The King of Fear: Part Two: A Garrett Reilly Thriller (15 page)

N
EWARK
, N
EW
J
ERSEY
, J
UNE
23, 10:15 P.M.

D
eep disappointment washed over Agent Chaudry as she stood in the dark of the concrete plaza in downtown Newark. She had failed to grab Garrett Reilly, yet again, and this time she had been so certain she would find him. Everything had lined up for her—she’d had the DIA on her side, links from Captain Truffant’s phone and from her e-mail, as well as receipts for plane tickets and rental cars over the last week. General Kline had ordered his subordinate to open all her books and records to the FBI, and the information had led them to the seventh floor of the half-finished office tower on Raymond and Market.

Only they were gone.

Garrett Reilly and Ascendant had fled before Chaudry and the Bureau got there. Another missed chance. And the pressure was mounting. The Bureau was on war footing: from the murder of a federal official to a domestic terror bombing, the case was now on the front page of every newspaper in the country. The director of the FBI himself had called her that morning, his voice brimming with impatience, explaining that the president’s chief of staff had called
him
only ten minutes earlier, wanting to know what the hell was going on. They had put three separate teams on the bombing in DC, with a liaison to coordinate their efforts with hers. They had given her two dozen extra agents in Manhattan, as well as a new forensics team from the NYPD.

And still she wasn’t getting the job done. Standing at the base of the building where Reilly had recently hidden himself, she could only scrape her heels
against the cement and wonder where he had gone. She was trying so goddamned hard.

In order to think like Reilly, Chaudry had immersed herself in the world of patterns: for the last twenty-four hours, anywhere she could possibly find a pattern, she sought it out, wrote it down, studied and analyzed it.

For instance, seventeen field agents worked in the Manhattan FBI office; thirteen were men, and four were women. But the men were, on average, seven years older than the women, and of the last four hires, two were female, and two male. When she looked up the average retirement age of an FBI agent—fifty-eight—she realized that at the current distribution of hiring, women would outnumber men in the Manhattan office in nine years.

That revelation made her exceedingly happy. Score one for patterns.

She categorized the last four digits of phone numbers in her contact list, but found nothing there, so she turned to spending data from the receipts she found at the bottom of her purse. A nice pattern emerged from those pieces of paper: she spent around seven bucks in the morning—on coffee and snacks—then averaged twenty-three in the afternoon, before dropping back down to eight-fifty when she stopped at the Korean deli near her house. She liked that information as well and made a note to be more careful with her credit card in the middle of the day.

All in all, she enjoyed seeing the world through numbers; she’d always been good at math, and it felt right to her, even if that put her squarely in the cliché of the Indian girl who was a numbers geek. So be it.

Yet it hadn’t paid off. Reilly’s friendship with Michaela Rodriguez had no pattern. His relationship to Ascendant had no pattern. His running to New Jersey had no pattern. And the part that killed her was that the Newark PD had raided that very same office three days earlier. They had been spoofed, had kicked down the door, guns at the ready, had seen every member of Ascendant—and had walked away. How could they have been so blind?

She knew how. If you weren’t actively looking for a suspect, that person could be right in front of your face and you wouldn’t notice him or her. The Newark PD was not in the Garrett Reilly business, so he had escaped their grasp. And truth be told, when she read the report of the spoofing, nobody mentioned an office worker who bore any resemblance to Reilly. Perhaps he had fled the premises before they got there.

But all of this raised another question: Who had spoofed those offices in the first place? Was it this Ilya Markov that Captain Truffant had gone on about? There was no evidence that he had anything to do with the bombing at the Arlington Best Buy, or the shooting of the Fed president. Yet Truffant seemed convinced he was behind all of it. Was Truffant paranoid? She didn’t seem like the type, but she was an intelligence officer, and they were, by nature, afraid of their own shadows.

It was all maddeningly complex, an opaque mystery, the veil of which Chaudry was not penetrating. How could this possibly be? She was a master criminal hunter. She did not fail.
Ever.

Agent Murray walked out of the lobby of the building shaking his head, followed by a phalanx of other agents. “Nothing in any of the other offices. We checked every one.” He stopped a few feet from Chaudry and eyed her expectantly. She was still the boss, but her position was becoming tenuous. The director of the Manhattan field office might decide to replace her at any moment; and if that happened, Murray might well step into her shoes. “So, what next?”

Chaudry clenched her jaw, her eyes sweeping over the landscape of Newark and New Jersey beyond. A soccer stadium was lit up in the distance.

“Head back to Manhattan. We’ll review what we’ve got.”

Murray nodded faithfully, following orders, but Chaudry could see the beginning of a gleam in his eye. She was giving up for the day, stifled, and that meant he was one step closer to taking over the case. She didn’t blame him for his eagerness; he had every right to be as ambitious as she was.

They got in the white Chevy Malibu and drove east, onto Route 9 toward New York, along the elevated highway, past the smokestacks and rotting swamp piers. Chaudry watched the passing scenery with disgust: she hated New Jersey, hated being there, hated being
from
there.

“We’ll get ’em tomorrow,” Murray said, as they entered the Holland Tunnel. “Never give up, right?”

She looked over at her partner, his hands gripping the wheel of the car, eyes forward. Would he do a better job than she would? Perhaps she had gotten too mired in the weeds of the case—maybe it needed a fresh set of eyes.

“Yeah, tomorrow,” she said halfheartedly.

They came out of the tunnel into the artificial night of Manhattan and inched through traffic on Canal Street. Murray turned right on Broadway and headed south toward the Federal Building and the FBI field offices.

Chaudry’s phone chimed, a text coming in. She checked it.

Where are you?

She tapped out a reply.
Who is this?

Your bud Garrett.

She glanced over at Murray to see if he was watching her, but his eyes were glued to the street. She typed,
How did you get this number?

You gave it to me. In an e-mail. Remember?

Yes, she did remember. Of course. But why the hell was he texting her now?

Where are you?
he wrote again.
I thought we had a thing.

Chaudry tensed. Was he playing with her? Or actually reaching out to her, as she had predicted he would. She couldn’t let him slip away, not this time. Her heart raced as she tried to figure out how to play the situation. She needed to keep him on the line.

Driving back to the office. Where are you?

The response was immediate.
What kind of car?

She looked over to Murray. “Paul, what kind of car is this?”

“Chevy Malibu. Finest fleet car the government can lease.”

White Chevy Malibu,
she wrote. She paused, then typed,
In the market for a new ride?

She pressed her lips together, her body tense with expectation. Was that the right tone to take? She should tell Murray to call the office and dispatch agents to triangulate Reilly’s cell phone, but Reilly would be expecting that; he was smarter than that. She needed to move their relationship to the next level. She needed to—

“Holy shit,” Murray screamed suddenly, slamming on the brakes. Chaudry’s head snapped forward, her seat belt locking, her chest and shoulders pressing hard against the strap.

Thump
. Someone had slammed their hands onto the hood of the car. Chaudry looked up in surprise, her hand instinctively going for the grip of the Glock in her holster.

But there, staring through the front windshield of the Malibu, a trace of a smile on his lips, hands on the hood, was Garrett Reilly. The look on his face was one of utter casualness, as if this were all going according to plan, and he had a fun little bit of mischief in mind. Mischief that he couldn’t wait to share with Chaudry.

“I surrender,” Garrett Reilly said. “Arrest me.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T
he following people were invaluable to me as I researched this book. My thanks to: Richard Campbell, for his expertise on technology and banking security; Suresh Kotha of the University of Washington, for his ideas on how to bring the world of finance to its knees; Ian Toner, for his primer on debt, derivatives, and bank runs; the great Robert M. Solow, for his insight into the weakness of the global economy; Kenneth Willman, for his introductions into the banking community; Daniel Goodwin, as always, for his views from inside the finance machine; Peter Loop, for his detailed explanations of cryptocurrencies and black markets; Yevgeniya Elkus, for her careful translation of English into Russian. And finally, to my sources at the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. You asked not to be named, for obvious reasons, but your insights were crucial.

My deepest gratitude to: Ragna Nervik, Dan Brecher, and Markus Hoffmann, for all the advice and support; the peerless Marysue Rucci, for shaping a mass of words and ideas into a book—you are the best; and my trusted inner circle of friends who lent a hand long the way—you know who you are. I couldn’t have done it without you.

Finally, to Lisa, Augusta, and Nora: thank you for putting up with the obsessions, the long hours, and the weeks away from home. You are the reason I write anything at all.

Want to know how this story ends? Read part three in the KING OF FEAR ebook series!

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The King of Fear: Part Three

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Photograph by Lisa Loop

D
rew Chapman has written studio movies, directed an independent feature film, and created and written network and cable TV shows. Most recently, he wrote and co-executive produced a season of the spy thriller Legends for TNT. Married with two children, Chapman divides his time between Los Angeles and Seattle.
The King of Fear
is his second book.

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The Ascendant

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