The King of Fear (4 page)

The bank examiner stared at Leone, eyes full of indignant scorn. “Maybe, maybe not. But as of this moment, your bank has no assets. It has officially collapsed.”

Q
UEENS
, N
EW
Y
ORK
, J
UNE
14, 1:52 P.M.

G
arrett walked north and east through lower Manhattan, keeping mostly to side streets and away from avenues. He walked fast, with his head down, only glancing up when he heard sirens. Police cars and fire trucks seemed to be racing through every intersection, and at Houston and Avenue A, a cop gave him the once-over from the driver's seat of his cruiser. Garrett tried to ignore him and kept walking, but he felt as if his hair were standing on end, and that his face had reddened to the color of an overripe strawberry.

He walked to put distance between himself and the Jenkins & Altshuler offices, but also to try to collect his thoughts; to figure out what had just happened, and think his way out of it. But the meds had seeped into his bloodstream, and his mind felt fuzzy, his brain clouded. He hated himself for relying on the crutch that the pain drugs had become. He was half a person when he was medicated, and he was for certain medicated now. For a moment, on Allen Street, he thought he heard Avery Bernstein whispering something in his ear.

“Not now,” he grunted to Avery, and to the air, sounding like a ranting homeless person. “Not fucking now!”

He closed his eyes and tried to concentrate. As much as he wanted to tell himself that it made no sense, that this was all some terrible misunderstanding, the truth was that it made perfect sense. And that was what was so terrifying.

Garrett had led the Ascendant program. He had guided it through a face-off with the Chinese government—and US intelligence services as well—and he had won. He had spotted a threat that no one else had seen, then responded in kind. But Garrett had done it anonymously, invisibly. People around the world had spent the last year trying to track him down, to find out who, exactly, was the brains behind Ascendant, and Garrett had felt their probing, their intrusions into his life; the amateurish attempts to hack his bank account, to hijack his cell phone, or to simply taunt him into the open on darknet bulletin boards.

Now, if an attack was coming—and he had no idea what that attack might look like—then whoever was behind it would figure that Garrett and Ascendant might be poised to intercept it. It stood to reason that they would want him out of the way. They would want to frame him and put him on the run. And they had succeeded.
He was scared. He was running.

He considered stopping at his apartment, but ruled that out almost immediately. That would be the first place the FBI would be waiting. He walked a wide circle away from his building on Twelfth and Avenue C and continued uptown. He called his best friend, Mitty Rodriguez, a like-minded freelance computer programmer and sometimes black-hat hacker, knowing he could ask her for anything, and that he could trust her. She'd heard about the shooting, but knew nothing else, and they set up a meeting for later in the day, at five o'clock.

“Meet me at that place,” she said, “where we ate last Saturday.”

Garrett appreciated her paranoia. At this point, anybody could be listening. He hung up, then took the battery out of his phone. That kept the police from tracking him, but it also took him off the grid—out of the information flow—and he felt the immediate loss of that in his bones. Garrett needed data the way he needed oxygen. Without a continuous stream of data to analyze, his mind went round and round in circles and eventually crashed.

He bought a sweatshirt and jeans at a discount store, using only cash, then changed out of his business suit in the bathroom. He bought a pork sandwich and a soda at a bodega on Ninth and wolfed them both down. He was nervous, and that made him hungry; his whole body was on overdrive. He walked up to Fourteenth Street, watched the street for a few moments, then dashed into the subway and took the Q train into Queens. A few transit cops were lingering at
some of the stations, so Garrett bought a
Daily News
and buried his face in it for most of the trip. That seemed to work; no one paid him any attention. He got off at Queensboro Plaza and killed time by 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 trying to set you up. She's trying to frame your ass.”

Garrett threw his hands in the air. “Why would she want to do that?”

“She's pissed at you for quitting Ascendant. And because the two of you were a thing, and now you're not.”

Garrett knew Mitty was taking his side against Alexis more out of friendship and loyalty than any well-considered opinion, but still, he needed to streamline his thought process, not go off on tangents. “So she had a banker shot just to blame me? A theory has to make sense for me to consider it.”

“It makes plenty of sense.” Mitty frowned. “Sorta. She's always been high-and-mighty, and I don't trust her.”

“Thanks, that's really helpful.”

“Whatever.”

Mitty had turned on a small television when they first got into the room and switched it to CNN. There'd been ten minutes of coverage of the shooting in the last hour, but a reporter on the scene—and another at a police press conference—had said the shooter was an obsessed female stalker, but they hadn't released her name. Nobody had mentioned Garrett or Ascendant or even the possibility of its being anything other than a random killing. Garrett had a flash of intense paranoia: Had he imagined the entire phone conversation? But how would that be possible? He had known nothing about the shooting until he answered his work phone.

No, he told himself. Do not think that way. Simple logic was still his friend. A to B to C. Do not deviate from known facts and hard data: categorize, test, analyze.

“Whoever called you made a mistake,” Mitty said. “The shooter was some crazy bitch with a gun, and she capped this dude, and no one on TV has mentioned anything about you, or a pattern, or anything like that.”

“So you're saying that I'm imagining all this?” Garrett booted up the laptop that Mitty had brought from her home. “I might take that personally.”

“No, no way,” Mitty said a little too quickly. “I'm just—you know—­examining it from all angles.”

Garrett glared at her briefly, then connected to the tire shop's Wi-Fi—Mitty said her uncle paid for high speeds to watch Venezuelan porn when business was slow. Garrett logged on to his virtual private network to search the Web for information on the shooting. His VPN let him go online without being tracked. He let the digital data wash over him and felt intense relief. He was back in the global information flow, where he belonged, moving from website to website, news feed to opinion piece. He checked the markets and interest rates, going from graph to chart to an endless scroll of numbers. The Dow had sunk on news of Steinkamp's death, and the VIX—the Volatility Index—had skyrocketed. He ran videos and read interviews and blog posts. A veil of anxiety had descended on Wall Street. The smart money was on edge.
Everyone was on edge.

All the while, Mitty kept up a running stream of commentary at his ear, complaining about Alexis Truffant, bitching about the Dominican whore her
uncle brought to the bedroom, and spending a good twenty minutes on her new diet. “Just Coke Zero and cottage cheese. It's a cleanse.”

“That's not a cleanse. A cleanse is—forget it.” Garrett found a news item from Agence France-Presse. “There's been a bank run in Malta.” Garrett scanned the news update. “Started just after the Italian stock drop. It lines up perfectly.”

“What's Malta? A coffee drink?”

Garrett ignored her. He pushed back from the laptop and massaged his temples.

Mitty watched him, concern softening her face. “Head hurting again?”

Garrett nodded imperceptibly.
Yes.

“You got meds?”

He shrugged. Yes, but he needed to stay off them for a while—not that Mitty needed to know that.

She watched him for a moment. “I'll run to the corner, get us some beers. Maybe some snacks. That'll help, right?”

“Sure,” Garrett managed to mutter. “But be careful.”

She returned fifteen minutes 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.