The King of Fear: A Garrett Reilly Thriller

by Drew Chapman

  He had a 4:00 p.m. appointment at the Eccles Building on Constitution Avenue. The Federal Reserve Board of Governors had called an emergency meeting, and Harris, as the chairman of the House Banking Subcommittee, had been asked to attend the end of the session. The Fed governors rarely invited a politician into one of their meetings, but events of the last twenty-four hours had been extraordinary—and they demanded extraordinary responses. The world seemed to be going up in flames—both the larger world and Harris’s personal world.

  So, he would wait. He would sit through the Fed meeting, rubber-stamp any demands they made, and promise to move heaven and earth in Congress to change any laws or move any money that needed moving. He was powerful enough to make that happen—probably the only congressman powerful enough to make that happen—and he knew that it was his duty. Country and economy first, wife and marriage second.

  And Rachel Brown? She was a physical manifestation of his weakness. Of his lust. And yet . . . her body, her skin, her lips. God help him. . . . He resolved, then and there, to do what had to be done. He would never see that woman again.

  Rachel. Not his wife.

  Then his phone chimed with an incoming text. The number was from Atlanta, but he didn’t recognize it. He tapped the screen.

  Hey, get together again today?

  Oh Jesus, it was her. It could only be her.

  He typed a response, fingers shaking. Rachel?

  One and only!

  Harris’s body tensed from head to toe. He considered what to write, but his brain seemed to have seized up. He had to tell her no, he would not see her, it was entirely wrong and inappropriate, and they would never meet again.

  I am not in Atlanta. Back in DC, he wrote.

  I know. Me too.

  Harris’s blood froze. She was in DC? How was that possible? Had she followed him here? As he started to type, another text came in.

  Got a treat for you.

  He read the words and felt a rush of blood to his loins. More shame swamped his mind. He was one of Pavlov’s dogs, salivating at the mere prospect of food. Or in this case, sex.

  Check your e-mail, she wrote.

  Harris booted up his computer, logged on to his public, congressional account, and immediately found the e-mail, from sender Rachel Brown, with the heading You’re going to like this. The e-mail had a link, and Harris took a long, deep breath before clicking on it.

  He was taken to a video site, one he had never heard of before, and immediately a player opened, video running, fuzzy at first. Harris squinted to make out what he was seeing. He seemed to recognize the room, but only faintly—a futon, a window, a dresser. Then it hit him in a wave of horror. He knew that room. It was in Grant Park, Atlanta. He had been there recently. Only three days ago.

  On the video, Harris himself walked onto the screen. Rachel Brown followed. She took him by the hand and began to kiss him. And he kissed her back. Then she started to undress him with astonishing speed, undressing herself almost as quickly. Almost before Harris could blink, he was naked, erect, and clearly recognizable as Leonard Harris, congressman from the Eleventh District of Marietta, Georgia.

  Harris watched the video, frozen to the spot, mortified. On-screen, Rachel Brown did horrible things to him: wonderful, horrible things, which he now regretted with every ounce of his being, but there they were, on video, available, he assumed, for the entire world to see.

  His phone chimed again.

  Nice, huh?

  He didn’t reply. He couldn’t make his fingers move.

  Meet me here. An address followed. It looked to be in central Virginia. Two-hour drive for you. See you around ten. Gonna be super fun. XOXO. R.

  Congressman Leonard Harris put down his phone, and in that same trancelike, autopilot state that he’d found himself in when he first went to Rachel Brown’s apartment, he pulled on a pair of slacks and a shirt, found his wallet and his watch, put on his shoes, and grabbed the keys to his rental car. Then, fully dressed, he Googled the address Rachel had texted him, mapped out a route on his computer, and tried to remember if he knew anyone in the DC area who might have quick and easy access to a handgun.

  • • •

  Everything about the Eccles Building on Constitution Avenue—its white Georgian marble, its classical façade, the grand sweep of the front stairs—spoke to its solidity, to its enduring purpose, and to its conservative nature. That was the entire point of the structure: it was the home of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve of the United States, the central bank that oversaw the monetary policy of the country, and the building said, to anyone who saw it, You can count on us to protect your money. We are careful, thoughtful, slow moving, and here to stay. We are not going anywhere. The same could be said of the building’s boardroom, with its massive wood conference table, high ceilings, draped windows, and gold-and-white American-eagle fresco above the fireplace.

  That is, on most days. But not today.

  The hastily called meeting of the governors of the Federal Reserve was frenetic right from the start, before the members were even seated, or the ones who were calling in were on the line. Caroline Hummels, the newly appointed chairwoman, had barely set foot in the room before Gottfried, the director of the Atlanta bank, came at her, his finger wagging in front of her nose.

  “What the hell is going on in New York?” He followed her across the room. “My people tell me we’re on the verge of a liquidity event. That it’s 2008 all over again. We’re looking at a credit crunch. Or worse. A bank run. A collapse.”

  Hummels pushed past Gottfried and nodded to the seven other board members and bank directors seated around the table: Sanchez from Minneapolis, Higgins from Philadelphia, Dan Stark from Richmond, and Chen, Lattimore, and Cohen from the DC board. And of course Larry Franklin from St. Louis, who was sunk deep into his padded leather chair, a furious scowl on his face. Everyone else would be on the phone.

  Lattimore shook his head vigorously in agreement with Gottfried: “I’m hearing the same thing, Caroline. The rumors have been building all week. And New York is going off its fucking rocker.”

  Hummels shot a look at Lattimore. “Would you like that in the minutes, Jack? That New York has gone off its fucking rocker?”

  Lattimore threw his hands in the air. “At this point, I don’t give a shit what goes in the minutes.”

  Hummels turned to Adelaide, her assistant, trailing a few steps behind her. “Is everyone on the phone?”

  Her assistant nodded, then punched the conference-call buttons on the phones placed across the table. “All here,” Adelaide said, sitting down to take notes. The meeting would be recorded, but the chairperson’s assistant always took notes as well, as a matter of habit and tradition.

  Of course, one person was missing from the meeting, and Hummels felt that absence deeply: Phillip Steinkamp of the New York Fed. He had been the old pro of the bunch, the calming influence. Just the thought of him, and what had happened on that street in Manhattan, made Hummels shiver. She couldn’t help but wonder if his death was related to what was happening now, to the panic in New York City, to the meltdown in the financial sector. She brushed off the flash of memory—there was no time for that now—and leaned in toward the closest phone.

  “Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for getting on the line with me—or being here—on such short notice. I think everyone knows why we’re here—recent events in New York City, both this last week and in the last twenty-four hours. And of course we are all mourning the loss of our colleague Dr. Steinkamp—Phil, to some of us—but sadly, that appears to be just the beginning of the problem.”

  “Have you heard from the FBI?” Lattimore interrupted.

  “Jack, please allow me to finish.” Hummels glared at Lattimore. She knew, instinctively, that he wouldn’t have interrupted Ben Bernanke when Ben was making a presentation to the board. They didn�
�t step all over you if you were a man; they gave you your moment, allowed you at least to speak your piece. But not a woman—a woman in finance had to claw her way to every moment of airtime, had to shout her ideas over the din of male egos.

  “We don’t have time for tidy speeches. You can finish, but Rome is burning,” Lattimore said.

  “I have not spoken to the FBI today,” Hummels said. “And if Rome is bur—”

  “But why not?” Sanchez blurted out. “Aren’t they supposed to keep you updated?”

  “Right now, we need to talk about banking,” Hummels said. “About the solvency of the financial system. I’ve heard the rumors, just as you have. Rumors of low capital at Vandy, rumors of bad loans, of a credit crunch—”

  “And what about the credit-processing slowdown?” Gottfried interjected. “That has to mean something. It was all up and down the East Coast and hasn’t been fixed, as far as I can see.”

  “I am well aware of what’s happening at AWCP,” Hummels insisted. “I’ve spoken to their CEO, and he says they are working on the problem. He said it was controllable—”

  “Controllable?” Gottfried asked with overblown, self-important incredulity. “They’re almost entirely off-line. That’s thirty percent of credit-card commerce in the tristate area.”

  “That can be cleared up.” Hummels tried to keep her temper under control. The president himself had warned her before he nominated her for the job, There will be people out there who are desperately jealous that you have reached the pinnacle of your profession and that they haven’t. “Are you ready for that?” he had asked her. Sitting in the Oval Office, surrounded by the trappings of American power, brilliant sunlight streaming in from the windows behind the president’s desk, she had answered yes, of course. But now, on her own, with a crisis coming down around her ears and the president nowhere in sight, she was no longer so sure.

  “The entirety of the situation can be cleared up. But we will need to move forward, as a board, with unanimity and purpose. We need to calm the markets. We need to open the lending window to banks if they are feeling strained. The federal government’s spigot of cash must be turned on, full force—”

  “No.”

  Hummels head snapped up and to the right, to where Larry “Let ’Em Fail” Franklin was sitting forward in his seat, his sharp chin jutting out from the collar of his white, button-down shirt, his gray eyes staring doggedly at Hummels’s. His lips were curled in an angry scowl, and he seemed to be trying to press his fingers through the mahogany of the conference table. “The federal government can no longer be in the business of propping up failing institutions. It’s is not in our charter, it is morally wrong, and it is bad for the economy.”

  “Bad for the economy?” Hummels’s eyes widened. “It’s the only thing standing between a decent economy and an utter and complete meltdown.”

  “Failure is a natural part of capitalism, and nature has to take its course. And anyway, you call this economy decent?” Franklin spat out. “The economy is in the toilet.”

  “It is limping along,” Hummels said. “And we have to keep it limping, and not let it collapse.”

  “It won’t collapse. Some things will be destroyed, but others will grow in their place. There’s rot in the system, and we are perpetuating that rot by propping up institutions that are bound to fail—”

  “Save the homilies for the book tour, Larry,” Gottfried said, exasperation coloring his voice. “We have serious problems here.”

  Franklin pushed himself out of his chair, gripping at the table as he did. “Our problem is that we no longer have moral standing—”

  “Give it a fucking rest!” Gottfried yelled. “We’re doing the best we can—”

  Franklin waved a crooked finger at Gottfried. “You just want a government takeover of the financial services industry! That would suit you just fine!”

  “You’re being paranoid!”

  “We are wasting time!” Sanchez barked from the side of the table. “We are all wasting ti—”

  “No. This is the crux of the matter. And if you don’t see that, you are a complete idiot!” Franklin said.

  Suddenly, everyone was shouting, waving their hands in the air. Someone was pounding on the table; Hummels thought it was Franklin, but he was standing and shouting and turning red in the face. Two of the other governors—and they were all male, except for Hummels—were also standing, one of them pointing at Franklin angrily and the other seeming to be talking to Hummels, but she couldn’t hear him.

  “What?” Hummels tried to raise her voice above the din. “What did you say?”

  It was Chen from the DC board, a voice of reason, but she couldn’t hear him, and Franklin was moving across the room toward Lattimore, yelling louder now. Hummels thought that perhaps she should call security, but that was insane—members of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve didn’t need the police to break up one of their arguments, did they?

  “Gentlemen!” Hummels screamed. “Gentlemen!” But no one listened. Hummels could feel the tears welling up in her eyes, but she knew, instinctively, that tears would make the men in the room only crazier—tears would be like blood in the water for hungry sharks. Instead, she grabbed the crystal water decanter on the table in front of her, raised it into the air in one swift motion, then brought it down with a crash onto the conference table. The glass shattered with a sharp boom, sending shards and water and ice cubes everywhere.

  Everyone in the room froze and fell quiet. Franklin, who had bellied up to Lattimore, stepped back and stared at Hummels, amazement on his face. Lattimore reached down and brushed a sprinkling of glass from his jacket. Water ran off the table and onto the carpet below in dribbling streams.

  “Holy shit,” Lattimore whispered.

  Hummels looked them all in the eye, one by one, her breathing coming in jagged gulps. “This is not a schoolyard, and we are not children. We are the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, and we will comport ourselves with the respect that the office demands. We are adults, and we serve the people of this country, at the pleasure of the president. Do not forget that.”

  She turned to Lattimore and Franklin. “Gentlemen, return to your seats.”

  Lattimore sat immediately, looking spooked, but Franklin lingered at the edge of the table, a flash of defiance still in his eyes.

  “Larry”—Hummels’s voice cracked—“sit the fuck down or I will call the bank police and have you removed from the room. And then I will urge the president to have you removed from the board. Permanently.”

  Franklin opened his mouth to reply, then seemed to think better of it and returned to his seat.

  Hummels took another breath, feeling her strength and power slowly returning. “Now”—her voice leveled out—“I believe Congress needs to make available emergency funds to backstop any institutions—banks or brokerage houses or insurance companies—that are facing imminent risk of collapse. To that end I have asked Leonard Harris, chairman of the House Banking Subcommittee, to join us for the remainder of—”

  “Madam Chairwoman,” a voice interrupted weakly.

  Hummels turned in surprise, a low fury showing on her face. Adelaide was sitting behind her and to her left, her face already reddening. “Adelaide, I am in the middle of—”

  “Congressman Harris—”

  “—speaking to the board and I will not be—”

  “—has disappeared,” Adelaide managed to squeak out.

  Hummels stared at her assistant in bewilderment.

  “I’ve checked everywhere. Nobody knows where he is. He’s AWOL. Didn’t leave word with anyone. Anywhere.”

  “I spoke to him last night,” Hummels said. “He said he would be here.” She felt a rising panic: Harris was the key to getting Congress to authorize money in a crisis. Without his leadership, the process would take days. Weeks, maybe. Months, e
ven. Or it wouldn’t happen at all.

  Her assistant shook her head vigorously, from side to side, and as she did she held her smartphone above the table to show it to Hummels. “There’s something else.” Adelaide tapped the phone and a news app popped up onto the screen. “A truck just blew up on the George Washington Bridge. All traffic has been stopped going in and out of the city. It’s chaos.”

  The room gasped collectively. Hummels could feel her knees quiver, and suddenly Lattimore was yelling again, and Franklin was back on his feet, and Chen and Cohen were both pointing at Hummels, their faces alive with anxiety. The boardroom was engulfed in noise. Adelaide looked at Hummels as the room descended back into a frenzy and said quietly, underneath the screaming, her eyes wide with fear, “What is going on?”

  Caroline Hummels, newly appointed chair of the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States of America, shook her head. “I have no idea.”

  FBI FIELD OFFICE, LOWER MANHATTAN, JUNE 24, 4:15 P.M.

  Garrett saw the first reports of the accident on Twitter, with follow-ups coming fast and furious from online news sites. A truck had jackknifed on the upper level of the GW Bridge, and its fuel tanks had exploded, burning the entire vehicle and its unknown cargo in the middle of the roadway. Rescue workers and firemen hadn’t been able to get past the flames yet, so the body count was unknown, but the assumption was that the driver of the truck had been killed. Reports from witnesses said they thought two people had fled the vehicle and walked the span of the bridge east, into Manhattan.

  The bridge was sealed off. Traffic in and out of Manhattan had come to a standstill at all tunnels and other bridges. The anxiety that had gripped the city in the morning was becoming an explosion of panic, and it was amazing to witness. To judge from the media, Armageddon was nigh. Anything might happen next—bombs, shootings, hurricanes. Anything. The entire island of Manhattan might sink into the Atlantic.