Free The King of Fear: A Garrett Reilly Thriller by Drew Chapman Page A

steady stream of cyberattacks from Russian technical colleges. 75%.
    •  May have worked/lived in west/US. 75% chance. Fits pattern of hackers who work here, return to native country. Maybe software development. Check Silicon Valley employment records. Chinese techs turned hackers are classic example.
    Following items skew more random. Thought you should have them anyway.
    •  On surface, no connection to organized crime. He will be clean. But higher probability that deeper in his BG will be ties to criminal activity. 60%. Friends, girlfriends, parents even. Check weak ties to mafia.
    •  Will enter country on student visa. 60%. Easiest to obtain, draws little attention.
    •  Passport should be legit. Arouse less suspicion. Again, 60% chance.
    •  Travel itinerary should match attacks in Europe. Munich, Lyon, Liverpool, Malta. All in last month. He will have overseen these personally. Correlate man to his travels. 60%.
    Following are more than two standard deviations from median on Gaussian bell curve. In other words, guesses.
    Alexis stopped reading for a moment and marveled at the way Garrett’s mind worked. There was nothing, no bit of human behavior, that he could not reduce to a number, or a pattern. In her mind’s eye, she could see him typing the e-mail, a snarl on his face, as he used probability to bolster his argument. She couldn’t help but smile—he always stayed true to form. She realized now that this was why she hadn’t turned him in: he was who he was, capable of some things, but not others. Not murder.
    She kept reading.
    •  Once in US, he will go off radar. Disappear. Use myriad stolen identities. This is his core competency. You must catch him at the border, before he goes underground.
    •  He will have a network of people in place here to help him. US citizens, probably. More efficient, less dangerous than bringing foreign nationals into US. There are plenty of black hats for sale here. He is a social engineer, con man—this is what he does best. Will find others to work for him. Probably already has.
    •  Finally—whatever he is doing has a political aspect. It is theater. For a larger cause. Find the cause, you get closer to uncovering the act. He is a hired hand. Someone else wants this done.
    That was the end of the list, but not the end of the e-mail. Garrett had typed a few last sentences. They were abbreviated and rushed, like the list, but they were pure Garrett as well.
    Am not crazy. I am right. You know it. You have to move fast.
    That was it. She read the list two more times, considering the numbers involved, and what it might—or might not—tell her about someone entering the United States. US Customs could not arrest every young Russian male entering the country on a student visa. They would fill up the holding cells on the East Coast within days. And even if they did spot him, what could they charge him with? Planning economic terror? It wasn’t as if he would be carrying explosives or the schematics for a skyscraper. Without Garrett in front ofher, without his twisted confidence, it all seemed like a paranoid theory. Tinfoil-hat stuff. And yet . . .
    He was rarely wrong. Perhaps that in itself was enough of a thread to go on. She grimaced, slipped the printout back into her jacket, and thought about how she could alert the country’s ports of entry without seeming like a crazy person herself.
    • • •
    “Feel better now?” Mitty asked as she drove through the Maryland countryside, rolling farms on both sides of the car. They’d already been driving for two hours, and they had many more to go, keeping off highways and sticking to less monitored back roads. “You saw your honey again, in the flesh. The two of you didn’t jump into bed, but you proved that you still got it—you still got a statistical swinging dick—so everything’s right with the world.”
    “I’ll feel better when you stop talking.” Garrett was lying on the backseat and trying