The King of Fear: A Garrett Reilly Thriller (32 page)

“Anyone left the building?”

“Nobody. And some of these bitches are pissed about it.”

“Keep holding them.” Garrett hung up.

Chaudry moved to his shoulder. “The side exits?”

“Alexis and Patmore would have called. And nobody’s getting past them.”

Chaudry and Garrett stood there, trying to puzzle out Thomason’s whereabouts. Chaudry frowned and looked at Garrett, and Garrett suspected she had come to the same conclusion as he had. “The roof?” she asked.

As they ran up the stairs to the thirty-fourth floor, they could hear an alarm blaring, and two flights later, they found the door to the roof banging in the breeze, open, the warning Klaxon screaming. Garrett charged out first. Thirty-five stories above the city, the wind and the sound of the Klaxon blended into a low rumble. Garrett’s eyes swept across the cluttered rooftop. A pair of steel huts, cooling fans, and vents that blew air into the sky all surrounded a raised helipad in the center of the roof. Garrett clattered up a flight of stairs to the top of the helipad.

Jeffrey Thomason stood at the far end of the platform, staring off at the
distant horizon. The rooftop offered an unobstructed view over the East River and into Queens. The building wasn’t high enough to allow a view past the boroughs, but a large swath of low-slung apartments, factories, and elevated highways was visible leading off into the distance. An intricate dance of jets and helicopters angled across the sky, and Thomason seemed to be staring at them.

Garrett slowed as he crossed the landing area. “Hey,” he shouted, as Chaudry ran up behind him. “You Jeffrey?”

Thomason turned. His face was drained of life, pale and white. His eyes looked watery, as if he’d been crying. “Who are you?”

“FBI, Special Agent Jayanti Chaudry,” Chaudry yelled. “You’ll need to put your hands above your head.” She flashed her badge—it seemed to Garrett that she did that a lot—then pulled her gun from her shoulder holster.

“No,” Thomason said without further explanation. He stepped backward toward the edge of the landing pad. “No, I don’t.”

“Where’s Ilya Markov?” Garrett asked.

“No idea.” Thomason took another step back.

“Hands above your head,” Chaudry yelled, moving quickly across the tarmac. Without warning, Thomason stepped off the helipad, jumping to the roof below. Chaudry and Garrett ran to the edge of the pad and watched as Thomason, limping from the fall, stumbled to the edge of the rooftop. A steel-wire barrier, about five feet high and strung with lines of wrapped wire, guarded the edge of the roof. Without hesitation, Thomason slotted his shoes onto the wires and climbed the fence, stopping to balance on the second-to-highest wire. With one lean forward, he would go over the edge and tumble thirty-five floors down.

Garrett leaped off the landing pad and ran toward Thomason. “Don’t,” he said, trying not to yell. “Don’t do this. Totally unnecessary.”

Thomason turned his body slightly to see Garrett, then put up a single hand to signal that Garrett should stop where he was. “Why not? You have a better option?”

Garrett started to say yes, that there was a better option, but he tripped on his own words. He couldn’t, at that moment, think of what to say. Was there a way forward for Thomason? Garrett didn’t suppose that there was. Thomason was looking at a long stint in jail, endless poverty, national disgrace.

“I think”—Garrett tried to muster a coherent sentence—“I think there’s no need to throw everything—”

Before Garrett could finish his sentence, Thomason leaned hard over the top wire, his upper body slipping over the edge. His shoes unhooked from the wires below his ankles, and he tumbled down, his head briefly banging on the top corner of the building. His feet flew out over his head, putting him into a somersault, and he dropped off into space without a sound.

M
IDTOWN
M
ANHATTAN
, J
UNE
25, 9:49 A.M.

T
he first thing Alexis heard was a shout—not a scream exactly, but more a strangled cry of horror. The sound came from a knot of people that had gathered on Forty-Sixth Street, on the south side of the Vandy building, not thirty yards from where she was standing. Alexis had been guarding the building’s two exit doors, making sure no one fled down the stairs and onto the street. There’d been no activity, nothing out of the ordinary, until that cry, and the small crowd of people huddled around the thing on the ground that Alexis could not yet see.

She started toward them, abandoning her watch on the doors, a dread growing inside her with every step. A middle-aged man turned away, his hand to his mouth, gagging as he staggered down the street.

Alexis slowed. “What is it?” she called out.

No one answered. Another woman turned away and retched.

Alexis held her breath and pushed through the small crowd. Lying faceup on the pavement was a young man in a suit. His eyes were open, his mouth too, with a smattering of blood around his head. That was horrible enough, but the way in which his arms and legs were twisted in impossible angles made Alexis unsteady on her feet; his right arm was bent backward behind his torso, and his right leg was cocked back under his left, as if he were a rag doll lying discarded on a playroom floor. Looking at him, Alexis could almost feel the impact of his fall in her own bones; it was as if she herself had hit the pavement, body crushed in an instant. No human should ever look like that. She became light-headed.

Alexis had seen death before, many times, in Iraq: bodies blown to pieces, servicemen shot by snipers, civilians burned in their homes. But she had steeled herself for those sights; she had known they were coming—had known it from the moment she set foot on the tarmac at Baghdad International Airport. This was different. This was not supposed to happen. This was a bolt from the blue.

“He fell off that building,” a man said. “I saw him land.” Alexis thought she heard a hint of ghoulish pride in his voice.

“He didn’t fall,” an older woman said. “He jumped. Nobody falls off a building. Not in a suit.”

Alexis knelt beside the body. She took the young man’s broken arm in her hands and checked for a pulse at his wrist. She wasn’t sure why she was doing it—the man was obviously dead—but she’d been trained in the army to always check for signs of life, and so she did it by rote. She counted silently to ten, but there was nothing, and then his fingers flinched slightly, a postmortem nervous-system response, and Alexis’s stomach did a flip. She dropped his arm and stepped away from the crowd, moving quickly to the edge of the sidewalk, gasping for breath. She leaned against a car, afraid she might faint. Someone approached her from behind and asked if she was okay.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Alexis said. “Thank you.”

A young woman took her by the hand. She was slight, with thick black hair and a tattoo on her arm. “Just take a deep breath. You’ll be okay. You need some air.” She led Alexis away from the crowd of gawkers and the twisted remains of what had once been a living person.

Alexis nodded, grateful for the human contact. “It’s so awful.”

“It is.” The young woman ushered Alexis off the sidewalk and onto the black pavement of Forty-Sixth Street. “Just awful. Why would someone do that?”

Alexis shook her head. “I don’t know.” She blinked in the morning sun.

“Come this way.”

Alexis, head still fuzzy, followed the woman down the block. But then something occurred to Alexis: Why was this woman leading her into the street? Alexis stopped walking. “What are you doing?”

“It’s okay. You can trust me.” Alexis stared at her. The young woman smiled. “You’re Alexis, right?”

Alexis froze with a jolt of sudden fear. She started to turn away, wanting to run, but pain exploded at the back of her head. She knew immediately that
it was a blow from something hard, a gun maybe, and she tried to yell, but couldn’t produce any sound. The city spun around her, and the young woman and somebody else—a man, Alexis thought, with rough hands—dragged her a quick few steps to the open back door of a car. Had the man hit her, and where had he come from? How could she have missed him? They shoved her inside the car as she tried to regain the use of her arms, the pain spiraling outward from her brain, making black spots explode in the periphery of her vision, and then she heard the door close and an engine rumble and the world went dark as something was thrown over her head. It felt like an old blanket, crusted on her skin, and it stank of rotting food.

“Move and I’ll shoot you,” the young woman said. Alexis could feel the woman sitting next to her on the backseat of the car. “You dying is no big deal.” She yanked Alexis’s hands behind her back and then bound them with wire that cut into Alexis’s wrists. Her phone and wallet were quickly stripped from her pockets.

Alexis lay motionless, wishing the pain in her head would subside and trying to gather her thoughts. She quickly understood that she’d been tricked, conned by Ilya Markov and whomever he had working with him, and a wave of guilt and remorse washed over her. Had he been watching her the entire time, maybe from a car parked on Forty-Sixth Street, waiting for the moment to strike? As the ache in her skull morphed into a throbbing pain that reached down into her neck and back, she decided that he had, and that while she was a good soldier, and a perceptive intelligence officer, she was no match for an experienced con man. A con man was always on the lookout for distractions, mistakes, and weakness. Markov couldn’t have predicted that someone would jump from the building, but when he saw it happen, he’d made immediate use of the situation.

He had made Alexis his victim.

She lay there for what felt like hours, but was probably only minutes. She could hear traffic all around her, the honking of horns, and then a low, constant roar that made her think they were driving through a tunnel. She guessed that they were leaving Manhattan, going into New Jersey, perhaps, although her knowledge of the geography of the city was limited. Once they left the tunnel, given enough time, they could be anywhere. She supposed that was the point—nobody would figure out where they were headed.

She groaned with the realization that she no longer had any control of the situation. She was Ilya Markov’s hostage, and he could do with her as he pleased—a nightmare scenario for her. A bleak despair invaded her thoughts: all she could do was hope that he wasn’t going to kill her, and that if he did, he would be quick about it. She did not want to see it coming.

That seemed like a reasonable last request.

V
ANDERBILT
F
RINK
, J
UNE
25, 10:42 A.M.

G
arrett sat on the rough tar-pebble roof, legs crossed under him, and felt the morning sun on his face. One of the steel huts protected him from the wind, but he could hear it rushing along the rooftop and over the air-conditioning fans that hummed behind him. Chaudry stood on a far corner, talking on her cell phone, while a half dozen other FBI agents looked over the rooftop, eyes peeled to the ground. What they were looking for Garrett couldn’t say—and he didn’t care.

Garrett sat there for an hour at least, maybe longer. He lost track of time. He felt awful, hollowed out and desperate. Watching Thomason go over the edge, fall all that way to his death, the slow-motion memory of it—Garrett knew it would haunt him for a long time. Maybe forever. He felt responsible. He had hunted for the man—and found him. Thomason had been guilty of a crime—a crime that was ongoing—and would have paid for it one way or the other. And yet . . .

Something nagged at Garrett. What was it? Markov was still out there, but he had been stopped, at least for the time being.
Hadn’t he?

“We grabbed two other assistants trying to leave through the lobby,” Wells said as he strode across the rooftop, passing the FBI agents without even looking at them. “Jeffrey had just sent them both e-mails. One was on the derivatives desk; the other worked for my chief investment officer. Little prick infiltrated everything.”

Garrett unfolded his legs and stood up. He scratched at his face and turned
away from the great urban vista that lay off the edge of the building. “What did they have in the works?”

“Not sure. It will take a while to untangle. They had passwords, account access. Probably had some investment vehicles loaded into the system, ready to blow up.”

“They’ll still do that. Blow up, that is. If they have derivative counterparties set up out there, those contracts will still be valid. They’ll still cost you money. Huge amounts of money.”

Wells shook his head. “That’s where you’re wrong. You punched above your weight for a while, but now you’re playing in a league that even you don’t really understand.”

Garrett scowled at Wells. He hated the man—had hated him the moment he met him, the moment they first tried to warn Wells about his own bank. He was arrogant and vain, and the fantasy of head-butting him flashed into Garrett’s mind once again.

“The chairman of the Fed is on her way to New York,” Wells said. “I just spoke to her. I’ll meet with the other bank CEOs tonight. Whatever Thomason set up, we’ll just lay to rest. Make it go away.”

Garrett’s jaw slackened ever so slightly. “You can’t. They won’t agree.”

“Sure they will. We’ve done it before, we’ll do it again. You worked a trading desk. You know the drill. When it comes right down to it, we’re all on the same team. If we don’t look out for each other, the whole system goes in the crapper. Certain interests are too crucial to be crippled by rules.” Wells stepped away from Garrett toward the edge of the roof. He gazed out over the landscape. “The view is good, but I’d like better. I think we’re going to build a bigger building. Downtown. Get a real penthouse office suite going. You know, eighty stories up. So you can see the curvature of the earth. I want that.”

A pit opened in Garrett’s stomach. He let out a soft, involuntary grunt.

“Come on. Don’t act so surprised. That’s the way the machine works. A crisis, the news media panics, the public panics, things look like they’ve changed, but in the end—they don’t. You work on the Street, Reilly. You know the game.”

Garrett closed his eyes. A train of thoughts rushed into his mind, roaring as they came. Nothing was as it seemed. For every straightforward event of the last two weeks, there was an alternative explanation that either led Garrett in an
entirely different direction, or betrayed something he believed true about the world. But if that were the case . . .

“It’s a sleight of hand,” Garrett said aloud, not to Wells, but to himself.

“What is?”

“This. Everything. He wants something else.”

“Who does?” Wells was looking annoyed, as if a fly that he couldn’t manage to swat were still circling his head and ruining his mood.

“Markov.”

Wells frowned at Garrett, confused, then shrugged and walked away. Garrett stared off into the distance. He didn’t care what Wells thought. He could go fuck himself. Garrett’s cell phone rang. He checked the number. Alexis was calling, probably to get an update. He’d left her without word down on the street.

“Hey,” he answered, distracted but trying to focus. “Sorry I didn’t call you earlier.”

Over the line came a male voice, calm, flatly unaccented, and seemingly coming from a quiet, remote location. “Captain Truffant is fine, but she won’t be forever.”

Garrett took in a sharp breath. Markov. Garrett knew it without thinking.

There was a moment’s silence on the other end of the line. “So listen very carefully to what I have to tell you. And then do it.”