Read The King of Fear: A Garrett Reilly Thriller for Free Online Page A

walking the streets and then sitting in a park.
    Through it all, his heart pounded like a drum machine and his skull ached. He felt as if he might jump out of his skin. The tramadols were wearing off. He’d grabbed his stash before he’d fled his office, but he didn’t want to take any more pills; he needed to think, and to think clearly.
    He tried to reason out who was behind what had happened, but he didn’t have enough information. He was cut off, adrift. He was an information junkie in withdrawal, longing for a fix in the form of a blast of digital intelligence. But he knew that a fix, right then, would alert the police to his whereabouts and get him arrested.
    Why the fuck were all his thoughts coming back to addiction?
    He toyed with turning himself in. Just walk into a police precinct, blurt out his name, and let the FBI come get him. But he had no idea what they had on him—fabricated evidence, some kind of bullshit eyewitness testimony. If he did surrender, he would be at the mercy of law enforcement, a cog in the bureaucratic machine, and he might not get out of that machine again for days. Or months even. That was a nightmare scenario for Garrett. He trusted no authority, anywhere, ever. Police, military, government—they were all, to his mind, self-serving and corrupt. His paranoia about those in power verged on the pathological, born of a lifetime of being on the outside looking in.
    Anyway, he couldn’t afford to be locked up, for any amount of time. He saw clearly that what had happened to the Federal Reserve president was the start of something else—the dense, complicated thing of his nightmares. A thing that was unfurling immediately, in real time. He had seen it, and now he was a part of it.
    At four thirty in the afternoon he wedged himself in an alley between two small apartment buildings on Thirty-Sixth Avenue in Queens and watched the comings and goings in front of a Brazilian restaurant. He scanned the street for any sign of surveillance cars, cops, or undercover agents. Anyone who might have deciphered his cell phone conversation with Mitty. But all he saw were old Brazilian men tottering into the restaurant for an afternoon beer and some salgados .
    At five, a beat-up Ford Explorer pulled up at the fire hydrant in front of the restaurant. Garrett didn’t recognize the SUV, but he could see Mitty in the driver’s seat, her mop of frizzy black hair draped over her shoulders. Also, he could hear a Kesha song blasting from the radio. Mitty loved Kesha.
    He ran across traffic and threw himself into the backseat.
    “What the fuck is going on?” she barked as soon as he had closed the door. “Did you hit that guy in mergers, like you said you would? Is he pressing charges? You gotta cut that shit out, because—”
    “Just drive.” He lay flat on a bed of old beef-jerky wrappers and empty Mountain Dew cans. “I’ll tell you everything. But first I need someplace to hide.”
    • • •
    She put him in a spare bedroom above a tire-repair shop that her uncle Jose owned on Northern Boulevard. Mitty said her uncle used the room to catch up on sleep when he worked late, but also, she suspected, to meet with his mistress on Wednesday nights. The room was tiny, with a single window looking out onto an alley littered with trash, and it smelled like sweat and old cigars, but Garrett didn’t care—he would take what he could get. He told Mitty to take the battery out of her phone; the FBI would start tracking his friends and family soon, and she was just about the only friend he had these days. She did as he asked, but grudgingly, and Garrett finally felt he was safe, at least for a while.
    He told Mitty about what he’d found, the dark pool, the hacking attacks, and then about the anonymous phone call, and what the woman on the other end had said, and Mitty responded right away with theories. She had been a member of Ascendant; she knew the players, and their history.
    “That bitch Alexis is