The King of Fear: A Garrett Reilly Thriller (13 page)

“I have conjecture. I have probability. And I have a lone Russian student wandering around the US. But I don’t have proof. Not proof that Kline will accept. He’s stubborn, and he doesn’t like to be wrong. Ever.”

“You could use other methods. To get him to do what we need.”

The air seemed to go out of the room. Alexis cocked her head, her face a sudden blank. She examined Garrett’s eyes, his mouth. It looked, to Garrett, as if she were sizing up his character for the first time, as if they’d just met—as if he were a stranger to her.

“What are you suggesting?”

“My name is linked with Ascendant. Ascendant is linked with him. And linked with you. If you threatened—”

“Blackmail? If I threatened to drag him down with me? Is that what you’re saying?”

Garrett hunched up his shoulders, as if to say,
Well, now that you mention it, I suppose that is a possibility.

“You’re asking for a lot. A fuck of a lot.”

Garrett was, and he knew it. But she was already in deep, so why not go all the way?

Her eyes burned into his, cold and searching, and he had to steady himself to match her gaze. He couldn’t read her, but he rarely could—she had been a mystery to him and continued to be one. Was she furious with him? Had she finally had enough? Had she caught a glimpse of his true nature and found it woefully lacking? Did it even matter?

Alexis blinked once, slowly, then swiveled to her computer and went back to work. Garrett watched her back, her black hair splaying out across her shoulders, but she didn’t turn around and didn’t say another word, and Garrett got the distinct impression that their relationship had just entered a new—and perhaps not as benevolent—phase.

A
TLANTA
, G
EORGIA
, J
UNE
18, 11:01 A.M.

A
hum of financial anxiety was in the air. Leonard Harris (R-Marietta, GA) could hear it in the hushed whispers of his aides in Washington, DC, yesterday, when Congress closed up session, and he could see it in the vacant stares of the businessmen at the airport when he got off the plane in Atlanta this morning. It was as if the entire country had gone off its antianxiety meds, and every crank rumor that you could think of was beginning to seep out of the swamp of public opinion: the end was near; buy gold. There was no more oil; ditch your car. The dollar would be worthless tomorrow; get a shotgun and run for the hills.

Good Lord, Harris thought to himself as he maneuvered his gray Lincoln MKZ through the hideous Atlanta traffic, people do love to work themselves into a state.

He checked his watch and decided he had just enough time to stuff some food in his face. He pulled off the freeway and made his way east to Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward toward a vacant lot behind a Piggly Wiggly. Because there, he knew, lay a culinary gold mine, a collection of food trucks from all over Atlanta—barbecue food trucks, Vietnamese food trucks, burger trucks, fish-and-chips trucks, even a vegan truck.

Harris loved to eat: Chinese, Italian, French, Thai chicken
satay
, Korean kimchi, Ethiopian flatbread slathered in
doro wot
. All good, to his mind. He’d eat in restaurants seven days a week if his doctor hadn’t told him it would kill him; so he kept it to four lunches and three dinners. He was fifty-seven, after all,
an eight-term incumbent who could probably see his way to fourteen or fifteen terms, if he kept his health up.

Harris parked his car a block from the Piggly Wiggly and walked to the caravan of food trucks. The Georgia sun was beating down, and the air was thick and damp. He’d kept an extra white shirt hung in the back of his car for the interview, which was a damn good thing, because the blue one he was wearing was already soaked through.

Harris was handsome, and telegenic. He had most of his hair and didn’t need glasses, which was part of why he had landed the chairmanship of the House Banking Subcommittee, one of the most powerful committees in all of Washington, DC. He had fought long and hard to get the post—put up with the myriad slights of his party bosses, done all the dirty work of a good political foot soldier—and now he was the boss. A great victory. But the job was not without duties, and interviews were top of the list: he was headed downtown to the CNN tower to a one-thirty Q&A with Wolf Blitzer. After that he had a PBS segment at four from a live remote, then a recorded talker with a radio station in San Antonio, Texas, at four thirty. And they were all going to want to discuss one thing, and one thing alone: the murder of Phillip Steinkamp.

Harris knew Steinkamp—had met him a couple of times, even had lunch with him once—and thought he was a nice guy. Terrible shame what happened. But Harris didn’t have any new theories on why he’d been shot, or who had done it. The FBI had given him a briefing two days ago, but from there on it had been silence. Not that it mattered: the cable news outlets were relentless in their search for gossip—any whiff of drama was reason for a new interview, more breathless analysis, another round of inane predictions.

Harris entered the food-truck lot and thought about what to eat. He came there so often that all the drivers and cooks knew him. Today, Harris decided on Jose’s Bandito Wagon. Jose was old and stooped, and he sat in the back of the truck while his wife—Sofia—cooked most of the food. And sweet Jesus, Sofia was a genius. Her chicken mole burrito was to die for, and her steak
carnitas
sprinkled with fresh cilantro made Harris’s heart skip a beat.

Harris ordered two shrimp tacos, a side of guacamole with homemade pepper chips, and a Diet Pepsi to wash it all down. He chatted briefly with Jose, waiting patiently for his order, but even Jose wanted to talk about the state of the country.

“Yesterday, I take my money, send it to Mexico,” he told Harris. “Safer there. I was in Mexico when the peso went poof. Disappear just like that. One day you got lots of money, the next day you got nothing. Maybe that happens here.”

Harris started to tell Jose that the US dollar was perfectly stable, and a heck of a lot safer than the Mexican peso, but found that he just didn’t have the energy, and anyway, his order came up in all its aroma-laden splendor, so he grabbed some napkins and a small container of
pico de gallo
and sat himself on a wooden picnic bench in the middle of the parking lot. Eating those tacos was like sex. Better than sex, in truth, because, well, he rarely had sex anymore. He rarely saw his wife, as she lived in Marietta, working as a doctor, and he was mostly in the capital, sharing a crappy little apartment with three other congressmen. Even when Congress was on recess, he and his wife didn’t sleep together. They just couldn’t seem to find the time. Or the passion. Which perhaps explained why he loved to eat so much. He was no amateur psychologist, but even he suspected he was filling unmet erotic desires with food.

He looked out across the half dozen other diners eating at separate tables in the parking lot. The sun slipped behind a cloud, and Harris dabbed at his sweating face. Thirty minutes until the CNN interview. What would he say? Was there really some sort of conspiracy afoot? Harris was having trouble wrapping his head around that, but he had to admit that things were looking squirrelly all over the place: the shooting of a Fed president, a bank run in southern Europe, targeted cyberattacks, the burgeoning civil war in Belarus, with the Russians moving their tanks up and down the borders of former Eastern Bloc countries as if it were the Cold War all over again.

A wall of worry. That’s what they called it on Wall Street. And the worry was spreading. The market had taken a major dump yesterday. The Dow had dropped 500 points and was down another 350 this morning. Rumors were flying. Were American banks in trouble? Had brokerage houses made bad bets again? Harris had seen some blowhard on Fox yesterday saying a derivative was out there that was going to take down a major trading house. What kind of irresponsible idiot would go on the air and say that? The entire edifice that was the American economy rested on the public’s believing that the structure was sound. If people didn’t buy into that idea, everything would go up in flames. Even Harris knew that.

Now he had to get on TV and tell the nation that everything was fine, the
world markets were fine, the banks were fine, and that Steinkamp’s murder was just one of those hinky coincidences. Nothing to see here, people; move on, move on.

But even he didn’t quite believe that.
Something was up.
Something strange.

Harris pushed the world of finance from his thoughts and glanced down the table. A young woman sat at the other end of the bench and laid a paper napkin on her lap. She was young, pretty, with dirty-blond hair and full lips. Harris loved full lips. Or had loved them, when he was single. A good Christian, moral to a fault, now Harris just admired those lips from afar.

The young woman looked up from her plate of food—she’d chosen the fish and chips from the Seafood Trucker, a wise choice, but not in the same league as the tacos—and quickly looked away. He’d been staring at her. She gathered up her purse and her plate of food and moved to another open table.

Moron, Harris thought to himself. Staring like a lecherous old man at a pretty young girl. Of course she moved away. I have to watch that. Harris felt sin came in all shapes and sizes, and sometimes just letting your eyes stray was all it took. That was a high standard to hold himself to, but it was nice to have high standards in something, after all. Wading through the stench of American politics took a lot out of him, and he needed his morality intact.

He finished his tacos, downed his Diet Pepsi, then wiped any traces of hot sauce from his lips. He stood, checked his watch, then walked past the young, blond-haired woman, careful not to stare again, and waved good-bye to Jose as he handed out another plate of enchiladas smothered in cheese. Then Harris stopped, let out a long breath, and shook his head.

If you sin, he thought to himself, even a little, then make up for it right away with a good deed. He walked back to the young woman. “Allow me to apologize.”

The young woman looked up at him in surprise.

“For staring at you. I was lost in thought, but I’m sure it was intimidating. An intrusion. Please forgive me.” He bowed slightly in apology, then started off again.

“Do I know you from someplace?”

Harris paused. That was one of the perks—or drawbacks—of being a US congressman. You were a celebrity, if only a minor one. “I’m Len Harris. I’m a congressman. From the Eleventh District.”

“Oh,” the young woman said, a hint of disappointment in her voice. “I thought . . .”

“You thought I was really important?” Harris smiled. “Not just a politician?”

The young woman laughed. “No. You reminded me of someone else. From a while ago. But you’re not him.” She reddened slightly, her checks flushing, as if the thought of that person, that memory, was dear to her, and just ever so slightly sensual. A lover, perhaps? An ex-flame?

An erotic pulse ran the length of Harris’s body, from his head to his toes. I wish I were him, Harris thought to himself. He must have been a lucky man. “Sorry to let you down.”

“You didn’t.” The young woman smiled—an open, trusting smile, compassionate and yet just ever so slightly inviting. “You were a gentleman. That was very nice of you. You don’t see that every day.”

Harris beamed. Always try to do the right thing, he reminded himself. Always. “Thank you.” He noticed, for the first time, what she was reading, a paperback laid out on the table beside her food. A science fiction novel,
Ender
’s Game
by Orson Scott Card. Harris smiled.
Ender’s Game
was by far his favorite sci-fi novel of all time, and Harris liked sci-fi almost as much as he liked food. He was a bit of a geek, and not afraid to admit it. In fact, he’d gone on and on about
Ender’s Game
on the Twitter account he ran for his constituents. Well, actually, that his congressional aides ran. Harris didn’t have the time to be posting tweets about anything, and definitely not about science-fiction novels.

“Great book.” Harris nodded to the paperback. “I’ve read it, cover to cover, ten times at the very least.”

The young woman looked at Harris’s face, as if trying to discern something from it. His veracity? Sincerity? Was he trying to pick her up? “Number three for me.”

“Then you are an incredibly well-rounded human being. You know the best places to eat, and the best things to read.”

“This is a great spot. The food is to die for.”

“I spend far too much time here myself.” Harris patted his stomach. “Far too much time.”

She laughed. “Nice meeting you, Mr. Congressman. Maybe I’ll see you around.”

“Yes, maybe.”

He nodded good-bye to her one more time, then hurried back to his car with a mile-wide smile on his face. Those words—
Maybe I’ll see you around
—stayed with him all through his interview on CNN. And PBS. And the radio-station talker from San Antonio. He couldn’t figure out why exactly—something about her tone of voice, the look on her face. She seemed lodged in his brain. As he went to bed that night, his wife, Barbara, fast asleep at his side, his mind flashed back, over and over, not to finance or Phillip Steinkamp or conspiracies and the money supply, but to that pretty blonde at the food-truck parking lot.

He decided he would go back to the food trucks the very next day. Not for anything special. Just to look at her face. That’s all. Not a sin. Just to have a friend.

With that thought, one of the most powerful politicians in the US Congress—the man who almost single-handedly regulated the financial industry—fell asleep, peaceful and happy.

M
IDTOWN
M
ANHATTAN
, J
UNE
18, 4:31 P.M.

S
ir, Charlotte offices calling again.”

Robert Andrew Wells Jr., CEO of Vanderbilt Frink Trust and Guaranty—known to most people around the country as Vanderbilt, and everyone on Wall Street as Vandy—grunted his displeasure as he marched down the hallway of the thirtieth floor of the bank’s headquarters, heading to the stairway. His assistant, Thomason, held a cell phone in the air, trailing after Wells. “They want to know—”

“I know what they fucking want.” Wells banged the stairway door open and sprinted upstairs, two steps at a time. “They want permission. Everybody always wants permission.”

Wells believed in entrepreneurship: you went out and did things. You didn’t ask for handouts. He believed in bootstrapping: no matter where you started in this life, in a backwoods shack or a rat-infested tenement, if you worked hard—dedicated yourself to whatever your heart’s deepest desire was—you would eventually get it. Call it force of will, the cult of personality, or just plain old American self-help, Wells bought the concept of the self-made man, hook, line, and sinker.

He had no time or patience for people who sat around waiting for someone else to help them up the ladder—welfare recipients or bureaucrats addicted to the mother’s milk of the state or sniveling branch directors who wanted to cover their asses before trying something new. They would never achieve greatness, those people, because they didn’t understand that greatness came from within. It was never given to you. You had to fight for it. You had to earn it.

Striding down the hall of the thirty-first floor, Wells basked in that notion. He had risen from the bottom floor up, fought his way through the company, and was now top dog, leader of the nation’s biggest bank. He was a master of the universe, a man with fabulous wealth and almost unlimited power—he was the 1 percent of the 1 percent, and all the world knew it.

That Wells’s father—Robert Andrew Wells Sr.—had also been a banker did not put a dent in Wells’s philosophical bearings. Wells Sr. had not run an institution like Vandy. He had been a midlevel player at a small Midwestern savings and loan, hardly a stepping-stone to running an international conglomerate. To Wells’s mind, the distance between his father’s position and his own was equivalent to the distance a homeless person needed to travel to make something of his or her life—to get a job, for instance, as a teller in one of their fifteen hundred branches across the country.

Yes, the government
had
helped bail Vandy out in 2008, backstopping their capital requirements with a massive loan from the Treasury Department, but Wells had seen to it that that loan was paid back swiftly, and with full interest. Vandy owed the US government nothing. At least, not right now. And never again.

Anyway, those arguments were quibbles, and Wells had heard them all before. The press did not like Wells, nor did the political Left. They were envious, to his mind, and had no conception of what Wells and his bank did for America—the lengths to which they went to make sure the wheels of capitalism kept grinding along. That was no small task. The press and the Left hated capitalism, hated banks, and they hated Vandy. The last three days had proven that point beyond any doubt. All that Wells had read for the last seventy-two hours was how perilous the state of his bank was—how their capital reserves were low, their loans were bad, their investments were shit. And, of course, how their CEO was making things worse with his arrogance and spite.

Wells let out a long hiss of breath and pushed open the door to the bank’s stock-trading floor. Thomason kept pace behind him, as did Stephens, the young woman from Boston. Those two assistants kept his schedule, manned his phones, and made sure he was up-to-date on everything that was happening in the world. Wells could not survive without his assistants, although one was probably enough to handle the job—but a second was nice. He was giving more people jobs, and that could hardly be called a bad thing.

“Don’t bug me about Charlotte again today,” Wells barked.

“Yes, sir,” Thomason said meekly.

Wells took in the trading floor with a satisfied stare. The room was massive, stretching out almost the entire length of the building, jammed full of busy employees buying and selling shares in the nation’s—and the world’s—biggest and best companies. Phones rang, conversations were shouted, buy and sell orders blinked across myriad computer screens. The room buzzed with activity, roared with commerce, and oozed prosperity—even if the naysayers argued otherwise. The place gave him strength; the room proved to him that the American economy still had legs to stand on. The future was bright. He needed that feeling because, no matter how much he believed in himself, the last few days had given him a dark sense of foreboding.

Wells marched across the room and caught, out of the corner of his eye, all the traders and analysts sneaking a peek at him. He was hard to miss, with his broad shoulders, head full of white hair, and his posse scrambling behind him like a pack of dogs. He liked that feeling—that people knew who he was and wanted to catch a glimpse of him. It wasn’t just that it made him feel important—it also proved that the bank still had a hierarchy, that even the lowest stock seller could aspire to be CEO one day. Could aspire to be the next Robert Andrew Wells Jr.

Wells rapped on the metal doorframe of an office that fronted the trading floor. Aldous Mackenzie, the bank’s chief investment officer, looked up from his computer screen. Behind him, through the plate-glass window, midtown Manhattan and the East River were visible in the afternoon sun.

“What’s the latest?” Wells asked, stepping into the room and motioning for his assistants to wait outside.

Mackenzie shrugged. “More anxiety. Rumors about a toxic derivative coming out of our trading floor.”

“That possible? Could we have missed it?”

“Anything’s possible. But Christ Almighty, we paid twenty million dollars for that risk-analytics software. Thing is supposed to catch any bad bet, anywhere in the company. So . . . I’m saying no. We couldn’t miss it.”

Wells closed the door behind him, then noticed a young man sitting on the couch opposite Mackenzie—Mackenzie’s assistant. Wells couldn’t remember his name, Benny something, but he stayed close to the CIO the way Wells’s assistants stayed close to him. “Could you give us a second?”

The young man jumped to his feet and practically fled the room.

“Our stock is getting hammered, Mac. Down another five points today. That’s fifty billion in market cap.”

“I’m well aware.” Mackenzie, a large man, had a florid face and not a lot of hair left on his head. “It hasn’t traded over thirty in two years. Another five-point drop isn’t going to kill anyone.”

“It might kill me. Or the press might kill me. Or some crazy woman with a pistol might walk up to me and blow my fucking head off.”

Mackenzie didn’t laugh. He pushed away from his desk. “That’s why you have a bodyguard. And Steinkamp should have been using his.”

“Who shoots a Fed president? What the fuck is wrong with the world?”

“Is that why you’re here, Robert? To talk about Steinkamp?”

“I’m here because volatility is through the roof, stocks are crashing, banks are dropping dead in Europe, and I want my chief investment officer to tell me that Vanderbilt Frink is too fucking big to fail.”

“Come on. You know it. I know it.” Mackenzie put a hand on Wells’s shoulder and squeezed. “We’re fine, Robert. All our bets are in the black. We are a fortress, impenetrable.”

“Too big to fail?” An ironic smile cracked Wells’s face.

“Too smart to fail,” Mackenzie said, this time without the irony.

Wells nodded a thanks, then stopped again at the door before leaving. “The Hamptons this weekend. Sally is cooking a roast. Should be good. We’ll drink bourbon on the beach.”

“Deal,” Mackenzie said. “Bourbon on the beach.”