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

Beach and spent the next six months pestering the Army Bureau of Records for information about his brother’s death. He’d made more than 120 phone calls to their DC offices. Later that year, he’d gone back to school at Long Beach State, but his grades had been indifferent, and he was cited twice by the administration for disrupting class and then getting into a fistfight with a fellow student.
    Bernstein, his Yale math prof, seemed to have tracked Reilly’s progress and brought him back to New York to work on the bond desk at Jenkins & Altshuler, a Wall Street trading house that Bernstein had taken over. There, Reilly had thrived. Thrived until a day in late March, a year ago, when a car bomb exploded in front of the Jenkins & Altshuler offices.
    Chaudry remembered the day well. It had been a sensational terror attack, but no one was killed, and then no one was charged in the bombing. The FBI hadn’t worked on that case—it had gone straight to Homeland Security, which was odd in its own right—and it was still an active investigation, unsolved and very much open. Conspiracy theories still swirled around it.
    To compound the strangeness, Garrett Reilly had disappeared that very day. He seemed to have enlisted in the army for a while and been under the supervision of the Defense Intelligence Agency, but he quit two months later, honorably discharged, and then went back to his old job at Jenkins & Altshuler, which he kept even when his mentor, Bernstein, died in a car accident soon thereafter.
    The threads of Reilly’s life were odd and disparate, and none of them quite meshed.
    When Chaudry had called the DIA right after the shooting, a general named Kline had seemed reluctant to answer her questions, citing national security concerns. It had clearly been a mistake to alert him. Twenty minutes later, someone called Reilly from a phone booth in DC, and Reilly immediately fled his office. The DIA must have circled the wagons.
    Now Chaudry had no idea where he was. They’d staked out his apartment, as well as his known associates and friends—although he didn’t seem to have many of the latter. Chaudry suspected that it was going to take a lot more than that to find him. Reilly was smart, he’d obviously received some training froma military intelligence service, and he knew the Bureau was looking for him. All bad, from where Chaudry sat.
    But had this Reilly character actually sent a mentally unstable woman to kill the president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank? How had he made her do it? Money? Drugs? Had they been lovers? Bachev’s phone records showed repeated calls to Jenkins & Altshuler, but they had been short, none lasting longer than fifteen seconds, almost like hang-ups, with no calls from Reilly’s office back to Bachev. Not a single one.
    And even if Reilly had some hand in the shooting, it raised the larger question of why. What possible purpose did killing Steinkamp serve? Chaudry could not see a reason. Maybe Reilly, not Bachev, was the one who was mentally unstable.
    Chaudry didn’t know. But she would find out, because untangling complicated cases like this one was what got her to the Manhattan field office in the first place. These cases were what she lived for, and better yet, parsing out the threads of what could be a far-reaching conspiracy was the dream of every FBI agent in the country. If she solved this, she’d be fast-tracked to becoming the youngest agent to run the Bureau’s New York field office. Not youngest female Indian agent. Just the youngest. Period.
    But first, she had to find Garrett Reilly. She wasn’t sure how, but she suspected that he was the key to all of this. Once she arrested him, all the other pieces would fall into place.
    She closed his files and considered her options. Reilly was on the run, an obscure, unknown entity swimming in a sea of anonymity. But it didn’t have to be that way. So far, Chaudry had kept Reilly’s name and picture out of the