The King of Fear: Part Two: A Garrett Reilly Thriller Read Online Free

passwords that were mostly letters (more common), a decent mix of the two (most frequent), or ones that were numbers, letters, and symbols (most rare). He loved trying to parse the etymology of people’s ciphers, although he was regularly astonished by how many of them still used 12345678, or that almost as many simply used the word password . People were such creatures of habit.
    Next he ordered couches, desks, chairs, and computers for the Newark offices of Ascendant. Garrett knew that the J&A purchasing department checked new orders twice a month, on the first and the fifteenth, and any order under$10,000 was rubber-stamped, especially if it was furniture going to one of the company’s real estate holdings. The guys in purchasing were not the brightest bulbs; they spent an inordinate amount of time playing Magic: The Gathering and making penis jokes. Garrett also made sure to rent the furniture instead of buying it, which made it seem more like a sales staging deal than a purchase for a working office. The office supply store in Hoboken said they’d swing by in a few hours.
    Garrett went downstairs to alert the guard at the front desk. He decided to swagger his way through the problem of being recognized. The guard was old, sixty-five at least, and his tiny body seemed lost in his baggy, dark blue uniform. Garrett started talking, loudly, the moment he stepped out of the elevator. He said he was from the start-up on the seventh floor—AltaTech Partners was the first name that popped into his head—and that a furniture delivery was due by the end of the day and could the guard please show them how to get to his offices. The guard said sure, taken aback and a little intimidated by Garrett’s attitude, but then seemed confused when he couldn’t find a record of any company called AltaTech Partners in the building.
    “We just signed the lease yesterday,” Garrett said. “We’re going to take over the entire floor. But not this month. Next month. And the eighth floor too, but not until the fall. At least that’s the plan.” Garrett winked at the old guard, figuring if you were going to lie, then lie big. “We might go totally broke before then. You just never know, do you?”
    “Yeah. Been there,” the guard said.
    Garrett stopped talking for a moment and looked at the old man’s face, lined with wrinkles and age spots and a pink scar that ran from his chin to just behind his ear. Whatever he’d done before becoming a security guard, it had been a hard life, and Garrett could see the consequences on his skin.
    “Thanks,” Garrett said, slightly ashamed of himself for taking advantage of the old man and his crap job status, and hurried upstairs.
    • • •
    Back in the office, Garrett considered what facts he knew about Steinkamp’s murder, and what he wished he knew. He had tried to research Anna Bachev, but she was a virtual nonentity: no digital footprint, no search references, no social media presence. She had no financial records or court documents, either. Bachev’s ghostlike history was probably why they’d hired her to do the job inthe first place. It occurred to him that hired was the wrong term. He guessed that Bachev had been blackmailed into shooting the Fed president. She had killed herself, after all—nothing else made any sense.
    But who had done it? Ilya Markov? And what was the geopolitical line of connection between Markov, a Chechen-born Russian, and Bachev, a Bulgarian? The whole thing was beginning to take on a distinctly East European flavor.
    Garrett researched events in Eastern Europe. He blew right through the usual assortment of corruption stories and threats of ruble devaluations, and came immediately to Belarus. While he knew that Belarus was a country, he didn’t know much more than that. It had been a part of the Soviet Union and lay between Moscow and the bulk of the nations of Western Europe; it was a bleak, flat Russian vassal state—at least, it had been until a few