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

lacked emotional depth. They lacked souls.
    Russia had a soul, although he had to admit it was twisted.
    The young man looked down at his tablet again. Delacourt hadn’t given up his Social Security number—no one ever did—but with some luck the young man could work that out quickly. He had gone to the Moscow State Technical University, majored in mathematics, and so was adept at crunching numbers—especially large numbers—and he’d long ago worked out a path to cracking American Social Security numbers.
    He ran through the necessary steps in his head: Once you knew the place and date of your target’s birth, figuring out the first five digits of his or her Social Security number was straightforward. The first three digits—called the area number, or AN—told you where the person had been born. If you knew the place of birth, you knew the AN. The next two—the group number, or GN—were correlated to the place and date of birth. How the Social Security Administration assigned those numbers was publicly available knowledge and easily discovered. With a little perseverance, almost anyone could figure them out.
    Unlocking the last four numbers was considerably harder, and what you needed was the SSA’s Death Master File, a list of every past Social Security number ever assigned, but only the numbers of people who were already dead. Again, the Death Master File wasn’t hard to obtain. Once the young man hadit, he’d run the Death Master File through a predictive algorithm—he’d gotten the idea from a study by professors at Carnegie Mellon University—which spit out a series of probable last four Social Security digits given the first five that you inputted.
    If the state the subject was born in was a low-population state—and Delaware qualified—then the algorithm checked the Death Master File and delivered around one hundred possible SNs, or serial numbers. Those were the potential last four digits of your target’s Social Security number. They were guesses, but they were close guesses.
    With a hundred sets of numbers to test, the rest was easy: feed the potential numbers into a network of computers and have the network attempt registrations at websites that demanded the user’s Social Security number. A Department of Motor Vehicles website, for instance, or a state utility. When the registration worked, you knew you’d cracked it. You had the person’s Social Security number.
    The entire process took five minutes, and most of that time was taken up typing in numbers. The actual answers came back in milliseconds. The young man had done this routine a few hundred times when he had been living in the States—sometimes just for fun, to see if it could be done, and other times for darker purposes. Given the inherent value in a valid Social Security number, the young man still found it remarkable that Americans could be so casual with them. He, personally, would lock his away in a safe and never expose it to anyone, or any company or any government. But then again, the young man in 34J knew exactly what bad things a bad person could do with stray Social Security numbers. He knew those bad things intimately.
    He looked over at Delacourt. The American was snoring, a thin line of spittle hanging from his lips, about to drip onto his chest. The young man bent low in his seat, as if to tie his shoelaces, but instead reached into the side pocket of Delacourt’s computer bag. After two attempts, he located Delacourt’s cell phone—a Samsung Galaxy—and quickly popped the SIM card out of its slot. He pocketed the SIM card and then replaced the phone in the bag. Delacourt’s phone wouldn’t work, but he would have no idea why, and by the time he took it to the Verizon store to have it checked out, the young man would have taken over his phone account as well.
    Basically, Delacourt’s entire life now belonged to someone else.
    The plane slowed noticeably, beginning its descent into Miami International Airport,