The King of Fear: A Garrett Reilly Thriller (25 page)

C
ITY
H
AL
L
, N
EW
Y
ORK
C
ITY
, J
UNE
24, 12:06 P.M.

D
eputy Mayor for Public Affairs John Sankey pushed open the door to Room 9 and was met with the overwhelming scent of two dozen middle-aged men and women all crammed in a room together: body odor and perfume, coffee and egg-salad sandwiches, breath mints and cheap aftershave. The smells mixed with the din of banter and telephone calls; the result was a place Sankey equated with an unnumbered circle of hell. He let out a disgusted grunt, then held a stack of press releases above his head.

“Statement from the mayor, press conference in the Blue Room in an hour,” Sankey bellowed above the chatter.

A few reporters snagged copies of the press release, while most of the others ignored Sankey. They knew canned statements from the mayor were worthless as breaking news; they wanted to fire questions at him. They wanted flesh and blood. Mostly, Sankey knew from experience, they just wanted the blood.

“His Honor asks that you keep the reporting on the current situation calm and rational.” Sankey was shouting slightly, but trying not to seem desperate. “That you stick to the facts, and not report rumor.”

The press crew laughed derisively.

“Have you seen Twitter lately, John?” asked Stan O’Keefe from Channel 7 news.

“I have a Twitter account, yes, and I check it periodically.” In truth, Sankey checked Twitter obsessively, had scanned it only three minutes ago, and knew he
had a public relations nightmare on his hands. #NYCmeltdown was the fastest-trending topic, with thousands—maybe tens or hundreds of thousands—of tweets and pictures from supermarkets and banks all across the five boroughs: lines, broken windows, empty shelves.

Scarcity, unease, panic.

“His Honor can ask for all the calm he wants, but social media says otherwise. Twitter says run for your fucking life,” O’Keefe said.

The room roared with laughter.

Cripes, Sankey thought. Reporters were cynical bastards. “We do not run this city on the whims of Twitter. Come on, guys, you’re professionals. You report the news, not innuendo and rumor. Do me, the mayor, and the people of this city a favor and do your jobs.”

DiMatteo, from the
New York Post
, tossed a Coke Zero into a garbage can. “Our job is to report what the hell is going on, and your job seems to be to deny it.”

“That’s unfair.”

“Really? The Dow dropped two thousand points this morning. Had to stop trading. Started again and it went down another thousand. And counting.”

Sankey wiped the sweat from his face on the back of his suit-jacket sleeve.

Lorraine Chu, from the
New York Times
, held up the press release and read aloud from it: “ ‘There is plenty of cash on hand in banks and food in the stores.’ ” She looked from the paper. “Has the mayor been outside lately?”

A mix of affirmative grunts and low laughter came from the room.

“He plans to tour a supermarket directly after the press conference,” Sankey said.

“Tell him to bring his boxing gloves,” DiMatteo shouted.

“That’s exactly the type of joke that becomes a rumor, and the type of rumor that people take as fact,” Sankey said, growing irritated. “It fuels the mood of chaos and fear, and it becomes self-fulfilling.”

“Thanks for the lecture,” O’Keefe said. “Very educational.”

Sankey let out a disgusted groan and headed for the door. Leigh Anderson, from National Public Radio, one of the few reporters that Sankey both liked and trusted, was waiting for him there. She was younger than the rest of the media crew, and considerably less cynical.

“John.” Her voice was just above a whisper. “A word?”

Sankey nodded, pausing by the door.

She stepped closer to him. “We’re working on a story. The gist is, this is a planned attack on the economy. A form of terrorism.”

“That’s just rumors. And anyway, I can’t comment on that.”

“Because you don’t know? Or because you’ve been told not to comment?”

“I can’t comment on that.”

Anderson nodded, scribbling in her reporter’s notebook. “Got it. You’ve been told not to comment.”

“That is not what I sa—”

“Here’s the real thing, John. The terror attack, we’re working on an angle that says this is just the beginning. That there’s something bigger in the works. Like spectacularly scary and disaster-producing big. That’s aimed at bringing the entire country to its knees. We have deep intelligence sources. Do you know anything about this?”

Sankey pressed his lips together in displeasure, then shook a finger angrily in Anderson’s face. “That is exactly the kind of irresponsible news story that I’m talking about. That is speculative and rumormongering—”

Again, Anderson cut the deputy mayor off, with a slashing motion of her hand. “No, John. We’re talking about a terror attack. The point of terror is to instill fear. That’s what a terror attack is all about—it’s baked into the name.
Terror.
Now, you can deny everything, but it won’t stop us from going to air at four o’clock with the story. So I’ll ask you again. Do you know anything about a coming terror attack against the city?”

Sankey shook out a kink in his leg, tapping his foot repeatedly against the base of a desk. He let out a hot breath. “Anonymously?”

“If that’s the only way you’ll talk.”

“We have heard the same thing.”

“Muslim extremists?”

“Don’t know. Possibly.”

Anderson scribbled in her book. “What is the city doing to prevent it?”

“Everything it can. No holds barred.”

“And the city hall reaction?”

Sankey looked out at the mob of reporters, most of whom had gone back
to talking on their phones or filing updates on their stories. The room was loud again, and frenetic. Sankey wanted out of there, fast. He turned to face the NPR reporter. “Off the record?”

Anderson nodded yes.

“We are very fucking scared.”

FBI F
IELD
O
FFICE
, L
OWER
M
ANHATTAN
, J
UNE
24, 12:15 P.M.

A
s far as Garrett could tell, mass hysteria had been around as long as there had been people congregating in groups. In ancient Rome, mobs of citizens would spontaneously gather in the dead of night, driven by rumors or fear, convinced that Jupiter himself had been spotted on the Capitoline Hill, or that hordes of exotic, savage animals were at the gates of the city, about to overrun it. In the 1500s in France, nunneries were overwhelmed with nuns who could only meow like cats, never speaking actual words. In Milan in 1630, the entire population of that city became convinced that someone had poisoned the food and water supply. The mob dragged a pharmacist from his workshop, and he confessed—on the rack—that he was responsible for the poisoning, and that he had been in league with the devil and unnamed foreigners.

Garrett found that tidbit intriguing: foreigners were often blamed, but few of them were ever actually found.

In 1835, Londoners became deliriously happy with the news that newly invented, high-power telescopes had allowed astronomers to see zebras and monkeys on the moon. The news spread around the globe, to mass celebrations, before it was extinguished in the face of absolutely no verifiable facts. On an October night in 1938, much of the Eastern Seaboard of the United States become convinced that aliens had landed in New Jersey and would soon be taking over the planet. Orson Welles’s radio broadcast became a classic example of media-fed mass panic. But it was hardly the last. There would be World
War II Japanese-citizen internments, 1950s Red scares, 1980s satanic day-care scandals, and on and on and on.

The pattern, to Garrett, was plain to see. Certain ingredients were needed. A period of true danger: war or famine or unemployment or civil unrest. A group of outsiders who had been responsible for problems in the past: foreigners, savages, criminals. A population crowded together in tight spaces where rumor and gossip could freely circulate. Big cities were often the starting point of the hysteria, but sometimes it was teens jammed together in schools, or religious devotees hidden away in monasteries. That last part seemed to be important: populations were most susceptible to panic and delusions when the surrounding culture was strict and controlling, with specific rules about what people could believe. When the society had rigid ideas of what was considered normal, and anything outside of normal was frowned upon—that bred hysteria. It was almost as if mass delusions were a form of rebellion against the existing order.

Garrett pondered that. What were the restrictive conditions in the United States that bred hysteria? Political correctness? Fear of terror attacks? Or was it the opposite, a vast shift in what was considered normal: the acceptance of gay marriage maybe, or the rapid legalization of drugs? Sitting in a small room in the back of the FBI field office in lower Manhattan, a trio of laptops open on a desk in front of him, he read article after article on the madness of crowds. Once a fire was set under a mass delusion, it took on a life of its own, resistant to facts or rationality. It spread like a virus. It some ways, Garrett thought, it was a virus—it infected a host, burned through its immune system, then moved on to the next victim.

He read one theory that said fear, and our panicked reactions to fear, was cooked into our DNA. If you were an early human, living on the plains of Africa, and you heard a mysterious rustling in the night, you were best served by reacting to that sound, quickly and decisively. Nine out of ten times, it might have been an overreaction, but overreacting to any possible danger kept you alive. The humans who didn’t overreact were eventually eaten. Therefore, only the most paranoid of our species passed their genes on to the next generation.

That meant humans were genetically programmed to panic. Ilya Markov seemed to have figured this out long ago. How he had learned it, Garrett had no idea, but the man had become a student of delusion, a master of hysteria.
All around Garrett, on the streets of New York City, was evidence of Markov’s genius.

It occurred to Garrett that mass hysteria was the opposite of a pattern. Popular delusions occurred when people attributed causality to events and things that didn’t actually exist, whereas Garrett sought patterns—or in his case, meaning—out of that same chaos. In a way, mass hysteria was his life counterpart; it was why he sought out patterns. Hysteria created fear; patterns subdued it—they were two sides of the same coin. Suddenly he understood that mass hysteria was that dark thing he had felt coming, that he had been terrified of the night before Phillip Steinkamp was shot. He also knew that it wasn’t out there, a storm he could see raging over the horizon. No, delusion and hysteria lived inside Garrett Reilly and always had. He reveled in them; they gave him power. The thought astounded him, but he knew it was true.

The dark thing was not coming. It was already here.

He was the dark thing.

• • •

Celeste and Mitty were the first to show up at the FBI field office. They had spent the night in Mitty’s apartment in Queens, and Celeste, instead of complaining about it—which Garrett had fully expected—said it had been comfortable, even fun, that they’d drunk wine and talked until three in the morning, and that the shower she’d taken in Mitty’s bathroom this morning was the best thing she’d experienced in days. Garrett was amused that they’d become friends, but it made sense—they were both outsiders to the core.

Alexis arrived next, having flown up from DC that morning. Garrett was surprised at how unscathed she looked, given that she’d been in a bomb attack, but when he got a closer look at her under the bright fluorescent office lights, he could see the dark bruises under her makeup, and the red scratches and cuts on her chin.

“Was it scary?” He reached out to touch her face, but stopped inches away.

“No. I didn’t have time to think.”

“When I heard, I . . .” He couldn’t finish. What he’d felt when he thought Alexis might have been killed was a mixture of dread and rage that seemed beyond his ability to articulate to another person, particularly to Alexis. “I’m just glad you’re okay.”

She nodded, saying nothing, and that was all the time they had for personal conversation.

Agent Chaudry stepped between them, grabbing Garrett by the arm. “She lived. Enough small talk. We have work to do.”

Garrett understood then that something was going on between the agent and Alexis, some tug-of-war involving governmental politics and police power. He guessed that Chaudry was simply asserting her alpha-dog status, and that Alexis had no choice but to be submissive, but still—their relationship would be interesting to watch.

Bingo and Patmore arrived a few minutes after Alexis. They had grabbed a motel room in downtown Newark, bunking out together in a Comfort Inn, but seemed no closer than they had before they’d spent the night together.

“So what’s next?” Agent Chaudry said, once they were all gathered in the back room of the field offices. “What’s the brilliant idea?”

All eyes turned to Garrett.

“He’s setting fires. All over the place. You can’t see the fires, but you can see the smoke, and psychologically that’s worse than the actual fire.” Garrett fingered a remote control, and a TV in the corner played a cable news channel. A breathless talking head was going on about shocks to the economy, and what it meant, why it was happening, and what the future held for the citizenry of the United States. “The fear is worse than the actual thing. The fear sets everyone on edge. The fear sets us up for the next shock.”

“But what is that shock?” Chaudry asked. “What’s he getting at?”

Garrett thumbed the remote control again, switching to a local channel, where a reporter was doing a live report from an eerily deserted Times Square. A smattering of riot police could be seen behind the reporter, cutting off access to Forty-Second Street.

“People are going nuts,” Mitty said. “Everybody’s going completely wacko.”

“And ‘everybody’ is the answer,” Garrett said.

“How so?” Chaudry asked.

“Large numbers. Crowds. Mobs. Viral concepts. We turn them around. Make them our allies.”

“Crowdsource it.” Mitty let out a noise that was halfway between a disgusted grunt and a shout of joy. “Can’t believe I didn’t think of that.”

“Reddit?” Bingo said. “Twitter?”

“For sure,” Garrett said. “Maybe start our own site.”

“All three,” Mitty said. “Fuck it. As many places as possible.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” Chaudry said.

Garrett turned to face Chaudry. “People are watching what’s happening, but they’re in the dark, so they’re letting their imaginations run wild. The consequence is, we get hysteria. That’s how Markov operates—from the shadows. That’s how he fans the flames. But if we’re transparent with people—if we tell them what we know—then they’ll see the bigger picture. They’ll come up with their own ideas about what’s happening and why.”

Chaudry shook her head. “But they won’t be any more right than we are. Or any smarter.”

“Individually, they’re not any smarter. But collectively, they’re brilliant. If we ask enough people a question, some of them will get the answer right. They’ll predict what Markov is going to do next. And if enough of them guess one way or another, then we’ll have a crowdsourced answer.”

“A massive predictive algorithm, made up of millions of people,” Alexis said, pleased.

Chaudry scanned the faces in the room, ending with Garrett. “Well? What the hell are you waiting for?”