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

to ignore the smell of old ham-and-Swiss-cheese sandwiches. “And when they find the guy.”
    “If he exists.”
    “He exists,” Garrett said. “It’s just a question of when he shows up.”

T HIRTY -T WO T HOUSAND F EET OVER THE A TLANTIC , J UNE 15, 4:42 P.M.
    T he young man in seat 34J opened his eyes and tried to stretch his cramped legs. They’d been flying seven and a half hours since Frankfurt, and he’d only gotten up once to use the bathroom. The scent of airplane food wafted up from the galley four rows back—boiled vegetables and dried-out rosemary chicken. The drone of the engines no longer registered in his brain—it had become white noise.
    He glanced at his neighbor in 34H, an overweight American named James Delacourt, passed out in his seat, his stomach spilling over his seat belt. The young man in 34J thought to himself, I am going to kill Mr. James Delacourt. Not in the physical sense, but I will kill him nonetheless—destroy him, utterly and completely.
    And that process has already begun.
    Delacourt lived in Bethesda, Maryland. He was flying home by way of Miami, where he was meeting a potential client. The young man in 34J had learned this by buying Delacourt a series of drinks—beers at first, then a martini, then three vodkas poured straight from the airplane minibottles into a cup—until the flight attendant, realizing how much she’d served the two of them, cut them off. But by that time it was too late; Delacourt was plastered.
    The American had boasted to the young man that he could hold his liquor, but, of course, he didn’t really have any sense of what holding one’s liquor meant. An average Russian could drink an average American under the table, and the young man in 34J was Russian, although he now considered himself acitizen of the world—a citizen who was well practiced at alcohol consumption. In fact, he could drink most Russians under the table. He wasn’t particularly proud of this ability; it was simply an asset he employed when going about his business. So James Delacourt never stood a chance.
    Over the four hours of conversation they’d had, the Russian had extracted a series of crucial pieces of information from Delacourt. The young man could be charming, if needed. He could be anything. He was a chameleon—another of his abilities—able to mold the surface of his personality to match any occasion. He could laugh at a lame joke, tell a story of his own humiliation, or spin a discourse on political corruption in third-world countries; he could flirt with women and argue sports with men; he could be loud and aggressive, or wallflower passive. He could do all of this in English, with barely an accent, in his native Russian, and in passable Chechen as well.
    What always surprised people about the young man was that underneath the surface of that interesting, entertaining, and changeable personality lay a vast, gray blank slate of a psyche, a psychological wasteland. A mind that had long ago inured itself to compassion . . . or caring.
    But no one ever figured that out until it was far too late.
    The Airbus A340 bounced in turbulence, so the young man in 34J closed his eyes and meditated on a faraway land: a sweep of forest, interspersed with rolling hills and swaths of grassland. The place was lovely, speckled with sunshine and wooden homes, a mixture of his memories of a Caucasus of long ago and the imaginary idyll of his dreams, because the real Chechnya, he knew from sporadic trips, was a savaged war zone blended with ever-evolving construction sites. Modern Chechnya was in a constant state of being simultaneously destroyed and rebuilt. It was not the place of his dreams.
    Every time he returned, he marveled at how Grozny, the capital, had changed beyond recognition, at least from when he had grown up there. But he had grown up there during the worst of the worst, the first Chechen War in 1995, and the holocaust that was the Battle of Grozny. His entire