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

months ago. That was when the citizens of Belarus somehow gave a plurality of their votes to a young reform candidate for president, forcing a runoff election. Most analysts assumed elections in that country were always rigged in favor of their longtime dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, but the government had grown complacent. They thought they would never be voted out of office, but they were disastrously wrong.
    Of course, those in power weren’t leaving without a fight. Civil war had erupted in the country—a civil war stoked by Russia and its vast security and intelligence agencies. The runoff election was scheduled for eleven days from today, and both sides—pro-Russia and pro-reform—were campaigning, and killing each other, at breakneck speed.
    Garrett pondered this. Could civil war in Belarus be related to the death of Phillip Steinkamp in Manhattan? That seemed like a stretch, yet Garrett could feel trails of connection between the two. Patterns didn’t always jump out at him—sometimes they needed to be coaxed gently out into the open.
    He checked one last thing while he had the time: stock and bond ripples from the buying and selling in the black pool he’d found. Nothing certain jumped out at him, but he saw some unusual oscillations in the behavior of recent tech IPOs on the NASDAQ, specifically a Brooklyn-based company called Crowd Analytics. The company website said it harnessed the power of crowdsourcing to help solve corporate planning issues. Garrett found a splashy feature article about Crowd Analytics’ CEO, a bearded, twentysomething Harvard grad named Kenny Levinson. The company was his brainchild and wasvalued at $30 billion. Garrett had to keep his revulsion—and envy—in check as he stared at the picture of Levinson on the steps of his Brooklyn brownstone, his startlingly pretty wife and perfect child at his side. Garrett didn’t want what Levinson had—but he kind of hated him for having it nonetheless.
    He pushed that from his mind. He couldn’t quite see the pattern that surrounded the company, but one was out there, for sure, and when it became fully visible, he would spot it.
    The furniture arrived at four in the afternoon. He signed the purchase order as Earl Erglittry—his favorite anagram of Garrett Reilly—and the movers didn’t give him, or his signature, a second look. The old security guard came up to peek into the offices as well, and Garrett handed him a Diet Coke for his troubles. Garrett took another Percocet and stared out the window toward the Jersey sprawl and Manhattan beyond it. The summer light was hazy and thick, and white explosions of clouds drifted overhead.
    Where was Ilya Markov, and what pattern was he weaving in his travels? Garrett didn’t know, and the drugs were beginning to take hold. The instincts that he relied on to discern order out of the white noise of everyday life faded from his mind. He sat on one of the new black couches and stared out at the vast country that was the United States. There were so many places to hide: so many apartments to hole up in, so many parks to disappear into, so many back roads to use for escape.
    The pain in his head lessened, Garrett lay down on the couch, and for a blissful few moments, he let the world’s troubles slip away and caught up on some sleep.

O RLANDO , F LORIDA , J UNE 17, 1:09 P.M.
    I lya Markov’s driver took him from Fort Lauderdale to Orlando. Ilya had found the guy on Craigslist, a student at UF named Jim who needed extra cash. The cost was $25, plus gas. Ilya had Jim drop him at a motel just south of Orlando, where Ilya spent the night sending encrypted e-mails and texting his American contacts on burner phones he’d picked up in Miami.
    Ilya needed more money wired to him in the States. He had carried $1,000 through customs, just to have cash on hand, and had been planning on using his own ID to collect more at Western Union offices in Florida and Atlanta, but the raid on his motel room had