The King of Fear: A Garrett Reilly Thriller by Drew Chapman Read Free Book Online

later with a six-pack of Schlitz, a bag of potato chips, and a plastic bottle of Motrin.
    Garrett drank a beer and swallowed six pills. “See anyone out there? Watching you?”
    “Chill. I got it covered. I’m the Puerto Rican James Bond.” She rubbed his neck and shoulders silently for a few minutes, and the pain in his head lessened. He was grateful for Mitty. She was excitable, opinionated, and bitchy, but she was also smart and intensely loyal. She would walk through fire for him.
    “You should get some sleep,” she said. “Make sense of this in the morning.”
    He nodded, but kept working, broadening his search. He researched the bank run in Malta. No one was saying exactly how the run had started; no one seemed to know. News clips showed angry depositors throwing stones in the streets. Mitty drank a second beer, then a third, then passed out on the bed, a laptop open on her stomach. Garrett must have drifted off as well, because he woke with a start at 2:00 a.m. to the sound of a window breaking. He sat bolt upright in his chair. Mitty was snoring peacefully on the bed.
    Garrett went to the bedroom door, cracking it open to listen. There was movement below, in the tire-repair shop: someone, or something, padding around amid the equipment. Garrett slid into the hallway, then stepped slowly down the cramped stairway that led to the machine shop. The smell of rubber and grease was overwhelming. A bank of windows on the far side allowed a streak of orange halogen light to wash across the piles of tires and the empty car bays.
    Garrett stepped into the room and listened. There was only silence. He tried to slow his heart rate—the blood was pumping in his ears. A flash of a thought occurred to him: he had quit Ascendant to get away from the exact things that were happening to him at this moment. And yet his past had caught up with him. With a vengeance. He wanted to scream, but stifled the impulse.
    He moved past the car bays and machinery to the entranceway—and froze. The door to the street was open, its window smashed. Garrett crouched low, expecting a blow from behind, but none came. He turned to scout out the rest of the waiting room, but it was empty.
    Garrett straightened and took a deep breath. What the hell was going on? Then he heard it—footsteps from above, up the stairs, in the bedroom. Without thinking, he raced back across the work bays, yelling as he ran. “Mitty!”
    He sprinted up the stairs, fists clenched, and stumbled into the spare bedroom. The light was on; Mitty was sitting up in bed, rubbing at her eyes.
    “Dude, what are you yelling about?” She winced in the light. “I was asleep.”
    Garrett searched the room. Other than for Mitty, it was empty. The window was open, but Mitty had opened it when they first came in. Everything else seemed untouched.
    “Someone broke into the shop. Front door is open. Window is smashed.”
    “Nobody steals used tires. Trust me. You can’t give ’em away.”
    “They weren’t looking for tires. They came up here. To this bedroom.”
    Mitty shook her head. “You’re high. Go back to sleep.”
    Garrett sat in the chair at the desk in the corner of the room. CNN was still playing, muted, in the corner. Maybe Mitty was right. Maybe he was high, the mixture of Motrin and Schlitz jumbling his brain.
    He glanced at his computer. A word program had been opened. He hadn’tbeen writing anything—and he never used Word. Someone had typed three short sentences onto the screen. Garrett read them and grunted in surprise.
    One man.
    A Russian.
    He is en route.
    HM

L OWER M ANHATTAN , J UNE 15, 2:15 A.M.
    I n the New York field office of the FBI, Special Agent Jayanti Chaudry was considered straight talking and intensely ambitious. She was usually in the running for the best, and most high-profile, homicide cases, and if she got one, she almost always closed it. An intuitive crime fighter, meticulous, and frighteningly persistent, she saw her relentlessness as