The King of Fear: A Garrett Reilly Thriller (24 page)

L
OWER
M
ANHATTAN
, J
UNE
24, 8:30 A.M.

A
gent Chaudry let Garrett Reilly sit in a holding cell on the twenty-third floor of the Federal Building all night long. She had taken away his belt as a precaution—even though the risk of his committing suicide seemed small—and confiscated his wallet and three cell phones as well. She had an agent bring him a plastic bottle of water and a pair of coconut-almond KIND bars, then let him sit there, by himself, without contact with the outside world, until morning.

She wanted him to worry. She wanted him to sweat.

But she wasn’t sure she got that result. She had watched through a two-way mirror as Reilly drank the water, ate one of the two KIND bars, then laid his head against a concrete wall and fell asleep. He woke a few times, paced the cell briefly, then slept some more.

At eight thirty in the morning, she’d had enough. She had Agent Murray roust Reilly and bring him to an interrogation room. Murray sat Reilly behind a desk, in the crosshairs of two separate hidden cameras, handcuffed him to a metal loop on the table, then joined Chaudry in an observation room next door.

“Ready as he’ll ever be, I guess,” Murray said.

Chaudry wasn’t so sure, but time was not her friend—the director of the Bureau would be rolling into the Hoover Building in an hour. His first call would be to the New York field office.
To her.
She called DC and linked them into the video feed; then she went to the bathroom, splashed water on her face, reapplied a bit of lipstick, and walked into the interrogation room.

“Good morning, Agent Chaudry,” Reilly said with a smile as she took a seat opposite him. He looked around the small, windowless room. “At least I’m assuming it’s morning. You look tired. No sleep?”

Chaudry arranged a yellow legal pad and a file folder on the desk in front of her and picked up her pen. “Why did you choose the building in Newark?”

Reilly seemed surprised by the question. He tapped the desk a few times. “I knew it from the J-and-A real estate portfolio. Newark is kind of broken-down, but on the upswing. A bunch of geeks wouldn’t stand out.”

“But why that building?”

“Unfinished and in bankruptcy, so there wouldn’t be a lot of guards or security. And I knew we’d leased some offices to a few tech start-ups, so I could use their Internet.”

“You knew that how?”

“I’d seen the J-and-A reports a few months ago. It said who leased space.”

“And you remembered that specific building, with those specific tenants? Even though you were on the run?”

“I remember everything. For instance, your quote in your high school yearbook. ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’ Martin Luther King Jr. It’s nice. Maybe a little clichéd. But you were in high school, so you get a pass.”

Chaudry took a deep breath. She knew that at least half a dozen FBI agents were watching the interrogation in the New York offices, and probably half a dozen more were watching the feed in DC. She would go slowly and not let Reilly throw her.

“Where were you when the Newark PD raided the office?”

“I ran down the back stairs.”

“Where’d you go after that? Did you have a plan?”

He narrowed his eyes and smiled. “Are you trying to figure out how I make decisions? What patterns I might follow?”

“How about I ask the questions.”

“Okay, sure. But shouldn’t we banter? So I’m relaxed and comfortable?”

“I’m interested in how you see the world. We plug things like that into our database of perps. The information comes in handy in future cases.”

“I like how you drop the word
perp
in there. Am I a perp?
Perp. Perp. Perp
. Weird word. But I like the way it sounds.”

“You’re in handcuffs; therefore, you’re a possible perp.”

Garrett tugged at his chain. “I keep forgetting.”

“Does being handcuffed bother you?”

“It would be better if I were naked, with a girl. But it’s okay. For now.”

Chaudry noted that on her pad. “Where did you end up? After you ran.”

“I overdid it with some alcohol. Maybe some Percodan as well. I passed out.”

“You do that often? Drink too much? Take prescription medication?”

Reilly shrugged. “I used to really like pot. That was my mood-altering substance of choice. I gave that up for prescription meds—as you know, from when you searched my apartment.”

“How did you know that? You were watching?”

“I was sent video alerts when you broke into my house. I thought you were cute, wandering around, trying to figure out who I was. Although at a certain point I did want to kill you for digging through my stuff. That was a violation of my privacy. People still have rights in this country. Or maybe they don’t. It gets confusing.”

“Do you often want to kill people?”

“That’s a little on the nose, isn’t it? I mean, if you want to trip me up, get me to confess, you could be a little more subtle.”

“Confess to what, Garrett?”

He smiled broadly. “That’s much better.”

“Is there something you want to tell me?”

“I think you have a beautiful smile.”

Chaudry exhaled. “Let’s talk about Steinkamp.”

Garrett leaned forward in his chair. “Maybe you’ll find this offensive, but would your parents be pissed if you married, you know, outside the faith? You’re Hindu, right? If you brought home a half-Mexican guy like me? Would that be trouble?”

“My father holds no prejudices. He’d be fine if I brought you home. Except that you’re a little young. And you’re a criminal.”

Garrett laughed. “My dad, he was raised Catholic, but I’m guessing he wouldn’t have cared if I married outside the Church. My mom said he hated the whole thing—the pope, Rome, priests. Said they were a bunch of sexless creeps. She worried a lot, after he died, that he was in hell, you know, an apostate, because of his beliefs. Of course that didn’t stop her from totally screwing
up her own life. I’m not sure where she thinks she’ll be headed.” Garrett looked at Chaudry again. “I never met my dad. Died when I was a baby. But my mom’s still around. You probably know that as well. Is it in my file? I have a file, don’t I? I hope I do.”

Chaudry watched him carefully. She had prepared for Reilly to be combative or possibly mute, but not like this—so at ease. She had figured that he would be cagey with her—that he would skirt subjects, try to deflect attention. But this was different. This felt—she struggled to find the word—
casual
.

“Garrett, you surrendered to me. You must have had a reason for that. You wanted to talk about what you’d done. . . .”

“I was tired of being on the run.”

“Not because you committed a crime?”

“Because a man named Ilya Markov wants me hunted, and your pursuit of me was eating up my bandwidth. I figured it was more productive for me to turn myself in and start fresh.”

“People turn themselves in because they are guilty of crimes.”

“Look, if you want me to confess, I will; all you have to do is ask.”

That caught Chaudry short.

He smiled at her, a wide, disarming smile, the corners of his eyes creasing as he did. “Just ask, and I’ll tell you whatever you want.”

Chaudry made a quick mental calculation. If she asked him to admit his guilt, was that coercion in the eyes of the law? Was that his plan? Perhaps it was a legal ploy for later, for the trial, or for some smart lawyer to twist into a wrongful-arrest suit. She racked her brain for an answer, but none came. She could feel all the eyes on her, all those older, white male FBI agents in both New York and Washington, second-guessing her, wanting her to fail.

“Okay, Garrett Reilly, how about you confess to the murder of Phillip Steinkamp?”

“Sure.” He looked up at the camera hidden behind a mirror in a corner of the room. “I killed Phillip Steinkamp.”

She noted the time on her sheet of paper: 8:52 a.m. “How did you orchestrate it?”

“I don’t really know, but I can make something up if you’d like.”

Chaudry looked up, frustration leaking from the downturned corners of her mouth. “Then you’re not really confessing, are you?”

“I’m trying to move the process along, Agent Chaudry. I’ve been here a while, and you’re wasting my time. If I tell you I did it, then you can investigate that, see that it’s not true, and we can move on.”

“You realize your confession will hold up in a court of law.”

“You’ll never bring me to a court of law because you’ll figure out—eventually—who the real killer is, and you’ll release me, and I’m actually hoping that you’ll apologize to me when you do, because this whole thing has been a giant pain in my ass. And when you do release me, it will allow me to finish the more important job at hand.”

Chaudry stopped leaning on the table, sat up straight, and folded her arms. “And what important job is that?”

“Tracking down Ilya Markov and stopping him from destroying the American economy.”

“Tell me about this Markov.”

Reilly did. Speaking quickly and precisely, he described the man and his exploits, as well as his own attempts to track Markov down and predict what he would do next. Chaudry studied Reilly’s face and eyes as he wove the story, more than she listened to the actual words. If she hadn’t known better, she would have sworn that Reilly believed every word of it, down to the last detail of the Lufthansa flight he claimed Markov had taken and the seat he sat in.

About five minutes into his story, the door to the interrogation room opened, and Murray poked his head in. Chaudry tried to hide the annoyance on her face, and Murray winced. He looked scared.

“Can we talk?” he whispered.

• • •

Garrett was surprised to admit it, but he found that he enjoyed spending time with Agent Chaudry. More than that, he just plain liked her. He tried to reason out why that was.

She was pretty, and that always helped, as far as Garrett and his relationship to females was concerned. He knew that was immature and simpleminded, but he liked looking at her thick black hair, and the way her red lips were set against her brown skin. He’d been teasing her when he asked whether her parents would disapprove of her dating a half-Mexican like himself, but he was interested in the answer nonetheless; junior year of college he’d tried hard to sleep with a Hindu poli-sci major from Artesia, but she’d turned him down flat every
time. She’d pulled the “My daddy would disapprove” card, but he suspected it was her disapproval, not her father’s, that had kept them out of the sack.

However, Chaudry’s looks were only part of the story for Garrett. She’d been tracking him, nonstop, for ten days now. He liked her single-mindedness. It reminded him of his own tunnel vision. She was ambitious too—he could tell by the way she held herself: tall, erect, chin up, eyes sizing you up the moment she entered the room. She was always looking for an advantage.

All in all, that was a good package for Garrett. But there was something else about Chaudry that he couldn’t quite pin down, something that made her doubly attractive to him. He replayed their conversation in his mind, thought about the way that she had steered it, and the stern demeanor she presented in her look. And then he realized the answer: she was
presenting
a demeanor. That wasn’t who she was; Agent Chaudry was faking it. She had another side, and she was keeping it hidden from Garrett.

Garrett considered what she was faking, what she would hide from him, and then it hit him, and he knew for certain why he liked her so much.

She didn’t actually believe he was guilty.

She was pretending, trying to fit Garrett Reilly’s supposed guilt into her view of the world, but she knew that the fit wasn’t right.

The moment that realization came clear to him, the interrogation-room door opened, and Chaudry reentered, followed by the older agent, Murray, and a pair of younger agents, who stood by the far wall. Chaudry walked wordlessly to Garrett. Her face showed a strain that Garrett hadn’t seen before.

She pulled out a small key and abruptly unlocked his handcuffs. “Your story checked out. All of it.”

“It did?”

“You’re surprised? After all that?”

“No, I’m . . . I’m pleased.”

“How nice for you. Here’s the thing, Reilly—as of about twenty minutes ago, the world started falling apart.” She motioned for him to get out of his chair, and quickly. “So stand the fuck up, because you work for me now.”

W
ASHINGTON
, DC, J
UNE
24, 9:08 A.M.

T
he call came in to Alexis’s cell phone as she was walking out the door of her condo, to-go coffee cup, as usual, in hand. The person on the other end of the line requested her presence at the New York City FBI field office that day. The caller, a male secretary—Alexis couldn’t remember his name—didn’t leave any room for negotiation.

“You are expected by noon.” He hung up.

She called Kline, and he okayed the travel. He told her to do whatever they asked of her. He said he would check to see what they wanted and try to update her before she left. She went back to her apartment, packed an overnight bag, then called a cab to take her to Reagan National. She looked at her face again in the mirror: her makeup covered most of the bruising on her left side, and the scrapes on her chin and cheek. Her body still ached from the blast; her shoulder felt as if it might just pop out of its socket at any time, and the muscles in her hip and leg were raw and painful. She took two Motrin, thought of Garrett and his prescription medications with a bit more compassion, and hoped the plane ride wouldn’t be too cramped or too turbulent.

In the cab she bought a shuttle ticket from her cell phone, but it took her seven tries before the purchase was finally approved. She thought that was odd. Then, waiting for the ten-thirty departure to LaGuardia, she stopped at a gate for a flight to Phoenix and watched, along with a group of about a dozen weary-looking business travelers, the television hung above a row of seats. The lead stories were all connected, all about the panic that was
beginning to grip the East Coast of the United States. The first was about a breakdown in credit-card processing across the Eastern Seaboard. Someone had hacked four financial-services processors and basically stopped all their transactions. Some stores were writing down credit-card numbers to be charged later, but others were accepting only cash. Lines had begun to form outside supermarkets.

Suddenly, her trouble buying a shuttle ticket on her cell phone made sense.

But that was just the beginning. The follow-up story was that ATMs belonging to some of the nation’s biggest banks had started malfunctioning overnight. A few were spitting out cash that didn’t belong to the users, thousands upon thousands of dollars in twenties and fifties. But most of the ATMs—especially the ones in Manhattan—had stopped dispensing cash at all. Some bank customers were forcing their way inside branches and demanding their money. No one at any of the affected banks had commented publicly.

Finally, three separate trucking companies that delivered food and fuel to New York City had all mysteriously gone bankrupt over the past twenty-four hours—or at least they had seemed to have gone bankrupt. Company officers were denying it, saying their books had been altered, but subcontractors had stopped working with the companies until the mess was sorted out, and drivers were refusing to get into their rigs until they were paid—in cash. The companies’ bank accounts were suddenly empty, and their credit ratings had plunged. In consequence, all deliveries from the affected trucking companies had stopped cold, and given that those three companies shipped 60 percent of all the meat and produce coming into New York, little new food was arriving in the city.

Manhattan, one news anchor commented, was an island that made or grew essentially nothing for itself. If cut off from the rest of the country, it would wither and die, and it would do so quickly.

A pit formed at the bottom of Alexis’s stomach. A few of the businessmen watching immediately got on their cell phones. Alexis overheard one calling his wife, telling her to get as much cash as she could out of the bank, while another called his office and told them he was canceling his trip to New York. He hung up and stalked out of the terminal. A third, a worried-looking paunchy man in a gray suit, turned to Alexis with saucer-wide eyes.

“What the fuck is this all about?” he asked, not to Alexis in particular, but
to the world at large. He wandered off to make a phone call before Alexis could answer, but she felt that even with what she knew, she couldn’t help him.

They called her flight, and as she was standing in line to board, Kline rang her cell phone. From what he could gather, Garrett Reilly had surrendered to the FBI in New York and was being held at their headquarters in lower Manhattan.

“Surrendered himself?” Alexis asked, not fully taking in the words. “Why?”

“Don’t know. They’re interrogating him.”

She approached the flight attendant collecting boarding passes. Her mind raced. What had prompted Garrett to give himself up? And what about the other members of the team? Where were they?

“Whatever he’s done, he did on his own,” Kline said over the phone. “Just cooperate and try to make the best of it. I’ll back you up.”

“Okay.” Her thoughts jumped from the TV news to Garrett to what the hell they could want from her at the FBI. “Have you seen the news?”

“No. I just got into the office.”

“Financial hacks in New York. ATMs, credit-card processing. People are freaking out.”

“Shit,” he said quietly, and Alexis could hear him rise out of his squeaking desk chair, most probably to turn on his television. “Call me when you land.”

She hung up, boarded the plane, and took a seat on the aisle in case she needed to stretch. The flight wasn’t long, but she still got up and shook out the kinks in her muscles every few minutes. When she walked through the terminal at LaGuardia, she thought she sensed a stillness among the passengers waiting to board their flights. A quiet anxiety. Or maybe she was imagining it; she couldn’t be sure. She caught thirty seconds of a live TV report from a bank branch in Columbus Circle, something about a window being broken by an angry customer, but she thought she’d better move on and get to the FBI field office.

She took a cab into Manhattan, and the thickset Slavic driver raced down FDR Drive. The cabbie barked into his cell phone nonstop as he drove, in a language she didn’t recognize, until, head aching, she asked him to stop. He glared at her in the rearview mirror, but hung up, and then a few minutes later asked, “You air-force lady?”

“No. Army.” She was wearing her fatigues.

“Sorry about noise. Talking to my uncle. He buys gold for me.”

“Gold?”

“In case . . . you know . . .” The driver shaped his finger into an imaginary gun and pulled the trigger. “The shooting comes.”

“There’s not going to be any shooting,” Alexis said adamantly.

“Okay, army lady. You say so.”

When they got off the East River Drive, the cab passed a bank branch with a crowd milling about outside, as well as a supermarket with a line snaking out the front door. Those scenes made Alexis’s heart race.

The taxi driver smiled. “You see? I tell you. Buy gold, buy gun, stay inside.”

They arrived at the lower-Manhattan Federal Building just before noon, where she passed through a metal detector and submitted to a brief patdown, then took the elevator to the twenty-third floor. She presented her ID to a secretary at the front desk.

“Take a seat, please.” The secretary typed Alexis’s credentials into a computer. “Someone will be with you.”

Alexis noticed that the secretary didn’t say someone would be with Alexis
soon
and settled in for a long wait. But she was surprised when Agent Chaudry appeared a few minutes later. Alexis had met her before, in Alexis’s room at George Washington University Medical Center. Chaudry had asked questions, almost all of which Alexis declined to answer, citing national-security grounds. That had seemed to make Chaudry exceedingly angry, and Alexis got the sense that the FBI agent was used to having her way—in all things.

“We meet again,” Chaudry said, without offering her hand to shake.

Alexis rose painfully and stood at attention, as rigid and straight as her aching body would allow. “Ma’am, your office asked that I come.”

“You know Garrett Reilly turned himself in?”

“I do.” Alexis kept her eyes focused on a back wall, to the right of Chaudry.

“And he’s cooperating with us?”

“I did not know that.”

“As much as he cooperates with anyone, I suppose.” Alexis turned slightly to look at the female FBI agent. Chaudry looked pensive, eyes half-closed. She folded her arms across her chest. “He asked for you.”

“He did?” Alexis hadn’t meant to sound surprised, but she did.

“Said you were crucial to the enterprise.”

Alexis started to answer, then held her tongue.

“You believe him? All this stuff about Ilya Markov? Attacking the economy?”

Alexis let her shoulders slump slightly—it hurt her hips to stand at attention. “I do. That’s why I backed him. Because I believe him. And events this morning . . .” She didn’t quite know how to finish the sentence.

Chaudry moved a step closer to Alexis and whispered in her ear, “He’s working for me now. Not you. He does what I say, or I throw him back in jail. I’ll make up charges: conspiracy, murder, flight from justice. I don’t give a shit. Even if they don’t stick, he’ll sit two years in a federal prison awaiting trial. Same goes for you. I know you called him from DC the day of the murder. There are tapes sitting at the NSA—aiding a fugitive in a capital murder case. Life in prison. So, just like him, you belong to me. You do whatever the hell I say. Understood?”

Chaudry was standing only a few inches from Alexis’s face. The two women were about the same height, and Alexis could feel the agent’s breath on her cheek and ear. She could smell coffee as well as a hint of perfume—not expensive, but not garish either. Alexis wasn’t afraid of Chaudry, but she didn’t take to being threatened either.

“What would you like me to do?” Alexis’s voice was cold and hard.

“I have to solve the Steinkamp case. And keep the economy from going down in flames.”

“I don’t know that I can help you with either of those.”

“What you can do is keep Garrett Reilly in line.”