The King of Fear by Drew Chapman

had clearly been a mistake to alert him. Twenty minutes later, someone called Reilly from a phone booth in DC, and Reilly immediately fled his office. The DIA must have circled the wagons.
    Now Chaudry had no idea where he was. They’d staked out his apartment, as well as his known associates and friends—although he didn’t seem to have many of the latter. Chaudry suspected that it was going to take a lot more than that to find him. Reilly was smart, he’d obviously received some training froma military intelligence service, and he knew the Bureau was looking for him. All bad, from where Chaudry sat.
    But had this Reilly character actually sent a mentally unstable woman to kill the president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank? How had he made her do it? Money? Drugs? Had they been lovers? Bachev’s phone records showed repeated calls to Jenkins & Altshuler, but they had been short, none lasting longer than fifteen seconds, almost like hang-ups, with no calls from Reilly’s office back to Bachev. Not a single one.
    And even if Reilly had some hand in the shooting, it raised the larger question of why. What possible purpose did killing Steinkamp serve? Chaudry could not see a reason. Maybe Reilly, not Bachev, was the one who was mentally unstable.
    Chaudry didn’t know. But she would find out, because untangling complicated cases like this one was what got her to the Manhattan field office in the first place. These cases were what she lived for, and better yet, parsing out the threads of what could be a far-reaching conspiracy was the dream of every FBI agent in the country. If she solved this, she’d be fast-tracked to becoming the youngest agent to run the Bureau’s New York field office. Not youngest female Indian agent. Just the youngest. Period.
    But first, she had to find Garrett Reilly. She wasn’t sure how, but she suspected that he was the key to all of this. Once she arrested him, all the other pieces would fall into place.
    She closed his files and considered her options. Reilly was on the run, an obscure, unknown entity swimming in a sea of anonymity. But it didn’t have to be that way. So far, Chaudry had kept Reilly’s name and picture out of the press—the official word was that Bachev was an unhinged stalker. But perhaps Chaudry needed to change tactics. If Reilly was as smart as he appeared, then she would have to use every bit of leverage to bring him out of the shadows.
    Garrett Reilly needed to become a celebrity in his own right.

A LEXANDRIA , V IRGINIA , J UNE 15, 7:45 A.M.
    A lexis Truffant filled her to-go coffee mug and headed out the door of her suburban DC condo. Mentally, she was already bracing herself for the day, which promised to be difficult. Yesterday had been a string of disasters, starting with the shooting of the New York Fed president, and ending with a grilling by a pair of humorless FBI agents. Alexis had answered the FBI as best she could, sticking to the truth mostly, and carefully talking her way around her involvement in tipping-off Garrett Reilly. The agents hadn’t seemed to know about the NSA recording of her phone call, and General Kline never mentioned it, so she found she could answer almost entirely truthfully. Almost.
    The agents wanted background on Garrett and his involvement with the DIA. Kline parried those questions in the usual DIA way—national security this, and national security that—but Garrett was clearly in their sights. They wanted him badly.
    But she’d be damned if she would help the FBI get him. Garrett could not be involved in the shooting of a federal banker. Garrett might yell and scream, be difficult and subversive, even punch someone in the face in a bar brawl, but assassination was not in his character. She knew him well enough to know that. In truth, she still had feelings for Garrett, no matter what she’d told Kline earlier. She might not love him—perhaps she never