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

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 atsome 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