The King of Fear Read Free Page A

last time.

J ENKINS & A LTSHULER , N EW Y ORK C ITY , J UNE 14, 8:52 A.M.
    T he ringing phone was getting on Garrett Reilly’s last nerve.
    He checked the incoming number on his work phone, but didn’t recognize it. Someone was calling his direct line, not the front desk, and his caller ID said it was from a pay phone without an area code attached. Nobody called him from pay phones, and certainly not clients. Garrett remembered pretty much every phone number he’d ever dialed, and the number on the caller ID wasn’t one of them.
    So he ignored it.
    Anyway, he was busy. He’d found the thing he’d been looking for—that dark, tangled pattern—and there was no chance he was going to let it slip away now.
    This particular pattern wasn’t easy to pick out—in fact, it had been incredibly hard. Garrett likened finding it to how astronomers had spotted the first planets outside our solar system. The exoplanets, as they were called—he had read about this in a Discover magazine in the waiting room of a doctor who Garrett had heard played fast and loose with Roxicodone scrips—were too far away and too small to be seen by regular telescopes, but astronomers had been pretty sure they existed. They just had to find another way to see them. So the astronomers looked for the effect the planets had on the things that they could see, which in this case were bigger, brighter stars. Every planet orbiting its own sun makes that star move, or wobble; the gravitational pull of the planet tugs at the star, distorting its orbit in specific, detectable ways. So astronomers studied stars—the visible—to find proof of the invisible.
    Which was what Garrett was doing as well, only in Garrett’s case he was watching money, not stars. Somewhere out there in the vast swirl of international finance, Garrett believed he’d found evidence of an enormous accumulation of money—sitting in a dark pool—that someone, somewhere, wanted to remain hidden. Dark pools were common enough—private exchanges that countries or investors used to trade equities away from the gaze of journalists or regulators or governments. This particular pool of money was buying and selling stocks in coordination with real-world events, and Garrett could see the ripples of that buying and selling as they radiated out through the global economy.
    Gather up enough money in one place, Avery Bernstein had once told Garrett, and it begins to create its own gravity. Words to live by, Garrett thought.
    Garrett pushed back from his desk and looked across the trading bull pen of the sleek Jenkins & Altshuler offices. Young men and women were busily tapping on their keyboards, buying and selling Treasuries and corporate-debt issues, derivatives and credit default swaps, none of them paying Garrett any notice. Garrett didn’t feel particularly close to any of them anymore; over the last year he’d begun to drift away from his Wall Street friends. He’d begun to drift away from everyone. And he no longer had that burning desire to make as much money as possible, to conquer the world. Where had it gone? He wasn’t sure. He was no longer sure of anything.
    A few traders had their faces pressed up against the windows that looked out onto lower Manhattan and the Hudson River beyond. Police sirens had begun to howl about ten minutes ago, and Garrett’s coworkers were speculating on what had happened. A fire? A terror attack? Whatever it was, the NYPD was taking it seriously. Garrett didn’t care. He was discerning order out of the chaos of the global information flow, hunting for a narrative in the random noise of the modern, interconnected world. What could be more important than that?
    His phone rang. That same number, a pay phone, with no area code listed. Garrett thought about answering, then ignored it once again. He went back to his screens, and the pattern that was unfolding there.
    On June 4, at