The King of Fear: Part Two: A Garrett Reilly Thriller Read Online Free PDF Page A

then dating, all things he cared not a whit about.
    By Macon, Georgia, they were best friends. By nine that evening, he was lying on a bed in a dim motel room in East Point, Georgia, just south of Atlanta. Two hours later, she knocked on the door.
    • • •
    She was a true believer, or at least she claimed to be, but that was not enough for Ilya. She had to come recommended by people he trusted, and she did: three separate sources, one in Europe, two in California. They said she was smart, discreet, and good at her job. She stood about five foot five, with shoulder-length brown hair that curled in tight ringlets.
    “Can you make it blond?” Ilya asked, pointing to her hair.
    “I can make it any color you want.”
    She had a thin face, more sexy than pretty. You looked at her lips before you looked at anything else; they were rounded and full, and she highlighted them with bright red lipstick.
    “The lipstick is too red,” Ilya said. “Too obvious. You’re not looking for attention.”
    “The lipstick is too red,” she repeated, as if taking notes.
    She was curvy, and she wore a gauzy white top, with denim shorts and sandals. The clothes clung to her body in the heat, accentuating her breasts and hips. She seemed to glide more than walk, and slink more than move. While they talked, her eyes never left Ilya’s.
    “You’re good in bed?”
    She started to undo the buttons on her blouse. “Pull down your pants and I’ll show you.”
    “I don’t want to have sex with you.”
    “Why not? Are you gay?” she asked, seemingly without an opinion on the matter.
    “What difference would it make? No sex.”
    “Okay.” She pulled the blouse back over her shoulders. “But the answer is—I’ve never had anyone complain afterward.”
    Ilya guessed her age at about twenty-five. “You will be reluctant at first. You’re not accustomed to casual encounters. But once things get under way, you become a tiger. You lose yourself in the moment.”
    She nodded. “I can do that.”
    “Rachel Brown? You’re Jewish?”
    “I can be Jewish. Or half. Or not at all.”
    Ilya realized he could ask about Rachel Brown’s ethnicity and her real name all he wanted, but he would never get an answer that he believed. Or at least fully believed. She lived—as he did—in that gray netherworld where the truth was what you made it. Whatever they decided was real, was real, just for tonight, in a motel room in an Atlanta suburb.
    “You are Christian,” he said. “Born-again. There’s a Bible in the bedside drawer. Memorize a few useful verses. We’ll find you a suitable church. We’ll drive by it tomorrow, so you know what it looks like. The clothes will have to change too. More modest. But not too modest. We’ll go to the mall and buy you some new things.”
    “I should have a crucifix. Born-agains wear them. And they draw the eye here.” She ran her index finger down her cleavage. “That always works.”
    Ilya watched her finger plunge slowly down her neckline and then back up again, and he had to agree—that would work well.
    “You’ve been to college?”
    “Two years,” Rachel Brown said. “Didn’t love it.”
    “What did you study?”
    “Communications. A little business. Mostly English lit. Chaucer and Melville and is Moby-Dick a metaphor for the discontents of capitalism. I didn’t think it was. I just thought it was about a big fish. My professor disagreed.”
    Ilya blinked and took another look at Rachel Brown, or the woman who called herself that. Perhaps he had underestimated her. Perhaps she was considerably brighter than he had imagined. She had a sense of humor, and that spoke to psychological flexibility, and psychological flexibility was key for Ilya’s plans.
    “You’ve done this before?” Ilya asked.
    “Well, you haven’t told me what this is yet, so I can’t be entirely sure.” She spread herself out on the twin bed that was closest to the motel window. Shekicked off her sandals and