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

by Drew Chapman

  He filled them in on Markov’s latest movements, his arrival at the Miami airport, his trip to Fort Lauderdale, and his disappearance from his motel room. Garrett told them whom he thought Markov might hire—social engineers, hackers, and garden-variety criminals—and about the money he suspected Markov had at his disposal.

  Then he told them what he believed Markov was trying to accomplish: sow chaos. Reap anarchy. Blow up the US financial system. Bring down the economy.

  “Is that even possible?” Celeste asked.

  “I don’t know,” Garrett said. “But he’s going to try.”

  “Why’s he doing it?” Bingo asked.

  “That’s part of what we have to figure out,” Garrett said. “A large part.”

  He told them about his suspicions about Russia, and the events in Belarus. As the room fell into a collective silence, Garrett surveyed the reassembled Ascendant team. Both Bingo and Celeste looked tired and travel-worn. Celeste still appeared angry, but she seemed to have set her rage to a low boil; if Garrett could keep her focused on the task at hand, maybe the rage would leak out of her system. And Bingo—well, Bingo just seemed lost and a bit scared. But as Garrett remembered him, Bingo always seemed lost and a bit scared.

  Mitty, sitting next to the two of them, was calm, a Diet Coke clutched in one hand. Garrett took that as proof that she was still working on her half-baked diet cleanse; he’d already found two containers of fat-free cottage cheese in the minifridge in the kitchen. She’d spent the day winding her way to Newark, trying to make sure no one followed her: subway, bus, taxi, on foot. Garrett knew he’d have to put up with her endless eccentricities, but he was thankful she was there nonetheless. She’d put up with plenty of his, after all.

  Standing in a corner, Private Patmore was smiling, bright eyed and broad shouldered. Garrett could see the grip of a sidearm protruding from his belt. As much as Garrett didn’t like guns—he thought they might just be the root of all evil—he was glad to know Patmore had one. And that he could use it. Garrett also had a specific plan in store for Patmore, and it had nothing to do with catching Ilya Markov.

  He turned finally to Alexis. She seemed tense. Garrett knew she was deeply out of her element; she had gone far off the DIA reservation, and the sad thing, for her at least, was that she probably wasn’t done breaking the rules. She didn’t know it yet, but Garrett did. She would have to go even deeper into uncharted waters before this whole thing was over, and she would be doing it on Garrett’s say-so. This operation was no longer some government-sponsored project that he’d been sucked into—this time he was in charge. If it was crazy, it was his crazy.

  “Any criminal record?” Celeste asked from the corner of the room.

  “None,” Alexis said. “And if he had, he’d have been deported immediately. But Customs did run a check on him two days ago, and there were faint points of intersection between Markov and the Russian mob. But he’s never been arrested for anything, or charged.”

  “Why don’t we just pass this whole thing on to the FBI? Let them find him,” Patmore asked.

  Garrett shot a look to Alexis, who put her hands up in front of her, as if to ask for patience. “Interagency cooperation will be limited on this one. I have a small discretionary fund, but the truth is, even DIA doesn’t know about this mission.”

  “Okay, that,” Mitty said, “is seriously fucked-up.”

  The room fell silent. Celeste stood, walked to the wall where Markov’s picture was projected, studied it for a moment, then turned to face the team. “Can we talk about the white elephant in the room here? When I turned on my TV two nights ago, your face was on it.” She pointed to Garrett. “Wanted in connection with the murder of the president of the New York Fed. You want to enlighten us?”

  “Someone is trying to frame me.”

  Celeste cocked her head slightly to the left, a bemused smile on her face. “That’s it? That’s all you’re going to say? You’re wanted for fucking murder.”

  “The shooting is linked to Markov, and what he’s planning,” Garrett said. “They want me—they want us—out of the way. Having me hunted by the FBI is the best way to achieve that.”

  “Well, before you called, they had me out of the way,” Celeste said. “I was sitting on my couch drinking Boodles and eating fried pork rinds. So I’d say that the person they want out of the way is you. From my way of thinking, you hauled all of us out here to help you clear your name. Am I wrong?”

  “No. You’re not wrong. I need to clear my name, and I need your help doing it. But finding Markov is part of a larger problem. Way bigger than whether I go to jail or not.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa. You’re asking us to believe that you are thinking about the welfare of the country? Before your own safety?” Celeste asked. “Because my memory of Garrett Reilly is of a guy who didn’t give a shit about anybody else. Who wanted to make a killing on the market, get rich and get laid, and that was it. Everyone else could go to hell. You telling me that you’re different now? That you’ve changed?”

  Garrett started to defend himself, but then lapsed into silence. He tried to frame the argument in his mind—that while he wasn’t a different person, per se, his values had changed. Maybe not wholesale, but they had inched slightly toward a broader worldview. He wasn’t trying to fool anybody; he hadn’t turned into Mother Teresa overnight, but he did feel a need to become more involved in the world. And anyway, keeping the American financial system safe made it possible for him to make more money in the long term, so what was good for the country was good for Garrett as well. He was about to make that exact argument when Mitty broke in.

  “He has changed. He doesn’t party anywhere near as much. I don’t think he’s slept with even one chica since you last saw him. At least he hasn’t told me about it. I don’t know if he’s interested in saving the world or anything, but I’d say he’s more concerned about other people.” She hesitated for a moment. “A little more.”

  “Thank you, Mitty,” Garrett said, unsure if what she’d said was a compliment.

  “He still takes a lot of drugs, though,” Mitty added.

  “Let’s move on,” Garrett said.

  “Lotta people have addiction issues,” she said. “But he’s got serious ones.”

  “They get it,” Garrett said forcefully.

  Patmore broke into a laugh. Garrett glared at him.

  “Kind of ironic, right?” Celeste began to pace the room. “I mean, last time, Ascendant sucked you in against your will, and all you wanted to do was get out. This time, you’re bringing us in, we’re hesitant, and you’re the white knight, gonna save the country.”

  “If that’s how you want to define irony, then sure, I guess it’s ironic,” Garrett said. Celeste was still clearly looking to pick a fight with him; she stopped by the door and put her hand on the doorknob. She looked, to Garrett, as if she was about to bolt. “Listen, this will not be easy, and, yes, there are risks involved. I am wanted in connection with a murder. I’m a fugitive, and you being here makes all of you accomplices in hiding me. But I am entirely innocent, and that will come clear to the police eventually.” Garrett gazed squarely at Celeste. “That’s scary, I get it. And dangerous. So if anyone wants out, okay, no problem. Tell me now and we’ll get you a ticket home.”

  Celeste’s hand played with the doorknob. Open, closed, open, closed; the door seemed to mimic her state of mind.

  “But just know, I want you here.” Garrett still stared at her. “Every one of you. What we’re trying to do is important. Not just to me.”

  Everyone in the room turned to watch Celeste. She fiddled with the doorknob some more, then let go of it and sat back down on a desk. “Whatever. Fuck it. Fuck him. Fuck all of you.” She folded her feet up underneath her and stared angrily down at the carpet. “Let’s just catch the guy and go home.”

  Bingo raised his hand like a shy student
at the back of class. Garrett nodded in his direction. “You don’t have to raise your hand, Bingo.”

  “So how do we catch him?”

  “Simple,” Garrett said with all the confidence he could bring to his voice. “We catch him with data.”

  NEWARK, NEW JERSEY, JUNE 18, 6:00 A.M.

  They spent the night sleeping on couches, covering themselves in cheap fleece blankets Alexis had bought at a dollar store, and when Garrett woke them at six so they could call Europe during business hours, they seemed more like cranky middle schoolers than a crack intelligence team. He made them cups of instant coffee, sent Patmore out to buy breakfast rolls, then assigned them each a task.

  He gave Celeste the hardest job: figure out how Markov had pulled off the Malta bank collapse. Garrett had her use voice-over IP software, so the phone calls were harder to trace, and she started by calling Interpol headquarters in Lyon, France. She told the Interpol agent that she was from the Ascendant project, an offshoot of the Defense Intelligence Agency, but the agent immediately transferred her to a different department, where a keenly interested American wanted to know her location before anything else, so Garrett told her to hang up. Immediately.

  “We’re on a watch list,” Garrett said, cursing under his breath. “Ascendant has been tagged. We can’t mention it again.”

  “Okay. I guess we’re done then, huh?” Celeste said. “We can all go home now, get back to watching Wheel of Fortune?”

  Garrett tried to stay patient, then had her call the IT department at the now-defunct bank in Malta. He watched over her shoulder as she tracked down ten different names and numbers, most of them on the island of Malta, with a few in Italy and one in France. She called each one and told them that she was from an American cybersecurity firm—Reilly Pattern Insight, she called it, which made Garrett smile—looking to patch vulnerabilities in their operating systems. Garrett gave her a word-by-word script to use, because the truth was, Celeste knew next to nothing about computers. A pair of employees hung up on her right away, two said their lawyers had told them not to speak to anyone, one claimed not to speak English, and no one answered at the other four numbers. But with the last call, she hit pay dirt. The IT employee—now ex-employee—was angry at the firm, and at regulators, and basically at the world at large. He said the IT department hadn’t had anything to do with the penetration, but they all suspected that the British moron Leone in HR had infected the system by putting a thumb drive into a network computer, which then emptied bank accounts, companywide.

  Celeste thanked him, and then she and Garrett spent the next two hours trying to hunt down Matthew Leone, assistant VP of Human Resources at the First European Bank of Malta. Celeste finally found him on his cell, in a hotel room in Bern, Switzerland, and he’d clearly been drinking. She put him on speakerphone so Garrett could listen, because he was slurring his words and repeating himself, but as soon as she asked him about the bank in Malta, he hung up on her. She called back three times, but he never answered again.

  “Dead end, we’re done,” Celeste said with just a hint of satisfaction in her voice.

  Garrett took a deep breath and asked her to start researching Leone. “He was the entryway into the bank. Markov used him. Think like a con man. That’s how we crack this.”

  She stared at Garrett without saying a word.

  “Is there a problem?” Garrett asked.

  “I still hate you.”

  “Then I guess the marriage is off.” Garrett moved on to find Bingo.

  Bingo had spent the morning calling tech firms in Silicon Valley, even though it was three hours earlier there. He knew a couple of employees at Planetary Software, the company that Markov had worked for in 2010. Some had moved on, but one still worked in the engineering department and remembered Markov.

  The engineer described him as quiet, hardworking, a bit of a drinker in his off hours. Not a ladies’ man, but not gay either. At least he didn’t think he was gay. Kind of hard to pin down.

  Garrett pushed Bingo to ask for more details. Religious beliefs? Coding quirks? Sexual fetishes? Was he political?

  The engineer seemed baffled by the questions. “Well, no, not political, exactly. But kind of like, maybe, I don’t know—a nihilist. I think his family was pretty fucked-up. The system is gonna screw you over, so you’d better get over on the system first. He only said that once, when he was drunk, but I definitely got the feeling that he’d be happy to see it all come apart. Watch everything go down the toilet. Like maybe that’s what happened to him when he was a kid.”

  Garrett thought about his own feelings about “the system,” and how, on many occasions, he too would have been happy to see the whole thing come crashing to the ground: the government, the military, the banks, and the bankers. Was there overlap between Markov’s vision of the world and his own? Or was overlap too mild—was there synchronicity? He walled that idea off from the rest of his thoughts. It was not a possibility he wanted to investigate. Now. Or ever.

  “No blogs, no websites?” Garrett asked.

  “None,” Bingo answered. “No digital trail.”

  “Hobbies? Perversions? What’d he do with his spare time?”

  “The guy said Markov liked to play games. Chess mostly. But other games too. Board games, word games, number games. He won the company chess tournament. But everyone said he was a ringer because he was Russian.”

  Garrett told Bingo to keep widening the web of Markov’s acquaintances: anyone who knew anyone who might have known him or had contact with him or even seen him on the bus one day.

  “No piece of information is too small,” Garrett said. “It all matters.”

  “Got it.” Garrett thought he detected a trace of boyish excitement in Bingo’s voice, as if he was having the time of his life.

  Weary, and in pain, Garrett took his last two meperidine and moved on to Mitty, who was building a nonrelational database. The database was a digital bucket into which they could load seemingly unrelated bits of information, then test whether those bits were actually connected to each other. What Garrett wanted to know was how Ilya Markov conned people. When he did it. How he did it. Whom he used to help him.

  Mitty had the database give all its answers as histograms and clustered dendrograms—graphical representations of data—and this made Garrett woozy with joy. For Garrett, data visualization was numbers porn. It activated some primitive pleasure center in his brain; he fell into the data, no longer an observer of it. He became the numbers.

  Mitty chuckled as Garrett pored over the data. His pupils dilated, his breathing slowed. She didn’t even have enough intel on Markov to make a genuine chart—most of what the computer was giving them was simply coding noise, but it didn’t matter to Garrett; noise was one step below facts, and many steps above real life.

  “You can be a little creepy, you know that, right?” Mitty said.

  Garrett gave her the finger and moved on to another part of their large, empty offices. He found Patmore in a far room with a view to downtown Newark, monitoring an Internet feed of four different cable news networks.

  Patmore stood and snapped to attention when Garrett walked into the room. “Low boil out there, sir.”

  “How so?”

  “A mountain of chatter about Steinkamp, sir. Who killed him? Was that a terror attack on the US economy? And why would a Wall Streeter like you have anything to do with it? A lot of conspiracy theories. Also about Russia. Like maybe they’re going to invade Belarus. And what a shitstorm that would turn out to be.”

  Every mention of Russia sent a pulse of electricity down Garrett’s spine. “Anyone say the two are connected? Steinkamp and Russia?”

  Patmore scratched at his chin. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Well, I think they are. So keep an eye out for any intersections.”

  “Will do, sir.”

  “Don’t call m
e sir.” Garrett nodded to Patmore and then to the chair. “And you can be at ease—or whatever people say.”

  Patmore sat back down.

  Garrett closed the door to the office and dug a $100 bill out of his wallet. “Listen, I have a different job for you. If you could just . . . well, look on Craigslist.” Garrett circled the topic. “And maybe find something. My head. You know, I had this fracture. And it hurts like . . .”

  “On it.” Patmore snatched the bill from Garrett’s hand. “Painkillers. A black-market seller. No digital trace.”

  Garrett nodded in surprise, then relief. He’d figured the request would take a certain amount of explaining. “I probably won’t take them. I just need them around in case—”

  “I got blown out of a Humvee in Kandahar. Went over an IED, Humvee flipped, next thing I knew I was in a field hospital. Not a day goes by my back doesn’t feel like it’s gonna split in two. Consider it taken care of.”

  A wave of gratitude washed over Garrett, and he felt as if he were about to burst into tears, and then Celeste walked into the room.

  “I found something.” She glanced at Patmore, then studied the odd look on Garrett’s face. “Am I interrupting? Were you two about to kiss?”

  Garrett shook his head in wonder. “You’re such an asshole. You’ve become more like me than me.”

  “I thought you’d enjoy that,” Celeste said.

  “It gets old.”

  “Imagine how the rest of us feel.”

  Garrett turned to Patmore. “Thank you, Private.”

  Garrett and Celeste left the room and moved to the empty reception area. Celeste’s laptop was open on a desk.

  “I checked up on Leone’s background. Nothing extraordinary. Grew up outside of London, midlevel colleges. Did some HR work in the City. Then he landed the job in Malta. Been there three years, rented an apartment, medium salary. Ordinary guy. Ordinary life.”

  “Okay.”

  “Then I thought about what you said—think like a con man—so I looked up his social media. Tumblr, Instagram, Facebook. Check this out.”