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

neighborhood—the Zavodskoy district—had been reduced to rubble. He had fled with his parents into the countryside, waiting out the invading Russians. The irony was that his family was not Muslim, or even Chechen. They were Slavs, ethnic Russians who’d moved to Grozny when his father got a job in an oil-tools factory.
    But that was the irony of the Soviet era, and of the Russian Federation that followed: It didn’t matter who you were, or what you represented; the system was going to grind you to dust one way or the other. The system did not care. The young man had learned this lesson early in life and had never forgotten it—learned it through his family’s poverty, his father’s alcoholism, his mother’s uncured depression. That was Russia. The young man took it as a guiding principle, and lately he had extended it to the larger world as well. He felt it was written, tattooed, on the inside of his skull.
    You are completely on your own.
    Life, to the young man in 34J, was a continuous struggle against uncaring and implacable power. That power was sometimes the state, sometimes the police, sometimes mobsters, sometimes even the God he didn’t believe in. Those forces tended to blend into one—they were all trying to keep him down, push him into submission and surrender, but he would never bend to their will. Never.
    The young man pulled his tablet from his flight bag and checked his notes.
    Once he’d had enough to drink, Delacourt, the fat American the young man planned to destroy, couldn’t stop talking about himself. The young man now knew the name of Delacourt’s wife (Nancy); the names of his two children (Thomas and Sophie); their dates of birth (5/18/03 and 12/22/01); Delacourt’s own birthday (that had been a surprise; the young man thought Delacourt looked considerably older than he actually was, but perhaps that was the weight); the name of their three cats (Misty, Poops, and Butter); his favorite sports team (the Redskins); the name of his elementary school (Banneker Elementary in Milford, Delaware); his mother’s maiden name (McClendon—that had been hard to extract without raising suspicion, but the young man had managed it by asking about Delacourt’s ethnic heritage, which had quickly led to an exchange of parental last names); and the make of his first automobile (a brown VW Rabbit, a vehicle in which he’d lost his virginity).
    All in all, a good haul. With a little time and a decrypting program, the young man had enough information to crack almost any password in any of Delacourt’s accounts—bank account, brokerage account, ATM card, cell phone account, office log-in, laptop log-in, even his account at the gym, if he had one, which the young man doubted. Almost nobody in this world created completely random passwords; they were too hard to remember. Most peoplesimply reverted back to things they would never forget—birthdays, maiden names, sports teams—and stuck them into myriad online forms, thus making it essential that a good hacker learn a few core data points about his subject before cracking open his or her life.
    The young man in 34J allowed himself a faint, satisfied smile. He was handsome enough, with a sharp jawline and a narrow nose. He was about five foot ten, and slim, with thick black hair that he kept short and neat. Women thought he was good-looking, but not spectacular, and that worked just fine. The young man in 34J did not like to call attention to himself; he preferred to pass unnoticed, and that’s exactly what he did most of the time. His English was excellent; he had spent two years at an American high school in Colorado, and then one year at a software company in the Bay Area. He didn’t hate his time in the United States, although high school had been a grind, but he didn’t love the place either. The country was, for him at least, too proud and puffed up with its own importance. To his mind, Americans hadn’t suffered enough in their history; they