by Drew Chapman
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 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 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 people simply 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 lacked emotional depth. They lacked a soul.
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 had it, 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 wou
ld 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, and as the captain’s voice crackled over the public address system, Delacourt jerked back to consciousness. The young man was sitting up in his seat, smiling.
“Damn,” Delacourt muttered. “I passed out.”
“Yeah, me too,” the young man lied with an easy grin. “I guess we drank too much, huh?”
“Yeah.” Delacourt blinked woozily. “You’re a devil, buying me all that vodka.” He looked over at the young man. “You really Russian?”
“I was born there. But I’m not sure what I am anymore.”
Delacourt nodded, still trying to rouse himself from his stupor. “Yeah, that’s the modern world, right? Nobody knows where they really belong anymore.” Delacourt laughed. “I like you,” he said, then hesitated, as if having trouble remembering the young man’s name.
The young man helped him out. “Ilya.”
“Ilya, right. I like you, Ilya. You’re my kind of people. I think we share a lot of the same, you know, stuff.” Delacourt grinned. “You know what I mean?”
The young man—Ilya, for the time being—nodded and smiled in return. “I do. I think we share a lot of the same stuff.”
ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA, JUNE 15, 8:15 P.M.
Alexis Truffant’s cell phone rang the moment she walked back into her apartment.
“Truffant here,” she said, trying to mask the exhaustion in her voice. From the moment Kline had stepped into her office with the news of the Fed president’s shooting, Alexis’s mind had been on overdrive, trying to make sense of what had happened—and how it connected to Garrett. Now, her brain needed a respite. She opened her fridge to reach for an open bottle of chardonnay, phone cradled between her chin and shoulder.
“This is Mac Gunderson at TSA.” The voice on the other end of the line was clipped and businesslike. “I’m regional operations director for MIA.”
“MIA?” Alexis asked, confused.
“Miami International Airport.”
“Okay,” Alexis said warily. She had only just delivered a watch bulletin to the Transportation Security Administration that afternoon, trying to carefully distill what Garrett had given her into a document that a bureaucracy such as the TSA could act on: Russian, student visa, engineer, distant mob ties. She had done it carefully, discreetly, without alerting Kline, and she hadn’t expected a response this quickly. Perhaps they were trying to make sense of her person-of-interest brief. Or perhaps . . .
“You probably should fly down here ASAP,” Gunderson said.
She shoved the bottle of wine back into the fridge.
• • •
Gunderson’s office at Miami International was a tiny, windowless room at the north end of terminal two. Gunderson was big, with a gleaming shaved head and a salt-and-pepper goatee. His suit jacket hung on the back of his chair and his tie was loosened around his neck. Alexis thought he was probably on the last few hours of a long shift. He pulled up a US Customs mug shot on his computer.
“Ilya Markov. Traveling under a Russian passport. Landed five fourteen p.m., Lufthansa flight 462 from Frankfurt.”
Gunderson tilted the computer screen so Alexis could see the photograph, a pale face against a white background. The young man looked handsome, with dark hair and genial blue eyes. His thin lips were compressed into a neutral scowl. He seemed weary—to be expected after a long flight—but his look also had a flatness. An emotionless quality. Maybe, Alexis thought, I’m just not used to seeing passenger mug shots.
“Born 1986 in Moscow, according to his passport records.”
“Does he match the profile we sent in other ways?” Alexis looked for some hint of personality in the man’s face, some twinkle in the corner of his eye. A sense of humor? A bit of flirtation with the camera? There was none of that.
“No. He doesn’t.”
“Then why am I here?”
“Because this guy does.” Another photograph appeared on-screen, time-stamped December 11, 2009. The young man in the photo bore a striking resemblance to Ilya Markov. In fact, they had to be the same person.
“Ilya Markarov. Also born 1986, Moscow. Came in on a H-1B visa. Software programmer. Went to the Bay Area, worked for a year without incident. Left the country in 2011, never came back.”
Gunderson tapped at his keyboard again. A page from a database appeared on-screen. Arrival and departure dates were listed in chronological order, starting three months ago and ending last week, June 12.
“He went to Germany, France, England, then Malta. In-outs. Just like you said he would. But he traveled on the Markarov passport, not the Markov.” Gunderson traced his finger along the screen to highlight the entry and exit dates.
Alexis felt a knot tighten in her stomach. “How’d you make the connection?”
“Facial-identification software.”
“I thought you guys didn’t use it yet.”
Gunderson just shrugged.
Alexis frowned, her mind immediately reviewing everything Garrett had told her earlier in the day. “What about criminal connections? That was one of the match points.”
“Nope, not this guy. However”—a new photo came up on-screen—“this guy has multiple cross hits with the Vor v Zakonye. Work associates, a cousin, a roommate, briefly, in Moscow.”
Alexis looked: this photo was also of the same young man, only now his head was shaved in a buzz cut, and the neutral scowl was replaced with a wide grin. He wore a white, button-down shirt and a red tie. He looked every inch the ambitious, up-and-coming young businessman. But Vor v Zakonye were the Russian mob. Thief-in-law.
“Marko Ilyanovich, born 1986, Grozny, Chechnya.”
“Christ,” Alexis muttered, staring at the photo. “This is a Russian passport photo, right? How could the Russians not track that it’s the same guy?”
“Ever been to Russia?”
Alexis shook her head no.
“Spend a week there and you’ll understand. Ten thousand bucks will get you anything. A passport. A wife. A murder. Nobody really cares, as long as you’re not blowing up train stations in Volgograd.”
“You get this with the facial-recognition software as well?”
“No. Once we had a match on two names we ran his fingerprints. His were on file with the Russian FSB. Federal Security Service. They had no direct hits on his mob ties, only cross-references. He has been associated with criminals, distantly, but isn’t one himself. At least not that anyone can prove.”
Alexis sat back in her chair and let out a long breath. Garrett had been spot-on about everything: young, male, Russian, student visa, a programmer, recent European itinerary—even the mafia connections panned out. And if Garrett had been correct about the young man’s entering the country, then Garrett was probably also right about what the young man had planned: a systemic volatility event. Crash the American economy.
Alexis shivered visibly in the air-conditioned office. She had the sudden, instinctive sense that a disaster was looming out there; a chaos, all-enveloping, coming toward her, threatening to swallow her, threatening to swallow up everything. She tried to shake the idea from her brain, but it remained at the periphery of her consciousness, lurking there, raw and terrifying, like an awful storm cloud rising up over the horizon.
“I’ll need to talk to him. Where are you holding him?” Alexis stood, patted down her green army jacket, and considered how she would initiate the interrogation.
“We’re not.” Gunderson grimaced. “Holding him, that is.”
“What?”
“Your watch request came in at six thirty this evening.” Gunderson
held up a single sheet of paper. “This guy—whatever the hell his name really is—cleared Customs at five forty-five.” The edges of the big man’s lips turned down, as if that were as much of an apology as he could muster. “I have no idea where he is now.”
• • •
On a constitutional level, Alexis knew that an administrative subpoena was a joke. It was an obvious end run around the Fourth Amendment, the guarantee against unreasonable search and seizure, a way to get what you wanted without ever having a judge look over your request. Administrative subpoenas allowed sanctioned government organizations—the Defense Intelligence Agency was one of those organizations—to ask for wiretaps and transaction tracking without a judge’s orders. The press hated administrative subpoenas. Actually, Alexis hated them as well. She had always believed she was in the army not just to protect the country, but to protect its laws as well, and the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution was a pretty important brick in the pantheon of the American legal system.
But at two thirty in the morning in Miami, Florida, expediency won out. Alexis knew that was a bullshit rationale, but it would have to do. In the light of day she would try to figure out something better.
She went to her hotel room at the Hilton just outside the Miami airport, ordered coffee from room service, and drew up the proper document: one page, brief, simple, and direct. Boiled down to its essence, the subpoena said, I need you to give me your last twelve hours of credit-card transactions for the following names (and their variants) in the Greater Miami/Fort Lauderdale area, and I need them right away.
She called the DIA’s connections at the four major credit-card companies—Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and Discover—and had the front desk at the hotel fax over the subpoena. The DIA was already part of the HotWatch program, in which federal agencies could ask for real-time financial tracking information on specific suspects. News of HotWatch had leaked into the press a few years ago, but no one seemed to get that upset about it. Alexis thought that was weird. She’d always assumed that if the American public knew the level of surveillance that was going on in their lives they would flip out, and they had, to a degree, especially when it came to the NSA listening in on their phone calls, but the American public only understood half of what the government did. When they figured out the rest, it would not be pretty.
