The King of Fear: A Garrett Reilly Thriller (35 page)

M
INSK
, B
ELARUS
, J
UNE
26, 9:02 A.M. (GMT +3)

B
elarus State Security officer Nagi Ulyanin waited patiently in line behind the two old women chattering at each other in Russian. Older people still spoke Russian; the youth of his country, they spoke their true native language—Belarusian—every day, all the time. Ulyanin was proud of that, and scornful of the babushkas in front of him. Yet, he thought to himself, he was glad they were voting. That was the point, after all—
everyone
casts his or her ballot in a democracy.

Ulyanin was filled with an almost inexpressible joy. Belarus was on the verge of becoming a Western-style country now. Election Day had come at last, the people were voting, and maybe, just maybe, new leadership would emerge from the carnage. And Ulyanin had helped in the transformation. He had worked from the inside of the state police apparatus, a subversive chipping away at the forces of oppression.

Ulyanin smiled. That old bastard Bazanov had never suspected a thing. Every time he’d called in troops, or more firepower or riot police, Ulyanin had seen to it that the worst companies, under the most incompetent officers, were brought to the scene. And if, God forbid, trained soldiers with true expertise made it to the front lines of the protests, Ulyanin and his fellow fifth columnists inside the secret police made sure they were badly equipped—the worst rifles, old ammunition, tanks with no fuel. He’d even mixed up orders and schedules, guaranteeing that the police arrived too late to make a dent in the protests or, worse, that their arrival time was well-known to the radicals
on the other side of the barricades. A hail of bullets was always in store for the government forces.

Ulyanin glowed with a quiet satisfaction. The process had not been easy, or without personal danger, but it had been worth it. He wondered about Bazanov, that growling, bald Russian son of a bitch. He had chafed under Bazanov’s rule, every single day, the humorless prick scolding Ulyanin for his incompetence or his lack of courage, cursing the backward Belarusian people and their miserable capital, Minsk. He had heard rumors, through the intelligence grapevine, that Bazanov had gone to New York City. That seemed too far-fetched to be believed, yet the gossip had been persistent. There was even a report that he’d been murdered, but Ulyanin discounted that as preposterous.

What in the world was Bazanov doing in New York City? Ulyanin had seen him in Independence Square, in Minsk, only a few days ago. Had he just picked up and moved his operation to the United States? And why? Spelnikov, a fellow subversive in the state police, had said he’d heard that Bazanov had something to do with the financial craziness in America. That it had been one of his dirty tricks, like hijacking a TV station or busing in gangsters to intimidate voters.

“On a slightly bigger scale,” Ulyanin had told Spelnikov, laughing. “Hijacking the American economy is harder than paying a busload of thugs to vote in local elections.”

“I hear what I hear,” Spelnikov had said, and gone back to obsessively rolling his stinking clove cigarettes.

Maybe Bazanov had been behind that thing in America. Ulyanin wouldn’t put it past him, or the SVR. The Russian president and his Kremlin mobsters were a crazy bunch. They would do anything if they thought it would make them money—or rid them of enemies. But what would the connection be between Belarus and New York City? Ulyanin didn’t think there was any, although he had seen newspaper articles yesterday admonishing voters not to choose the uncertainty of Western free-market capitalism over the solidity of Mother Russia.

The two babushkas picked up their ballots, grabbed pens, and walked to the table where you marked your selections. That everyone else could see whom you voted for was disturbing to Ulyanin, but at least it was actual voting. Progress was being made.

Ulyanin gave his name to the pretty young election official. She looked it
up, checked it off on her roll book, then gave him a ballot and a pen. “Please return the pen when you are done.”

“Of course.” Ulyanin moved to the table to fill in the ballot. He made his marks quickly, voting for Anna Shushkevich, the young reform candidate, and the other National Reform Party candidates on her slate. He peeked up when he was done, checking to see whom everyone else at his table had voted for. The two babushkas had marked down Lukashenko, their disgraced dictator of a leader. Ulyanin’s stomach dropped slightly, but then he reminded himself that change rarely came from the older generation. Lukashenko would not win—Ulyanin was sure of this: the past could not hold back the future.

He dropped his ballot into the sealed ballot box, then gave his pen back to the pretty election official. “Thank you for all your hard work,” he told her, and she smiled happily at him.

He stepped outside the union hall where the voting was taking place, breathing in deep of the summer’s morning. Rain clouds were moving off to the east, revealing a glorious morning sun. The day was warm and clean and new. He walked down Vawpshasava Avenue, as cars and trucks rumbled past, and Ulyanin decided that he would take the rest of the day off. He would walk to the park, Aziarysca, and sit under a tree and enjoy life.

As he strolled along, he passed a strange-looking man, thin, very thin, with a hard, pinched face. He wore a slick black suit, even in the heat, a bit like the mobsters of Moscow used to favor. Ulyanin thought nothing of him, smiled, and kept walking, but the man’s face stuck in his memory. Had he seen him before? Did he have something to do with Bazanov?

“Comrade Ulyanin,” someone called out to him in Russian.

Ulyanin stopped, surprised, then turned to see who was hailing him. The thin man in the slick suit had changed direction and was striding quickly toward him, only now he was trailed by two enormous men in black T-shirts, their muscles bulging under their tight sleeves. A shock wave of fear ran the entire length of Ulyanin’s body, and in a flash of insight he saw his future laid out before him: a trip in a car to a deserted forest, a beating, a lecture, more beatings, and then a bullet to the head.

“We need to talk.” The thin man waved his bony hand at Ulyanin. “Come take a ride with us.”

Ulyanin jerked backward, away from this ghastly creature, but the goons
following him were too quick. They surrounded Ulyanin and held him by the shoulder. Suddenly a car was pulling up at the curb, a black Mercedes, and the back door was popping open. Ulyanin grimaced. There was nothing for it now. He was doomed.
Damn it.
The day had been so glorious. He struggled to free himself from the grip of the musclemen, but they were too strong. Ulyanin wanted to cry. But, no, he would not. He craned his head toward the bone-thin Russian man in a suit.

“You cannot hold back the future!” Ulyanin shouted.

The thin man shrugged, uncaring. “Perhaps not. But we can try.”

L
OWER
M
ANHATTAN
, J
ULY
8, 3:31 P.M.

G
arrett watched the city below through the wide bank of windows at Jenkins & Altshuler and marveled at how rapidly life had gone back to normal; stores were open, banks were solvent, the stock market hadn’t crashed. The American dollar had stabilized. The press had taken to calling it the Midsummer Madness, and only two weeks after it had happened, people seemed to have already forgotten the entire event. The panic and chaos seemed like a distant fever dream: no one was sure it had actually taken place. Perhaps it had been imaginary—a mass hallucination.

Garrett wasn’t sure himself. At times the memory of it seemed like a nightmare, a drug-fueled episode stoked by his own raging paranoia. Perhaps Ilya Markov was a figment of his imagination—a tale he told himself to feel important. To feel needed. To feel loved.

Or maybe not.

Garrett had gone back to work a few days after the incident in the marshes of Staten Island. The other traders at J&A had given him a few odd glances, but only one had had the nerve to ask him what had happened, and where he’d been. Garrett explained that he’d been wrongly accused of the murder of Phillip Steinkamp, and that everything had been sorted out with law enforcement, but more than that he couldn’t really say: “Classified.”

He kept buying and selling bonds, and he found that he did it with better results than before Ilya Markov had showed up in his life. He attributed this to quitting his painkiller habit, but he also suspected that the incident had given
him a new perspective on his life. Maybe he didn’t have it so bad after all. He was one of the lucky ones. And yet . . .

Markov’s words popped into his head at odd moments: just before he fell asleep, or when he was trying to calculate the discounted present value of a corporate junk bond. Was he, Garrett Reilly, going to be happy doing this for the rest of his life, working inside the great capitalist finance machine? Would he forever be an outsider, face pressed up against the glass, no matter how much money he made? Perhaps he was supposed to live a different life—a life of rebellion, outside the rules, bringing change, forcing governments and the privileged to account for their actions and their crimes.

Perhaps he was wasting his time at J&A. Perhaps he had missed his true calling. The possibility haunted him.

No matter how hard he had looked in the past two weeks, he’d found nothing online or in the news about bad trades or highly leveraged derivatives coming from Vanderbilt Frink’s trading desk. Nothing. Wells had been right that day on the roof—it would all get covered up, and no one would be the wiser.

Garrett had found a few news items that intrigued him, though. The day after Markov had been shot, a financial blogger wrote about a rumor that Robert Andrew Wells Jr. and four other banking CEOs had been seen dining together in the back room at the restaurant Daniel on Sixty-Fifth Street. They’d been joined by Caroline Hummels, the chairwoman of the Federal Reserve. No pictures were taken, and no official word had been released on any such meeting, but Garrett thought it made sense: all the counterparties to Vandy’s bad bets had sat down over an ’86 Château Margaux and filet mignon and agreed to let them slide. As if all those transactions, all those bets, had never happened. It was just as Wells said: the wealthy protected their own interests, and the government aided that enterprise. The wheel went round and round.

The other news item—and this one had broken big—was the suicide of Leonard Harris, congressman from suburban Georgia. Harris was the chairman of the House Banking Subcommittee, and he’d been humiliated by a sex video that had gone viral. No one could identify the woman on the video—her face had been carefully angled away from the camera—but the man was clearly Harris. And what they did was explicit. Police theorized that Harris had gone to meet the woman at a cabin in rural Virginia, potentially to have sex with her. Or maybe to kill her. But either way, the woman never showed up. Alone
and broken, Harris scribbled a rambling suicide note, then turned his gun on himself.

The press posited it as an isolated case of adultery and regret, but Garrett thought otherwise. Garrett thought Harris had been taken out of the picture at the exact moment when he was most needed, when the American economy had teetered on the brink of ruin. Harris was another Ilya Markov dupe, and he had paid the price for his gullibility.

Garrett left work early, and Mitty met him at their favorite bar, McSorley’s, in the East Village. The two of them drank beer and tequila shots. He told Mitty all about the night in Staten Island, and what had happened with Alexis.

Mitty, as always, was sympathetic to Garrett’s side of the story. “You did what you had to do. You made the calculated decision, and it was the right one. If Alexis can’t handle that, then fuck her.”

“You think Markov was telling the truth about her working for Homeland Security?”

“Does it matter? She either works for military intelligence or Homeland Security. What’s the difference?”

Garrett thought she had a point.

He called Oakland a few times that week and spoke to Bingo, who said he was moving out of his mother’s house. He sounded excited to be looking for a new apartment. Garrett was happy for him and tried to say so without sounding patronizing.

“If you need me again,” Bingo said, “you can just, you know, call.”

“Will do. Stay safe.” Then Garrett thought about that. “Actually, don’t stay safe. Get into boatloads of trouble.”

Garrett exchanged e-mails with Celeste as well. She said she was toying with leaving the Bay Area and moving to New York, maybe to get work as a translator at the United Nations. The thought of Celeste living in the same city made him exceedingly nervous, but he supposed there were enough people in New York to act as a buffer between the two of them. In a moment of weakness he offered her a place on his couch, but she declined.

Gonna stay with Mitty,
she wrote.
We’re sympático.

Garrett laughed for the first time in days when he read that. Maybe running into Celeste in New York wouldn’t be so terrible after all. The next eve
ning, when he stepped out of the lobby of J&A, a black SUV pulled up to the curb. Garrett flinched when he saw it, but the passenger door popped open and Agent Chaudry climbed out.

She was smiling and looked much happier than when they had worked together. “Can I buy you dinner?”

Garrett chuckled, half at the idea that he would go to dinner with an FBI agent, and half that he had been so ready to bolt at the sight of an unmarked SUV.

Agent Murray drove, and Garrett noticed that he didn’t look any happier than before. Garrett figured Chaudry must have come out of this case looking good, and Murray not so much. Murray dropped them at an Indian place on Hudson Street in Tribeca.

Agent Chaudry seemed to know the waitstaff. “Want me to order for you?”

“Always in charge.” Garrett nodded.

“Life is just easier that way.”

They made small talk for a few minutes, then Chaudry cut to the chase. “I want to know everything Markov offered you that night. I’d like you to try to give me the conversation you had, verbatim.”

Garrett told her. He could remember every word they had said. That was one of Garrett’s gifts, and he didn’t hold back; he felt he had no reason to keep anything from anyone.

“Were you tempted? To go with him?” she asked when he was done, pouring Garrett another glass of wine.

“That night? No. Now? I think about it.”

Chaudry looked surprised. “Go join a bunch of hacker criminals? Living in shitholes all around the world. That sounds appealing to you?”

Garrett dipped a samosa in a spicy green sauce and tasted it. The food was good, and he was hungry. “Maybe I didn’t agree with how Markov did things. But his goals weren’t so crazy. The power structure in this country needs a bullet to the head. You think an Indian woman from New Jersey is ever going to run the FBI?”

Chaudry gulped down a mouthful of wine and smiled. “I do, actually. And I’ll give you a call when I get there.”

Garrett laughed.

“Look, Markov was a con man, plain and simple,” Chaudry said. “He didn’t have real goals, other than money. We finally got some responses back from the Russian internal security service, and they said he’d been running computer scams for years. Just making money. He was a petty criminal. This was all part of a scheme.”

“They’re lying to cover up their motives. They paid him to attack the American economy and swing an election,” Garrett said.

“Maybe they did. But that doesn’t change the fact that Markov’s goals were ambiguous at best. He was an amoral thug for hire.”

Garrett considered this. “Maybe I’m amoral.”

“Don’t think that I haven’t wondered about that.”

Agent Murray picked them up and drove Garrett home, and he and Chaudry got out of the SUV at his apartment.

“One question,” Garrett said, as they lingered by his front door. “Staten Island. How’d you know to follow me?”

“I didn’t at first. But when both you and Alexis disappeared, that seemed strange. Not your normal pattern.” She grinned at him. “You taught me well.”

Garrett didn’t know what to say. Why anyone would want to look at the world the way he did was a mystery.

“I put both your pictures out on the wire. Because the streets were empty, it was easy to spot you. We sent people to South Ferry. They watched you from there on in.”

“Huh,” Garrett grunted. That explained his uneasiness on the train, and later in the marshes. “Well, thanks.”

She shook his hand, said good-bye, and drove off. Garrett went back up to his apartment and smoked a bowl of Fighting Buddha. He’d decided that he needed some kind of chemical mood enhancers to keep the demons—and the pain—away, and pot seemed harmless enough.

Still awake two hours later, he called Mitty. “Something’s not right.”

“Are you still obsessing about Alexis?” Mitty sounded groggy.

“Yes.” He thought about this. “But more than that.”

“If there’s a problem, go do something about it. But stop calling me at three in the fucking morning.”