update on her encounter in Atlanta, and so far, so good, at least as far as Ilya could tell. Rachel was enigmatic, saying she and Harris had made contact, and that the congressman had seemed intrigued, but she didn’t elaborate.

  Ilya was okay with that. He trusted Rachel, even if he couldn’t say why, exactly—something to do with the flat, almost detached quality of her personality. When you gave people like that a task, they just did it and didn’t ask too many questions. She was a bit of a sociopath, and that was fine with him. In his line of work, sociopaths made excellent coworkers.

  Inside the decrepit liquor mart—EDDIE’S JUNIOR MARKET, the broken plastic sign read—Ilya pulled an iced tea from the cooler and lingered over the newspaper rack, perusing the headlines of the Charlotte Observer and USA Today. The Steinkamp murder was all over the front page, but so were smaller articles on the state of the economy. The Dow had lost another three hundred points yesterday, making it a thousand for the week, and rumors were flying about phantom bank runs and looming credit shocks. Ilya took a moment to relish the news; he’d set a rock in motion down the side of a mountain, and that rock would soon gather company—and become an avalanche.

  Ilya passed on the papers—he got all his news online—and approached the register. He had the iced tea in one hand, and with the other he held a blue work shirt and a pair of blue work pants, both hung on metal coat hangers and slung over his shoulder. He’d bought them twenty minutes ago from a Goodwill down the block, and together they made a spot-on service uniform, which was exactly what Ilya needed. With a needle and thread, and an hour to do the work, he would have a new persona ready for tomorrow morning.

  He laid the iced tea on the counter and looked up at the large, unshaven clerk behind the register. He had muttonchop sideburns, his long hair pulled back in a ponytail, and he smelled of coffee and cigarettes. A small television played at his elbow, a morning news-talk show, and Ilya could hear the male and female hosts chatting in solemn voices about something heinous, or what they wanted their audience to believe was heinous, although he couldn’t see the picture on the screen, as it was turned away from the counter.

  “And a pack of Camel unfiltered,” Ilya said, pulling out his wallet. He laid a $20 bill on the counter.

  The clerk grabbed a pack of cigarettes from the rack, dropped them on the counter, looked up into Ilya’s face, and stared. And kept staring.

  His eyes shot back to the TV, and then to Ilya again.

  Ilya smiled, surprised at the intensity of the man’s gaze, then tapped the counter. “What do I owe you?”

  The clerk rang up the sale, slowly, methodically, then said, “Eight-fifty.”

  Ilya nodded to the twenty on the counter, and as the man took the money, Ilya felt a hollowness in his stomach, an instinctive dropping-out in his gut that was telling him something was very wrong here. Ilya relied on his instincts to steer him clear of danger; they had saved his life—or at least kept him out of jail—on any number of occasions, and they were howling at him at the moment.

  “Passing through?” the man behind the counter said.

  Ilya shook his head. “No. I live down the block. Just moved in.” He smiled as he said the lie, trying to keep his voice affable. Friendliness got you what you wanted a lot faster than confrontation, Ilya had learned in his years in the game, and now he just wanted his change and to get the hell out of the store.

  “Really? Down the block? Not a lot of people live around here. Like, maybe no one.” The clerk shot a curious glance at Ilya, then pulled cash from the register and laid it on the counter. As Ilya reached for his money, the man slapped a beefy hand on top of Ilya’s, fingers wrapping around Ilya’s wrist, pinning his hand to the Formica.

  “Amber Alert, asshole,” the clerk barked, all friendliness gone from his voice.

  Ilya tried to pull back his hand, but the man was remarkably strong. Ilya racked his brain, panic growing, trying to remember where he’d heard the term Amber Alert before. Was that some sort of police warning? Ilya was not particularly powerful, and when brute force needed to be applied to a situation, he always found himself at a disadvantage. His left hand still held the uniform draped over his shoulder.

  “Where’s the kid?” the clerk growled.

  “What kid? What are you talking about?”

  “You know what the fuck I’m talking about. The boy you snatched. You’re not moving from this store until the police get here. Fucking child molester.”

  Ilya grimaced. He dropped the hangers with the pants and shirt and tried with his free hand to pry the clerk’s meaty paw off his wrist. But the clerk’s grip was like a vise. The clerk g
rabbed a phone and was about to dial with his left hand when Ilya decided: he had only seconds to fix the situation.

  He grunted hard and held his breath, forcing the blood to his head, then began to shake—all over his body. He went into spasms. Spit sprayed from his lips. He knew, from practice, that he looked terrifying, like a man having an epileptic seizure, face dark red, head bobbing back and forth. Sure enough, the clerk stared at Ilya, mouth sagging open. He released the pressure on Ilya’s hand for just a moment, gasping, “What the fuck”—and that was his last mistake. Ilya wasn’t about to give him another chance.

  With one fluid motion Ilya yanked his hand back from the clerk’s grip, grabbed the bottle of iced tea from the counter, and smashed it into the clerk’s temple, just above his eyes. The bottle shattered, sending glass and iced tea raining to the ground, and the jagged, broken end of the bottle that remained in Ilya’s hand raked across the clerk’s eyes and forehead. The clerk screamed, dropping the phone and bringing his hand to his bloodied face. Ilya reared back with that same jagged bottle end and rammed it into the clerk’s throat, twisting once, and slicing into his Adam’s apple and windpipe.

  The sound was gruesome, the snap of tearing flesh, and the clerk gurgled another cry of pain and terror, then fell back onto the floor behind the register, gasping for breath and trying to keep the blood from spouting from his neck. Ilya watched him, trying to determine if the man would die, and decided, without much data, that he would not. Not yet, at least.

  Ilya reached over the counter and hung up the phone, then grabbed the small TV and turned it toward him. On-screen, two anchors, a young woman and an older man, were sitting on stools and chatting in a carefully manicured broadcast studio, with the name Charlotte Today projected onto the lower third of the screen. Ilya didn’t pay attention to what they were talking about because behind them, on a screen in the back of the studio, was his own passport photo, enlarged halfway from the floor to the ceiling, his eyes staring into camera. The name Ilya Markov was written below the photo in a faux Most Wanted typeface. The words Amber Alert accompanied his name.

  “Sukin syn.” Ilya pressed his lips together and quickly wiped his fingerprints from the plastic of the television and the phone. Son of a bitch. Rage shot through his body; a blinding-hot fury. He knew immediately who had done this, and he could even guess how it had been pulled off, and his first thought was of bloody retribution. But now was not the time to contemplate revenge. His situation was too perilous. Everything needed to be put right, and quickly, before payback could be planned.

  He looked back down at the clerk—rolling on the floor and struggling to get air into his lungs—and made a snap decision. He vaulted over the countertop, found a large, jagged piece of glass from the iced-tea bottle, and sawed powerfully at the clerk’s throat, finishing the job he had started a minute earlier.

  The clerk tried to howl, but the noise wouldn’t come, drowned out by the blood and the air rushing from his cut throat. Ilya watched him die, eyes glancing back at the liquor mart’s front door every few seconds. He remembered the first time he had watched someone die, as a child during the Chechen war. He and a band of friends had found a wounded Russian soldier hiding in a bombed-out basement, unarmed and begging for help. Instead of aiding him, Ilya had convinced his friends to cover the soldier in chunks of broken cement, piece by piece, the soldier pleading for his life, until the weight of it forced the air from his lungs. The Russian soldier had invaded Ilya’s homeland, killed innocent people, and so Ilya had in turn killed him for his crimes.

  He hadn’t enjoyed it, just as he wasn’t enjoying killing the clerk, but he found that he could turn off a part of his brain when he did horrible things, so that the nature of what he had done didn’t cause him consternation—or slow him down. That on/off switch in his thinking was a useful tool, and the switch was currently in the off position. He suspected it might have to stay that way for a while.

  When the clerk stopped breathing, Ilya leapt the counter again, locked the front door, and wiped any surfaces he thought he might have touched. That done, he spotted a closed-circuit video camera in a ceiling corner, found the camera’s DVR in the back room, and erased every image on it from the last hour. When he discovered that the machine wasn’t Net connected—and that no other images were stored anywhere in the liquor mart—he went a step further and opened the machine with a screwdriver he’d found beneath the cash register, removed the hard drive, and slipped it into his pocket for later destruction.

  When he was finished, he carefully grabbed a replacement iced tea and two packs of unfiltered Camels, draped the uniform shirt and pants back over his shoulder, and slipped out the store’s back door to head north, to get as far away as he could from Charlotte, North Carolina, as fast as he could, and to repay the favor that Garrett Reilly had just done him.

  HUNTS POINT, BRONX, JUNE 19, 11:15 A.M.

  Celeste Chen cursed her arrogance as she checked the addresses on the buildings on Lafayette Avenue in the Bronx. She had been sure everyone in Ascendant would agree with her—that Garrett was a drug addict and that they needed to abandon this insane mission immediately. She was even the one who suggested that the vote be binding. There was no way she could lose. But she did. And now she was fucked, because what she really thought she should do was climb back on a plane and head to the West Coast.

  Instead, she was in the Bronx, looking for Anna Bachev’s apartment.

  “The FBI has been all over this,” she had told Garrett that morning. “There’s nothing we’re gonna find out about Anna Bachev that they don’t know.”

  Garrett had nodded calmly, as if he were some elder statesman, which drove Celeste nuts. “True, but the FBI aren’t sharing data with us, so we need to find out on our own.”

  So off she went to the Bronx. She’d never been there before, and she’d been expecting towering projects and gang members fighting in the streets. But Hunts Point, while poor and mostly black, was nothing like that. There were markets and offices, tidy apartment buildings, and seemingly happy women pushing baby strollers. It seemed like any other working-class neighborhood in a big city.

  “Look for details,” Garrett had said back in Newark. “Remember—he exploits people’s weaknesses.”

  Celeste found Bachev’s building—764 Bryant Avenue—and knocked on the manager’s door. The manager, a dour-looking Hispanic woman in her fifties, listened to Celeste claim to be from a legal aid foundation that was working for Anna Bachev’s family, then slammed the door in Celeste’s face. Celeste could hear her cursing in Spanish as she bolted locks and turned up the television.

  Celeste stepped outside and called Garrett on the burner cell phone he had given her. They had agreed to not use names when they spoke, and to avoid all specifics of place or time.

  “Manager told me to get lost,” she said. “And some other stuff, but it was in Spanish.”

  “Expected. Check local stores, markets, whatever. See if they know her, know anything about her.”

  Celeste sighed. She couldn’t imagine a task she could hate more than starting conversations with strangers and trying to extract information from them. Garrett seemed to sense that over the phone. “You did it once, brilliantly. You can do it again.” He was referring to China, and the detective work she had done there. He was right, she had been good at it, Celeste thought, but that still didn’t make it any easier.

  She found a Starbucks down the block on Lafayette Avenue, bought herself a latte, and tried to make conversation with a pair of baristas, but neither of them had even heard of Anna Bachev.

  “Don’t follow the news much?” Celeste asked, even though she knew she shouldn’t. It amazed her how badly informed Americans were at times.

  The baristas, a young girl with purple hair and a boy with dreadlocks, stared at Celeste with blank faces, and she backed quickly out of the coffee shop. She stopped in a market, but the Korean owner bar
ely spoke English; then she peeked her head into a dry cleaner’s and a pawnshop, but those also seemed like a dead ends.

  She called Garrett again. “Nothing.”

  “All right, come back,” he said, disappointment in his voice, and hung up.

  Celeste immediately hated herself for caring what he thought. She stood on the corner of Hunts Point Avenue and tried to think of any other angles she could exploit. Beater cars cruised past her, and a young man whistled at her from a gold-painted Camry. A Chinese restaurant was on the corner, and at the side entrance an old Chinese woman sat on an overturned plastic pail, peeling the leaves off a pile of bok choy.

  Celeste walked up to the old woman. “Nín hăo.” Hello.

  “Nín hăo.” The old woman didn’t look up.

  “Wŏ shi jĭngchá” Celeste said. I work for the police.

  The old woman stared up at Celeste, then studied her from head to toe without saying a word. From the look on her face, Celeste could tell that the old woman didn’t believe a word of it. But she shrugged nonetheless and continued in Mandarin, “What do you want?”

  “I am trying to find out about the woman who lived here, the woman who shot the banker in Manhattan. Her name was Anna Bachev.”

  The old woman went back to peeling the leaves off the bok choy.

  “Did you know her?”

  The old woman shrugged.

  Celeste took that as a yes. Her pulse quickened. “She came here sometimes? To the restaurant?”

  Again, the woman shrugged.

  “How often did she come to eat here?”

  The old woman stopped peeling and took in the sky for a moment. “Not so much lately.”

  Celeste smiled. The old woman was talking. That was good. “Why not lately? Do you know?”

  “Very sad.”

  “Depressed?”

  “Yes.” The old woman nodded. “Very depressed. This country makes people depressed.”

  Celeste nodded. There was truth in that. Especially if you were peeling vegetables on the sidewalk in the middle of the Bronx on a hot summer’s day. But there was something else the old woman wasn’t telling her. “Yes, it does. Makes me depressed sometimes too.” Celeste waited a moment. “Was there anything else?”