The King of Fear

by Drew Chapman

  But why had they been looking for someone like him in the first place? How did they know an action was planned? This troubled him. Had he been sloppy? He had put out Web feelers for potential associates; he’d offered some cash on the darknet, had made calls to people who trafficked in hacking, but he’d been careful. Perhaps they’d tied him to the cyberattacks in Europe? But how? The money that paid for those hacks came from a fund that he had absolutely nothing to do with. Instead, he had to keep himself afloat with the bits and pieces of cash that wound their way to him through painfully obscure sources: safe-­deposit boxes at rural German banks; handouts at a corrupt Greek government office; falsified refund receipts at an electronics store in southern France.

  Maybe they’d been alerted by the shooting in New York? But endless intermediaries were between himself and the shooter, Bachev, innumerable layers of obfuscation and misdirection. That would have been either a lucky guess or a phenomenal bit of pattern recognition.

  He paused on the sidewalk and breathed deep of the humid Florida air. Being here was like living in a sauna. A sauna mixed with car fumes and barbecue sauce. Perhaps it wasn’t such a bad thing to have lost his clothing; he could buy shorts and Hawaiian shirts. Maybe even a pair of flip-flops.

  Patterns. A predictive algorithm would explain why a pair of suited agents and an army officer had descended on the Motel 6, and not a SWAT team. They had no reason to arrest him and had no idea if he was dangerous. Legally, they probably couldn’t arrest him. They were anticipating events, trying to scare him off. Or simply letting him know they were watching.

  Well, he knew that now, for certain.

  Ilya suspected he knew who was behind this. Like every other hacker in the worldwide underground, Ilya had followed the exploits of the Ascendant program, how it had attacked China so cleverly, knocking the Golden Shield out of commission, poisoning the Shanghai stock exchange, inciting riots in Chinese cities. He wasn’t sure how big it was, or how well funded, but he shared the view of most other hackers that Ascendant was a stroke of brilliance, a modern tool for fighting modern wars, and a dangerous arm of the American government.

  Ilya had also come to believe that he had discovered, on his own, through countless hours of digging, the person at the heart of Ascendant. A young Wall Street bond trader, a math geek with a penchant for seeing patterns with only the faintest of clues. That would match up with how quickly Ilya had been found out. Yet, Ilya had been all but certain that the young bond trader had been neutralized. The Steinkamp killing should have done the trick . . . but perhaps that had been a clumsier attempt than Ilya had originally thought. Perhaps the young Wall Street hotshot was still in the game.

  “Garrett Reilly.”

  Ilya whispered the name quietly to himself, an echo of respect in the saying of it. He knew quite a bit about the man—his education, his work history—and Ilya had to admit to a trace of jealousy over Reilly’s talents. Maybe that jealousy had colored his estimation of Reilly’s abilities. Ilya had been thinking about Reilly a lot lately. Ilya knew this was strange, but he felt close to Reilly. Intellectually close. Emotionally close.

  And now, perhaps Reilly had turned his sights on Ilya. If this was true, Reilly would be a formidable obstacle. Reilly would make Ilya’s task that much harder.

  Well, that’s okay, he thought, as a white Honda—his ride, at last—slowed down on Marina Mile Boulevard to pick him up. If Garrett Reilly is going to come after me . . .

  I can go after Garrett Reilly as well.

  NEWARK, NEW JERSEY, JUNE 16, 4:58 P.M.

  One of the benefits of working at a Wall Street brokerage house was that the company had investments, of all sorts, all across the United States. Jenkins & Altshuler was no exception. The firm had put money into shipping companies, clothing manufacturers, railroads, and real estate. Lots and lots of real estate.

  Garrett knew every corner of the brokerage’s real estate portfolio. He knew which investments were paying off, and which were circling the drain. One of J&A’s worst performers was a still-unfinished office tower just off Raymond Boulevard in downtown Newark. The developer had filed for bankruptcy six months ago; the place was half-empty, with intermittent air-conditioning and plastic tarp over the windows of a unbuilt seventeenth floor. Most importantly for Garrett, it had an unguarded lobby.

  Mitty dropped Garrett a block from the office building, then drove herself back to Queens. Garrett told her she’d probably be under surveillance the moment she showed up at her apartment, and she should act accordingly: go about her life as if nothing extraordinary had happened, wait for Garrett to contact her, and if arrested—demand a lawyer and then shut up.

  Garrett walked unnoticed into the lobby of the Newark office tower just before five, when he knew the security firm came through and locked the front doors. He took the elevator to the sixteenth floor, then walked down, floor by floor, checking each office for an unlocked doorknob. He found three that were both unlocked and unoccupied and chose a corner suite on the seventh floor, partially because it was at the end of a hallway, but also because it shared a utility closet with an IT start-up. Garrett figured he could hack into their Internet connection, and he did. Easily.

  He sat himself in a corner room of the empty, white-walled office suites, with his laptop, a can of tuna fish, and a Diet Coke. The first thing he did was pop a pair of Percocet. He hadn’t been alone for two days, and this was his chance to regain equilibrium. He had half a dozen pills left, so next he hunted online for refills from local Craigslist offerings. A few people claimed to have black-market drugs for sale, but they all wanted bitcoins up front, and no way was Garrett going to risk paying digitally and alerting the police. He would have to start rationing his meds, but that might become difficult. His thoughts were growing more disordered, and that troubled him even more than the tendrils of pain that were snaking out across his brain. He tried soothing himself with a mantra: logic, facts, patterns. Keep the chaos at bay.

  “A to B to C,” he said quietly. “A to B to goddamned C.”

  He checked the news. The market was down again, another three hundred points, and rumors about teetering banks and shaky money-market funds were mushrooming. He did a Google query on his own name, and the search engine came back with more than 17 million hits in under half a second. Garrett Reilly was all over the Web.

  “Son of a fucking bitch,” he said to himself.

  Garrett sampled a few of the stories, even though he knew he shouldn’t. They were all over the place in terms of their accuracy and the wildness of their conspiracy theories. One article said that he was planning on robbing the Federal Reserve; another posited that he was Anna Bachev’s secret husband; a news blog said he’d been to Afghanistan, converted to Islam, and was now radicalized and trying to overthrow the government. The blog also mentioned his brother, Brandon Reilly, writing that he’d been a marine killed in action, and that Garrett’s rage at the United States had led him to convert. Garrett had to give the blog writer credit—it was at least half-true. He quit reading after that, but not before looking up the DNS host server of the site that mentioned his brother, finding an open port on their system, and launching a Denial of Service attack against them.

  “Suck on that, asshole,” he said as he hit send on his Low Orbit Ion Cannon program. The Ion Cannon would send ten thousand queries to the blog’s server in the next few seconds, and another fifty thousand soon after that, with more to come. The site would crash in minutes. He knew it was childish, but it made him feel better, and while he felt he had matured some over the last year, he hadn’t matured that much.

  Next, he logged on to his various e-mail accounts, always through an anonymous darknet router so he wouldn’t be pinged. Special Agent Chaudry had sent a short note to his J&A e-mail, thanking him for the call and promising to be in touch soon. Garrett thought that was cute, but didn’t respond. She seemed smart, and on the ball, but she could wa
it awhile. Hell, she could wait forever. He needed an update from Alexis, and he got it a few minutes later, when he checked the account he reserved for Ascendant communications.

  The e-mail read simply, He’s real. He’s in the States. We missed him.

  • • •

  She flew into Newark Airport, rented a car, and met him in Riverbank Park, a playfield and grass park that stretched along half a mile of the muddy Passaic River. The park was mostly empty when they met, at eight thirty that night. A cop patrolled the pathway that meandered along the river, but he paid them no particular attention. He seemed more interested in a half dozen teenagers horsing around on a swing set.

  “Matched all your criteria,” Alexis said, sliding a pair of printouts across a concrete picnic table near a softball diamond. “He landed last night.”

  Garrett stared at Alexis. She was in civilian clothes—jeans and a plaid shirt, her hair down around her shoulders—and even in the fading evening light Garrett still thought she was beautiful: high cheekbones, blue eyes, olive skin, and long, elegant fingers. Yet, now that he was seeing her again and had spent an hour in her apartment the day before, reliving old memories, he found his attraction to her muted. Why had he been so crazy about her? He was no longer sure. They were such opposites. Perhaps, he told himself, he just wanted a friend. He had so precious few left.

  He separated the two pieces of paper, read the first, then the second. They contained two color passport photos and a few lines of information, and nothing else.

  “Ilya Markov? That his real name?”

  “One of many.”

  “And that’s all we know?”

  “So far,” Alexis said. “That’s his entire known profile.”

  “He went to the Moscow State Technical University. They must have rec­ords.”

  “I’m working on that. The provost there is not being particularly helpful.”

  “The Russian government told him not to be.”

  “Possibly.”

  “Friends, coworkers in the Bay Area?”

  “I made a few calls. So far, very little. Unremarkable guy, smart, kept to himself.”

  “English skills?”

  “Fluent. No one can remember an accent.”

  Alexis dropped a thick paperback on the table. “We found this in his room. Along with some clothes. Nothing else.”

  Garrett thumbed through the copy of Cryptonomicon. He read the blurbs on the back cover. The book seemed to be about hacking and code breaking. It was a book Garrett would have read himself, which gave him pause.

  “Could you be wrong?” Alexis asked. “Could this all just be coincidence?”

  “Sure. He could be another Russian student wandering the States, looking to get laid. But I don’t think so. And the fact that he fled his motel room after you guys showed up doesn’t put him in a particularly positive light.”

  “Maybe he was looking to overstay his visa. He wants to live in the States. When he saw us he panicked.”

  “You don’t want it to be true.”

  “No. I don’t. I mean—” Alexis hesitated. She seemed to gather herself, watching Garrett all the while. The suspicion in her look was gone. Garrett sensed that she’d stepped over some kind of line in her head: she believed him now, she was on board. “What is he planning, Garrett? If you have some sense, you need to tell me.”

  Garrett considered this for a moment, then said, “I want you to meet someone.”

  • • •

  She drove the two of them into Manhattan by way of the Holland Tunnel, hoping that the blackness of the night and a rolled-up window would make it hard for anyone to recognize Garrett’s face. They found street parking on Columbus Avenue, near Ninety-Fourth Street, then walked to a small brownstone just west of Central Park. Garrett rang the doorbell, and after about a minute the door opened and a frail-looking woman in her seventies appeared. She wore a light-blue, quilted nightgown and a pair of librarian’s glasses on the bridge of her nose. She was tiny, considerably less than five feet tall, but Alexis immediately had the impression that this woman had once been a force of nature and perhaps still was.

  “Hello, Garrett.” She smiled warmly.

  “Professor Wolinski.” Garrett’s voice had a tone of respect and humility that Alexis wasn’t sure she’d ever heard before. “I’m sorry to show up so late.”

  “I saw your picture on the news.” The woman had a thick Eastern European accent. Polish, Alexis decided. “And all hell is breaking loose in the markets.”

  “I didn’t do it,” he said.

  She looked at him long and hard with her tight, flinty eyes, then nodded, and opened the door wide. “Of course you didn’t. But you’d better not stand on the street, regardless.”

  She ushered the two of them into a dark living room, then drew the blinds and turned on a light. The walls were lined with books, thousands of them, textbooks and novels in a scramble of languages, stacked from floor to ceiling, like what Alexis imagined a turn-of-the-century Parisian literary salon would look like.

  “Professor Wolinski, this is Alexis Truffant. She’s an officer in the US Army. And a member of the team I worked for.”

  “Ah, yes, the Ascendant project.” Wolinski looked Alexis up and down. “Avery Bernstein told me all about it. Secrets and spies and the military. So, a forward question, if you don’t mind my asking: Did your people kill Avery?”

  Alexis blinked in surprise. “No, ma’am, we had absolutely nothing to do with that. It was a tragedy.”

  “It was,” Wolinski said slowly. “I loved Avery very much.”

  Garrett stepped between them. “Alexis, this is Professor Agata Meyer-­Wolinski, dean of the economics department, Columbia University. Wrote the definitive multidimensional scaling algorithm for currency-rate fluctuations. Short-listed for the Nobel in economics. Hasn’t won it. Yet.”

  Wolinski smiled wryly. “Ah, flattery. You know that you were Avery’s favorite pupil”—Alexis saw Garrett smile—“and least favorite employee.”

  Alexis laughed. Even though Wolinski had challenged Alexis, Alexis liked her. Wolinski had opinions, but also compassion. She was sly, and not beyond pushing people’s buttons, or challenging authority. Alexis could see why Wolinski and Garrett had an affinity for each other.

  Wolinski folded herself in a dark, red armchair with faded upholstery. “But that is not why you are here. With a representative of the US military. And the FBI on your trail. What do you need from this old woman, Mr. Reilly?”

  Garrett scanned the room, as if contemplating what it was, exactly, that he wanted from Wolinski. “We’ve been tracking global events. There’ve been connections. A little tenuous, but . . .” He stuttered for a moment, but then gathered himself and started again. “Could a determined terrorist explode the American financial system?”

  Wolinski seemed unsurprised by the question. She issued a low grunt, more curious than concerned, then shook her head back and forth a few times, as if considering the issue. She turned to Garrett. “Would you get me a glass of wine? There is a bottle of red on my kitchen counter.”

  Garrett nodded and left the living room. Wolinski polished her glasses, put them back on the bridge of her nose and studied Alexis. “Are you a couple?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “But you were once,” Wolinski said without hesitation.

  Alexis didn’t answer. She just watched Wolinski in the darkness.

  “He’s a good boy.” The professor bit gently at her lower lip. “But he is dangerous, certainly. He owns a cornucopia of faults. That might impede a relationship, I suppose.”

  Alexis wanted to say, No shit, but thought better of it.

  Garrett returned with a glass of red wine and handed it to Wolinski.

  “Thank you.” She sipped the wine. “Please, take a seat.”

  Alexis and Garre
tt sat on a couch opposite the professor.

  “This terrorism. It is coming now?” Wolinski asked.

  “I think so,” Garrett said.

  “You know why?”

  “No.”

  “It would help to know why.”

  “We’d be guessing.”

  Wolinski thought about this, nodding her head slowly. Alexis could see the old woman’s eyes dancing back and forth in the darkness, as if taking on the mental challenge of the question.

  “We need to know if the threat is real, Professor,” Alexis said. “In your opinion, could it actually happen?”

  Wolinski sat up slightly in the chair and looked at Alexis, locking in her gaze.

  “In 2005 there were two billion connected devices,” Wolinski started in a slow, steady tone, as if talking to a roomful of undergraduates. “In 2010 that number had tripled. Next year, there will be sixteen billion connected devices in this world. We create two point five quintillion bytes of data every day. That is information that gets sent around the world in milliseconds. This is a good thing. A blessing. It represents openness and truth. It represents an increase in global learning and education. When I was a young girl in Warsaw, if a neighbor had a library of a hundred books, he or she was considered wealthy and learned. Today my granddaughter stores a thousand books on her cell phone. For an old woman like me this is a miracle. For my granddaughter it is ordinary.”

  Alexis smiled, but remained quiet. Wolinski had a certainty, a clarity. She seemed to know, not guess.

  “Garrett’s mentor Avery Bernstein made his fortune through the trafficking of data. He used it to buy and sell stocks and bonds to his—and his clients’—advantage. Information came to him in moments, and he passed it on moments later. In the intervening seconds he bought low and sold high. For Avery, another blessing. But he saw what happens when that information becomes dangerous. When a small trickle of information becomes a flood of data, real or imagined, and overwhelms our ability to sort truth from fiction. This is a real phenomenon.”